The Lie: A Novel

by Hesh Kestin

  What do the artists know who are carefully inscribing in Arabic and French the proper identifying marks onto a gray 1978 Cadillac ambulance, or those who are preparing four white BMW motorcycles with the markings of Le Police Nationale du Liban? Told nothing, they know enough.

  The same is true for the seven master tailors working from designs prepared by professional pattern makers, all pressed into service from the Israeli fashion industry. What need they be told other than that they must quickly create the following costumes: twenty extremely elegant Italian army uniforms, authentic down to the buttons, nine short-trousered Ugandan army uniforms, four uniforms of the motorcycle corps of the Lebanese gendarmie, replete with somewhat worn black leather jackets? Meanwhile, two custom shoemakers in an adjoining room are tasked with creating complementary knee-high boots, and across the hall costumers from Habima, the national theater, put the finishing touches on theatrically authentic helmets to complete the charade. Already accounted for are dozens of shabby costumes suitable to Lebanese laborers, two cocktail dresses with deep décolletage, two fur stoles, two pairs of gold-colored five-inch heels, sufficient paste jewelry for ten Israeli bridesmaids, two tuxedos with appropriately ruffled shirts, bow ties, cummerbunds and patent-leather shoes, a nice selection of white medical attire, and one dark gray chauffeur’s uniform replete with a peaked cap that was used only the month before in an Israel Television comedy about a simple farming family that wins the lottery and hires a chauffeur to drive their tractor.

  Have these tailors, shoemakers, costumers, and—in yet another building—makeup artists been informed about what is planned for their creations? Absolutely not. Do they know that nearby in what had been—before the British decamped in 1948—a mess hall for His Majesty’s Fourth Mechanized Grenadiers, some eighty members of the most elite units, the ablest commandos in the IDF, are even now about to be addressed by their chief of staff? Certainly not. Are they aware that every stitch, every placket, every detail will shortly be employed in a plan so audacious none of its operational details will be made public in their lifetimes? Without a doubt. Like every other citizen of Israel, they have watched the lurid videos on Israel Television, read the newspapers, talked about what must be done over Elite Turkish coffee or HaTzvi arak or Goldstar beer. And all of them have answered their spouses’ questions about why they have disappeared with a raised eyebrow and a wink, and said nothing. And in saying nothing said it all.

  59

  Now, in the former mess that has become a military lecture hall, the eighty IDF personnel, all men except for two women, stand as the chief of staff strides in, followed closely by one Col. Gadi of the well-known lisp and one Medical Officer Itzik, bespectacled, short and chubby, the country’s leading expert on battle trauma—the IDF censor forbids identification of most serving personnel by anything other than first name, though every Israeli and his parakeet knows who they are. A few steps behind, one Col. Kobi enters the hall wearing a uniform he thought he might never don again.

  The chief of staff—who in meetings at the political level, such as the Security Cabinet, might appear restrained and reserved, even diffident—is now in his element. “As you were,” he says with such authority that everyone in the room is abruptly off their feet as though one long string has pulled them all back down to their seats. “I’m here not to interfere with what I believe to be a well-planned operation but to wish you a successful mission and a safe return. In case you are unaware of the significance of this operation, understand the following: [a] We have a single tactical objective—the safe return of two of our boys—but beyond that a strategic goal, which is to destroy the enemy’s use of kidnapping to impair morale within Israel and to split the population. The enemy wishes us to face two alter natives: Negotiate for the hostages, any hostages, or see them suffer and die. We offer a third choice: Take the hostages back and wipe out the kidnappers; [b] This operation will transpire in a civilian setting. Pro forma, the enemy is hiding among the innocent. As always, we will do what is possible to spare civilian lives; [c] Our boys are suffering grave punishments. If indeed all we can do is bring back their bodies, that is what we will do. If that is clear, in the name of the nation I wish you the blessing of the just.”

  All stand to return his salute. In an instant he exits as briskly as he entered.

  Col. Gadi takes the podium. “Settle down, gentlemen,” he says with his mild lisp. He looks over his troops. “And ladies. We will review operational details once more, following a briefing by Dr. Itzik and Res. Col. Kobi, who has been reactivated to serve as mission intelligence officer. Kobi?”

  “Except for the chow,” Kobi says, “it’s good to be back. My friends, here is what we know.” He picks up a pointer. “And what we don’t.”

  60

  At precisely the same time, in his apartment in Beirut, Tawfeek Nur-al-Din, writing in a fine Arabic hand, completes a letter to his wife in Athens. As is common with many high-level Palestinian commanders, Tawfeek’s family is tucked safely away in Europe so that Israeli agents cannot take them as counter-hostages. The envelope is addressed to a flat in Paris that is little more than a drop box. Upon receipt, it will be forwarded to a second address in Barcelona and from there sent on to a post office in Athens, where it will be picked up by a courier who will then deliver it to a Palestinian-owned café off Independence Square. Once a week Fatima Nur-al-Din stops there for coffee and baklava, and ice cream for the children, a boy of six and a girl of four.

  This elaborate system, the coordinates of which are changed regularly, is meant to put Israeli intelligence off the scent. They are, in the main, unnecessary. Despite its fearsome—and often undeserved—reputation for merciless efficiency, the Mossad and associated minor agencies are perennially underfunded and consequently understaffed. Unless there is a chance that Commander Tawfeek himself is expected to visit his family, there is little reason to surveil his family beyond monitoring his wife’s telephone conversations. And one significant reason not to: By custom, if not outright protocol, the wives and children of enemy operatives are specifically exempt from what is called “administrative interference.” Even the wife of the late Yassir Arafat was effectively immune during the years she lived openly in an opulent suite at the Bristol Hotel in Paris.

  But paranoia is a constant companion of Arab terrorists, who project upon their enemies in the West their own lack of scruples regarding non-combatants. This is not to say Israel will stay operations against specific targets when there is danger to their families—otherwise, terrorists would know they are protected in their homes—but Israel has not descended to specifically targeting the innocent.

  Oh, my dearest, Commander Tawfeek’s letter concludes, once again the necessary precludes the pleasurable. Some day, when we have regained the homeland and driven the savages into the sea, you and I and the children will walk on the beach and dip our toes in the water of freedom. Please do not fear. I have taken every precaution. The Small Satan is now in delicate military negotiations with the Grand Satan and dares not offend its master with an attack on a neighboring country. In time the exchange will indeed take place. Thus encouraged, all true Muslims will join with us to reclaim our homeland and resume the illustrious history that has been interrupted for a thousand years. Embrace the children in my name, and remind them of their father who loves them. With desire, your Tawfeek.

  61

  At 1:40 that morning, a moonlit night that no one would have chosen for such a mission, the two matte-black Yasurs fly low over the Mediterranean, skimming the whitecaps, six missile-armed Super Apaches flying shotgun ahead and above. No lights, radio silence.

  To the northeast, the streets of central Beirut are still lit up; its cafés and discos will be doing business until dawn. From this distance, the pulsing center of the Arab world’s ultimate party town reveals itself in the blurry white lines of automobile headlights. Secondary concentrations of light indicate casinos in the hills overlooking Beirut and a half-dozen nightclubs north
of the city. In contrast to these hot spots, the windows of the Lebanese capital’s three- and four-story apartment buildings glow softly with the shimmer of big-screen televisions, the Westernized equivalent of the Bedouin fire pit, around which families are still gathered at close to two in the morning. Beirutis stay up late.

  This does not make the mission any easier. According to real-time intelligence compiled through satellite surveillance capable of identifying the brand on a cigarette pack, Hezbollah fighters are heavily dug in on the border between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut. They control all four traffic arteries leading inland from the sea. If the two IDF soldiers are indeed being held in West Beirut, getting there will require a three-mile journey across an insomniac city cut into jittery segments by paranoid militias. And this is merely the entry ticket: Around the target site, an unknown number of defenders are established in a strong perimeter, including control of the rooftops. Until engagement, any contact with locals, both Hezbollah and civilian—the latter of which can be trusted to sound an alarm: it pays well—must be limited to French for those wearing Italian uniforms, English for the Ugandans, and for all others Lebanese-inflected Arabic. From takeoff until the unit fires its first shot, not one word of Hebrew will be spoken.

  To the Air Force officers piloting the Yasurs, this hardly matters. Their single-minded objective is to land their eighty-nine-foot craft within hundred-foot-diameter landing zones among the dunes southwest of the city. The landing zones are to be lit with flares at precisely 2:11 A.M. This is to be handled by a pre-insertion force of six who arrived that evening on commercial flights from Paris, Rome, and Athens. The six carry passports from Egypt, France, Greece, Germany (two), and Turkey. Precisely at 2:11, the pilots spot two impossibly tiny triangles of light.

  Yasur One peels off, followed by Yasur Two, shadowed by four Super Apaches hovering at one hundred feet in order to deal with unexpected resistance. The remaining pair of attack helicopters remain in tactical reserve at eight hundred feet.

  Even before Yasur One touches ground, its rear gate swings down to form a ramp as commandos leap off to take up protective positions until the four police motorcycles within roll off safely onto the sand. Fifteen seconds later, Yasur Two touches down, its own ramp disgorging six commandos dressed as Arab laborers and four in more exotic dress—two male officers in tuxedos, one of whom speaks with a mild lisp, and two elegantly attired women in cocktail dresses and elaborate wigs, one blonde, one redhead: Nurit and Alexandra, both Russian-speaking children of emigrants from the former Soviet Union. They are members of a Mossad special operations unit based in the Persian Gulf watering hole of Dubai, where Russian beauties are in high demand. The two wear flats, but their large gaudily sequined purses contain five-inch heels, to say nothing of the Uzi machine pistols that can take down three dozen men in one burst. Last to exit is the meticulously authentic pearl-gray 1978 Cadillac ambulance marked with the Red Crescent. Augmented with four-wheel drive and other nonstandard equipment, it holds Dr. Itzik and four men in white medical uniforms, whose military specialties concern the saving of some lives and the taking of others.

  Waiting for the force’s arrival on the dirt road that parallels the beach are a new Mercedes limousine, three taxis, a refrigerated seafood van, a glazier’s pickup truck carrying four-by-eight-foot mirror panels vertically on its sides, a garbage truck, and a white American-made school bus with black UN markings. All of these have been “borrowed” for the occasion by Israeli operatives permanently resident in Beirut, not all of them Israelis. Considering the expense of maintaining operatives in an enemy country, replete with convincing cover stories, employing locals becomes not only cheap but efficient: Locals know where to liberate a garbage truck or a limo or a seafood van. A good many of these operatives are Christians with a standing grudge against Hezbollah for its ongoing Islamization of what was, until recently, Christian-dominated Lebanon. All were trained at a special camp for foreign assets at a discreet facility in southern Israel.

  In a matter of seconds the vehicles scatter, the two Yasurs lifting off to join the Apaches as they move out over the Med. Other than the tracks of the ambulance and motorcycles and the footprints of the unit sprinting to the road above it, no sign is left on the beach of the invasion force. In a matter of half an hour this evidence too will be erased by the incoming tide.

  As the helicopters disappear, three Super Dvora Mk III patrol boats take up positions offshore. These carry sufficient sea-to-ground missiles to provide a meaningful distraction should the rescue force require it. Just over the border, thirty-two miles to the south, a flight of fourteen drones is launched, four outfitted with live television cameras. The remaining eight are what their Israel Air Force controllers call Killer Smurfs, flying bombs set to detonate on impact. At a base one mile south of the border, a brigade of helicopter-borne paratroopers stands by in case things go very wrong.

  Each unit of the team moving toward Beirut travels alone, each on a separate route. Each must penetrate, circumnavigate, or neutralize the perilous, sometimes fatal Lebanese equivalent of traffic lights, the roadblock.

  62

  In Caesarea, Dudik and Uri sleep together propped on a couch, the father holding his seventeen-year-old son as if he were a small child. Both are exhausted from crying.

  Damn CNN, Dahlia thinks. Damn the wonders of technology.

  She sits on the other side of the sliding glass doors smoking by the edge of the pool, her feet dangling in the dark water. The air is cool, as cool as she had been when they watched the new video, her own child being tortured there on the television in their living room. Of course she had seen it before, the complete version, before CNN edited out the worst. Still, she would have thought it would affect her again the same way or worse. But no, it was almost comforting that her son is still alive. Imagine that, she thinks, I have watched my son being tortured and managed not to cry. Maybe Dudik is right to call me cold. Maybe Floyd is right to call me a bitch. Maybe Zalman Arad is right to have chosen me for a job whose very parameters require a kind of cranial disconnectedness. She had always thought of herself as warm, passionate, caring. Now she sees the other side, the side others see. So what? she thinks. So what if I have become this way or always was and maybe always will be. It’s a tough neighborhood. You have to be as tough, if not tougher. You have a husband, even if he is a soon-to-be-divorced husband, and a son. You have to lead by example. The bastards want you to be weak, to be broken by grief. I will not be broken by grief. They will get him out. And if they don’t? Don’t think of that. One step at a time. If Kobi spoke of seventy-two hours, then even now something is being done to save Ari, to save both boys. The Bedouin kid’s mother did not show fear. She showed anger. Be like her. In seventy-two hours it will be done, one way or another.

  Uri had thrown up. Right there in the living room, Dudik holding his head as he used to over the toilet bowl when Uri was a child with a stomach flu. It was Dudik who had comforted him afterward until both had fallen asleep, worn out by their tears. All she had been able to do was walk out onto the patio, sitting silent by the edge of the pool.

  She stubs out her cigarette in a glass ashtray etched with the logo of Château Fuente, a memento Dudik had not bothered to take with his other belongings. Abruptly, out of nowhere, she thinks, If not for Uri I would swim nude. When is the last time I swam nude?

  She looks behind her. The boy is sound asleep. She thinks then of Dudik. What if Dudik wakes and finds me that way? Only days ago she would have considered it something a divorcing woman must not do. How odd that now she feels a closeness to Dudik that she has not felt in years.

  She slips out of her shift and eases her way into the still water, its temperature not that much different from her own. It is as if she has become one with the water, and for the first time in days finds herself relaxing, her breasts bobbing free as she floats on her back. In a moment, for the first time in days, she is deeply asleep, buoyed by her breasts, and by hope.

>   63

  Flanked by four Lebanese Police motorcycles, two fore and two aft, the white school bus marked UN on all sides and on the roof, a common troop carrier for the ubiquitous UNIFIL peacekeeping forces stationed in Lebanon, pulls up before a roadblock on the main east-west road. The barrier forms a choke point between the apartment blocks on either side, from whose windows armed Hezbollah fighters stare down. On either side, an embankment of old cigarette butts lines the street like dirty snow fallen from above. The roadblock is brightly lit. Wrecked cars narrow the wide street so that only one vehicle can pass. From out of one of these, as if from a proper office with a desk and a telephone and a photo of the Hezbollah leader, a thin officer steps.

  On the lead motorcycle Kobi knows the man is an officer because he carries in his right hand a distinctive Heckler & Koch VP70 machine pistol. An ungainly affair, it appears to be a handgun to which someone clumsily attached the stock of a rifle on one end and an obscenely long magazine carrying one hundred eighteen 9mm rounds on the other. This is arguably the world’s most deadly handgun. Capable of firing twenty-two hundred rounds per minute, it sounds in operation like a chain saw on steroids. Only selected Hezbollah commanders are issued this gun, a mark of status. Armed with their commonplace Kalashnikov automatic rifles, the officer’s troopers stand leaning half asleep against the apartment house walls on either side. Thanks to decades of Communist Bloc arms dealing, the Kalashnikov AK-47 is standard issue for every Arab soldier, bodyguard, and terrorist in what security professionals call the ABC, the unstable triangle that stretches from Afghanistan in Central Asia to Beirut in the Middle East to Chad in West Africa. Whether originating in Russia or Romania or China, the AK-47 is the personal weapon of choice wherever Allah is praised.