Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2)

by Fleming, Preston

  “I think you and I just might be able to help each other, Elie. Come, let’s finish our work here on the summit as soon as we can so we can go down to the lodge and drink some of that brandy you bragged about.”

  They rode the remaining hundred meters of the T-bar in silence, then dismounted onto a steep slope just below a ridgeline. After descending the slope, Elie pointed with his ski pole for Lukash to remove his skis and climb to the lip of the ridge. Once there, Lukash spotted a bunker-like ski hut made of reinforced concrete that lay half buried under shoulder-high drifts of snow. A pair of black electrical wires led from the top end of the ski lift to a corner of hut, just above its sliding door.

  Elie reached into the zippered breast pocket of his ski jacket and removed a pair of keys. He used one to open a fist-size padlock on the door and used the second to unlock the door itself. He yanked hard on the long metal lever, but when it failed to budge, he removed an alpinist’s ice ax from his belt and used the ax to chip ice from the door’s edges. On the third try the door slipped open and Elie beckoned for Lukash to follow him inside.

  Lukash shut the door behind him and felt claustrophobic for a moment on hearing the solid click of the latch reseal the insulated door. He found himself crammed into a tiny airlock vestibule with Elie where not a single ray of light could penetrate and where there was barely enough room for one man, much less two. A moment later an inner door opened and Elie switched on an overhead light. Along the far wall stood a metal rack stacked nearly from floor to ceiling with electronic equipment. Lukash, who had spent much of his two years in Saudi Arabia tending electronic eavesdropping devices, recognized the sensitive radio receivers and transmitters as American-made equipment that had been considered obsolete by the Agency for nearly a decade.

  “From this location,” Elie said, “we are able to intercept Syrian military communications all over Lebanon and western Syria, and to receive clandestine radio broadcasts from our agents operating at locations in the Bekaa Valley and Damascus. The problem with our equipment is that despite all the insulation and our climate control system, the radios are not reliable in the winter months. Very shortly the colonel will request that your agency replace the radios you see here with the latest American-made models. What he fears, however, is that the new equipment you give him will also enable your technicians to capture the messages we receive from our Syrian agents. For this reason, he has asked me to show you the intercept equipment and to help you in selecting replacement equipment, but to conceal from you those systems of ours that handle agent communications. So shall we begin? You brought your notebook and camera?”

  Lukash circled the metal racks and examined the equipment closely. “Ready when you are.”

  Elie waved his arm as if offering the entire hut for Lukash to do with as he pleased.

  “Excellent. Elie, I can sense your nest egg growing already.”

  Lukash attached an electronic flash to his government-issue Pentax camera and lowered himself onto his haunches to bring the equipment on the rack’s bottom rung into focus.

  A mounting roar like the sound of an approaching diesel locomotive all at once penetrated the heavily insulated walls of the hut and startled Lukash sufficiently to throw him off balance. A sort of low-level vibration electrified the air as if everything in the hut were resonating with the roar outside. Lukash had never experienced an earthquake before, but he recalled that Lebanon was indeed earthquake country. Some two thousand years earlier, an earthquake had devastated the Roman city of Baalbek, little more than one hundred kilometers to the east in the Bekaa Valley. If this was a quake, he thought, he had not picked the safest place to sit it out.

  Lukash regained his balance and, out of the corner of his eye, saw Major Elie bolt out into the sunlight without bothering to close the double doors behind him. Lukash followed, and the moment his head was out in the open, he realized that the roar had been caused by an avalanche. He quickly closed the doors to the hut and followed Elie to the edge of the narrow plateau that spanned the top of the ridgeline and gazed down toward the snow-covered base hut. The avalanche had started a few dozen meters below the upper station of the ski lift, where his and Elie’s skis had sliced diagonally across a slab of newly fallen snow. The right side of the slab had apparently sheared away and started a chain reaction that spread at a forty-five-degree angle as it raced down the mountain.

  “Look—there at two o’clock—they are in its path!” Elie gasped, pointing to a pair of skiers in olive drab parkas two-thirds of the way up the lower-stage ski lift. “Can’t they see it? Why don’t they escape?”

  At that moment, the skiers split away from each other, and both set off obliquely across the mountain with the apparent intent of outflanking the avalanche. They crouched in racing position, heads down, hands held out before their noses, and elbows tucked into their ribs as the seething front edge of the avalanche followed them, resembling for a brief moment two surfers riding a giant wave off Oahu’s north shore. And as every wave must eventually break against the shore, the avalanche soon broke over the two skiers and carried them forward another two hundred meters before stopping barely fifty meters from the row of stone huts that lined the road.

  “Come on, Elie, we’ve got to find them before the snow hardens. In a few minutes it will be like concrete down there.”

  “Wait. We can see them more easily from here than down below. The snow was not so deep when it overtook them; perhaps one of them will be able to push up a baton or a leg for us to see.”

  No sooner had Elie spoken than Lukash spotted a dark form burrowing out from under the scrambled snow, arms flailing wildly as if the person to whom they belonged was desperate for his next breath of air. Then forty or fifty meters farther down the hill, another dark figure encrusted with snow raised himself unsteadily to his feet.

  “I see two of them now,” Lukash noted with relief. “For a moment I thought those guys were goners.”

  “Imbeciles. They had orders to wait until we were finished before starting up the lift. Yalla, Wali, let us finish our work here and go soon. I no longer have a good feeling about this place.”

  Chapter 13

  The intercom buzzer sounded and Lukash rose from the dining room table to answer it.

  “It’s me. Bud.”

  “Come on up,” Lukash replied. “Take the stairs. The elevator isn’t working.”

  Lukash returned to the table, gathered the papers that were spread out upon it, and inserted them into a zippered portfolio. He carried the portfolio to an inconspicuous end table in a dark corner of the room, unfastened a hidden latch, and lifted the top of the table to reveal a hidden compartment some three inches deep. He laid the portfolio in the compartment and latched the top shut. It was inconvenient to write his intelligence reports by hand and to not be able to keep extensive reference files, but he was getting used to it. In some ways it made his work simpler than if he were working from an office in the embassy, and simplicity was something for which he felt a powerful longing these days.

  He heard Bud Strickland’s knock at the door and crossed the room to let him into the flat.

  “Sorry it took me so long, old buddy,” Strickland began breathlessly. “I meant to be across the Green Line by now, but your pals over at Phalange intelligence kept me busy for two hours with their questions about radio intercepts.” He looked around the room. “Say there, I hope I’m not disturbing anything. You don’t have some Lebanese honey lined up to come over and cook you dinner, do you?”

  Lukash smiled. “A couple of those same Phalange pals offered to fix me up tonight, but I told them I’m trying to cut back.”

  “Yeah, I know about that one, too. I have an ex-wife in Tennessee who’s been wanting me to do that for years.”

  “And have you?”

  “Now and then, but never for long. A man needs companionship when he’s on the road, especially in the shithole places where I get sent. Hell, I’ve done so many TDYs in the last year, I had to ge
t me some extra pages in my passport for all the visas.”

  “Bud, you sound like a man in need of a drink. Pull up a chair. What will it be? Beer, bourbon, gin and tonic?”

  “Bourbon and water, if you don’t mind. But before we get too relaxed, let me deliver your mail.” Strickland pulled a folded manila envelope from his waistband and dropped it on the table. “Connie told me to make sure you got this by the end of the day. Most important is the list of equipment that Headquarters is prepared to offer the Phalange, along with delivery dates. And there’s also some personal mail that arrived in yesterday’s diplomatic pouch.”

  Lukash ripped open the sealed envelope, scanned each message from the station briefly, and then glanced at the return addresses on each piece of personal mail. “It’s all routine stuff. Let’s call it a day and pour some drinks. Bourbon and water coming up.”

  Lukash left Bud Strickland seated at the dining room table while he filled a small ice bucket with ice. He returned with the bucket, a bottle of Old Fitzgerald, two crystal tumblers, and a dish of Lebanese roasted nuts.

  “Walt, I don’t mean to pry,” Strickland started as he reached for a handful of nuts, “but Connie asked me to remind you of the cable Ed wanted you to write about that Irish gal who followed you here. He asked me to pick it up from you if it’s ready to go.”

  “It’s not,” Lukash answered abruptly while he filled their glasses with ice and poured three fingers of bourbon in each.

  “Okay,” Strickland replied, backing off. “Is there anything I can tell them by way of explanation?”

  “It’s gotten to be such a mess, Bud, I don’t even know where to start.” Lukash swirled the ice in his glass and took a long sip of bourbon before continuing. “Do you remember the assassination plot against King Khalid two years ago in Jeddah?”

  Strickland nodded.

  “Lorraine was married to the ringleader. She was also sleeping with our agent, who was one of the plotters. Of course, Lorraine had nothing to do with the assassination plot, but to Headquarters her name will always be tarred by her association with Islamic militants and terrorism. But what bothers them even more is that after Connie and I helped her escape from Saudi Arabia, Lorraine showed up in Amman and started appearing on the cocktail circuit.

  “You see, Lorraine has this uncanny way of fitting into any social group and ingratiating herself with just about everybody. Within days after arriving in Amman, she got herself a job with Royal Jordanian Airlines and was turning up regularly at the American Club. I’m telling you, if she were working for the U.S. government, she’d recruit more agents than any of us.

  “So, anyway, one night she and I had a long talk at the American Club about her old life in Saudi Arabia. We hit it off pretty well, and after that we kept on running into each other. One thing led to another and after a while I let her move in.”

  “Excuse my asking,” Strickland interrupted, “but didn’t the chief of station have anything to say about that? Wherever I’ve been posted, there’s been a rule against case officers shacking up with foreign nationals.”

  Lukash took another sip of whiskey. “Maybe so. But this COS didn’t seem to care, and the DCOS had his own share of foreign sweethearts, so he didn’t push it either. It wasn’t till a new chief arrived that anyone thought to do a name trace on Lorraine. Soon after that, Headquarters warned me to drop her if I didn’t want major trouble with the Office of Security. But by then I was getting close to the end of my tour of duty, and I was thinking a lot about returning to Washington.

  “Lorraine must have figured out what was going on, too, because she started leaning on me…hard. The ironic thing is, I might have taken her back with me if they hadn’t sent me over here. I’ve never met anybody who suits me nearly as well as Lorraine. Yeah, it would have been an uphill battle getting a security clearance for her so I could marry her without having to quit the Agency, but those kinds of things can be arranged if you’re at Headquarters long enough to see it through. There’s always a way. I just needed some time to work things out.”

  “Walt, you can tell me to go to hell if you think I’m out of line,” Strickland said, “but I was in Ed’s office when he read the cable from the division chief about Lorraine showing up in Beirut. Believe me, if you don’t drop her fast, Headquarters will be hauling your ass home regardless.”

  “Let them. I’m not dropping her,” Lukash asserted.

  Strickland downed the rest of his bourbon and Lukash did the same. He refilled both glasses and added more ice to each.

  “Is there something I’m missing here, Walt? It seems to me that you can’t possibly win this.”

  “Maybe not, but there’s a reason why I’m doing what I’m doing, and it’s something that I’ve never talked about with you or Connie or anyone else. If I tell you, will you promise to keep it to yourself until I get all this worked out? It would mean a lot to me, Bud. Will you promise me that?”

  Strickland hesitated. “This isn’t anything that the counterintelligence staff or the FBI ought to know about it, is it? Because if it is, I can’t make you a promise like that. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Lukash gave a mirthless laugh. “I haven’t been spying for the Russians or stealing government funds, if that’s what you’re worried about. It may be just as rotten, in a way, but it’s definitely not a federal offense.” He watched Strickland nod his assent and suddenly stood up with glass in hand. “Bud, top up your glass and come with me.”

  Lukash opened the sliding door to the east-facing balcony and carried a pair of chairs and a portable stereo cassette player out the door. He turned on a tape of local belly dance music and beckoned Strickland to take a seat. “Bud, were you ever in Beirut before the Events?”

  “A couple of times, in transit. Spent a few days at the Hotel St. Georges, checked out the casino and the nightclubs, that sort of thing.”

  “Do you remember what it was like here then, how free it made you feel, as if there were absolutely no rules and anything was possible?”

  Strickland nodded in understanding.

  “I was sent here in 1975 to study Arabic under cover as a student,” Lukash continued. “They gave me a tourist passport under the name of Bill Conklin, told me to stay away from the embassy, and to come back in a year with fluent Arabic for assignment to Cairo under nonofficial cover.” Lukash swirled the ice in his glass nervously, and felt a shiver run down his back. He rubbed his cold hands together and then went on.

  “I hired an Arabic tutor and took lessons in the morning and afternoons, preparing my homework in the evenings after dinner. I worked nonstop, and in a few months I had made good progress with the language but was starting to burn out. I decided to cut back to morning lessons only, with homework in the afternoon, and to spend the evenings on the town, practicing my Arabic, getting a feel for the local culture, and having some fun.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Strickland noted.

  “No joke. Anyway, my Arabic tutor at that time was a middle-age woman named Claudette Hammouche, who also taught part-time at the U.S. embassy. We got along well enough, and she had me over to the house a number of times for lunch or for coffee. Not long after I started going out in the evenings, Claudette arranged a blind date for me with her niece, Muna, who had just graduated from Beirut University and was working as a graphic artist for a local advertising agency.

  “Muna was a lovely girl—extremely bright, full of energy and ambition. She would practice her English on me, and I’d practice my Arabic and French on her. We never ran out of things to talk about, and she never seemed to tire of my stories about the U.S. and the places I’d visited in Europe and Asia. And she was such a beautiful girl that I simply couldn’t take my eyes off her. Or my hands, for that matter.”

  “Uh-oh. I see it coming,” Bud broke in.

  “No doubt about it, the bachelor life in Beirut had gone to my head. I had a terrific apartment, a decent salary, time on my hands, and a city that was full of ex
citement. Muna and I went out to restaurants and nightclubs several times a week, joined a private beach club, and took ski trips on the weekends. I thought it would never end. Even when it started getting close to the time for my reassignment to Cairo, somehow I assumed that I’d be able to arrange for Muna to go there, too. Of course, I never told her that I worked for the Agency, but at the same time, I never told anyone in the station or at Headquarters that I might be getting serious about this Lebanese girl that none of them knew I was even seeing.

  “Then one day Muna came to me and said her period was three weeks late. Well, you know how those things go. We sweated and sweated, and in the meantime we started talking about the possibility of getting married. And when her period finally came, she didn’t stop talking about it. That was about a month before my reassignment was due. In a matter of days I was scheduled to travel to Headquarters for a ten-day TDY to take my Arabic examination, talk to the Egypt desk officers, and study the files of the agents I was supposed to take over in Cairo.”

  Bud Strickland held up his hand to interrupt. “Wait a second. What sort of work did Muna and her family think you did for a living?”

  “The cover story I told everybody in those days was that I was a salesman for a refrigeration equipment company and had been sent to Beirut to learn Arabic in preparation for a sales assignment in the Arabian Gulf. As I recall, my plan at the time—to the extent that I had one—was to return to Headquarters, tell them about Muna, wait for her security clearance to come through, and then get married before we moved to Cairo together.” Lukash added more bourbon to his glass.

  “Pretty naïve, eh?” he added, looking to Strickland for a response and finding none. “In hindsight, what I did back then makes no sense at all. Maybe it was Muna’s persistence. Maybe I thought I would be able to force the issue once I got back to Headquarters. But whatever the reason, I proposed to Muna and we scheduled a wedding date for a week after my return from the U.S.”