The Secret Soldier (26 page)

An hour later, he was a half-mile from shore, close enough to hear the occasional hum of engines on the coast road. The beach ahead was empty and unlit. Even so, Wells was exposed. The moon was low in the sky, but starlight shone off the water. The shore was flat and ran straight north-south, no nooks or crags to hide behind.

No wonder Nicholas had insisted on staying out to sea. Three hundred yards out, Wells revved the outboard, trying to close quickly. He needed a muffler. Fortunately, this stretch of coast was lightly developed, probably because of its nearness to Syria, which had a habit of invading Lebanon.

Fifty yards from shore, Wells cut the engine to just above idle, let the waves carry him in. He didn’t see Gaffan. But as he reached the beach, a Jeep pulled off the road and flashed its headlights. Gaffan stepped out. Wells hefted the crate from the raft. “I brought you a present.”

 

 

THEY LOADED UP, HEADED
south. After a mile, Gaffan turned left, inland, passing between citrus groves. “Hit a checkpoint on the way up,” he said.

“Army or police?”

“Couldn’t tell. Either way, we should ditch that crate.” Gaffan parked beside a building that looked like a garage for farm equipment and cut the headlights. Wells stepped out, listened for dogs or traffic, heard neither. He popped the trunk, pried open the crate, pulled out their arsenal: AKs, pistols, grenades, ammunition, silencers.

“Nice.”

“I checked it on the boat. It’ll do.” Wells transferred the weapons to a canvas bag, stowed the bag in the Jeep’s spare tire compartment, tossed the tire and crate in a ditch behind the garage.

He checked his watch. Five a.m. Another night gone. Working for the agency had downsides, but it meant quick access to vehicles, safe houses, and identification. Wells would have gotten from France to Lebanon on a fresh passport in hours instead of days and had a pistol and sat phone waiting.

“It’s a lot slower when you’re on your own,” Gaffan said, as if reading his mind.

“Yes and no. On a government ticket, we’d have to check in with the head of station, get an in-country brief—”

“I know you’re supposed to do those things. But did you ever actually, John?”

“I didn’t always.”

“Ever?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I’m picking up some bad habits from you.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

They headed south toward Beirut on the coast road. The checkpoint was south of Tripoli. The paramilitary police looked them over, waved them through. “If they ever stop us, play the stupid American,” Wells said. “Touristico. They are always ready to believe it. Definitely don’t let on you know Arabic.”

“Roger that. So when we get to the Bekaa, what are we looking for?”

Wells had spent the ride from Cyprus mulling that question. “We know it’s a big operation, a bunch of guys. It’s been going a while. That credit card’s four months old. And it’s got to be more than just a crash pad. The logistics don’t work. These ops are happening two countries away.”

“So a full-on training camp? A base?”

“At least a house where they plan missions. Maybe just a few guys, maybe a couple dozen.”

“All Saudi.”

“Hezbollah run the Bekaa. They’re Shia, and Iran’s behind them. Maybe Abdullah and Miteb have it wrong and this is an Iranian operation to destabilize the Saudi government.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Abdullah, he’s old, angry, but he’s smart. His brother, too. If they think this is coming from inside their family, then I believe them. And the guy I saw in Italy, he was Saudi, not Iranian.”

“Anyway, what would the Iranians get out of it?” Gaffan said. “They’ve got their own problems.”

“True. Figure it’s Saudi-run. Even so, they can’t operate here without Hezbollah. They must be paying for protection. Which means if we make too much fuss, we’ll have a problem.”

“Will your friends help?”

“Don’t count on it.” Wells recounted his last conversation with Shafer. “Duto probably wants to see what we find before he decides to bail us out.”

“He’d do that?”

“He’d enjoy it. Any case, we’d best find them quick, before Hezbollah figures out we’re looking.”

“Then hit them?”

“Depends on the target. If it’s fortified, no. But if we can get in and out without waking the neighbors, maybe.”

“So how do we find them?”

“That’s a very good question.”

BEIRUT LOOKED LIKE A
cross between Miami, San Francisco, and Baghdad, a hilly, densely packed city with a waterfront promenade—and every so often a bombed-out building as a reminder of the civil war that had raged from 1975 to 1990. Wells and Gaffan rented two rooms in a Sofitel in East Beirut, the Christian quarter, to shower, shave, and nap.

By noon they were up, following a highway that rose into the mountains. The Bekaa’s farms and vineyards were closer than they seemed. Lebanon was a bite-sized country, one hundred fifty miles from tip to tail but less than fifty wide.

At the crest of the highway, uniformed soldiers manned a checkpoint, backed by an armored personnel carrier under camouflage netting. A soldier waved the Jeep over. “Identification,” he said in Arabic.

“Excuse me?” Gaffan said in English.

“Identification. Passports.”

Gaffan handed over his passport, Wells his driver’s license.

“Your passport, please,” the soldier said in English.

The passport was a problem. Specifically, the lack of a border entry stamp in the passport was a problem. The agency specialized in handling these details.

Wells tried to look sheepish. “I’m sorry, captain, I left it at the hotel.”

“Which hotel?”

“The Sofitel. In East Beirut.”

“And why do you come to Lebanon?”

“Tourists. We’re headed for Baalbek.”

“You should—”

“The ruins—”

“Shh! I know. You should have your passport.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking.”

The officer flipped through Gaffan’s passport again, held Wells’s driver’s license close to his face. “Next time make sure you bring it,” he said. “You’re not in America. This doesn’t mean anything here.” He handed back the passport and license, waved them on.

They were halfway down the mountain before Gaffan spoke. “
Captain
was a nice touch.”

“Yes, but. This is going to be a problem, these checkpoints. Best travel separately, so if I get taken out, you don’t.”

 

 

IN ZAHLÉ, WELLS BOUGHT
the first motorcycle he saw, an air-cooled Honda CB650, old but in good shape, worth maybe one thousand five hundred dollars. Wells paid twice that without blinking, another two hundred dollars for a helmet. Then he and Gaffan rolled north-west, toward Baalbek.

Hezbollah territory started east of Zahlé. Yellow and green flags hung from streetlights and telephone poles, proclaiming the group’s slogan: “Then surely the party of God are they that shall be triumphant.” Ten-foot-tall posters displayed larger-than-life photographs of Hezbollah’s leaders, heavy, scowling men wearing long black robes. On billboards, a pale white horse danced across an oddly lunar landscape. The horse symbolized the twelfth imam, and the billboards called the Shia to the festival of Ashura, which commemorated the death of Hussein Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and the third Shia imam. In the Bekaa, party, state, and religion were one.

Baalbek lay almost halfway up the valley. The town had grown around the remains of the Temple of Jupiter, built by the Romans about two hundred years after the birth of Christ. Its size was actually a sign of weakness, a futile effort to stop the new religion:
Look at this shrine and know that our gods are stronger than your Messiah.
But the majesty of a single God had overwhelmed the Roman pantheon. Wells wondered why Hezbollah had based itself here. Probably the group’s clerics viewed the temple as a simple tourist attraction, acres of meaningless stones.

North of Baalbek, traffic on the road thinned. The vineyards disappeared, replaced by scruffy farms of tomatoes and lemons. Here and there, Wells saw concrete mansions, set hundreds of yards off the road and protected by high brick walls. The homes were three and four stories high and garishly painted in yellow and green. McMansions, Lebanese-style. Wells assumed they belonged to hash farmers and Hezbollah leaders. Any of them could have served as the safe house he and Gaffan were looking for.

Farther north, the farms vanished. To the east, gray-brown hills rose toward the Syrian border. To the west, the Lebanon Mountains disappeared beneath low clouds. Qaa, the last village before Syria, was really just a mosque, a few houses, a small grocery store, and the gas station that had shown up on the credit card that the NSA had traced. Wells rode until a blue sign announced, “Syria 1 KM,” then made a U-turn and waited for Gaffan to follow.

At the gas station, Gaffan filled up the Jeep. “What are we doing, John?”

“They don’t teach recon in the army anymore?”

“This is Jamaica all over again. Worse. This valley is fifty or sixty miles long, twenty wide. A thousand square miles. We’re looking for one house. No way do we find these guys without comint”—communications intelligence—“or imagery. Even with a helicopter we might miss them.”

“Wrong. First. The camp’s around here. Not in the south.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because the credit card was used here. If you’re in Zahlé, you wouldn’t drive up here. And if they have a camp, they need space.”

“What if it’s just a house?”

“Then why did somebody put five hundred gallons of diesel on a credit card? For the miles?”

“Even if you’re right, we’re talking hundreds of square miles.”

“Wherever it is, once we get close enough, anybody within a couple miles will know.”

“You can’t be sure.”

Wells controlled his frustration. After the near disaster in Jamaica, Gaffan had the right to be gun-shy. “Think it through. Everybody’s everybody’s cousin here. You think they don’t notice if a bunch of Saudis come in? At least the neighbors would have called the paramilitaries, made sure it’s okay.”

“So. Assuming your instinct is right, and they’re somewhere close, and the locals know where, how do we find them?”

“We ask.”

The gas station was a concrete shed with a tin roof and a plywood counter. A middle-aged man in a dirty red shirt sat by the register. He barely looked up as Wells entered. He was focused on the television blaring out a call-in advice show from Beirut. The Lebanese loved these shows. They loved to give one another advice.

On screen, a woman in a head scarf and a pound of makeup listened to a man complain that his brother had borrowed his car, dented the bumper, and refused to fix it. “First of all ... are you sure it wasn’t your wife who dented the bumper?” the woman said. The audience chortled.

“Good show,” Wells said.

“Very funny.”

“Yes. I need another delivery. More diesel.”

The man shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“For the camp.”

“What camp?”

Wells couldn’t tell if the guy was hiding what he knew, had no idea what Wells was talking about, or was just slow. The third seemed likely. He couldn’t push too hard, risk rattling the guy, but he thought he could get away with one more try. “The one in the hills.”

“You want it, come with your truck and pick it up. Like before.”

“Of course. Like before.” He’d hoped to catch a break, trail a tanker truck to the camp, but that would have been too easy. Still, he had confirmed that the camp was somewhere close. Within ten miles, twenty at most.

“What’s your name?”

“Jalal.” Wells had used the name for a decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By the end, he had known it as well as his own. Maybe better. “I’ll come back tomorrow. For the diesel.”

“As you wish.” The man turned back to the show.

 

 

WELLS RODE WEST, ONTO
a road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. Over a rise, he stopped to make way for hundreds of sheep picking their way across the pavement. Two boys on donkeys and a single mangy collie herded the flock.

The older boy, maybe ten, shouted, “Vroom, vroom,” and grinned and waved the stick he was using to prod the sheep along. He wore a tunic and a freshly laundered red-and-white kaffiyeh that contrasted sharply with his dark skin.

Wells hopped off the bike. “What’s your name?”

“Hamid,” the boy said shyly. The sheep marched around them, as slow and implacable as time itself.

“I’m Jalal. These are your family’s sheep?”

“My father’s.”

“How many?”

“Two hundred and eighty-one.” His pride was obvious.

“That’s a lot of sheep.”