Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

by Alexander McNabb

  ‘So I understand. Which is why you ended up in Roumieh Prison. I’m offering you a nice stable government job, Marwan. You know, guaranteed hours and a good, clean salary check. Even a little, how do I express this, gratitude if you should ever find yourself needing a friend.’

  Nimr cast up his eyes at the bottles stacked on shelves behind the bar, took a drink from his glass and shook his head. ‘No, thanks, man. Nice of you to think of me.’

  Lynch turned to Nimr. ‘You were supposed to learn from jail, Marwan. They’re meant to be correctional institutions. You’re still running shit from the Bekaa.’

  He glimpsed the big man’s fist bunched in his trouser leg, stretching the material.

  ‘No way. I’m clean, man.’

  ‘Bullshit. Look, I’m offering you a sweet, all expenses paid chance to help me fuck up the Freijes. I think you owe them something, no?’

  Nimr considered Lynch’s words. He nodded. ‘Sure I do. But I don’t do public sector, man. No way.’

  Lynch fished in his pocket, emerging with a black pellet that he held under Nimr’s nose. Take a sniff of that,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Really first-class stuff.’

  Nimr’s eyes were fixed on Lynch, his face pale. Beads of perspiration dotted his head. He inhaled hesitantly, his nose crinkling.

  Lynch was still smiling. ‘Hash laced with opium. Very nice, top quality. From the Bekaa. You know they farm that stuff up there still? Land belongs to a flyboy who doesn’t understand that the civil war is over. You might have heard of him, Nimr. Marwan Nimr. Flies fruit by day, gear by night. Fat bald guy.’ Lynch pulled on his cigar, ignoring Nimr’s raised hand. ‘Chalhoub will take you down the second I call him, Marwan. For the murder of Paul Stokes.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with the kid, I just took him on a ride. Najimi wanted him, I didn’t. Najimi worked for Freij.’

  ‘Worked? My, but word gets around quickly.’

  The sweat trickled off Nimr’s bald head. He turned to face Lynch. ‘Was it you?’

  Lynch handed the pellet of marijuana to Nimr, who nodded and slipped it into his pocket. ‘Okay. But you pay.’

  Lynch lifted his second beer. ‘I just said that. Jesus, Marwan, can we not be a touch more subtle about the money stuff.’ He screwed up his face in disgust. ‘I hate talking about fucking money.’

  ‘Ten thousand.’

  ‘Lire?’

  ‘Fuck you man. US.’

  ‘Five. You have a vested interest in helping me, believe me.’

  ‘Ten.’

  Lynch drew on his cigar. ‘So how long did you spend in Roumieh? Time go quickly, did it? Or did you settle in nicely with all the pretty young things they sent in there to keep you company?’

  Nimr growled. ‘Don’t fuck with me like that, man.’

  ‘Five thousand, Marwan. I’ll buy the fuel. Last.’

  Lynch tapped his cigar on the ashtray, dislodging the fine grey ash from its end and studying the glowing tip. He took a puff.

  Nimr nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll live with that. You better have a strong stomach, though, James Bond.’

  Lynch considered this for a second. ‘Uh, no. My name’s Lynch. Gerald Lynch.’

  ‘I preferred Bond.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  Soaring above Beirut, they left the city behind. The great mountain, Sannine, loomed to their right as they banked away from the sea and flew over the foothills. Nimr’s helicopter, an ex-army Alouette II, was registered as a crop sprayer. It wasn’t carrying any tanks or spray rig.

  Nimr was in his element, his hands deft on the controls and joy in his voice as he pointed out landmarks to Lynch, the wooded slopes below dotted with farmhouses. They flew across a green valley, the white-capped mountains rising to their right.

  Nimr raised his voice above the whine of the rotors. ‘That’s Feraya, where Beirut likes to go ski. Nice place. We’re about half an hour from Deir Na’ee but I have to make a quick stop first.’

  Lynch turned, but the helmet, glasses and microphone made Nimr’s expression impossible to gauge. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to get some stuff prepared. No big deal, take about fifteen minutes.’

  Lynch turned back to see the dramatic folds of the mountainside below them, dotted with greenery with occasional patches of white as the spring sun started to reclaim the ground from the winter.

  Nimr gestured to the land ahead of them, his voice carrying over the intercom above the insistent whine of the engines. ‘This used to be deep snow through this time of year right up to June. Snow’s been pretty erratic last few years, comes late, comes early. It’s fucking up the skiing industry.’

  They passed a freestanding crucifix perched on a rocky outcrop, which Nimr pointed out. ‘See that? You’re in Christian country big time now, Kartaba.’

  They climbed, banking to fly north above the valley, rising to its left. Nimr leaned across Lynch pointing to the left and dipping the helicopter so they looked down to the rocks that breasted the top of the valley, a smattering of snow dusted across the rockscape. ‘See there? That’s Jaj. I got a sister-in-law lives there.’

  ‘Too much detail, Marwan. Let’s get the fuck on with it, eh?’

  ‘Only being friendly, dude. Don’t wanna waste the scenery now.’

  Lynch laughed, shaking his head. ‘Fuck, no. Sure am’t I a tourist only?’

  They passed a village to their right, terracotta roofs and an area of cultivated fields rose, then dipped down, descending fast towards a small wooded valley, the hillsides closing in on them as it deepened. A blue warehouse building loomed ahead, blacktop laid to its front. They dropped to the tarmac and landed gently, a last bump before Nimr killed the rotors, their insistent whipping slowing.

  Nimr unclipped his seatbelt and removed his helmet. The shades stayed on. ‘Cigarette break.’

  Lynch stepped down from the chopper, his breath misty in the cold mountain air, tucking his hands under his armpits for warmth. Nimr turned to him. ‘See that bowser over there? That’s fuel. Pull the pipe over this way and fill her up. You engage the red handle.’ He strode towards the warehouse, unlocking the side door and wrenching it open with a screech.

  Lynch wandered over to the small, rusty lorry and unhooked the dirty pipe from its side, dragging it over to the Alouette. He found the fuel tank and was trying to snap the red handle of the feeder pipe to the notched tank-mouth when Nimr returned with a pallet truck.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Nimr took the metal fitment and twisted it with a single practised movement, the two pieces snicking together smoothly. He handed Lynch a pair of keys on a plastic fob. ‘Start her up and hit the green button on the dash.’

  The engine of the bowser kicked into action after a few coughs. Lynch found the green button and listened to the pump kicking in. He dropped down from the cab and went back to the Alouette. ‘How do I know when it’s full?’

  Nimr was stretched underneath the body of the aircraft, wrenching a complex assembly to the fuselage. ‘When it’s full.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Nimr grunted as he tightened the wrench, sliding out on the trolley under his back. He blinked as the wintry sunlight caught his brown eyes. ‘Mind your own business.’

  There was a snapping sound and the pump cut off. Nimr grinned. ‘Full. Disconnect it and I’ll put this junk away.’

  Lynch eyed the fuel pipe distastefully. ‘That didn’t seem worth it.’

  ‘This baby’s got a 350 klick range. You never know when you might need that last thirty or so. Best fly full when you can, kapisch? Unclip it, man, we need to get going.’

  Lynch did as he was told. Within a few minutes they were sitting back in harness and Nimr hit the starter. The Alouette’s engine coughed and roared into life.

  They rose vertically above the blue warehouse, the sheer face of the valley in front of them dropping away under them as if they were going up in a lift, the Alouette steadied by Nimr’s sure rudder-work, his legs flexing. They breasted the va
lley, skimming over the snow-whitened, rocky land to another valley beyond, the road below clinging to the steep, far side of the valley, snaking between the dark trees in the wintry landscape. They rose farther, leaving the valley and then banking right to follow a steep ravine.

  ‘This is Bcharre. People up here are real headbangers. Khalil Gibran came from here. Over there are the famous Cedars of God. You heard of them, right?’

  Lynch laughed. ‘Marwan, I first came to Lebanon in my twenties. I remember The War. I told you already, you can keep the patter.’

  ‘Fuck me for being helpful.’

  ‘Fuck you anyway. How far now?’

  ‘Just ’round the corner, few minutes. I’ll take us up over the top, yeah?’

  ‘Sounds good. Can we approach it from the sea as well?’

  ‘Sure, no problem. Two passes is about it, though. Those Freij boys can get itchy, know what I mean?’

  Banking left above Bcharre, they floated in blue sky above white folds of barren mountain, the land below shining with the glare of the light reflecting from the snow. Lynch grinned with the sheer liberating delight of skimming untrammelled above the peaks, his heart racing with the thrill even as the anticipation of danger ahead made his gut tighten. He reached for the camera bag and dug out the high speed camera, cleaning the 28-300mm zoom.

  Nimr’s voice was edgy. ‘Okay, we’re about forty-five seconds from the edge.’

  He tilted the Alouette to give Lynch clear shots as they flew over the edge of the high, snowy escarpment Deir Na’ee was nestled against, the snowy rocks falling away from them in a vertiginous curving tumble. Lynch spotted a grouping of outbuildings, snapping away as they passed by. Nimr brought the Alouette round for another run. They had agreed on an approach that would allow the complex to be accurately waymarked and the manoeuvre took them up over the cliff edge again, the whump of the rotors echoing back at them as they rose up the rock face.

  ‘What’s that over there?’ Lynch pointed to the left as they climbed over the edge of the escarpment, a long double strip of black etched on the mountainside lost as they breasted the ragged top. Nimr took the Alouette around and left, sliding back over the escarpment with consummate skill and giving Lynch a clear series of shots of the runway below them, a double line of tarmac airstrip and a cluster of buildings to the southern end, a road dropping directly down from the airstrip to the Deir Na’ee site. An Ilyushin 76 sat to the side of the apron, the big Russian freighter dwarfing the executive jet next to it.

  ‘Shit. A whole private airport.’

  ‘Coming around now to give you that approach from the sea.’

  ‘Nice and slow now.’

  ‘We can’t go too slow. I told you, man, these guys are headbangers up here. This is tribal country, they’re armed to the teeth and they’ll shoot at shit.’

  Lynch was snapping on auto, the high-resolution camera struggling to keep saving the bursts despite its unusually advanced specification, each shot a triple-play of 28mm, halfway and then a 300mm zoom of the relevant feature. A high-pitched alarm sounded.

  ‘Fuck!’ Nimr wrenched the cyclic and rammed the Alouette right. Lynch was flung against his harness, the camera flying from his hands, the precious shots and expensive body saved by the strap wrapped around his wrist. Nimr shouted, ‘Radar. We got radar lock, man.’

  Nimr gunned the engine, taking them fast towards the escarpment. He slapped his hand on a mushroom switch to the right of his dash. Lynch caught the flashes pulsing behind them. Nimr was releasing flares as they sped towards the rock wall.

  Lynch looked down. Flashes lit the ground. ‘SAMs.’

  ‘Seen ’em. Trust me, man.’

  ‘Fuck all else I can—’ Lynch could see individual stones on the rock wall in front of them, stark in the bursts of light from the flares behind them. Nimr clutched the cyclic to his gut to bring the Alouette vertical to the cliff, blowing a cloud of snow from the rocks. The helicopter’s turboshaft engine screamed. They scraped up the rock face and careened over the escarpment edge in an explosion of powdery snow. The missiles struck below, the concussion wave flipping the Alouette over. A hail of rock flew from the roiling core of the explosions. Nimr fought to bring the bucking chopper back under control. They rolled, the throttle cut as Lynch pushed back as deeply as he could into his seat, his legs scrabbling. He clutched the camera and gulped sweet life from the cold air. He was snivelling and fought for control, gasping for breath and reasserting himself. The violent movements calmed as Nimr righted the Alouette. He switched off the flares. The fingerless glove on his right hand was shredded, blood streaming down the ball of his thumb.

  ‘Shit man, fuckin’ cyclic bit me again.’

  Lynch unwrapped the strap tied on his wrist, the flesh rubbed raw. His shoulders felt bruised from the harness. ‘That was close.’

  Nimr shrugged. ‘Told you they were headbangers, man.’ He leaned forward and banged his fist against the display. ‘Crap.’

  ‘What?’

  Nimr’s voice on the intercom was matter of fact. ‘We got trouble. Fuel tank’s hit.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  Nimr was jabbering in Arabic on his radio, negotiating by the sound of it. Lynch craned to peer at the fuel gauge. It was showing empty. Nimr’s voice rose an octave and he started to gesture with his left hand. The sea was spread far beyond, the land below swathed in green vegetation. They were still climbing.

  ‘Okay, we’re going to land at Hamat. It’s a disused military base. I got some guys coming out to meet us.’

  Lynch’s response was lost in the sound of the engine coughing and then dying in a slow, whining wheeze. He froze, consumed by a sudden rush of absolute fear, a cold sweat breaking out all over his body. The rotors whooshed in the silence.

  Nimr pulled on the lever to the side of his seat, using the pitch of the blades and guiding the cyclic between his legs back and forth. They started the descent towards the runway shimmering into sight ahead of them. Nimr guided the Alouette with skilful touches of the controls. Lynch, once again recovering from staring death in the face, stuttered.

  ‘What the the the—’

  Nimr glanced at him, grinning, his hands working the controls of the Alouette. ‘Autorotation, man. Only a fuckin’ idiot crashes a chopper. This beauty’s gonna land like a fuckin’ sycamore leaf on a baby’s belly. You gotta control her careful, but the rotors slow us down with updraft if you pitch ’em right. We’re going to glide down, see?’

  Lynch watched the ground approach them, gripping his seat as the last few seconds rushed past and the earth rose to meet them, the nose of the Alouette tilting up and then the sliding impact as Nimr fought to keep the aircraft stable. They careened to a standstill, the rotors whirring silently. Lynch thumbed the catch and pulled apart the harness, moving left to dismount. Nimr held him back. ‘Wait a second, man,’ Nimr cackled. ‘I mean, like, shame to beat SAMs and an autorotation landin’ then get fucked up by the blades when you hit ground, no?’

  Lynch nodded, dumbly, grateful he hadn’t soiled himself. The long concrete runway was blistered with craters, gouged and uneven. Weeds pushed through the surface. The rotors slowed and he jumped down from the Alouette, shocked at how weak his legs felt. He fumbled for his mobile, dialling Nathalie.

  Nathalie took the call sitting at the dining table in Lynch’s apartment, her screen displaying the scrolling repository of information streaming in from the hack of Falcon Dynamics. She had been trying to make sense of the metatagged datasets and follow leads through the quagmire of information. Her teams in Beirut and Brussels were struggling to download, process and tag the huge volumes of unstructured data flowing in.

  She had been working for hours trying to build a picture of the events she and Lynch had seen unfolding over past weeks. The task was complicated by the richness of data – video, images, eyewitness reports, intelligence updates and white papers, snippets of news that had been catalogued and tagged into the files all jostled for attention. Nathalie wa
s silent, tight-lipped and fatigued as she tried to make sense of the information streaming into the feeds.

  She held the mobile under her cheek with her shoulder as she worked on the screen. ‘Durand.’

  ‘It’s me, Gerald.’

  ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Ah sure, you know yourself. We got shot down.’

  She took the mobile in her hand, standing. ‘You are kidding, right? Are you okay?’

  ‘Right as rain. I’ve got the photos but it’ll be a while before I can get to you, I’m at Hamat Airbase. Listen, There’s an airstrip up there at Deir Na’ee, newly built from the look of it. There are two planes there currently, an IL76 and an executive jet. The Ilyushin is marked OD-256. I couldn’t see a marking on the small plane. Not sure what make it is. I’m going to try to send you a photo from the camera, but it’ll take time to upload. The Lebanese mobile networks are pretty fucked up.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll try to look it up. I’m searching—’

  ‘Sorry, got to go. We’ve got company and they don’t look friendly. Let Dubois know we’re here, yes?’

  The line cut. Nathalie closed her eyes and held the mobile to her forehead for a second. She couldn’t bear to think of Lynch in danger, this man who had made her feel alive again She shook her head to clear it. An Ilyushin 76. She Googled it. A big plane, a freighter and underpowered at that. Built to circumvent strategic arms limitation treaties, they can be converted into bombers at the drop of a hat. OD-256. A Lebanese aircraft ID, the plane registered in Tripoli, Lebanon. She smiled. To Falcon Tourism and Logistics.

  Nathalie miskeyed the name in her haste. The links came back, the list growing as the database scanned the product from Falcon’s servers. Set up two years ago, Falcon Tourism and Logistics was a freight forwarding company that also operated charter flights. Oddly, it also linked to the files of the Near East Institute for Oceanographic Research, an organisation that operated a marine research facility in Santorini. Her lips moved as she scanned the data, her eyes flickering over the links, her fingers flying on the keyboard. Based on an island near Thira in Santorini. A lease from the Governorate of Thira. She whistled. The lease had cost Falcon five million dollars. She put in a request for OD-256’s flight log, tapping the tabletop as she waited, the data confirming that OD-256 had been cleared for take-off from Santorini International Airport that morning, cleared to fly to Beirut, carrying two containers of United Nations aid supplies.