Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2)

by Fleming, Preston

  “The guy back there with the flat tires?” Prosser exclaimed. “What the hell would the Phalange intel chief be doing on this side of town?”

  “I went up to the mountains last night with five of his men to deliver some equipment to the Syrian Free Officers. A few minutes after we handed it over, Syrian army patrols hammered us. Nobody from our side made it back but me. Somebody in Phalange intelligence clearly double-crossed us, so I decided to take it up with the colonel. You can imagine his surprise.”

  Lukash removed a pocket cassette recorder from his breast pocket and laid it on the dashboard. “Con, do you have any idea how much equipment Washington has been funneling to the Phalange this year?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Prosser replied warily.

  “Well, what you may not know is that Headquarters appears to have given the Phalange a green light to pass some of it to the Syrian opposition. The idea was to show Damascus that we’re prepared to stand up to al-Asad in the next round of peace talks. But the Phalange has been playing both sides against the middle. Their intention is to provoke al-Asad into retaliating against the U.S. so that we’ll have no choice but to get in bed with the Phalange. Which is why the colonel tipped off the Syrians to last night’s delivery, even at the sacrifice of his own deputy, three more of his men, and three Syrian Free Officers—not to mention the American liaison officer who was stupid enough to go with them.”

  “The colonel told you all that?” Prosser gasped.

  “I have it on tape.”

  Prosser shook his head in astonishment while Lukash brooded silently over what had happened and what might come next.

  “How long before we’re at the airport?” Lukash asked nervously a few minutes later.

  “Ten minutes, if the checkpoints aren’t backed up. According to the radio, there was some trouble around here yesterday with illegal roadblocks taking civilian hostages. I hope you brought your dip passport.”

  Lukash patted his breast pocket and felt the stiff cover of the diplomatic travel document.

  “If we get stopped, you’ll need it,” Prosser added.

  Before they had gone another kilometer, Lukash spotted a half-tracked armored personnel carrier parked diagonally across the road some two hundred meters ahead.

  Prosser also saw it and braked immediately. “Let’s try another way, just to be on the safe side,” he offered. “A half a click behind us we passed a side street that ought to take us to a road parallel to the one we’re on.”

  They retraced their path and turned onto a newly paved side road that led west toward the Mediterranean. Abandoned villas, some only partially completed, rose amid a vast expanse of flat, treeless terrain. The area apparently had been next in line for residential development before the outbreak of civil war, but the decline of the Lebanese economy over five years of intermittent fighting had left the acreage all but worthless.

  As they drove farther, the road curved gradually to the right until Lukash could see that they were traveling nearly due south. Neither man spoke, and Lukash let his mind drift—first imagining his favorite watering holes in downtown Washington and Georgetown, and then the mob scene he would face at the airport ticket counter to book his ticket back to the United States. His American Express card would cover the airfare, but he worried that his wallet might not hold enough Lebanese lira to bribe his way on board if today’s flights to Europe were fully booked.

  Lukash had paid little attention to his surroundings for several minutes when at last he looked up and saw something that both thrilled and frightened him. On either side of the road was a two-meter-high stucco wall. A hundred meters or more in front of them was one of the improvised roadblocks he had first seen in the days just before the outbreak of civil war in 1975. It consisted of two cars parked astride the road in a way that enabled a few armed men to halt the flow of traffic along the road and question all travelers before allowing them to pass.

  What unnerved Lukash about the place was not the roadblock itself but that he had seen it before in a recurrent dream that had plagued him since the first night after his return to Lebanon. The dun-colored walls were exactly as he had imagined them each time he had traveled this road in his dream. The vehicles blocking the path ahead were also familiar to him: a rust-eaten white Mercedes and a battleship-gray Land Rover. Just beyond the barrier, a Fiat and a white Peugeot were parked at the curb, with a dark Volvo sedan waiting farther down the road.

  “Let me handle this, Walt,” Prosser declared as they approached the roadblock. “And this time, stay in the damned car. No more stunts like the night you arrived.”

  He glanced across at Lukash, whose eyes were fixed on a huddle of eight or ten detainees, including a young woman and child, lined up behind the Land Rover as if they were waiting for its tailgate to open and swallow them all. A tall, skinny militiaman wearing a baggy black hood over maroon-and-green-camouflage fatigues aimed his Kalashnikov rifle nervously at the center of the group.

  The Renault came to a stop opposite a short but sturdily built gunman in a disheveled khaki uniform. He wore no helmet or hat or insignia of rank, and the cast of his eyes through the cutouts in his black hood was as cold and cruel as that of a medieval executioner. The hoods and lack of insignia meant that the roadblock was not a routine security check by a recognized military authority but most likely a hostage-taking operation. Lukash felt a surge of adrenaline suddenly erase the feelings of weariness, hunger, and thirst that had nagged at him since he crossed the Green Line.

  “Hawwiyatak,” the gunman demanded of Prosser. Your identity.

  Prosser drew his foreign ministry card out of his shirt pocket and presented it. The sentry gave it a cursory look and returned it, paying no attention to Lukash.

  “Yalla, yalla,” the sentry barked impatiently, waving the Renault through with the muzzle of his AK-47.

  “Shukran,” Prosser replied, quickly shifting back into gear.

  But when the Renault drew abreast of the huddled detainees waiting behind the Land Rover, Lukash suddenly seized the steering wheel. “Stop the car,” he demanded.

  Prosser tried to dislodge his grip. “Don’t be insane, Walt. Leave them alone. They aren’t our people and this isn’t our business. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Lukash reached between the two front seats and yanked the handle of the emergency brake. The car skidded sideways to a stop on the sand-strewn pavement and he threw open his door. “Wait here. I think I see somebody I know.”

  Lukash could hardly believe his eyes. The hostage scene was just as he had dreamed, time after time, including the lovely young mother in the sleeveless flowered sundress with the long chestnut hair tied at the nape of her neck. He could see that, with her small-boned ballerina’s figure and classical Mediterranean profile, she bore a distinct resemblance to Muna Khalifé. Just as in the dream, the woman’s slender hands rested on the shoulders of a little girl three or four years old, who reached up and grasped her mother’s wrists. Tears stained the daughter’s cheeks, while the mother’s color was ashen and her jaw firmly set.

  As Lukash approached the Land Rover, its tailgate opened and the cluster of hostages surged forward under the prodding of a pair of hooded guards. Lukash addressed the guards. “The woman and the small girl are my neighbors. Can you tell me where you are taking them?”

  The shorter of the two men redirected the muzzle of his rifle toward Lukash, who slowly raised his hands above his head. The sentry shouted into the van and a short, heavyset militiaman wearing similar maroon-and-green-camouflage fatigues and a red beret emerged into the sunlight.

  Lukash held out his black U.S. diplomatic passport to the man, whose only weapon was a holstered pistol. As soon as he took it, Lukash pointed to the young mother. “I am a foreign diplomat. This woman and her little girl are my neighbors. I don’t know where you are planning to send them, but I am willing to pay you if I can take them with me. How about it?”

  The militiaman listened and then s
hook his head and handed back the passport. “If you know them, tell me their names.”

  “I can’t,” Lukash answered. “We just say hello when we pass in the street.”

  “Then why do you care so much about them?”

  “Because I do. What have they done that you must take women and children as prisoners?”

  “Their papers show they are Maronite Christians. My orders are to collect Christian hostages. They must come with me. Please, go now, or it will be the worse for you.”

  “No,” Lukash insisted, holding his ground. “If it’s Christians you’re after, why don’t you take me in their place and let my American friend over there take the woman and girl back to Beirut. Surely it’s Christian men you want, not women and children, no?”

  The Arab reddened and anger colored his voice. “But you are not a Lebanese. We are not interested in foreigners. Go, I say; I have no more time to waste on you.”

  But Lukash did not budge. “I have two thousand lira here in my pocket, and my friend in the car has more. How much do you want for the woman and the girl? Name your price.”

  Instead of replying, the militiaman gestured angrily toward Lukash and barked out an unintelligible order to the shorter of the two riflemen, who swung his rifle butt around with lightning speed against Lukash’s left temple, knocking him to the ground.

  Though too dazed to get up, Lukash saw that his passport, some folded banknotes, and his Phalange intelligence building pass had fallen out of his breast pocket. His hand shot out to retrieve the pass, but it was too late. The stylized cedar-tree emblem of the Phalange imprinted on the document had already caught the eye of the Arab in the red beret, who scooped it up before Lukash could reach it. He studied the card for what seemed like an eternity while Lukash waited. Suddenly he drew his pistol, angrily pulled back the slide, and pointed the muzzle inches from Lukash’s chest. Again the rifle butt crashed against Lukash’s head. This time he lay still.

  The Arab in the red beret barked out another order, and the short rifleman picked up the cash, passport and other papers that had fallen from Lukash’s pocket and stuffed them into the deep cargo pockets of his fatigue blouse.

  Meanwhile, the other gunmen herded their detainees into the back of the Land Rover, leaving the young woman and daughter for last. As if it were an afterthought, the leader waved them apart from the others when their turn came to board, pointing them toward Prosser’s Renault a few dozen meters away.

  Prosser watched the woman and child approach, hesitantly at first, with furtive glances back at the gunmen, who were now busily dismantling their makeshift roadblock and closing the doors of the Land Rover on their luckless prisoners. The militiaman in the red beret climbed into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover while the other men removed their black hoods and prepared to depart in the other vehicles.

  Prosser held open the passenger door of the Renault for the terrified mother and daughter, all the while watching Lukash’s inert body for signs of movement. He started the engine and stood by to retrieve his fallen colleague as soon as the gunmen left the scene.

  Then the Rover’s engine roared to life and its driver swung the car around to withdraw in the direction of the Cité Sportive. At the same moment, Prosser saw Lukash lift his head and slowly rise to his knees. He knelt at the side of the road, just wide of the Land Rover’s escape route. In a few seconds the Rover would be past him and Prosser would be able to move forward to take him on board.

  But in the next instant Prosser looked on in horror as Lukash drew a pistol from his belt and fired twice at the Rover from where he knelt. The Rover swerved suddenly toward Lukash, horn blaring wildly, and struck him as he attempted vainly to scramble out of its path. The horn abruptly stopped on impact and the Land Rover drove on with the Volvo closely behind, leaving the motionless Lukash in their dusty wake.

  Chapter 21

  The moment the kidnappers were out of range, Prosser raced to Lukash’s side and put his fingers against the man’s throat. Despite the tremor in his hand, he detected a faint pulse beneath his fingertips. At once he waved the young mother to his side and instructed her in mangled French to help him drag Lukash to the car with the least possible jostling to his head. With considerable effort, they laid him on the rear seat and folded his legs so that the door would close.

  While the woman settled her little girl in the front passenger seat, Prosser fetched an old jacket and a dusty blanket from the Renault’s trunk and positioned them carefully around the unconscious man’s neck to prevent his head from moving when the car hit a bump. The moment her mother left her side, the doe-eyed little girl rose promptly to her feet and watched Prosser’s every move from over the seat back.

  During the minute or less required to arrange the makeshift padding, the young mother, eyes brimming with tears, made the sign of the cross over her wounded rescuer and said a fleeting prayer while holding her palm against his dust-caked forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, Prosser noticed the child staring fixedly at Lukash with a puzzled expression. Then, all at once, she broke out into an excited babble of Arabic and French that rose in volume until her mother grasped her by the shoulders in frustration and sat her down.

  To Prosser’s amazement, Lukash moaned softly, blinked several times, and then drew his dangling right arm across his chest before losing consciousness again. With renewed hope for Lukash’s recovery, Prosser summoned the woman to rejoin her daughter in the front seat and prepared to set off for the American embassy.

  Once they were safely on the main highway, Prosser noticed the child peeking at Lukash again from between the front seats and recalled her excited babbling when she had focused her attention on him at the start of the drive. Curious about the girl’s interest in Lukash, Prosser asked the woman what her daughter had said to her.

  “She said she knows this man,” the woman replied with a bewildered look. “She said she has seen him in her dreams and knew he would come for her someday.”

  “Wow, the things kids come up with,” Prosser muttered in English, then he returned his attention to the road ahead.

  * * *

  During the thirty-minute drive, Prosser discovered that the young mother could be extremely helpful in talking their way through the numerous roadblocks along the coastal road. A young couple with a small child presented no apparent security risk, and their injured passenger was considered a nuisance best shuffled off to the next checkpoint. When at last the final roadblock on the coastal road was behind them, Prosser deposited the mother and daughter at the entrance to the four-star Summerland Hotel, where they could safely report their abduction to the authorities and call for family to bring them home.

  Upon reaching the embassy Prosser cleared the series of roadblocks outside the front entrance and summoned a pair of contract security guards to help him convey Lukash to the first-floor dispensary. There, Asma al-Tawil, the embassy’s American-trained contract nurse, would be on duty to offer first aid and arrange for more serious medical attention, if necessary, at the American University at Beirut Hospital just a few minutes away.

  Prosser entered the chancery behind the guards and vouched for Lukash with the marine guard on duty in the absence of any identification papers for Lukash. Then he returned to the Renault and parked it along the Corniche a block west of the embassy. By the time he returned, the contract guards were back at their post under the porte cochere, and the marine guard buzzed him back in.

  Upon arriving at the dispensary, he found Lukash sitting on an examination table with his legs dangling over the edge while Nurse Asma conducted a preliminary neurological exam. First she tested the movements and reactions of Lukash’s eyes and examined them with an ophthalmoscope. Next she held a succession of small glass vials under each nostril to test his sense of smell. Lukash identified correctly the fragrances of mint, citrus, cedar wood, garlic, and vanilla, but gagged when the vial of vinegar was opened, causing the nurse to spill nearly half the vial on the floor.

  The
n she asked her patient to extend his arm at shoulder height and touch the index finger of each hand to his nose, which he did despite a noticeable tremor in his left hand. Then she directed Lukash, in rapid succession, to smile, frown, whistle, stick out his tongue, and clench his jaw. Through clenched teeth he asked if the exam was over yet. The nurse glowered back at him and, without responding, proceeded to palpate the neck muscles involved in moving his head.

  “Damn, that hurts!” he exclaimed, recoiling suddenly and seizing her wrist.

  “The pain is hardly surprising, considering that someone knocked you on the head twice with a rifle butt and ran you down with an automobile. Tell me, how long were you unconscious, Mr.—”

  “Lukash,” he answered. “How long? How should I know? I was out cold.”

  “Give us a guess,” Asma responded with annoyance.

  “Oh, I suppose not more than a minute or two. I kept my eyes shut a while longer, but only because my head hurt so bad.”

  The nurse did not appear to believe him.

  “Whether you believe me or not,” he went on, “I know I was awake, because I could feel every damned pothole.”

  The nurse turned her gaze to Prosser, who confirmed the patient’s testimony.

  “That’s right,” Prosser acknowledged. “Once we got him onto his feet, he seemed to snap out of it and looked a lot better.”

  Nurse Asma narrowed her eyes but stopped short of accusing the pair of collusion. “All right, Mr. Lukash,” she announced. “You don’t seem to be in any immediate danger from your injuries, but I strongly recommend that you see a neurologist right away for a more thorough examination. I’m going to ask you to lie down and remain as still as possible while I make an appointment for you at AUB Hospital and arrange with the motor pool for a ride.”