The Lie: A Novel

by Hesh Kestin

  The officer pointedly ignores the Lebanese motorcycle cops and climbs aboard the bus, which as is normal in Beirut travels with its doors open to catch the Mediterranean breeze. Everyone aboard but the Italian driver is asleep, Africans on one side, Italians on the other. Climbing down, the officer gestures behind him with his machine pistol. “From where are the monkeys?”

  “Africa,” Kobi says.

  “But where in Africa? This interests me.”

  “Who knows? They are UNIFIL. By the prophet, my dear friend, it is fucking late.”

  “You don’t know from where? Clearly, the white ones are Italian. From the uniforms. Each one must have his own personal tailor.”

  Kobi turns to the second motorcycle cop, whose name is Yossi. “Achmed, from which country are the black ones?”

  “Uganda.”

  As if the Hezbollah officer requires a translation, Kobi says it again, louder. “He says Uganda.”

  “Is that a Muslim land?”

  “Who knows?”

  “If they are Muslim,” the Hezbollah officer says, “they should wear long pants. Lebanon is a civilized nation, not the jungle.” He waves the bus through.

  64

  At a second roadblock half a mile to the north, the Mercedes limo is stopped at a makeshift barrier staffed by two young Hezbollah militiamen wearing uniform shirts over jeans and Nike running shoes. They admire the car. Mercedes Benz automobiles are common enough in Lebanon, but a Mercedes limousine is rare. Of course, anything the least bit out of the ordinary would be enough to rouse their interest in the middle of yet another trafficless night.

  “Maternal cunt,” its chauffeur says in the best street Arabic. “Let me deliver these stinking foreigners to their hotel so I can get some sleep.”

  Unable to peer through the mirror glass of the windows, one of the Hezbollah men opens the left rear door: Four reprobates, living cartoons, each of the men holding a bottle, the redhead passed out, the blonde in sunglasses grinning back at them, stinking drunk. She says something in Russian, slurred. In a typically ambivalent Arab gesture revealing simultaneous disgust and envy, the militiaman spits on the limousine’s windshield and then offers a thumbs-up. Pointing with his Kalashnikov, he waves them through.

  65

  Not half a kilometer from the second roadblock, a sandbagged machine-gun position faces the entering street, where the seafood van is lined up in front of the glazier’s pickup. Without so much as a comment, much less permission, Hezbollah fighters open the van and begin unloading trays of shrimp. The van driver leaps out. “By God, take a bit for your honors, who work in the cold night. But I have a family. Leave me something to sell.”

  Behind the van, the glazier hits his horn. Taking an interest, a second Hezbollah officer strolls over.

  “Habibi, for the sake of justice!” the pickup driver says. “From the port in Tripoli I have had the joy of six roadblocks. Please, if you wish to do business with a fish seller, be my guest, but let pass an honest glazier.”

  The Hezbollah officer smiles in sympathy. He makes the universally understood Middle Eastern sign for patience, thumb and forefinger touching as his hand bobs slowly up and down, then leisurely circles the pickup for a cursory inspection before returning to the glazier. “Why must Muslims be so vain as to need such large mirrors? Do they not know that to make a human image is forbidden?”

  “This is not making an image,” the glazier says. “These are mirrors. The image makes itself.”

  The officer laughs, revealing a good-natured understanding of the complications of applying sacred law to a still-profane world. “So late at night for the splitting of theological hairs,” he says with a smile. “Please accept my apology.” To better make his point, he swings the butt of his Kalashnikov in a wide arc. Secured to the side of the van, the huge mirror shatters in place. “But next time, kindly be more patient. Just as you have a job to do, so too we.” He waves the glazier through. The seafood vendor gives up arguing, re-enters his now half-empty van, and—the tax having been paid—follows.

  66

  The garbage truck with two laborers hanging off the back pulls up before a fourth roadblock narrowed by fifty-gallon oil drums burning scrap wood, Hezbollah fighters warming their hands in the glow. In an instant the garbagemen are off the truck and warming themselves as well. It gets cold hanging off the back of a vehicle going fifty miles an hour in fifty-degree temperature.

  Coming up quickly, the Red Crescent ambulance, siren bleating, brakes hard, almost hitting the garbage truck.

  The ambulance driver jumps out. He is a sharpshooter named Moshe whose family, originally from Syria, speaks Arabic at home. The accents of Lebanon and western Syria are indistinguishable. “Move this stinking pile! A man is dying of heart failure, and you are blocking the way with offal?”

  A Hezbollah officer leaves the warmth of the fires and approaches the ambulance. “Let me see this dying man.” He peers into the ambulance. “There is no patient here, dying or otherwise.”

  “Not here!” the ambulance driver shouts. “There! In the hills. We go to his aid, then to bring him to hospital—unless again we are stopped. Do you wish that poor man’s life on your head?!”

  The officer sprints to the garbage truck and grabs its driver by his collar through the open window. “Idiot, selfish fool! Move your rolling trash heap. Get going!”

  The garbage truck grinds out of the way, leaving room for the ambulance to pass, its siren echoing as it speeds across the sleeping city to join the other units closing on the target site.

  67

  Minutes later, as the four units converge, Staff Sgt. Ruhama, a nineteen-year-old Israel Air Force remote-flight technician, takes her seat in a control room carved into a cave in the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea at Rosh HaNikra, virtually on the Lebanese border. Like everyone around her, she wears a sweater. The heavy computing power at her fingertips demands the room be kept uncomfortably cold. It is beyond air-conditioned. Meat will not spoil here.

  Having grown up with video games, Ruhama is the Israel Air Force’s ranking ace when it comes to directing drones in battle. Operating an LED panel over which is an array of fourteen live-action monitors—rigorous testing found that for one controller fourteen drones is optimal: One more and operational efficiency drops by twelve percent—Ruhama settles in and begins the drill she knows so well. She had been out dancing in the nearby beach town of Nahariya until midnight. It is now 2:44 A.M. She remains fresh, energized. Youth has certain advantages.

  Behind her stands her unit commander, Maj. David, the son of American ascendants to Israel (one ascends to the Holy Land; one does not simply emigrate). Twenty years earlier his parents pulled him out of a school for the gifted in San Francisco to live in a tiny settlement in Judea, which the world news media calls the West Bank. A lonely child in an unchallenging school, young David soon developed an interest in remote-controlled model planes, building and flying them from the barren hillsides overlooking the hostile Arab villages surrounding the settlement. Over time he attached a tiny television camera to the belly of a two-foot-long aircraft and brought it to the settlement’s security chief with the suggestion that the cobbled-together device might provide early warning in case of a terrorist attack. From this adolescent curiosity came Israel’s world leadership in drone weaponry.

  Maj. David unwraps another stick of gum as he holds to his ear a blue phone with an open line to IAF headquarters one hundred feet underground at the Kiryah in Tel Aviv.

  Sgt. Ruhama goes through her checklist. “Airspeed: a hundred and five kilometers per hour. Time to target: four minutes, thirty seconds. Air-to-air visibility: forty-five kilometers. Air-to-ground visibility: category one. All systems in order.”

  “Arm weapons.”

  “Units one through ten arming.” She takes a sip from one of the six cans of Diet Coke she will drink over her ten-hour shift. “All weapons armed.”

  “Okay, sergeant. Do your stuff.”

 
“Roger that, David. Doing my stuff.”

  Her commander unwraps another stick of gum.

  68

  Over southwestern Beirut eight Killer Smurfs peel off, leaving in reserve two similar explosive-laden aircraft, while four observer drones armed only with extremely high-definition night-vision video cameras circle at fifteen hundred feet, just below cloud cover but well beyond the range of rifle fire from Hezbollah riflemen perched on the rooftops surrounding the target site.

  From behind their sandbags, the riflemen look up as the sound of what could only be giant mosquitoes becomes evident, then louder.

  Then louder still.

  Then fatal.

  69

  A few blocks away, all four units, engines running, stand by in staging positions. Their radios are silent. There is no need for communication. The signal to move in will be the sound of the first explosion as the drones find their targets.

  Before the second explosion all vehicles and personnel are on the move. Whether or not the drones will have destroyed all six Hezbollah positions on the rooftops of the buildings surrounding the target site, the action has commenced. There is no turning back.

  70

  In her cold room at Rosh Hanikra, Staff Sgt. Ruhama watches on live television as her drones do their work. “Smurfs one through eight on target,” she says in the affectless voice of a video gamer with nothing to prove. “Nine and ten standing by.” She zooms the images on her television screens. “Number four marginal hit. Looks like a wind gust.” In the narrow canyons created by the buildings lining the street a sudden gust can knock the tiny aircraft off target by as much as ten feet. “Taking care of that, commander.” With a flick of her joystick, she detaches drone number nine.

  71

  As the vehicles converge from both ends of the street the rescue force sprints to its objectives. They could do this blindfolded, and in fact have twice among the forty clocked drills they have carried out in a simulation of the same street, the same buildings, the same potential defenders. Each man carries a Micro Tavor rifle specially adapted for urban warfare, plus seven thirty-round magazines and four grenades, along with hollow-ground commando knives honed so sharp the blade can separate the head of a mature male from his body in one slashing arc. Nurit and Alexandra, having changed into uniform, retain their lipstick and eyeliner, so that with their short hair—their wigs ornament the floor of the limousine that blocks one end of the street—they might well be taken for androgynous marchers in Tel Aviv’s annual gay-pride parade.

  The ambulance hangs back at the other end of the street until the invasion force has taken their designated places and find cover in doorways or lie like corpses facedown in the street, clinging to the asphalt with their fingertips.

  The ambulance roof slides back, a .50-caliber machine gun rises from within as steel shields lower behind the vehicle’s windshield and windows. A white-uniformed machine gunner in the rear scans four starlight-scope monitors revealing every crevice of the street in ghostly shades of green. On his screens dozens of Hezbollah fighters scramble into the street from buildings on either side.

  Using electronic controls adapted from video-game technology, the gunner sweeps one side of the street and then the other: In a kind of mortal ballet, the Hezbollah fighters are blown back by the force of the .50-caliber hollow-points, which on impact flatten to the size of silver dollars. Upon entering the body these tear through muscle and bone to cause massive internal bleeding and fatal damage to vital organs. Only in exceptional cases is there an exit wound.

  From a doorway of the café that only hours before was populated by tea-drinking shesh besh players a lone survivor of this sweeping fire kneels to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. Perfectly aimed, the RPG hits the ambulance and explodes.

  It makes no impression.

  He shoots again.

  The result is the same.

  “God help us,” the gunner says aloud in finely enunciated Arab, as though speaking in a lecture hall. “It is a tank.”

  A bullet strikes the wall just above his head. Reflexively the militiaman swivels in the direction of its source and for a moment a look of deep puzzlement twists his face. The Micro Tavor that fired this bullet is equipped not only with a nightscope but also an eerily efficient integrated silencer.

  Col. Gadi, leaning out of the limousine at the other end of the street, fires again. The sound at the source is like a walnut cracking open. At the end of the bullet’s trajectory there is only silence.

  The street is now secure. Leaving four men to make sure it stays that way, Kobi’s group enters the target building, taking the stairs two at a time, while Gadi and his men begin searching the ground floor.

  72

  Having snaked around to the rear of the building, two naval commandos shoot a grappling hook to the roof three stories above. These are specialists, trained to board fast-moving ships from rubber boats bobbing in the waves by pulling themselves up to a deck as much as one hundred feet above their heads. To naval commandos, successfully making fast a grappling hook from solid ground is hardly a challenge. After securing the other end of the rope to a parked automobile, one begins climbing as the other stands guard. When the first reaches the roof to cover him, the second straps his rifle to his back and ascends so quickly it is as if gravity, in this spot, on this rope, has no dominion.

  73

  In the single apartment on the ground floor spaghetti is still cooking on a stove in the kitchen, music plays on a radio in a long room used as a barracks, and a cigarette still burns in an ashtray on a card table whose hands have been abandoned in midplay. The ground floor is otherwise empty.

  “Commander, over here!”

  It is an entrance to the basement, not very well concealed behind a kitchen cupboard that crudely slides away, no booby trap, no security, not so much as a latch. A flight of wooden stairs and there it is, just as they had studied it in the video transmissions: a television studio, oddly larger in reality than on-screen. Of course in the videos the twenty or so Hezbollah militia who stood watching with satisfaction the systematic torture of two young Israelis had not been visible. Now they are equally invisible, having fled rather than confront Jews who are not unarmed, not tied, not undergoing torture. The room is as empty as the ground floor.

  A moment later, down a dark, damp corridor, Gadi’s force finds a tiny room, its steel door ajar: inside nothing but blood-soaked blankets.

  From somewhere above, echoing in the walls, the sound of gunfire.

  “Upstairs! On the double!”

  74

  In an apartment on the third floor, Tawfeek Nur-al-Din burns papers in a fireplace as two bodyguards open a hatch leading to the roof. A folding ladder drops down. The two scramble up. Their only possible escape is over the rooftops. But when the first bodyguard steps onto the flat roof of the building he comes face-to-face with the two naval commandos.

  His inert body drops back into the room. With the rooftop blocked, the remaining bodyguard steps on the chest of his dead companion, pushes up the spring-loaded hatch, and bolts it.

  “The corridor!”

  Trained to respond immediately to his commander’s orders, the bodyguard flings open the corridor door and is met by heavy fire from Kobi’s unit in the hall. He flies backward, propelled into the apartment by the rifle blasts, dead before his body hits the floor. The door slams shut.

  Kobi speaks into his helmet microphone, radio silence no longer necessary. “Skull to Heights, situation.” He listens to the buzz of returned communication from the rooftop, then turns to the door. “Hezbollah, this is Israel Defense Forces!” he shouts in Arabic. “Your way is blocked on all sides. You will not get out alive. Your only chance is surrender.”

  From the other side of the door a voice shouts back: “Israel, this is not Hezbollah, only a poor shopkeeper and his family. There are small children. Please God, all cursed Hezbollah cowards are gone!” Meanwhile, the speaker continues methodically to burn papers in the fir
eplace.

  Kobi kneels to pull on his gas mask as the unit follows suit. Their eyes are fixed on the door. If they must break in, the room will be flooded instantly with tear gas.

  “Whoever you are, surrender before we breach the door and come in firing.”

  “There are no Hezbollah here. Only family, children. We are innocent Christians. Please leave us in peace.”

  Outside in the corridor, Kobi is joined by Gadi and his unit.

  “We take them out now,” Gadi says in an undertone. “No delay.”

  “I need information, not corpses,” Kobi says. It is the classic battlefield confrontation: intelligence requires prisoners so they can be pumped for critical information; operations requires them dead.

  “Ten seconds and we’re inside.” Somehow Gadi’s lisp adds to his authority.

  Kobi is not about to dispute the order. In close combat, decisions made on the spot may be wrong, but they are not subject to debate. “This is your final warning!” he shouts. “Unlock the door or we will do it for you! You will not survive!” Into his helmet microphone, he whispers, “Skull to Heights, situation.” He presses the earpiece to his head. “There’s a chimney. He’s burning papers.”

  “On three,” Gadi whispers.

  “Skull to Heights, on my count of three.” A buzz. “One . . . two . . .”

  From inside: “Do not shoot! I am opening the door. Do you hear me? I am opening—”