94

SOUTHERN LEBANON

They sped north and soon reached the first checkpoint.

It was located just ahead of the bridge spanning the Litani River.

As the cargo van slowed, Geoff found himself impressed with the plan Jenny Morris had laid out for them. Until that meeting at Langley, he had never met the woman before. He had heard her name, knew she was CIA and that she had been the Agency’s station chief in Moscow. Geoff had even heard a few rumors from time to time about her possible involvement in the extraction of a high-level mole the Agency had code-named the Raven. But that was it. He had no idea how or when she had first met Marcus Ryker.

Whatever her exploits in the past, Jenny’s CIA training was being put to good use now. Back in the courtyard, she had ordered them to find as many of the fallen Hezbollah terrorists as they could. They did their best in the five minutes she allotted and brought her four bodies and some additional body parts. These she wanted loaded into body bags they had brought with them and set in the back of the Mazda Bongo. With that done, she had them zip Abdel Rahman and the other prisoner into body bags and load them into the back of the van as well, underneath the bodies of the others. Rahman and his colleague were not dead, of course. But as drugged as they were, they certainly looked like corpses, especially when Jenny smeared dirt, blood, and soot on their faces and hands to accentuate the effect. For good measure, she had ordered Geoff to remove the boots of one of the bodies and put those boots on Rahman, so that if someone looked carefully, he would not be wearing boots with a bullet hole in each foot.

When the van reached the front of the line at the roadblock, the Hezbollah soldiers told them to stop the vehicle, turn off the engine, and step out slowly. They did, playing the parts that Jenny had assigned them. The men were all wearing their filthy, bloodstained Hezbollah uniforms and kaffiyehs over their faces. Their cover was that they were returning to Beirut from the front with the bodies of their fallen comrades.

Jenny, however, was no longer wearing a uniform. She had, instead, changed into a black abaya and black hood that covered her from head to toe. Only her brown eyes were visible through the small rectangular slit in the front of the hood. Though this was more typical of Shia women in Saudi Arabia than southern Lebanon, it was certainly not unusual in Lebanese cities farther north. The role that she had assigned herself was that of a tearful sister, traveling with her brother—Tomer, the leader of the group, and the most proficient Arabic speaker—back to Beirut for the funerals of all these men, including, ostensibly, her and Tomer’s youngest brother.

Noah, meanwhile, was to feign having been severely shell-shocked—unable to hear, unable to speak, and barely able to stand on his own two feet. Geoff was tasked with holding him up and praying that neither of them was asked a question, since Noah didn’t speak Arabic and Geoff’s accent would give them away.

Callaghan was the last and most reluctant to exit, but he finally did from the front right passenger seat. His job was to look tough and exhausted and annoyed by the whole “been there, done that” process. Jenny was not worried about him at all. He had learned Arabic during his four combat tours in Iraq and had sharpened it quite a bit during his recent studies. With his dyed hair and beard, he looked the part well enough, despite his light skin.

Nearly twenty Hezbollah operatives swarmed around them. The leader, wearing a black hood, barked a series of questions at them. Tomer answered for the group. The leader demanded they remove their kaffiyehs, then checked each person’s face against photos he had on his smartphone. When the commander in charge of the checkpoint came over to him, Geoff caught a glimpse of the photos he was scrolling through. Not surprisingly, they were pictures of Ryker, Curtis, and Mizrachi. But there were also pictures of al-Masri and members of his team.

Geoff tensed, though he tried not to show it. Did the commander have photos of all of al-Masri’s men? More to the point, did they have a shot of Abdel Rahman or the other still-living prisoner in the back of the van? He was about to find out.

While the commander continued talking to Tomer, other operatives moved to the rear of the cargo van and opened the hatch. Keeping Noah close to him, Geoff drifted back a bit, trying to see if the men were going to check the body bags.

They did. The first one, fortunately, was filled with bloody body parts, including not one severed head but two. The faces had largely been blown off, making visual identification impossible. The men quickly zipped that one back up and opened another. This bag contained an entire intact body, but it too had been so badly burned—not just the torso and limbs but the face, as well—as to prevent a positive ID.

One of the men began to vomit. Others were looking away, repulsed by what they were seeing, especially since the uniforms—however bloodied and burnt—made it clear that these truly were fellow Hezbollah warriors. Still, one of the men seemed determined to go through all the body bags—then someone started yelling.