by Dick Stivers
In the front seat of the Mercedes, the CB radio alerted the three men. Then Clayton spoke through the walkie-talkie. "We saw the limo. And we're moving. Where are you?"
Again, Powell did not acknowledge his officer's question. But he did rave, "He's so stupid! Why did they send him here?"
Hussain watched the rearview mirror. He glanced back to Powell, and said, "The Libyan comes."
Headlights gained on the Mercedes. They stared forward as a pickup truck with militiamen in the back roared past. Two limousines followed an instant later. The convoy continued ahead, then skidded around a corner.
Clayton followed. Accelerating, weaving past the Mercedes, the panel truck gained on the limousines. A second surveillance car, a Fiat, raced to keep up with the truck.
Powell leaned forward to Akbar. "Slow down. Let Clayton take point if he wants to."
The taillights of the panel truck and the Fiat turned. Akbar stayed two blocks back.
Suddenly, autofire and rocket blasts shattered the night. Powell saw flashes of high explosives over the buildings, and flames fuelled by gasoline. Rifles fired hundreds of rounds.
Akbar floored the accelerator. The Mercedes sped past the narrow street. Looking out the side window, Powell saw only one image.
A street of flames.
3
In the walnut-paneled luxury of an office in Washington, D.C., a senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency discussed the assassination of a field agent in Beirut. He spoke with a State Department officer of corresponding rank. Both men, career civil servants, wore the uniform of the bureaucrat: three-piece suit, tie, gold cuff links. Their uniforms differed only in color. One man's suit was gray, the other's blue. The State Department paper Viking swiveled in his desk chair, considering the information his counterpart in the Agency was relaying to him.
"A standard surveillance operation. Absolutely no expectation of danger — other than the threat of random violence in that awful place, of course. Our man — his name was Clayton — and his assistants maintained strict procedural discipline. No one outside of the field unit knew of the assignment. Let me emphasize that — no one. If there was a breach of security, it came from someone within the group."
The State Department mandarin interrupted with a question. "Is there any chance your man simply drove into a firefight between rival militias? That he was an innocent bystander, in a sense?"
"Clayton had a good many years of experience in his work and he wouldn't have blundered into some crossfire between two ragtag gangs. The initial report indicates a carefully plotted ambush. The two cars received intense automatic-weapons fire and several hits from rocket-propelled grenades."
"Any indication of who supplied the weapons?"
"What?"
"The machine guns, the rockets. Who sponsored this? The Soviets? The Syrians? Or — perhaps this is an utterly Machiavellian thought — is it possible our Israeli friends decided to bloody our nose? With the intent of course of putting responsibility and therefore the blame on the Soviets and their allies?"
"We haven't had a chance to analyze the intent."
"When will you have the evidence from the scene? The forensic evidence?"
"We may never have that evidence. We simply do not have the manpower to send an investigative unit. And I don't know if the spent casings and bullets and whatever other evidence we could find would help us. Every weapon from every nation in the world shows up in Beirut. I think this situation requires interrogation of the personnel involved. To be exact, the Marine who survived."
"A Marine? Does the Agency employ servicemen now?"
"A Marine Corps captain. At least he was. He's now on detached duty with us. He served in the Multinational Peacekeeping Force. Before his Beirut duty, he'd studied Arabic. He became indispensible for our contacts with the fundamentalist Muslim groups, the various Shia gangs."
"What is his ethnic background?"
"Texas."
"Would I know his family? Are they prominent in society?"
The Agency officer laughed. "I doubt it! He's just a shack-town kid who made good in the Marine Corps."
"He's a negro? Is that why he relates to those Mohammedans?"
"No, he's white..."
"Strange."
"He had two years of college on his own before he enlisted. Then he worked hard and scored well on all tests and finally got into officer's training school through the backdoor. Learned passable Arabic somehow. And French. He proved himself in a difficult situation we had in California. Then he volunteered for the Beirut duty. He proved to be a remarkably effective liaison officer."
"How did he survive the attack?"
"He was in the third car. Clayton and the others were in the first and second. Powell saw the ambush and simply drove away."
"Leaving the others to die?"
"Exactly. When he returns to Washington, we'll question him very closely."
"What do you know about his links to Muslim gangs?"
"I know that he's our best man in Beirut, so far as the Shits go — as I call the Shutes. In fact, dismissing him will cost you the single most productive source of street-level information the State Department has in West Beirut. He knows every fundamentalist chieftain and every officer on the staffs of the raghead militias, which proved invaluable during the stationing of the Marine Beirut Force..."
"But which is of negligible value now." The State Department officer looked at his watch. "We really don't want anything to do with those groups. Not on a diplomatic level. For counterterrorism, yes. But his reports don't focus on that, if my memory is correct."
"No, his reports certainly don't. He almost seems to be pleading their case sometimes. Telling us of neocolonialist privileges and discrimination and institutionalized inequality..."
"As if we don't know the realities of demographics and politics there. Should we continue this over lunch?"
"Why? Until we've interrogated him, we'll know nothing more."
"A very unfortunate turn of events."
"True. Mr. Clayton had a promising future with the Agency. We'll miss the loss of his talents. But we will not miss the questionable talents — and the lectures on democracy — of Captain Powell."
4
Powell emptied the drawers of his desk into a cardboard box. The pens, the .45 ACP cartridges, the jagged crescent of shrapnel, the bundle of paperback Korans — all the tools and mementos of his short and difficult career with the Central Intelligence Agency went into a box with Arabic scrawl and the picture of a peach.
Outside the Plexiglas windows of the Agency's East Beirut annex, 155mm artillery shells screamed through the gray morning. Explosions came from the port. Seconds later, the booms of the guns firing came from the Shuf Mountains above Beirut. Both the Phalangists and the Lebanese army had headquarters at the port. Powell went to the window of the west-facing office and tried to look to the northwest. But he couldn't see the target of the shelling.
"Your friends are murdering Christians again," Fisher said from the door. A blond pink-faced man of forty, Fisher had relayed the cable from Washington. "Guess it's a going-away bang for you."
"I don't have any friends with cannons."
"So you say. Here's your ticket to Washington." Fisher dropped an El Al folder in Powell's box of belongings. "Tell it to them."
Powell handed it back to him. "I'll book my own flight. Cancel this one."
"You're going out through Cyprus?"
"I don't know. Maybe they'll open the airport. I'm in no rush."
"Washington wants to debrief you immediately. Repeat, immediately."
"But I don't work for the Agency anymore. If I understand that cable correctly, I'm on my own time now."
"You're out of Beirut, that's what it means. As to your reassignment to another station, Langley didn't cable that information."
"Don't dodge it. I'm out. So I can leave when and how I want. And if I want."
"You want to stay on?" asked an incredu
lous Fisher.
Powell shrugged. He checked through the drawers a last time. Fisher glanced at the box of objects and books. Seeing the Korans, he started away. "Don't leave just yet," he said. "There's a detail I need confirmed."
"What?"
"Checking a translation." Fisher went to his office and returned with a file of reports. "That Libyan. In a lounge he made a comment..."
"Where?"
Fisher ignored the question. "He made a comment in Arabic that one of our people overheard. Our man translated it, but just to be sure, I had him quote in Arabic also. Look at this, what does that mean?"
Scanning the handwritten script, Powell considered it a moment, then asked, "What was the context?"
"There was a news clip on the television of the President. The ragheads made a series of threats..."
"Ragheads?" Powell interrupted. "You mean, Muslims? Or Palestinians? Or Syrians? Iranians? Libyans? Maybe Aunt Jemima? Who exactly is a raghead?"
"Muslims, whoever, they're all the same. One of them said, 'If the infidel offends thee, strike down the infidel with a sword.' "
"Talk's cheap."
"And the Libyan said, 'The sword rises.' "
"What else?"
"Then the Libyan left for his appointment. You know the rest."
"He said that just before Clayton got wasted?"
"Only minutes before the ambush. Is that quote translated correctly?"
Powell nodded. "The sword rises."
* * *
Akbar and Hussain led Powell up flight after flight of steel stairs. Artillery and rocket-propelled grenades had punched holes through the reinforced concrete of the stairwell walls. Though workers had cleaned away the debris and repaired the damage the high-explosive and armor-piercing warheads had inflicted on the steel stairs, the gaping holes in the walls remained — some only a hand's width wide, others a meter in diameter. Winter wind and freezing rain came through the holes.
At one landing, Powell found himself staring into storm clouds where an entire section of wall was gone. The stairs and railings had been rewelded and gaps bridged with scrap steel and pipe. Holding onto the rail, Powell looked straight down to the slums and ruined districts of Beirut.
"This is a new one," Powell said to his friends.
"Quite a view, huh?" Akbar asked. "Think I could open a restaurant? Call it the 'Stairway to Heaven.' Hot night spot. Look out at the lights, all that?"
"What lights?" Hussain asked.
"The lights of the city!" Akbar looked at Hussain with surprise. "You didn't listen to the radio this morning. The government announced the restoration of electricity to West Beirut. In forty-eight hours..."
They laughed. Continuing to the next landing, they stopped at the sandbagged post of two sentries. The teenage guards glanced at the handwritten pass Akbar displayed. The pass had the photos of all three men. But this did not satisfy their suspicions. The guards looked at Powell. They studied his face. They noted the Galil SAR and the American Colt .45 he carried. They looked at the Shia uniform he wore. "Who are you?" they demanded.
Akbar answered. "He's one of us. Does not the pass bear his photo and name? Perhaps you should summon our commander for a verification."
"We will." A teenager swung open the door and called into the corridor.
A group of armed men crowded the door. A tall dapper officer in faded fatigues and a beret stepped forward.
"My friend!" He gave Powell a quick embrace and ushered him into the corridor. The uniformed militiamen made way for the two men.
Sayed Ahamed headed a unit of Amal fighters operating in the area of the International Airport. Not a professional soldier, Ahamed had returned from a college in New York with a degree in urban engineering. However, in the chaos and hatred of the Lebanese civil war, no government office would consider the application of a Muslim. Rather than travel to the Gulf states in search of work, Ahamed stayed to fight for the creation of a modern, nonsectarian Lebanon.
Powell had met him when they worked together as coordinators of the Marine patrols, Powell mapping the routes of the Marine platoons through the Shia neighborhoods, Ahamed arranging the preparations for the patrols. In the days and hours preceding the patrols, Ahamed and his units acted as advance men, scouting the narrow streets, questioning residents, watching for outsiders. This prevented incidents. However, after the American administration ordered the guns of its naval force off the Lebanon coast to fire in support of the Christian forces, the Marines — and any friend of the Marines — lost the goodwill of the Shia people. Families gave shelter to anti-American fundamentalist gunmen. Snipers fired on Marines. Ahamed could no longer send in his men without casualties. The Marines abandoned the patrols due to the extreme risk.
In the months that followed, the Marines became prisoners within their compound, under fire from every extremist sect and gang. The militias fought an endless battle of unreported skirmishes with units of the Palestine Liberation Army, the Islamic Amal splinter group, the Iranians, the Druze and Syrian terror teams, infiltrating with the goal of murdering
Marines. The Syrians and Iranians finally resorted to a truck bomb to penetrate the concentric rings of Christian security, Shia security, then the few Marines with unloaded rifles who manned the gates to the compound. Hundreds of United States Marines died. The two friends — Ahamed from a village in the Shuf Mountains and Powell from a one-drugstore town in Texas — refused to hate each other for the mistakes of fools educated at Harvard and Yale.
"The others are waiting," Ahamed told Powell, his arm around his American friend's shoulders.
"I don't work for the Agency anymore."
"What? They..."
"They fired me."
"They take this killing of Clayton so seriously? Why?"
Powell stopped outside the door to the conference room. He glanced at the guards standing in the corridor of the blasted hotel. They would not hear. Cold wind blew through a shell hole at the far end of the corridor as Powell talked quietly in English to the Shia officer.
"There is something I cannot talk about in there. I need your help. The Libyan that Clayton was following had something to do with an Iranian named Rouhani. Rouhani's with a gang of Revolutionary Guards out in the Bekaa. The Libyan has an organization and millions of dollars to give away and Rouhani wanted in on it. They're planning something and I want to find out what it is."
"Another attack on Americans? Perhaps Europeans?"
"Would I care..." Powell faked shock "... if the Iranians killed some French or English? I would contribute to the cause of killing pacifists and hypocrites. Kill the queen, kill the head of the European Common Farce, I mean kill them all! Seriously, I doubt if the Iranians would need the organization or money to hit a target in Lebanon."
"Israel?"
"They could get the money from the Syrians or Palestinians. I think the Iranians want to hit a target outside of Lebanon, maybe in the United States."
"But you are no longer with your government."
"If I break up a gang trying to hit the United States, maybe I'll get my job back."
"We cannot allow uncontrolled elements to operate from our country," Ahamed said. "You know I'll give you whatever help you need."
"Knew you'd say that. Let's go in."
* * *
The leaders of the several Amal militias stationed in Beirut faced Powell. They did not waste time on greetings or polite conversation.
"What do the clowns think now?"
"Do they accuse us in the murders?"
"What was the report you sent to Washington?"
"Does this mean more weapons and dollars for the Fascist warlords?"
Powell waited until all the chieftains had asked a question, then calmly responded. "It means that Clayton's dead and you've got one less clown in the Agency. It also means that I am now a private citizen, persona non grata with the United States government. They don't care what my report said, they don't care what the truth is."
&nbs
p; "Do they believe it is the work of our people?"
"Of course," Powell answered. "All Shias are terrorists. Don't you read the newspapers?"
"We don't need the United States."
"Yes, you do. And the United States needs your friendship. That is why I will disregard the orders from my superiors. I will not return to the United States until I know who the killers of that dog Clayton are. Because I will not have the support of my government, I am here now to ask for your help."
Sayed Ahamed spoke to the others. "Powell has always told the truth."
"Unlike his despicable President and diplomats," one chieftain declared.
Powell stared past the table where the chieftains sat. The plate-glass windows of the hotel conference room overlooked the gray Mediterranean. Wind-whipped whitecaps flecked the surface.
Again Sayed Ahamed took Powell's side. "He has nothing to do with his President. Will we help him in his search? It was not our people who killed the American agent. It can only be to our benefit if my friend discovers the truth."
The militia chieftains nodded.
5
Lyons guided the rental car through the maze of streets in the industrial park. He circled around parked diesels and inched through groups of workers crowding around catering trucks. Finally he found the address of the workshop.
Parking in a space marked For Clients Only, the tall, square-shouldered ex-LAPD detective took two cases — one long and flat, the other the size of an airline flight bag — from the back seat. He pushed through a plate-glass door to a tiny reception room.
A secretary looked up from a stack of order forms. Almost sixty, with brilliant false teeth and white hair, she glanced to the cases he held and then pressed an intercom button. "They're expecting you, sir."
"If I get a call, can you switch it to a phone in there?" Lyons asked.
