by Mike Bond
He dressed in the used clothes, holstered the Makarov under his left shoulder, wrapped the food, water, and spare clothes in the blanket roll, tied it across his other shoulder Afghani style, and followed Independence Avenue toward the Damascus road.
There was firing up ahead so he turned south toward the Hippodrome. Cars full of Palestinians raced toward the firing, shooting their guns in the air and screaming, but the people on the sidewalks paid no heed. At a crossroads he rubbed dust into his face and clothes, skirted Christian Beirut and took the Damascus road into the hills.
Before dusk he ate bread and goat cheese on the last ridge above Beirut then backtracked after dark to lie up in a deserted barn’s dry hay.
As kids he and Cole had once floated a gray plastic model battleship on a pond in Cobbossee Woods and shot it with a BB gun till it sank. He’d been excited, imagining the gun crews shattered and killed, the bridge blown apart, water rushing through holes below waterline. If the New Jersey hadn’t shelled Lebanese villages would the Marines still be alive?
Before dawn he walked north around the Syrian checkpoints. Stone villages lay in the folds of the hills and dwarf junipers marched along the crests. The baaing of goats and once the wooden thunk of a barley mill came up from a valley. Tiny red and yellow flowers hid in cracks in the rocks where the goats couldn’t reach them.
He crossed a dirt road with recent jeep tracks and continued north, stopping often to pull thorns from his sandals. In late afternoon he drank and refilled his bottles in a pool where water spiders skittered over his hands. At dusk he came upon a ruined castle and slept under the eaves by a crossbow slot where a scimitar moon shone through.
On the third day he crossed mountains he remembered from the map as Jabal el Mnaitra. Ravens soared high above on updrafts. Towns and terraced fields lay to the west, on the Christian side, and beyond them the gauzy sea. To the east on the Muslim side the Beqaa Valley spread north and south, green in its center where irrigated by the Litani River, sere and arid in the foothills and stony on the crests.
The sun set behind Jabal al Mnaitra, glinting on farmhouse windows on the Syrian side. He came to a pool where a river rushed from a hole in the mountain through the fallen columns of a Roman temple. This, he decided, must be the river above Yammouné. He filled his bottles, added more iodine, ate the last of his bread and cheese and slept in a ruined hut, wakened several times by mice scuffling in the straw.
In the morning he found the mice had chewed through a sandal strap. It seemed a bad omen and he felt lonely and afraid. He didn’t have to do this. He was going to get horribly killed.
Yammouné was a clean village with purple flowers in red clay pots and chickens scratching the dust, sheep and donkeys in pens beside the houses and children chattering on their way to school. He went into a little shop with clumps of garlic, tomatoes, onions, tangerines and lemons hanging by the door.
An old woman in black came through a bead curtain at the back. “Do you have leather?” he asked, conscious of his poor accent.
She cocked her head as if not believing what she’d heard.
He held up the sandal. “To fix this.”
“Ah, you must be sore-footed.” She dug into a cardboard box and tossed some twine on the counter. He bought hard bread, cheese, and a goat sausage, and followed a path by a lake where ducks quacked and dabbled. Out on the flatlands doves rose and fell in dizzy clouds; larks and blackbirds sang from cattails along the canals. Roman columns stood over dusty villages like relics of a giant race.
As he walked he invented a life for himself. Ahmad Katswah, born in Edeni. Ahmad’s mother was his, and Ahmad’s father who had been killed by the Uzbeks when they stole his sheep. A year of university in Kabul, returning to teach in Edeni’s schoolhouse under the yew tree. Now he spoke aloud in Arabic, trying an Afghani accent.
“That’s a strange story,” said a voice behind him.
He spun round. A barefoot boy with a stick in his right hand, a plastic bag in his left, something moving inside the bag. “Where’d you come from?” Jack said.
“Catching frogs in that ditch. What are you doing here?”
“Going to Baalbek to find work.”
“There’s no work in Baalbek since this War. Should’ve stayed where you were.”
Jack sat on a stone to tighten the twine on his sandal. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Shouldn’t talk to yourself. Anybody might hear.”
Jack noticed Roman letters and numerals carved into the stone. A Roman mileage marker. “Hey,” he started to say – but how would an Afghani know Latin?
“I can’t believe a guy like you ever went to university,” the boy said. “Look at you, all dirty and dusty! University people drive cars and wear nice clothes.”
“I only did one year. I was poor.”
The boy squinted up at him. “You still are.”
Baalbek’s Roman columns jutted up from sprawling slums as if left behind in some hasty departure. In a café two men were drinking mint tea and another with burly arms was shelling walnuts into a plastic bowl. Feeling out of place Jack asked for a tea which the burly man brought him wordlessly. He tried to understand their conversation and realized they were talking about rebuilding an engine. He shouldered his blanket roll and left, wanting to take a bus back to Beirut.
Four delta-winged Mirages passed over. Minutes later he thought he heard distant explosions. For a while he sat on the edge of the ruins. Temple of Jupiter, a sign said in French. Beyond it were more ruins, rows of columns like organ pipes reaching for the sky.
There were many things to think about but most of them were dangerous. That he might die here. What they’d do to him if they found him out. Like all liars, he realized, he wanted to convince himself of the safety of his lie.
He ate lamb mishwi for dinner in a café and slept under the stone lid of a sarcophagus, nosed by a dog whimpering with hunger.
He gave her bread and she fell on it, choking. I never felt alone, he told her, when I had Bandit. When I had Thor. She begged for more and he gave her a little, then tried to shoo her off, but she turned round three times at the foot of his sarcophagus and went to sleep.
Next morning he stopped two men in the street carrying Kalashnikovs. “Can you tell me where the fighters are?”
“Who are you?” one said. He was taller, with red hair, blue eyes and freckles.
Jack told his story. “How did you get here?” the red-haired one said.
“From Karachi, a port in Pakistan, to Mecca for the hajj, then Alexandria with a boat of pilgrims going home, then Beirut.”
The other thumbed the rifle slung from his shoulder. “Know what this is?”
“I’ve killed seventeen infidels with a gun like that –”
“You have your own war. Why come fight ours?”
“It’s the same enemy. And because we’re backwards in our fighting we may not win. I’ve been sent to learn your ways.”
“Our ways? We may not win either.”
They took him to a hut near the ruins, blindfolded him and handed him an empty gun. “Strip and reassemble it,” one said.
The blindfold pinched the bridge of his nose. He heard them taking apart his blanket roll.
The gun was an old AK-47 with a metal plate around the front of its stock and a flat metal receiver cover. Willing his fingers not to tremble he felt for the catch on the cover, shoved forward the recoil spring guide, lifted out the recoil spring and guide assembly, slid back the bolt assembly, snapped the bolt to the rear of the carrier, twisted it and shoved it forward. It was too loose, worn on the right side. How many men, he wondered, has it killed?
He slid the bolt back into the carrier, replaced the gas cylinder and twisted the bolt carrier assembly back into the receiver track. They tugged off the blindfold. “You carry no weapons?”
“A pistol here, under my arm.”
They took the Makarov and made him drop his trousers to show he was circumcised. “So maybe you�
�re a Jew?” one snickered. They took him through the alleys to a stucco house with a radio antenna in a plane tree in the courtyard. The red-haired one went inside and came out with a slender limping man. He had been wounded in the face and the scar had contorted his lips into a permanent snarl, the teeth on the left side of his mouth visible. He placed Jack’s Makarov on the table between them. “I am Ismael al-Haji.”
It took Jack an instant to realize the man had spoken English. “I understand your name,” Jack said in Arabic, “but not what you say.”
Ismael al-Haji slid the Makarov from the holster. “You have a strange accent.”
“Arabic is different from our Pashto tongue.”
“Speak some of that –”
It was easy and very comfortable to drop into Pashto, telling him of the war in Afghanistan, the Soviet invaders.
“Enough. I do not understand you.” Ismael thumbed the magazine catch and slid the magazine from the grip. “These are Soviet bullets?”
“Nine millimeter.”
He snapped in the magazine and thumbed the safety. “Down is safe?”
Jack ignored his fear. “Up is safe. Down is fire.”
Ismael nudged the safety down. “Now tell me,” he said in English and pointed the gun at Jack, “why are you here?”
Fear drained him. “Why do you aim my gun at me?” Jack said in Arabic, “when I have come all this way to learn from you?”
“This is your first lesson. That we watch everyone. And if you’re not true we will kill you.”
With his good left hand Jack tugged open his shirt. “You see this shoulder? An infidel bullet did it. Why do you doubt me?”
“Permission is granted unto those who take arms against the unbelievers, for they have been unjustly persecuted by them...”
“I give you back the same Sura: Those who have fled their country for the sake of God’s true religion – on them will God bestow an excellent recompense –”
Ismael pushed up the safety, snapped the magazine catch and piled the bullets on the table. “Where did you learn your Arabic?”
“From the Koran. And from the mujihadeen who come from Saudi Arabia to help us fight the infidels.”
“It’s for that you have the Saudi accent –”
“In Afghanistan we don’t understand explosives.” Jack scooped up the bullets, reloaded and holstered the Makarov. “How to blow up a truck among the infidels.”
“And if you learn?”
In this Jack could speak the truth. “I’ll go home and use this knowledge.”
Hezbollah
“NEVER AIM,” Jack said. “Look at the enemy. The bullet will hit where you’re looking.”
“How?” said the kid, a new recruit from the Shiite slums of Beirut.
Jack took the Israeli Galil from the kid’s hands and draped a headscarf over the rear sight. Seventy yards away among the bullet-pitted Doric columns stood a cardboard man. “See that yellow stone – beside the target’s foot?”
“The little one, to the right?”
“Watch it.” Jack focused on the stone and fired. The stone pirouetted away.
“Praise God!” the kid said.
Jack rubbed his scarred shoulder where the recoil had punched it, handed back the Galil. Who, he wondered, am I training him to kill?
The first night he’d slept with five others in the ruins, awake most of the night for fear he’d speak English in his sleep. For several days they’d held exercises there, firearms use, the principles of urban combat, religious indoctrination. “To be a Muslim,” the lead instructor, a narrow-chested man named Samir repeatedly told them, “is to kill non-Muslims. That is why God put you on this earth.”
“Why train here?” Jack said one day, “in the middle of these old temples?”
“In this rubbish made by infidels two thousand years ago, the Israelis and Americans will not bomb us.” Samir snickered. “For fear of destroying what is already ruins...”
Early next morning three of them were told to gather their things, knelt hastily for the first prayer then were blindfolded and led into the back of a panel truck. “Where are we going?” Jack asked but Ismael did not answer.
The truck jounced through Baalbek’s streets then picked up speed on a paved road. The rising sun through his blindfold showed they were driving north. There was a reek of poppies. Twice vehicles passed southwards. He calmed his breathing, slowed his pulse to sixty and counted: after forty-three minutes the truck slowed; he heard other cars and trucks and the stopping and turning and voices of a town. They gained speed, swung more to the east and uphill.
This road was unpaved and rough. He kept shifting position to calm the pain in his shoulder. After eleven minutes they slowed for another town. The sun had shifted more to his right so they had turned north again. He steeled himself to think only of his fabricated memories of growing up in Afghanistan.
The driver dropped to first, the truck jerking in and out of ruts, chuffing uphill. The cool air tasted of snow and junipers. The truck shuddered downhill for seven minutes and forty seconds and squealed to a stop. The engine gave a last rattle and died.
The back doors scraped open. “Take off the blindfolds,” Ismael said.
They stood in a great cirque of brown rock, in its center a wadi and a cluster of sharp-peaked Bedouin tents umber as the rock. Camels by the tents, scruffy chickens, young bearded men with guns. A machine gun nest on the far side of the wadi, and another, better camouflaged, in the cliffs. Ismael took his elbow. “Are you ready to die?”
He kept his voice steady. “Die?”
“For God? To drive a truck to the home of your enemies and destroy them?”
“Our warriors who destroyed the American Marines in Beirut...” Jack looked at the ground. “Did they come from here?”
“That’s not your concern. You must simply prepare yourself to do the same.”
“Despite all my fighting I’m still afraid of death.”
“The very instant of death we’re in Bayit al-Ridwan, the finest garden in Paradise, reserved for martyrs and the Prophets. That’s not enough?”
“You believe in Paradise?”
“God does with us what He wants.” Ismael turned, and Jack had a sense that Ismael was perhaps more adept at sending others to their deaths than facing his own.
The days were constant training for desert and mountain combat, ambushes in wadis, how to cover yourself in dirt and stones, ignore the scorpions and wait for the enemy. Some of it was led by trainers from Iran who spoke poor Arabic but were experts in making bombs from a variety of explosives, and who talked constantly of the need to kill Americans.
“But in Afghanistan,” Jack said one night, “the Americans give us guns, ammunition, RPGs, surface-to-air missiles, information from the sky on enemy locations. They bring mujihadeen from other Muslim countries to join our fight. Why do we attack them here?”
“There is only one God,” answered Ismael.
“And so?”
Ismael spat a pistachio shell that stuck to his lip. “Everything evolves from this truth.”
“I’m a poor schoolteacher from Afghanistan. Please explain.”
“That’s your mask. Just as mine’s this wounded face. The Koran is the only truth. Our God the only God. The Koran orders us to destroy all that is not of our God. Nothing else to say. Nothing else to think.”
Two weeks Jack had been there and still they watched him, especially the Iranians. At night in the crowded Bedouin tents, in the day with other recruits, making sure he was never furthest away. Even during the five daily prayers as he bent facing Mecca with the others he was conscious of eyes on him, ears listening to the authenticity of his prayers.
“You don’t use a prayer rug,” Ismael said one day.
Jack watched a chicken digging itself into the dust in a vain attempt to escape its lice. “It’s not the custom in our country. God made the earth we kneel on, also.”
“You’re not in your country now...”
He was aware of a subtle need to annoy Ismael – “change one letter in your name,” he told him silently, “and it’s Israel...” Then forced himself to think what antagonizing him would mean.
“For now we group our forces here,” Ismael said one night. “To someday retake all lands where Muslims live.”
“But Muslims live everywhere –”
“Precisely.”
This base, Jack had decided, was near the Syrian border. To cross Syria meant hundreds of miles in any direction. But to recross the Beqaa Valley westward into the mountains to the Christian lines was only fifty miles at most.
When it came he wasn’t ready for it. “Your prayers have been answered,” Ismael said. “He will be here this morning.”
“Who will be here?”
“One from your country. Another Afghani mujihadeen.”
Jack could not steady his voice. “I must go meet him.”
“I want you here till he arrives.”
How had he given himself away? “I’ll return to my training.”
“No. Stay near me.”
Now he would die. For being foolish enough to come here. For not listening to his fear. He ambled over to several men working on the engine of an old Syrian truck. They fell silent and he moved on.
Rising sun blazed down the canyon wall. The day’s first breeze came up the wadi, too hot to breathe. His wrists would not stop shaking.
At the well he kicked aside manure where the camels had clustered, and dropped the bucket into the damp darkness. A hen clucked, announcing a new egg.
Drinking deeply he scanned the camp. Seven men moving up the canyon, rifles glinting in early sunlight. Changing of the crew on the far machine gun nest. From within a Bedouin tent a radio burst forth, fast Arabic chatter.
The Syrian truck was revving. Readying for the food run down to Labwé? Or to pick up burlap sacks of crushed poppies to trade the Syrians for guns?
Behind him Ismael and a squat bearded man were bent over a map. Jack slipped behind the Bedouin tents, picked up a Galil, ducked a hissing camel, and climbed in the passenger side of the Syrian truck. Time to die now.