Bride of a Bygone War (33 page)

The major’s throat was already cold when Lukash attempted to take his pulse. The belt lay loose around his leg, just as he had left it. Major Elie had bled to death. Recognizing his fatal error, Lukash bellowed in frustration and slammed his fists against the icy ground. “God forgive me,” he muttered and then turned around wearily to recross the avalanche debris for a third time.

He was halfway across when the next salvo of mortar shells rained down on the road behind him. They followed him across the icy debris of the avalanche until at last he reached the far side and dashed up the road to the still-intact Land Rover in which Captain Fadi and Lieutenant Ilyas had intended to make their escape.

Lukash started the Rover and headed back up the mountain toward the hut just as the Phalange’s big 155-millimeter howitzers began firing from Qanat Bakiche, sending huge shells into Wadi Chakroub that quickly silenced the Syrian mortars. Each shell sounded like a freight train as it passed overhead, sending shock waves reverberating from every rock wall as it exploded. Before long Lukash passed the hut where his team had spent the evening and soon after crossed the ridgeline separating Wadi Chakroub from the Phalangist heartland.

After an hour of creeping forward without daring to use headlamps, Lukash at last saw the lights of Baskinta twinkling in the distance. Less than a mile ahead he spotted a wood fire in an oil drum where an informal roadblock had been set up. He considered briefly whether the troops who manned it were more likely to be local Phalangists or Colonel Faris’s intelligence men. But the distinction was probably irrelevant, because in either case they would likely turn him over to Colonel Faris. And if they did, his fate would be sealed.

Finding a ravine whose boulder-strewn bottom was only poorly visible from the road, he pulled the Land Rover onto the shoulder and stepped out. Removing as much M-16 ammunition from the vehicle as he could reasonably carry, he stashed it on a ledge that was out of sight from the road. Then he seized the Rover’s steering wheel and pushed the vehicle down the shallow incline until its front wheels dropped over the edge. A moment later the Rover gained speed and tumbled forward into the ravine, bouncing off one rocky surface after another for more than a hundred meters before coming to rest in a crumpled heap.

Having thus disguised his back trail, Lukash started up the mountain with his M-16 and spare ammunition and set off on a course calculated to bypass the Phalange roadblock and bring him back to Baskinta.

Chapter 18

Lukash stood motionless at the side of the road, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his French military parka, and listened to the trailing murmur of the old truck whose grizzled driver had given him a ride through Baskinta on his way toward the coast. It had been a long night and he was cold, hungry and exhausted, but Wadi Chakroub was far behind him now. The air was heavy with a seaborne mist that climbed the pine-studded hills in sluggish clouds yet seemed never to rise above treetop level. Although somewhere east of Damascus the sun was rising, in the hill town of Bikfaya, family seat of the Gemayel clan and spiritual home of the Phalange Party, the skies failed to show the light.

Lukash advanced on foot past an uneven row of snow-covered automobiles and approached the lighted windows of the filling station. Through the window he saw the grease-stained red ski jacket and immediately recognized the oldest son of Major Elie’s cousin slouched on a tall stool behind the cash register reading a comic book. The sound of boots splashing through heavy slush alerted the teenager to Lukash’s approach, and he raised his eyes without apparent curiosity or alarm.

“
Sabah an-nour,
Jibran,” Lukash greeted him, relieved at being able to remember the boy’s name.

“
Bonjour, monsieur,
” the boy replied dully.

“Did Major Elie come by here last night to tell you I was coming?”

The boy titled his head back a few degrees, looked out through hooded eyes, and made a “tsk” noise that in the Levant signified a rather bored “no.”

“Were you working here last night?”

The boy repeated the gesture.

Lukash stroked his beard thoughtfully. “He must have been in too much of a hurry to get up the mountain. I need to follow him. Can you give me a ride to Qanat Bakiche? I’ll pay you: fifty lira.”

The boy scowled and shook his head. “I cannot leave the pumps. Our customers need to fill their tanks before setting out for Jounié and Beirut. With the rationing, it is difficult to buy benzine there.”

“Then do you have a car you can let me use for the day? I will pay you for it, of course.”

The boy gave Lukash a hard look, and then a faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Use my car. Three hundred lira the day, plus benzine.”

Lukash unbuttoned his breast pocket and removed a money clip with a folded wad of Lebanese banknotes. He picked out three one-hundred-lira notes from the center and handed them over. “Where is it? For that kind of money I expect a car that runs without problems.”

The boy pointed to a huge Mercedes touring car that looked as old as Lukash but whose polished, ivory-hued finish seemed to fairly glow in the semidarkness. It was a car for a bank director or a militia chief, not an eighteen-year-old pump jockey.

“When you will bring it back?” the teenager asked.

“Tonight,” Lukash answered. “If I am not here by closing time, you can reach me through Major Elie. You have his number?”

The boy nodded perfunctorily, stuffed the bills into a zippered pocket in the arm of his ski jacket, and fished a key ring out of his trousers.

Lukash took it and, without another glance at the boy, started across the slush-covered asphalt toward the Mercedes.

At first he drove eastward toward the intersection with the secondary road leading to Baskinta, but after less than a kilometer he circled around and headed back toward the western side of town, where the largest of the walled villas lined the town’s imitation of Beirut’s Corniche. There he surveyed one side street after the next, avoiding the main road as much as possible to avoid the appearance of loitering, but never straying far from the villa of Colonel Faris Nader. By seven o’clock the westward traffic on the Corniche became noticeably heavier. If the colonel was in his villa and expected to reach Phalange intelligence headquarters by eight thirty, he would have to leave very soon.

Lukash spotted a pushcart vendor near the western end of the Corniche and stopped to buy a bag of sunflower seeds. In Beirut a Mercedes was the least conspicuous model of car on the road—sometimes it seemed that fully half the city’s population of cars consisted of white Mercedes sedans. But here on Bikfaya’s main street he wondered how long he could wait and circle, circle and wait, wait and circle around the colonel’s villa before somebody noticed the mint-condition touring car.

Lukash leaned across the leather seat to roll down the passenger window for the pushcart vendor, a wizened old man whose olive military parka closely resembled his own. As he handed over a five-lira bill, he heard a car kick up a spray of slush against the Mercedes as it passed and looked up in time to recognize the colonel’s gold Volvo sedan.

“God be with you,” he told the old man as he took the bag of seeds from him and rolled up the window without waiting for change.

The car’s five-liter engine had better acceleration than he expected of a thirty-year-old car. Lukash was able to keep the Volvo in view while he caught up to it, then maintained a standoff distance of about two hundred meters as they climbed the first grade before beginning the long descent toward the coast.

He knew he would not be able to hang behind the Volvo for long. The colonel would surely notice the white Mercedes in his rearview mirror kilometer after kilometer while other cars either passed him or dropped out of sight. Lukash would have to come up on him soon and make his move. But how? Possibly a glancing blow against the front fender while passing on an outside curve. Or maybe he should come abreast with the Volvo and blast away with his .45. But that would require him to score with his first shot or two, because the colonel would surely have a Kalashnikov or a machine pistol on the seat beside him.

The Mercedes was in fourth gear now, and it was becoming more difficult to maintain the pace as the Volvo accelerated around the rocky foothills of the Sannine Range. The suspension had doubtless been the best available in 1950, but it was unresponsive and sloppy now, and Lukash’s hands ached from gripping the steering wheel as if someone were trying to wrest it from his hands.

He heard the screech of rubber and realized he had entered the curve going too fast. He was less than a hundred meters behind the Volvo now, but he despaired of ever closing the distance. To descend any faster on such treacherous roads would be suicidal. The road leveled out again and then swept around to the right in a 200-meter straightaway before disappearing into the black hole of a two-lane tunnel. Lukash stepped on the accelerator and raced to beat the Volvo to the tunnel’s mouth.

Fifty meters in front of the opening, he pushed the accelerator to the floor. As he nosed ahead of the Volvo, he saw the colonel cast a sideward glance to see what kind of
rustaud
was passing him at the entrance to tunnel. A momentary look of confusion passed over the colonel’s face, then panic as Lukash twisted the steering wheel savagely to the right. The right rear fender of his Mercedes crumpled against the left rear wheel of the Volvo. The colonel slammed on his brakes but, possessing neither enough time or space to avoid the collision, ran the Volvo head-on into the tunnel’s stony buttress.

Lukash stopped the car inside the tunnel and shifted into reverse, backing out rapidly until he saw daylight again, and pulled in behind the Volvo. He stepped out of the Mercedes and removed the .45 automatic from its holster. Very little time remained before the next car might come along.

An eerie silence surrounded the wrecked Volvo, its engine compartment now foreshortened to half its depth where it pressed against the mountain. The colonel hardly had enough time to know what hit him, Lukash thought, and he steeled himself for the sight and smell of bloody mayhem. He tugged on the driver’s door and, to his surprise, it opened easily. The colonel lay slumped forward, still held at the waist by his seatbelt, his bloodied brow resting on the car’s dashboard beneath the skullcap-size indentation it had created in the shattered safety glass.

Lukash laid two fingers along the colonel’s throat and drew them back, surprised that the colonel could still be alive after a head-on collision of such force. The flow of blood was light and came primarily from shallow cuts just above the colonel’s hairline. In a few minutes another motorist would likely come by on his way to the coast and take the victim to the nearest infirmary, where the colonel might conceivably revive and have the presence of mind to report Lukash’s escape. If so, the colonel’s organization would be certain to alert all Phalange-controlled checkpoints to arrest Lukash on sight.

Once he was in custody, Phalange intelligence would doubtless spin a stirring tale of the late Walter Lukash’s courage under Syrian fire for the benefit of Pirelli and Ambassador Ravenel, but no body would ever be produced. If the Phalangists took him alive, he would be locked away in the cellars under the Phalange intelligence compound and not even his screams would emerge.

Lukash poked the colonel in the ribs with the muzzle of his .45 but evoked no response. He pulled his combat knife out of his pocket and made a small cut in the man’s ear. Still no reaction. He aimed the .45 at the base of Colonel Faris Nader’s skull. But he could not bring himself to pull the trigger.

Lukash returned to the Mercedes, inserted his key in the trunk lock, and opened the lid. Then he went back to the Volvo, seized the colonel by the wrists, dragged his limp body toward the open lid, and dumped it in. For good measure, he stripped the colonel of his narrow leather belt, wrapped it tightly around the man’s wrists, and knotted it behind his back before slamming the lid on the trunk.

He drove cautiously the rest of the way through the coastal hills, having no idea how soon, if ever, the colonel would awaken. He feared that a curve or a bump taken a bit too fast might elicit a frenzied fit of screaming or kicking or possibly even a daring escape attempt while the Mercedes was bottled up in heavy traffic. But as he drove, a plan was forming in his mind. Twenty minutes later the Mercedes swung in a wide left arc onto the coastal autostrade and joined the slowly advancing traffic toward Beirut.

Every time the cars ahead of him stopped, his doubts and fears returned. If the colonel were to stomp his feet against the door or emit a stream of muffled shouts within earshot of the early morning commuters, he might attract a great deal of attention, and no matter what kind of tale Lukash told, the Lebanese would likely take the colonel’s side against that of a foreigner. But before long, traffic moved freely again, and at last the autostrade came to an end at Jdaidé. Lukash breathed a sigh of relief and turned east toward the port crossing.

Before he attempted to cross the Green Line into West Beirut, he would need to shed his parka and Phalange uniform and find some civilian clothes. Lukash wondered whether Phalange intelligence would have already placed his apartment and the silver BMW under surveillance. Might they already suspect that he had survived the mountain ambush? Possibly, he thought, if they had searched the ambush site by morning light and done a body count. But they would have had no reason to alert the checkpoints to stop him unless the colonel had already known of his escape before setting off for Beirut. And the look of surprise on the colonel’s face when Lukash forced him off the road revealed that he had not.