Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (45 page)

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 from 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.