Our commo gear, heavy weapons, and specialized goodies were traveling with Duke, Larry, Frank, and Baby Rich. They had the easiest trip: a Military Air Command flight to Sigonella Air Base in Sicily, a restful night of cold beer, then an early-morning air shuttle aboard a Navy C-2 Greyhound COD (Carrier On-board Delivery) aircraft, which would drop them onto the flight deck of the USS Independence, just off the Lebanese coast. From there, my SEAL quartet would infiltrate by coming ashore with a Marine contingent. Then they would change clothes, lose themselves in the crowds, and make their way north to the city. I was to pick them and their booty up outside the airport terminal in seventy-two hours.
Paul, Horserace, Pooster, and Snake were scheduled to fly to Amsterdam, then make their way overland by train to Athens. They’d stay there a couple of days to make sure they were “clean,” then fly to Cyprus, where they’d catch a ferryboat to Beirut. They would be at the Museum Crossing— one of the few places where it was possible to pass between East and West Beirut without getting sniped — in eighty-four hours. Jew, Ho-Ho-Ho, and Fingers had the most circuitous and dangerous route; London, Paris, Frankfurt — and Damascus. Once in the Syrian capital, they’d hire cabs and make their way to Beirut overland, then check into the Summerland Hotel, on the beach just north of the airport.
On this particular combat patrol, I was point man. I’d operate solo for a day or so, getting the lay of the land, arranging transportation, looking for appropriate safe houses, and watching out for — whatever. I smiled at the mustached official who’d stamped my passport for me. There had been a pastel pink and yellow, 50-pound Lebanese note folded neatly in my Irish passport before I passed through immigration. Now I had a two-month visa, and the fifty pounds had disappeared.
“Shukran— thank you.”
“Aufwan — you are welcome.”
I walked up the ramp toward the outer doors. It looked as if there were a riot going on outside, but it was only the usual bustle, common to Third World airports from Cairo to Karachi. The difference in Lebanon was that here, everybody was armed to the teeth.
Three cabdrivers fought over me, and I surrendered to the winner, a small dark man with a single, thick eyebrow and a crooked smile below a badly repaired harelip- He guided me toward what might once have been a Chevrolet. I went along, watching him lope in front of me, shoulders rolling. We reached the vehicle. He paused. He turned. The massive eyebrow raised itself almost a full inch. “Where we go?”
“Commodore Hotel, Igor.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “Sahafa— press? Journalist?”
“Yes. Sahafa. Irish Weekly Flagpole. Heard of it?” I watched as he gave me what I assumed was a Beimti’s quizzical look. “No, mister.”
“That’s okay — no one else has, either.” I climbed into the passenger’s side, threw my baggage on the rear seat, and wrestled the door almost closed. “What’s your name, habibi?”
“Habibi? You speak Arabic?”
“No — only a few words. I can tell you to go fuck yourself and ask where’s the pissoir.”
“That’s enough.” The driver turned to me, his grinning made all the more absurd by the condition of his lip. He pulled out, oblivious of the traffic careening on either side of us.
“Call me Abu Said, habibi. Said Abu Said.” He shook his head, reached behind himself, and tapped my luggage. “Ya, habibi — please not to do that — it is giving temptations. Putting them under your feet, please.”
I restowed my luggage properly as the taxi swerved precariously out of the airport proper. We negotiated two Lebanese roadblocks and started north on the divided roadway running into the city. Two Volvos that appeared to be in a drag race a hundred yards ahead of us suddenly bounced off each other. One swerved precariously, did a 180, then pulled to the side of the highway. The other Volvo veered to the shoulder and skidded to a stop. Both drivers got out brandishing pistols. Abu Said put pedal to metal and sped past the gunshots. Welcome to Beirut.
We were waved through a Marine checkpoint, manned by apple-cheeked kids with unloaded M16s. One of the idiotic “rules of engagement” that had been promulgated by the bureaucrats in Washington was that Marines were not allowed to protect themselves. I looked back over my shoulder. They were sitting ducks. I turned back to see an urban sprawl of bombed-out, gutted ruins in front of us. “Bourj al Barajneh — Palestinian camp,” Abu Said explained as we passed.
“Israelis no like.”
He swerved left at an intersection, then soon bore right around what remained of a traffic circle. A sign on a building to my left told me we’d just passed the Kuwaiti embassy. Now we passed what looked like a football stadium. “Sports center,” he explained. “PLO used it for weapons. Israelis bombed- Syrians — shoot with tanks. Everybody — ka-boom.”
We drove on. To my right, houses flattened like pancakes cluttered the landscape. “Chatila camp,” the driver explained. “ATatoefc — Phalangists…” He drew his finger across ‘’ his throat. “Kill many Palestinian here.”
We swerved left, then right, then left, following a small residential road lined with double-parked cars and apartment houses that seemed to have weathered the war without too ‘ much damage. We S-turned again, and I was suddenly presented with a remarkable expanse of green-blue Mediterra; nean on our port side. Even with all the destruction, the view ’, was spectacular — this must have been an incredible city be; fore the Lebanese decided to commit national suicide. I sat |fcack and relaxed. After a few hundred yards, the cab was ‘ shaken by a huge thump and a tremor that was followed almost instantly by a dangerous-sounding explosion somewhere behind us. I turned to see brown-black smoke coming from the residential area we’d just left.
“What was that?”
Abu Said pulled onto the sidewalk and stopped. He got out and looked back at the smoke. “Car bomb,” he said matter-of-factly. “Dangerous.”
“No shit.”
He returned to the cab and hunched over the wheel, yanked the door shut, and put the car in gear. “No shit, habibi.” We ground our way up a steep, narrow street that cut through a hillside urban canyon, then slalomed down the other side, threading the needle between pedestrians and parked cars as a pair of fire trucks, sirens screaming, came careening up the opposite direction heedless of oncoming traffic. Then came another, steeper hill. Finally, radiator smoking, the cab wheezed up in front of the hotel entrance. I gave Said Abu Said a hundred Lebanese pounds. He bowed and grinned.
“Shukran, habibi. May you have a good stay — and a peaceful one.”
“Thank you, Abu Said.” I bent over to retrieve my luggage.
“I will need a driver for a few days — are you available?”
He nodded affirmatively. “Three hundred American dollars a day — and fifty dollars more each time we cross the Green Line under fire.”
I put out my hand. “Two fifty a day — and fifty each time we cross the Green Line under fire, without getting hit.”
He laughed. “Done and done. Shall I wait for you now, habibi?”
“No — I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eight. Today, I want to get settled, then I’d like to go sight-seeing on foot.”
I picked up my bags, walked into the Commodore’s lobby, and dropped them on the floor by the registration counter.
Ahead and to my left I saw a comfortable-looking red-vinyl bar, and glass doors leading to what appeared to be a deck and swimming pool-
The Commodore had a reputation that was worldwide. It was a journalist’s hotel in the Old World style: expenseaccount heaven. Bar bills became “Laundry”; restaurant tabs became “Telex” or “Long Distance.” The same thing could be done with gold or jewelry — they could be bought for guests and billed as room charges. Even the wine cellar was renowned: the Commodore’s sommeher could supply almost anything — so long as he had time to get a label printed up.
I checked in, dropped my bags in a shabby, rear-facing room, hit the bar, had a couple of Bombays, then went out for a stroll.
Juice bars churned out frappes. Storekeepers, long since bombed or shelled out of their shops, piled their wares and plied their trade on the sidewalk.
Despite the peaceful activity, the knots of young men in jeans, leather Jackets, and not-so-well-concealed weapons who loitered outside various apartment houses and storefronts gave off the same kind of vibes I’d gotten while watching Mr.
Charlie in the Mekong Delta more than a decade earlier. I bought an eclair at a bake shop and was amazed to see what appeared to be a bomb factory in the basement as the shop’s cellar door opened fleetingly. Aitick of information clicked into place. Beirut was just like Vietnam, where a peaceful hootch often concealed the entrance to a weapons cache in the secret tunnel below. Okay, Lebanese — doom on you. The Sharkman has arrived.
With the help of a map, I navigated my way toward the American University, wandered alongside the gates and walls, then meandered slowly past concrete-shard ruins where bougainvillea grew in clumps and occasional street cats, lean and mean-tempered, skedaddled, down to the corniche — the Avenue de Paris — to see where the seven-story American embassy faced the sea.
I walked past the embassy, a relic of the days when embassies were as open and unguarded as public libraries, paused a few minutes to sit and admire the relentless Old Testament sky, uncompromising and obstinately blue — and then resumed my stroll. It didn’t take long to see that embassy security was a goatfuck. Sandbags had been piled high alongside the driveway to guard against firing from the street. But if terrorists came up the unprotected driveway with a car loaded with TNT. the explosion would be directed into the embassy instead of deflected away from it. And anybody could drive right up to the front door: there were no heavy-duty barriers to keep vehicles out, only lightweight barricades and oil drums filled with sand. Most of the Lebanese guards outside carried sidearms, but nothing more potent. The Marines and their shotguns were inside, where they were least needed.
The rest of the day I wandered the streets, getting the lay of the land between the embassy and the hotel, searching for apartments we could use as safe houses. Problem was, I couldn’t read the Arabic “for rent” signs — or even tell if there were any. Dusk fell early, just after 1630, and as the streets got dark, I made my way back to the Commodore and its friendly bar. Up in my room I checked my luggage carefully: it had been searched. That was okay — there was nothing in it to tell anyone about me, other than the fact that I carried no razor, my paperback books were British editions, and I had a blank reporter’s notebook. Downstairs, I hadn’t even settled onto the stool before the bartender set a double Bombay on the rocks in front of me. My room may have had stained, threadbare carpeting, lousy plumbing, and a swayback mattress, but the bar was strictly five-star. It’s all a matter of priorities — and the Commodore had its priorities straight.
Abu Said was sitting in front of the hotel at eight the next morning, his motor thumping. I jumped into the front seat.
“Yallah— let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Coffee- Take me to the best coffee shop you know.”
“It is done, habibi.” Abu Said grinned wetly through his mustache, stomped the accelerator, and wheelied down the hill toward the seafront.
We ran the Coast Road south to Khalde. Ran is an understatement. Abu Said drove like a SEAL. The highway was a divided road, and whenever the southbound flow was too slow for him, he jumped the divider, turned on his brights, hit the horn, and drove against the northbound traffic, feinting and weaving up the shoulder and passing lane as cars and trucks swerved to get out of our path. About six clicks south of the airport he turned onto a rutted dirt road, bounced another half click, then screeched to a stop in front of a small, anonymous storefront whose windows were shielded by a double row of sandbags.
“Best coffee in Beirut. My cousin’s coffee.”
“Terrific. Now, Abu Said. please be so kind as to join me.
I need your assistance and your counsel.“
That day, the ubiquitous Abu Said helped me find two apartments, one for my “news bureau,” the other for my “photographers” and “technicians,” who would be arriving the next afternoon. I paid a month’s rent, plus another month in baksheesh, the all-encompassing bribe-cum-expediting-feecum-gratuity that greased wheels all over the Middle East, and took possession of two sets of keys. I checked out of the Commodore and dropped my bags in the larger of the two fiats. And I hired another of Abu Said’s endless supply of cousins as a second driver. That gave us two pseudo-Chevys, and two mustached drivers named Abu Said — so I promptly began calling one Taxi Alpha and one Taxi Bravo.
By dusk of day three, the team had arrived intact. I snatched Duke, Larry, Frank, and Baby Rich from the airport, picked up Paul, Snake, Pooster, and Horseface at the Museum Crossing, and trekked out to the Summerland Hotel, which sat near the beach due west of Chatila, and found Jew, Ho-Ho-Ho, and Fingers holding court at the bar.. It took me almost two hours to separate them from three delectable young things who wanted to come along for the ride-
The safe houses — safe apartments, actually — couldn’t have been better situated. One sat on the corniche not six hundred yards from the American embassy; a four-room fiat on the third floor, it looked out onto the Mediterranean, facing north, with a view ofJuniyah, the Maronite Christian stronghold. The second apartment was near UNICEF headquarters.
It was smaller, but comfortable. It gave us good access to the embassy’s back door.
Communications were important. Duke’s group had brought a number of secure radios, and we set up three separate networks. One was rigged from apartment to apartment; another, using miniature transceivers, was for on-street useThere was even a portable satellite dish and a SATCOM, so we could talk to JSOC if necessary. Ever careful. Duke had brought a new toy — a hand-held scrambler. To use it, you punched in a scrambling code, then recorded your message onto a tape. You made your call on an open line — you could use pay phones, hotel lines, whatever — then played the tape into the receiver. The receiving party taped the message and used the same numerical code to unscramble the message.
The combinations could be changed daily — or even hourly if necessary.
The parameters of our job were tight. The embassy knew a survey team from JSOC was going to be coming in, but the dip-dunk diplo-dinks wanted nothing to do with us. So far as they were concerned, embassy security was A-okay and there was nothing to worry about; ‘twas the season to be jolly, and fa-la-Ia-la-la, la-la-la-la.
Screw ‘em — we’d save them in spite of themselves.
I broke us up into two-man teams — swim buddies. Paul and Duke, Snake and Pooster, the Gold Dust Twins, Rich and Ho-Ho-Ho, and Jew and me. The mission was to see if there was a terrorist threat, and if there was, how it could be countered. We knew the Marines were already taking sniper fire from the Shüte slums facing the airport, so I sent Paul and Duke to recon the area from one side, and the Gold Dust Twins to take the opposite point of view for their target assessment. Snake, Pooster, Jew, and I would concentrate on the embassy. The other two pairs would do a general sneak and peek, assessing the mood of the city and trying to locate specific areas of concern.
Specific — shit, the whole city was an area of concern. The following morning Jew and I went for a quiet stroll along the neatly manicured paths that ran through the American University of Beirut, which sat behind the embassy. Jew carried an autofocus camera, and so far as any passersby were concerned, he was just another asshole taking occasional snapshots. What he was really doing, however, was classic target assessment: producing a visual �
�narrative” showing how unprotected the rear of the embassy was, and how easily it could be breached from every side.
We walked and talked and look pictures for about an hour, then decided to find a place and grab some lunch. Outside a small shop near Bekhaazi Street, Jew turned to me.
“Smile…” He brought the camera up.
I waved. “Hi, Mom.”
He snapped away, and we turned to continue down the street.
In a split second, six teenagers, four with drawn pistols and two with AK-47s, lunged at us from an alleyway, babbling in rapid-fire Arabic, pointing at Jew’s camera, and signaling us to stop.
Jew started to react defensively. I stopped him with a flick of an eyebrow — we didn’t want any trouble in broad daylight on a crowded street. I raised my hands and put my back against the wall. Jew did the same. “What’s up?” I smiled at the gunmen reassuringly. No response. “Parlez vous franfais?”
One of the kids answered me in heavily accented French.
“Who are you?”
“7e suis journaliste. Sahafa. Press.”
He translated for his friends. They weren’t impressed- The AKs pointed at our throats. I noted for the record that the weapons’ selector switches were on full automatic fire, and the kids had their fingers on the triggers. I tried to remember how many pounds of pressure it takes to set an AK off. I decided it was a piece of trivia I didn’t want to remember.
The French speaker turned back to me. “Your friend took a picture of a secret military installation.”
I told Jew what he’d done. “Look ashamed, asshole,” I chided.
Jew hung his head and muttered something under his breath. Then he opened the back of the camera, took the film, and pulled it out, exposing the entire roll. “Ask ‘em if it’s okay now — ’cause if it isn’t, I’m gonna waste the motherfuckers.”
French speaker took Jew’s film. The weapons were lowered. “What installation did we violate?” I asked.
Rogue Warrior rw-1 Page 34