Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2)

by Fleming, Preston

  Lukash and Major Elie looked back to the east across the bridge at the flaming hulk of the first Land Rover and stared open-mouthed at the glowing red tracer bullets still pouring into the wreck from machine guns hidden in the hills above them to the north and east. Minutes later, as they examined the wreck from the relative protection of a massive boulder, it seemed impossible to Lukash that either of the two point men could have survived the explosion, the crash, or the subsequent machine-gun fire.

  Elie pulled his Land Rover back onto the main road and at once Lukash heard something resembling the distant clatter of a jackhammer, followed almost instantly by the eerie whistle of a bullet tumbling end over end as it passed them by. Now a trail of heavy machine-gun bullets raked the rock wall behind the Rover, sending rock fragments clattering against Lukash’s side of the vehicle.

  “Where’s Fadi, for God’s sake?” Elie burst out. “Why isn’t he returning fire?”

  Around the next bend, a hundred meters ahead of them, the third Land Rover was angled across the roadway at its narrowest point. Fadi and the driver scrambled out the doors, rifles in hand, and took up positions behind the vehicle’s engine compartment, aiming straight for Elie’s oncoming Land Rover. The rifleman on the left fired a short burst from his M-16, and the bullets crackled like firecrackers as they flew past Lukash’s open window.

  “Don’t stop! Ram them! Aim your right fender for their rear wheels—it’ll swing them around. Faster!” Lukash screamed.

  “It’s too narrow!” Elie shouted back as he reached across the steering wheel with his left hand and seized the hand brake with his right. In a single movement, he spun the wheel violently around and jerked up on the hand brake so that the Rover spun around and showed its rear end to the two gunmen. As the Rover’s rearward momentum slowed, Elie shifted into first gear and headed back downhill toward the bridge.

  “We must find cover,” he told Lukash. “When we stop, take up your rifle and follow me.”

  One of the machine gunners on the next hill began firing regular three-round bursts that skipped along the ground to the left of the Land Rover. Elie brought the steering wheel around hard and sent the Rover skidding broadside into a mound of knee-high boulders. Lukash gathered up as many sacks of ordnance as he could hold from among those piled in the backseat and swung his legs out the door. Elie tumbled out behind him.

  They had no sooner toppled forward onto the rocks than strobe-like muzzle flashes cast their flickering shadows against the snow-covered hillside behind them. An instant later a scattering of bullets hit the exposed side of the Land Rover, scattering tiny fragments of safety glass over their legs and backs. The muzzle flashes came from the direction of Fadi’s makeshift barricade, and Lukash could tell from the extremely rapid rate of fire that the bullets were being shot from a Phalangist M-16 and not from a Syrian AK-47.

  Then a moment later the firing stopped, and the only sound they could hear was that of the wind fanning the gasoline-fed flames of the burning Land Rover.

  “The Syrians will come for us soon,” Elie said. “First they will pin us down with mortar and machine-gun fire, and then they will send a squad of troops up the road to flush us out. They will have orders to take us alive—I am sure of it. For you, that is not so terrible. You would bring a high price from your government, and the Syrians know how to drive a hard bargain. Maybe they will be able to extract a confession from you. But for me there will be no ransom, no bargaining, no exchange—only torture and death. For me the only chance is to get past Fadi and Ilyas and stay hidden among the rocks farther to the rear until our local boys along the next ridge hear our gunfire and come to retake the road from the Syrians. This is Phalange territory; once our boys arrive, the Syrians dare not remain.”

  “Then let’s keep moving,” Lukash replied.

  Elie looked askance at Lukash, as if he had expected the American to surrender, and then flashed an animated grin. “Do you still have the LAW?” Elie asked.

  Lukash groped among the pouches, slings, and ammunition belts he had retrieved from the Land Rover but could not find the metal cylinder. “I can’t find it; I must have left it in the Rover.”

  But Elie did not hear him. He seemed to be straining his ears to pick up some distant sound in the valley. “There it is. Do you hear it? Automatic rifle fire, below in the wadi.”

  “Do you think the flight lieutenant...?”

  Elie lowered his head. “The Syrian army must have waited until the transfer was complete. Now Damascus will have exactly what it wants. And perhaps Colonel Faris as well. For I believe the colonel warned them of our arrival and ordered Fadi not to let us return alive.”

  “But why? If the colonel had wanted us dead, he could have had us killed in Beirut or on the road to Baskinta or back at the hut. Why here?”

  “To give the Syrians proof of American aid to their oppositionists,” he suggested. “And perhaps because he discovered my assistance to American intelligence.”

  “But that’s impossible, Elie. We never even spoke of it until Wednesday, and that was on a mountaintop with nobody else within a kilometer of us.”

  “But we spoke of it in your automobile, on the way back to Beirut. Do you remember the Mercedes that followed us from Baskinta to the end of the autostrade?”

  “A bug…in my car?”

  Elie nodded. “Not long ago we caught a traitor by installing a small tape recorder under the passenger seat of a French intelligence officer’s Peugeot. It was activated by a pressure switch so that it would record whenever a passenger rode in the car. We changed the tape every time the Frenchman came to see us.” He paused, his voice filled with self-reproach. “Your car is in our compound every day, Wali. I should have thought of it from the beginning.”

  “What happened to the Frenchman?” Lukash asked facetiously. “Was he taken out to the mountains and shot, too?”

  Elie laughed with bitter irony. “Of course not. Your situation is entirely different from that of the French officer. Colonel Faris wants you killed or captured tonight to prove to the Syrians that your government is helping the Syrian Free Officers. Don’t you see it? The Syrians now have the lieutenant, the radios, the medical supplies, and the other equipment, and soon they will have us as well. Ah, it is so simple! Why didn’t I see it sooner?”

  From the wadi came the crump of a mortar round being fired.

  “They will test the range with a single mortar tube. Once they have bracketed their target, other mortars will join in. And when that happens, the air above us will be so thick with shrapnel that it will become impossible for us to raise our heads. Now, before the mortars find their range, we must advance quickly to kill Fadi and IIyas or at least drive them back up the mountain.

  “Listen closely: when I go forward, open fire at the Land Rover in short bursts until you run out of ammunition or I have dropped to the ground. Then insert a fresh magazine and move forward along the rock face while I cover you. If we succeed in outflanking them, they must retreat or face death. Believe me, they will retreat.”

  At that moment they heard a voice calling out from somewhere near Fadi’s Land Rover. “Leave them, Captain! Surely they must be dead by now. We must go!”

  “Take the car five hundred meters back up the road,” came the reply. “I will follow.”

  A few seconds later Lukash heard the throaty engine of Fadi’s Rover being started, and a moment later it was out of sight. From across the valley came another crump, and then yet another a few seconds later, as the Syrian mortar adjusted its range.

  Major Elie leaped to his feet and ran toward the place where the Rover had been.

  The two men advanced as Elie had proposed, one after the other. Twice Captain Fadi was able to fire off short bursts from his M-16 before being pinned down again. Lukash saw a dark form retreat around the next bend in the road.

  Then the first mortar shell dropped into a deep snowdrift some twenty meters above the roadway where Elie and Lukash had left their disabled
Land Rover. The explosion triggered a minor landslide of snow, rock, and dirt onto the abandoned vehicle. A second mortar shell fell just below the lip of the road, sending a hail of stones harmlessly in all directions. Additional rounds fell behind them as the two men advanced up the roadway.

  Fadi saw his chance to gain safety around the next bend and raced across the forty meters of road that separated him from the next rocky outcrop. Elie let loose with his M-16, but his aim was high and Fadi made good his escape.

  As the mortar rounds had by now nearly found the spot from which Elie and Lukash were firing, both men rose and headed around the curve with their rifles held ready to fire from the hip. Just short of reaching cover, a mortar shell detonated behind Elie, lifting him off the ground, spinning him in a cartwheel, and setting him down roughly on the exposed shoulder of the road. This time Elie did not get back up.

  Lukash, having already dropped to the ground, looked back for his partner and found no one. He was out of the range of the heavy machine gun, but not out of range of the mortar’s high-arching trajectory. He peered back around the corner and saw Elie lying motionless. “Elie, just another ten meters and you’re in the clear,” he called out. “Can you make it?”

  A string of heavy machine-gun bullets pounded the granite wall behind Elie, sending a stinging shower of rock fragments onto his legs. Elie did not move.

  Lukash put his rifle down and set out crawling across the road on his belly toward Major Elie. As soon as he reached him, he shook the Phalangist by the shoulders. Though Elie failed to stir, Lukash thought he heard a faint moan from him.

  He tried to drag Elie forward by the collar of his French army parka, but the man was too heavy and the ground too rocky. The next mortar round fell just beneath the lip of the road, spreading its deadly shrapnel without harm into the valley below.

  “Hold on,” Lukash said as he turned Elie onto his back, hoisted him onto his shoulders, and staggered back toward the rocks.

  Elie awoke and shrieked with pain; Lukash felt the man’s body stiffen with the effort of screaming. He carried him another ten meters around the bend, out of mortar range. Somehow he knew Elie would not be able to travel any farther, but if he could only hold on, perhaps the local Phalangist contingent would retake the road from the east. In the faint light of the cloud-covered moon, Lukash examined Elie’s head, neck, chest, and back for wounds, found none, and moved on to the arms and legs. The damage was to his right leg: crushed to a pulp above the knee. Lukash stripped Elie’s web belt from his trousers and began looping it around his leg to serve as a tourniquet.

  “Elie, can you hear me?”

  No response.

  “Elie, listen to me. I’m going to stop the bleeding in your leg. This belt of yours is going to do the job just fine. Now, all you’ve got to do is just hang on, okay? I’ll be here with you, so don’t worry about a thing. Lots of guys have survived wounds worse than this one, okay? So, just lie down and—”

  The crack of a single rifle bullet passing over Lukash’s left shoulder startled him and made him drop the belt before he had a chance to tighten it. He turned in the direction of the gunfire and saw another muzzle flash about eighty meters up the road. He flattened himself and in the same instant heard a second sharp crack as another bullet passed a few inches over his head.

  He rolled over and grasped his rifle and then fumbled for the selector switch to put it back on semiautomatic. Fadi had it right, of course: in the dark, at eighty meters, with your target taking cover behind rocks, the only chance of scoring a hit was to fire a single round at a time. He waited in the silence for his eyes to readjust to the darkness, saw a slight movement near where the previous muzzle flash had been, and squeezed off a round from his M-16.

  A moment later a mortar round fell about a hundred meters ahead, illuminating Captain Fadi from behind. Lukash fired instantly, kicking up a wisp of dust at Fadi’s elbow. Then he heard a deep rumbling roar unlike anything he knew. It came from behind Fadi, and after a moment Lukash reasoned that it must be the sound of an avalanche set in motion when the latest mortar round exploded in an accumulation of wet snow.

  He watched as tons of snow and ice poured down the mountainside onto the road and cascaded into the valley. It was only a minor snowslide, lasting fifteen seconds or less, but to Lukash it seemed far longer. And now the road behind Captain Fadi had suddenly become impassable for a stretch of thirty meters or more, closing off his line of retreat to the waiting Land Rover.

  Fadi fired another round at Lukash, but this time it passed several meters wide. Lukash held his fire as Fadi clambered up the head-high wall of snow and ice. Though agile, the Phalangist had apparently underestimated how difficult it would be to traverse the thirty-meter field of slush, which was already hardening into a cement-like consistency in the frigid night air.

  Lukash advanced at a trot while the Phalangist scrambled clumsily across the slushy mess. He heard Fadi shout to Lieutenant Ilyas with a note of panic in his voice. “Wait! Ilyas! Don’t leave me! Climb up those rocks and cover me, for God’s sake!”

  The driver did as he was told, within moments appearing silhouetted against a snow-flecked boulder as he raised his rifle to fire at Lukash. The Lebanese pulled off a short burst on full automatic, but the rounds went high. Lukash dropped to one knee, fired a single shot to the militiaman’s chest, and saw his body lift before falling backward onto the snow. Fadi looked up, saw his fallen companion, and redoubled his desperate effort to traverse the icy mush. He fell on his face in the snow, rose, lost his balance again, and began crawling on all fours, rifle slung across his back, the sound of his heaving breath audible to Lukash from twenty meters behind.

  Lukash advanced in the holes made by Fadi’s feet and soon had a clear line of sight at the man’s retreating back. He fired a round overhead and ordered Fadi to halt.

  “Stand up, hands in the air, and unsling your rifle slowly with one finger.”

  The captain gasped for air, his chest heaving as he rose, and did as he was told.

  “Now kick the rifle toward me and do the same with your ammo belt.”

  Again, Fadi followed instructions, his breathing now less convulsive than before.

  “Now the parka. Unzip it and let it drop. Slowly…”

  Fadi pulled the zipper deliberately from his neck to his waist with his right hand and stopped short. He brought his left hand forward, as if to force a jammed zipper, but instead found a grenade inside, pulled the pin, and tossed it at Lukash’s feet.

  Lukash dove away from it, stayed down until the grenade had detonated harmlessly in the snow, then raised his head to find Fadi, who was now within three paces of reaching the other side of the packed snow. Lukash held his breath, aimed his rifle at the center of Fadi’s back, and fired.

  He watched the Phalangist’s body topple forward. But the detonation of yet another mortar round between him and the Land Rover reminded him that he was far from being out of danger. He picked himself up, slung his M-16 over his shoulder, and crawled toward Captain Fadi. Pulling out his GI .45-caliber pistol, he held it to Fadi’s temple as he felt the man’s throat for a pulse. There was none. He holstered the .45 and headed toward the edge of the avalanche ice.

  Lukash had no sooner arrived at the edge of the ice, within twenty paces of the surviving Land Rover, when he remembered Major Elie. He looked back across the ice. How would he be able to carry Major Elie across it? Three more rapid-fire crumps sounded in the valley. The Syrians were stepping up their barrage.

  He looked across the fallen snow once more, trying to remember exactly where he had left the major. Who could possibly blame me for escaping? he thought. Besides, who would ever know what really happened? By now Elie had to be a goner.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered, and retraced his steps across the ice, praying that the mortar rounds would keep their distance.

  Finding his way back to the major went much more quickly than he expected, since the slushy mix had hardened to a large ext
ent. He reached the place where he and Fadi had clambered onto the avalanche field and spotted Elie’s booted leg extending from behind a rock not far away.

  The major’s throat was already cold when Lukash attempted to take his pulse. The belt lay loose around his leg, just as he had left it. Major Elie had bled to death. Recognizing his fatal error, Lukash bellowed in frustration and slammed his fists against the icy ground. “God forgive me,” he muttered and then turned around wearily to recross the avalanche debris for a third time.

  He was halfway across when the next salvo of mortar shells rained down on the road behind him. They followed him across the icy debris of the avalanche until at last he reached the far side and dashed up the road to the still-intact Land Rover in which Captain Fadi and Lieutenant Ilyas had intended to make their escape.

  Lukash started the Rover and headed back up the mountain toward the hut just as the Phalange’s big 155-millimeter howitzers began firing from Qanat Bakiche, sending huge shells into Wadi Chakroub that quickly silenced the Syrian mortars. Each shell sounded like a freight train as it passed overhead, sending shock waves reverberating from every rock wall as it exploded. Before long Lukash passed the hut where his team had spent the evening and soon after crossed the ridgeline separating Wadi Chakroub from the Phalangist heartland.

  After an hour of creeping forward without daring to use headlamps, Lukash at last saw the lights of Baskinta twinkling in the distance. Less than a mile ahead he spotted a wood fire in an oil drum where an informal roadblock had been set up. He considered briefly whether the troops who manned it were more likely to be local Phalangists or Colonel Faris’s intelligence men. But the distinction was probably irrelevant, because in either case they would likely turn him over to Colonel Faris. And if they did, his fate would be sealed.

  Finding a ravine whose boulder-strewn bottom was only poorly visible from the road, he pulled the Land Rover onto the shoulder and stepped out. Removing as much M-16 ammunition from the vehicle as he could reasonably carry, he stashed it on a ledge that was out of sight from the road. Then he seized the Rover’s steering wheel and pushed the vehicle down the shallow incline until its front wheels dropped over the edge. A moment later the Rover gained speed and tumbled forward into the ravine, bouncing off one rocky surface after another for more than a hundred meters before coming to rest in a crumpled heap.