Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

by Alexander McNabb

  Freij feigned surprise. ‘Marcelle? Oh, I invited her to join me for this moment. I find this type of event so very stimulating. Marcelle is very good at her job, Mr Lynch. You should save up and perhaps give her a try one day. Although I understand it could be difficult on a British civil service salary.’

  Freij tapped the desktop again. ‘It is over, Mr Lynch. As you so correctly pointed out when you sent this text to your friend Ms Durand, the Ilyushin is indeed gone from our airfield here. It flew to the Baazaran Air Base with two mobile missile launchers, each armed with a highly sophisticated medium range missile. These have both deployed on schedule. You have been looking for two Russian Oka class nuclear warheads, have you not? Let me fulfil your quest for you. They are both at Baazaran. You have heard of Baazaran?’

  Lynch glared at Freij, his breathing quickening with his anger.

  ‘It is a disused airbase in the mountains, in the area we call the Chouf. The Druze made great use of it during the civil war and I am making use of it now. Any Iranian retaliation will be, of course, directed at the place the missiles originated.’ Freij chuckled. ‘Not a good time to be Druze, I think.’

  Lynch struggled against the sharp-edged cable ties. ‘You’ll never get away with this.’

  ‘My God, could you come up with nothing better than that?’ Freij kicked his chair back and rounded the desk. ‘Is that it? Your last great line?’ He gripped Lynch’s chin, forcing his face up to meet Freij’s furious eyes. ‘You’re not going to escape, Lynch. You’re not going to blow up my mountain retreat and walk away with the girl. You’re too late and, if I may be frank, not very good.’

  Freij let Lynch’s head drop and strode to stand in front of the picture window, a dark silhouette against the blue sky. ‘In a little under five minutes, those missiles will launch and in under ten minutes will be suborbital over Syria. This, habibi, is game over.’

  Lynch’s mobile buzzed on Freij’s desk. Freij turned from the glass. ‘What could we have here, Mr Lynch?’

  Lynch was silent as Freij read the message. He dropped the mobile and strode to the door, barking a command in Arabic as he left. Danni entered the room, shutting the big door behind him very carefully.

  ‘Marcie,’ Lynch craned his head back to try to see her. ‘Fancy reading what that text said?’

  Marcelle rose from the sofa where she had been reading a magazine and walked up to the desk, pushing away the gun that Danni brandished.

  ‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, boy,’ she drawled.

  She picked up the phone. ‘Army coming. Hold on.’

  Lynch nodded, his urchin’s grin lighting up his battered face. ‘Yes, I can see how that would piss him off.’

  The beat of helicopters penetrated the thick glass of the picture window, the impact of the first concussions coming soon after. Craning his neck, he could see the first Huey rising up the valley towards Deir Na’ee. An instant later, white trails of missiles streamed from its pods.

  Overwhelming relief made him boyish, the impish grin coming easily.

  ‘You made a will, Danni boy?’

  Danni leapt for him, the punch smashing into Lynch’s cheek and rocking the whole chair. ‘Kiss immak!’

  Lynch braced for another punch, but Marcelle’s cry stopped the gunman. She shouted at him in Arabic, his response a surly glare at her and a snarl at Lynch. He left the room.

  Good doggy, thought Lynch. His vision was blurred by the punch and he tried to clear his head. SAM fire was returned at the helicopters, an awful moment of impact and then the lead chopper blown apart in a ball of flame, the wreckage plummeted down, pulling a plume of smoke behind it. The crack of gunfire sounded, the distinctive clacking of AK47s joined by heavier answering fire.

  Lynch meant his voice to sound airy, not nervous and croaky. ‘Marcie, do you fancy, you know, untying me?’

  Marcelle gazed coolly across at him, her deep eyes weighing him up.

  Another Huey went down to SAM fire from the ground, explosions throwing up clouds of dark grey smoke farther down the valley. A series of white streaks rammed down the valley from above them, the salvo of Katyushka rockets throwing up enormous gouts of red soil.

  Dubois punched the air in frustration. ‘Come on, Jean, we must be able to do something.’

  Meset was sweating, his plump hands flying across the keyboard. ‘We’re all on it, Dubois, give me a break.’

  The room was packed with people using screens, clamorous with raised voices, telephones and clattering keyboards.

  Ghassan Maalouf replaced the handset he had been talking into. ‘Radar went down two hours ago in Beirut International. It affected both civil and military traffic. Our analysts believe it was some kind of electronic countermeasure. It came from the blue and only lasted twenty minutes.’

  ‘What could that possibly—’

  ‘It’s happening again now. We are also hearing reports of two very large missiles seen launching from the area near the Baazaran Air Base in the Chouf mountains. I think this is where Mr Lynch’s Ilyushin 76 went. It makes sense.’

  Dubois flicked through the banks of camera views on the Deir Na’ee CCTV system, his eyes on the display as he talked. ‘Why launch the missiles from the Chouf? Why not directly from Deir Na’ee?’

  Maalouf was impassive. ‘Because this dirty bastard wants any Iranian retaliation to hit the Druze.’

  Brian Channing re-entered the operations room at the Résidence des Pins, having left to take a call on his mobile. He was grim-faced as he approached Dubois and Maalouf. The room was quiet, everyone watching the scene unfolding on the CCTV screens as the Lebanese army battled the One Lebanon militia in the mountains of northern Lebanon.

  Channing’s voice rang out in the silence. ‘Right. We’ve been told to clear our forces from Deir Na’ee. My PM and your PM,’ he gestured at Dubois, ‘have agreed with the Americans. Ghassan, your CiC has confirmed receipt of the instruction and his compliance. He has ordered a retreat. We are to leave this to them. The Americans will take any further action.’

  Dubois’ fists balled. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means we’re pulling out. We’re leaving it to the Americans. They have launched a major cruise missile strike vectored from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Gulf.’

  Meset leapt up. ‘We’ve got it! We’re in! We have control of the missiles.’

  Channing wheeled, incredulous. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Here, just here. Over Syria.’

  ‘Can you disarm them?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve initiated that sequence.’

  ‘Ditch them, then, man. Ditch the fucking things. Here, in the Aral Sea. There’s nothing much worse you can do to that poor, benighted bloody pond.’

  Marcelle regained her seat on the big sofa moments before Freij re-entered the room. She composed herself, shooting him a too-bright smile. Ignoring her, Freij strode to the big picture window and gazed over the valley below.

  The helicopters were pulling back, gaining altitude and banking to turn towards the sea. The sound of heavy gunfire, muffled by the thick glass, ceased and, gradually, the little puffs of smoke on the mountainside abated.

  Freij turned with a cold smile at Lynch. ‘As you can see, Mr Lynch, we are very well defended.’

  There was a knock on the door. Danni was excited, eager and chattering overexcitedly in Arabic. Freij smiled and held out a hand to him, palm down to slap Danni’s upturned hand, dismissing him with a gentle shove on his shoulder.

  ‘Shukran, ya Danni. Take Marcelle up to the eyrie for me.’

  He turned to Lynch. ‘So you see, Mr Lynch, as I was saying, I am well protected also in the political sphere. The politician is, it would seem, mightier than the sword.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Lynch, staring fiercely out of the window. ‘In fact, I’d say quite the opposite. Goodbye, Michel.’

  Freij hesitated, fearing the cheap trick. He turned to the picture windows. Lynch lunged f
rom his chair. He raced for the door, Danni keeping it open for Marcelle with his back. The gunman reacted too slowly. Lynch’s rabbit punch, delivered with all his momentum, smashed down on the man’s cheek, driving his head back against the metal door with a sickening crunch of bone. Lynch elbowed the man’s deadweight aside, powering through the doorway. He caught Marcelle around the waist, his weight sending her flying against the rough wall of the corridor beyond the doorway, but at least keeping him on his feet. He drove her running ahead of him, screaming ‘Move! Move! Move!’ Marcelle’s dress caught in her legs, she stumbled and Lynch overtook her, caught her hand and dragged her behind him down the corridor.

  Freij barely had time to raise his hands in a futile denial as the phalanx of brutal, finned cruise missiles loomed into the glass like sharks in a tank, shattering the thick pane with a massive impact that sent a wave of brilliant shards bowing inwards.

  The freezing air sucked into the room blossomed into orange fire, the cloud of flying glass became flechettes shredding anything in their path before they melted and vaporised. Michel Freij’s face was lit for a microsecond in a fierce orange glow like a million sunsets. His lips were forced back by the force of the first concussions, a macabre, manic grin that melted as his flesh was flensed from his bones by the tiny shards, his bones carbonised by the hellish heat of the first wave of explosions, his ashes thrown into the air and atomised by the second and third waves of missiles as they slammed into the boiling mountainside.

  The heavy door smashed open and was obliterated, a roiling fireball raced down the corridor, sucking the oxygen from the air to feed its devouring flames.

  A second door, farther down, caught the violence of the first explosion and held, the vacuum extinguishing the flame for an instant before it sucked in the powerful concussion of the second wave. The door blew apart and the shards of metal glittered as they were driven forwards by the massive force of the second wave of detonations. The corridor was stripped back to bare rock by the metal and flame until the whole punch of fire met the mangled wreckage blocking the ruined lift shaft. Everything in the two hundred foot length of passage was destroyed.

  The cold air rushed in from Dannieh to fill the vacuum left by the fireballs. Cracking, ticking and dripping, the various materials that formed the remains of Deir Na’ae cooled in their various ways.

  In a tiny side room off the main passage, its door blackened but whole, a woman sobbed.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Brian Channing stood at the head of the boardroom table in the British Embassy. Around it were gathered Nathalie Durand, Jean Meset, Yves Dubois, Ghassan Maalouf and Tony Chalhoub. The gold tassels on the velvet curtains glowed in the Mediterranean sunlight streaming in through the mock Georgian windows.

  ‘It falls upon me to draw a line under yesterday’s events and to clarify them for your benefit. After we leave this room, we will likely never speak of this again. However, I believe we all need to walk away having shared the intelligence we worked together to collect, and to understand that we did a fucking good job.’

  Channing took them in, rewarded with wan smiles. ‘First, the American angle. As we now know, there was never an ...’ Channing’s fingers made quotes in the air, ‘official American operation. This is being positioned as a right-wing group well placed in the corridors of power in Washington that worked with Israeli intelligence to create an attack on Iranian nuclear programme sites that would be deniable by Israel and the United States. It was Michel Freij’s aim to use the attack to ensure that any reprisals would take place against the Druze and Shia areas of southern Lebanon.’

  Channing paused and scanned the weary group. ‘The Greek Navy is currently conducting a mop-up operation at the so-called Near East Institute for Oceanographic Research.’

  He lowered his hands and continued. ‘The Iranians are making a huge song and dance about two missiles fired in their direction, of course. And the Kazaks are not so happy about two new additions to their environmental disaster zone. The Yanks are crawling all over the Aral Sea trying to get to those missiles before the Russians do. Our friends in the home of the free and land of the brave are inventing some cock and bull story that you’ll be reading in tomorrow’s press. You can enjoy a sneaky laugh at whatever it is they come up with.’

  There was indeed, despite the drawn faces of those at the table, a quiet murmur of anticipatory amusement. Channing waited for it to die down.

  ‘Michel Freij is also dead, as is anyone who was within several hundred yards of Deir Na’ee. The Americans loosed over a hundred cruise missiles in total. Much of the facility has been totally destroyed and the fires are still burning there.’

  Channing scowled at the room. ‘And we mourn our colleague, Gerald Lynch, who died bravely fighting for truth, for fairness and for justice.’ He glanced at Nathalie, sitting back from the table. She avoided his gaze. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her hands worked together in her lap, her knuckles white.

  Channing’s mobile peeped insistently. The people in the room started looking at the damn thing and he grabbed at it. They watched him take the call. He shook his head, steadied himself against the table. Stammering, he ended the call and dropped the mobile.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Channing told them. ‘It’s Lynch.’

  Dubois cracked first. ‘What about him?’

  Nathalie looked up, wiping her eyes. Channing spoke to her rather than Dubois. ‘It would seem the bastard’s still alive.’

  Fin

  Thanks

  To ‘beta readers’ Bob Studholme, Micheline Hazou, Kamal BinMugahid, George Kabbaz and Alice Johnson. Thanks, too, to Sara Refai and Taline Jones for early reads and constant friendship. To the Grey Havens Gang, as always, for support, laughs and shoulders. Roba Al Assi once again inspired a scene in one of my books. This time she gave me Barometre which gave me Spike and so but for Roba, Leila Medawar would still be alive! To Eman Hussein I owe a great deal, not least for sharing her Beirut with me as we walked and walked in between death-defying servees rides. Maha Mahdy tottered across the city with me in her Louboutins and gave Nathalie another reason to bug Lynch. I have a day job, and owe a great deal to my partner in crime in that enterprise, Carrington Malin, who has been a staunch ally in this whole book thing.

  I owe a great deal to the support of Jashanmals, my distributor, in particular Narain Jashanmal and Siju Ravi and also Therese Nasr at Levant Distributors. Derek Kirkup gave me the Arabian Princess and a great deal of help and guidance on matters nautical, while Andy Drew helped with the whizzbangs. Jessy Shoucair designed the ‘bulletstick’ for the cover.

  Beirut was originally written in 2009 and takes the form it does today because of that rarest of things, a helpful literary agent, in this case the most kind Andrew Lownie, who saw something in it and encouraged me to bring that something out. Thanks, too, to Robin Wade, my own agent, for trying gamely to flog this book to an unreceptive publishing industry and to Robb Grindstaff, my editor, who curbed many of my more outrageous tendencies.

  Finally, most importantly, thanks to my long-suffering wife Sarah, for putting up with a husband who has his head in the clouds 99 percent of the time.

  Reading club notes and more at:

  www.Beirutthebook.com

  www.alexandermcnabb.com

  Complaints and demands for refunds can be directed at @alexandermcnabb

  After a lifetime of service around the Middle East, retired diplomat Jason Hartmoor is dying of cancer. He embarks on a last journey back to Lebanon where he studied Arabic as a young man at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, the infamous ‘British spy school’ in the village of Shemlan far up in the hills overlooking Beirut.

  Jason wants to rediscover the love he lost when the civil war forced him to flee Lebanon. Instead his past catches up with him with such speed and violence, it threatens to kill him before the disease does. The only man who can keep him alive long enough to face that past is Gerald Lynch.

  To be published 2013
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