The Lie: A Novel (16 page)

Each unit of the team moving toward Beirut travels alone, each on a separate route. Each must penetrate, circumnavigate, or neutralize the perilous, sometimes fatal Lebanese equivalent of traffic lights, the roadblock.

In Caesarea, Dudik and Uri sleep together propped on a couch, the father holding his seventeen-year-old son as if he were a small child. Both are exhausted from crying.

Damn CNN
, Dahlia thinks.
Damn the wonders of technology
.

She sits on the other side of the sliding glass doors smoking by the edge of the pool, her feet dangling in the dark water. The air is cool, as cool as she had been when they watched the new video, her own child being tortured there on the television in their living room. Of course she had seen it before, the complete version, before CNN edited out the worst. Still, she would have thought it would affect her again the same way or worse. But no, it was almost comforting that her son is still alive.
Imagine that
, she thinks,
I have watched my son being tortured and managed not to cry. Maybe Dudik is right to call me cold. Maybe Floyd is right to call me a bitch. Maybe Zalman Arad is right to have chosen me for a job whose very parameters require a kind of cranial disconnectedness
. She had always thought of herself as warm, passionate, caring. Now she sees the other side, the side others see.
So what?
she thinks.
So what if I have become this way or always was and maybe always will be. It’s a tough neighborhood. You have to be as tough, if not tougher. You have a husband, even if he is a soon-to-be-divorced husband, and a son. You have to lead by example. The bastards want you to be weak, to be broken by grief. I will not be
broken by grief. They will get him out. And if they don’t? Don’t think of that. One step at a time. If Kobi spoke of seventy-two hours, then even now something is being done to save Ari, to save both boys. The Bedouin kid’s mother did not show fear. She showed anger. Be like her. In seventy-two hours it will be done, one way or another
.

Uri had thrown up. Right there in the living room, Dudik holding his head as he used to over the toilet bowl when Uri was a child with a stomach flu. It was Dudik who had comforted him afterward until both had fallen asleep, worn out by their tears. All she had been able to do was walk out onto the patio, sitting silent by the edge of the pool.

She stubs out her cigarette in a glass ashtray etched with the logo of Château Fuente, a memento Dudik had not bothered to take with his other belongings. Abruptly, out of nowhere, she thinks,
If not for Uri I would swim nude. When is the last time I swam nude?

She looks behind her. The boy is sound asleep. She thinks then of Dudik.
What if Dudik wakes and finds me that way?
Only days ago she would have considered it something a divorcing woman must not do. How odd that now she feels a closeness to Dudik that she has not felt in years.

She slips out of her shift and eases her way into the still water, its temperature not that much different from her own. It is as if she has become one with the water, and for the first time in days finds herself relaxing, her breasts bobbing free as she floats on her back. In a moment, for the first time in days, she is deeply asleep, buoyed by her breasts, and by hope.

Flanked by four Lebanese Police motorcycles, two fore and two aft, the white school bus marked
UN
on all sides and on the roof, a common troop carrier for the ubiquitous UNIFIL peacekeeping forces stationed in Lebanon, pulls up before a roadblock on the main east-west road. The barrier forms a choke point between the apartment blocks on either side, from whose windows armed Hezbollah fighters stare down. On either side, an embankment of old cigarette butts lines the street like dirty snow fallen from above. The roadblock is brightly lit. Wrecked cars narrow the wide street so that only one vehicle can pass. From out of one of these, as if from a proper office with a desk and a telephone and a photo of the Hezbollah leader, a thin officer steps.

On the lead motorcycle Kobi knows the man is an officer because he carries in his right hand a distinctive Heckler & Koch VP70 machine pistol. An ungainly affair, it appears to be a handgun to which someone clumsily attached the stock of a rifle on one end and an obscenely long magazine carrying one hundred eighteen 9mm rounds on the other. This is arguably the world’s most deadly handgun. Capable of firing twenty-two hundred rounds per minute, it sounds in operation like a chain saw on steroids. Only selected Hezbollah commanders are issued this gun, a mark of status. Armed with their commonplace Kalashnikov
automatic rifles, the officer’s troopers stand leaning half asleep against the apartment house walls on either side. Thanks to decades of Communist Bloc arms dealing, the Kalashnikov AK-47 is standard issue for every Arab soldier, bodyguard, and terrorist in what security professionals call the ABC, the unstable triangle that stretches from Afghanistan in Central Asia to Beirut in the Middle East to Chad in West Africa. Whether originating in Russia or Romania or China, the AK-47 is the personal weapon of choice wherever Allah is praised.

The officer pointedly ignores the Lebanese motorcycle cops and climbs aboard the bus, which as is normal in Beirut travels with its doors open to catch the Mediterranean breeze. Everyone aboard but the Italian driver is asleep, Africans on one side, Italians on the other. Climbing down, the officer gestures behind him with his machine pistol. “From where are the monkeys?”

“Africa,” Kobi says.

“But where in Africa? This interests me.”

“Who knows? They are UNIFIL. By the prophet, my dear friend, it is fucking late.”

“You don’t know from where? Clearly, the white ones are Italian. From the uniforms. Each one must have his own personal tailor.”

Kobi turns to the second motorcycle cop, whose name is Yossi. “Achmed, from which country are the black ones?”

“Uganda.”

As if the Hezbollah officer requires a translation, Kobi says it again, louder. “He says Uganda.”

“Is that a Muslim land?”

“Who knows?”

“If they are Muslim,” the Hezbollah officer says, “they should wear long pants. Lebanon is a civilized nation, not the jungle.” He waves the bus through.

At a second roadblock half a mile to the north, the Mercedes limo is stopped at a makeshift barrier staffed by two young Hezbollah militiamen wearing uniform shirts over jeans and Nike running shoes. They admire the car. Mercedes Benz automobiles are common enough in Lebanon, but a Mercedes limousine is rare. Of course, anything the least bit out of the ordinary would be enough to rouse their interest in the middle of yet another trafficless night.

“Maternal cunt,” its chauffeur says in the best street Arabic. “Let me deliver these stinking foreigners to their hotel so I can get some sleep.”

Unable to peer through the mirror glass of the windows, one of the Hezbollah men opens the left rear door: Four reprobates, living cartoons, each of the men holding a bottle, the redhead passed out, the blonde in sunglasses grinning back at them, stinking drunk. She says something in Russian, slurred. In a typically ambivalent Arab gesture revealing simultaneous disgust and envy, the militiaman spits on the limousine’s windshield and then offers a thumbs-up. Pointing with his Kalashnikov, he waves them through.

Not half a kilometer from the second roadblock, a sandbagged machine-gun position faces the entering street, where the seafood van is lined up in front of the glazier’s pickup. Without so much as a comment, much less permission, Hezbollah fighters open the van and begin unloading trays of shrimp. The van driver leaps out. “By God, take a bit for your honors, who work in the cold night. But I have a family. Leave me something to sell.”

Behind the van, the glazier hits his horn. Taking an interest, a second Hezbollah officer strolls over.

“
Habibi
, for the sake of justice!” the pickup driver says. “From the port in Tripoli I have had the joy of six roadblocks. Please, if you wish to do business with a fish seller, be my guest, but let pass an honest glazier.”

The Hezbollah officer smiles in sympathy. He makes the universally understood Middle Eastern sign for patience, thumb and forefinger touching as his hand bobs slowly up and down, then leisurely circles the pickup for a cursory inspection before returning to the glazier. “Why must Muslims be so vain as to need such large mirrors? Do they not know that to make a human image is forbidden?”

“This is not making an image,” the glazier says. “These are mirrors. The image makes itself.”

The officer laughs, revealing a good-natured understanding of the complications of applying sacred law to a still-profane world. “So late at night for the splitting of theological hairs,” he says with a smile. “Please accept my apology.” To better make his point, he swings the butt of his Kalashnikov in a wide arc. Secured to the side of the van, the huge mirror shatters in place. “But next time, kindly be more patient. Just as you have a job to do, so too we.” He waves the glazier through. The seafood vendor gives up arguing, re-enters his now half-empty van, and—the tax having been paid—follows.

The garbage truck with two laborers hanging off the back pulls up before a fourth roadblock narrowed by fifty-gallon oil drums burning scrap wood, Hezbollah fighters warming their hands in the glow. In an instant the garbagemen are off the truck and warming themselves as well. It gets cold hanging off the back of a vehicle going fifty miles an hour in fifty-degree temperature.

Coming up quickly, the Red Crescent ambulance, siren bleating, brakes hard, almost hitting the garbage truck.

The ambulance driver jumps out. He is a sharpshooter named Moshe whose family, originally from Syria, speaks Arabic at home. The accents of Lebanon and western Syria are indistinguishable. “Move this stinking pile! A man is dying of heart failure, and you are blocking the way with offal?”

A Hezbollah officer leaves the warmth of the fires and approaches the ambulance. “Let me see this dying man.” He peers into the ambulance. “There is no patient here, dying or otherwise.”

“Not here!” the ambulance driver shouts. “There! In the hills. We go to his aid, then to bring him to hospital—unless again we are stopped. Do you wish that poor man’s life on your head?!”

The officer sprints to the garbage truck and grabs its driver
by his collar through the open window. “Idiot, selfish fool! Move your rolling trash heap. Get going!”

The garbage truck grinds out of the way, leaving room for the ambulance to pass, its siren echoing as it speeds across the sleeping city to join the other units closing on the target site.

Minutes later, as the four units converge, Staff Sgt. Ruhama, a nineteen-year-old Israel Air Force remote-flight technician, takes her seat in a control room carved into a cave in the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea at Rosh HaNikra, virtually on the Lebanese border. Like everyone around her, she wears a sweater. The heavy computing power at her fingertips demands the room be kept uncomfortably cold. It is beyond air-conditioned. Meat will not spoil here.

Having grown up with video games, Ruhama is the Israel Air Force’s ranking ace when it comes to directing drones in battle. Operating an LED panel over which is an array of fourteen live-action monitors—rigorous testing found that for one controller fourteen drones is optimal: One more and operational efficiency drops by twelve percent—Ruhama settles in and begins the drill she knows so well. She had been out dancing in the nearby beach town of Nahariya until midnight. It is now 2:44
A.M
. She remains fresh, energized. Youth has certain advantages.

Behind her stands her unit commander, Maj. David, the son of American ascendants to Israel (one ascends to the Holy Land; one does not simply emigrate). Twenty years earlier his parents pulled him out of a school for the gifted in San Francisco to live in a tiny settlement in Judea, which the world news media calls
the West Bank. A lonely child in an unchallenging school, young David soon developed an interest in remote-controlled model planes, building and flying them from the barren hillsides overlooking the hostile Arab villages surrounding the settlement. Over time he attached a tiny television camera to the belly of a two-foot-long aircraft and brought it to the settlement’s security chief with the suggestion that the cobbled-together device might provide early warning in case of a terrorist attack. From this adolescent curiosity came Israel’s world leadership in drone weaponry.

Maj. David unwraps another stick of gum as he holds to his ear a blue phone with an open line to IAF headquarters one hundred feet underground at the Kiryah in Tel Aviv.

Sgt. Ruhama goes through her checklist. “Airspeed: a hundred and five kilometers per hour. Time to target: four minutes, thirty seconds. Air-to-air visibility: forty-five kilometers. Air-to-ground visibility: category one. All systems in order.”

“Arm weapons.”

“Units one through ten arming.” She takes a sip from one of the six cans of Diet Coke she will drink over her ten-hour shift. “All weapons armed.”

“Okay, sergeant. Do your stuff.”

“Roger that, David. Doing my stuff.”

Her commander unwraps another stick of gum.

Over southwestern Beirut eight Killer Smurfs peel off, leaving in reserve two similar explosive-laden aircraft, while four observer drones armed only with extremely high-definition night-vision video cameras circle at fifteen hundred feet, just below cloud cover but well beyond the range of rifle fire from Hezbollah riflemen perched on the rooftops surrounding the target site.

From behind their sandbags, the riflemen look up as the sound of what could only be giant mosquitoes becomes evident, then louder.

Then louder still.

Then fatal.

A few blocks away, all four units, engines running, stand by in staging positions. Their radios are silent. There is no need for communication. The signal to move in will be the sound of the first explosion as the drones find their targets.