BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON
THE BEKAA WAS REALLY TWO VALLEYS.
The southern half, nearer Beirut, was densely populated and fertile. A half dozen rivers supported farms and light industry. On day trips, tourists visited vineyards and the ruins at Baalbek. In Zahlé, which had eighty thousand people and was the largest town in the valley, Muslims and Christians lived together, their churches and mosques practically side by side.
North of Baalbek, the valley looked different. Water was scarce and precious. The people were entirely Shia, and mostly poor. The twin mountain ranges, the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, pulled away from each other. The land between grew dry and wild. Herds of sheep wandered across rocky hummocks. Roads turned to gravel without warning.
In the north, Wells felt very much at home.
HIS RIDE FROM CYPRUS had gone smoothly. Wells sat on the deck as Nicholas and his men smoked in the cabin and argued in Greek. At one a.m., Wells called Gaffan on Nicholas’s satellite phone, confirming that Gaffan had arrived and passing along the GPS coordinates for the landing.
Two hours later, five miles off the Lebanese coast, Nicholas cut the cruiser’s lights. “You’re captain the rest of the way.” Nicholas nodded at the rubber raft tied loosely to the deck.
The raft was six feet long, five feet wide, with a rusted outboard engine at its back. It was made of black rubber, with a yellow patch sewn onto its right tube. Someone had drawn a smiley face on the patch. The smiley face failed to reassure. Wells felt a flutter in his stomach. He wasn’t a great swimmer. He hadn’t had much chance to learn, growing up in Montana. Was it possible he was… scared?
But nothing scared him. Not bullets or grenades or nuclear bombs. And since nothing scared him, he couldn’t be scared now. So, good, he wasn’t scared. He was irritated. Because drowning would be an irritating way to die after everything he’d survived, and if this raft sank, he’d probably drown. Not scared. Irritated.
Wells was glad to sort that question out.
“Don’t be frightened,” Nicholas said. “If I wasn’t sure you’d make it, I wouldn’t let you go. You think I want you to drown, your boyfriend bothering me? It’s simple. We drop it in. You get in, push the red button, the engine starts.” Nicholas handed Wells a plastic yellow Garmin GPS, the landing position flashing a black X. “Aim at that.”
“Simple.”
“And one more piece of advice.” Nicholas pointed at the dim lights along the coast. “See that red light? On the left? That’s Syria. Stay away from the Syrians. They’re not nice. Otherwise, no problem. Smooth water. A big bathtub. It takes about an hour. Very flat coast, low draft, you ride right to the beach.”
“And when I get there I leave the raft?”
“For a hundred thousand dollars, I can buy a new one.”
Wells spent the five-mile ride promising himself he would take swimming lessons when this mission was done. But Nicholas was right. The trip was easy. The eastern Mediterranean was as dull as a lake, the waves no more than two feet. The raft rocked lightly as Wells navigated toward the X, keeping a hand on the wooden box where his weapons were packed.
An hour later, he was a half mile from shore, close enough to hear the occasional hum of engines on the coast road. The beach ahead was empty and unlit. Even so, Wells was exposed. The moon was low in the sky, but starlight shone off the water. The shore was flat and ran straight north-south, no nooks or crags to hide behind.
No wonder Nicholas had insisted on staying out to sea. Three hundred yards out, Wells revved the outboard, trying to close quickly. He needed a muffler. Fortunately, this stretch of coast was lightly developed, probably because of its nearness to Syria, which had a habit of invading Lebanon.
Fifty yards from shore, Wells cut the engine to just above idle, let the waves carry him in. He didn’t see Gaffan. But as he reached the beach, a Jeep pulled off the road and flashed its headlights. Gaffan stepped out. Wells hefted the crate from the raft. “I brought you a present.”
THEY LOADED UP, HEADED south. After a mile, Gaffan turned left, inland, passing between citrus groves. “Hit a checkpoint on the way up,” he said.
“Army or police?”
“Couldn’t tell. Either way, we should ditch that crate.” Gaffan parked beside a building that looked like a garage for farm equipment and cut the headlights. Wells stepped out, listened for dogs or traffic, heard neither. He popped the trunk, pried open the crate, pulled out their arsenal: AKs, pistols, grenades, ammunition, silencers.
“Nice.”
“I checked it on the boat. It’ll do.” Wells transferred the weapons to a canvas bag, stowed the bag in the Jeep’s spare-tire compartment, tossed the tire and crate in a ditch behind the garage.
He checked his watch. Five a.m. Another night gone. Working for the agency had downsides, but it meant quick access to vehicles, safe houses, and identification. Wells would have gotten from France to Lebanon on a fresh passport in hours instead of days and had a pistol and sat phone waiting.
“It’s a lot slower when you’re on your own,” Gaffan said, as if reading his mind.
“Yes and no. On a government ticket, we’d have to check in with the head of station, get an in-country brief—”
“I know you’re supposed to do those things. But did you ever actually, John?”
“I didn’t always.”
“Ever?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I’m picking up some bad habits from you.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
They headed south toward Beirut on the coast road. The checkpoint was south of Tripoli. The paramilitary police looked them over, waved them through. “If they ever stop us, play the stupid American,” Wells said. “Touristico. They are always ready to believe it. Definitely don’t let on you know Arabic.”
“Roger that. So when we get to the Bekaa, what are we looking for?”
Wells had spent the ride from Cyprus mulling that question. “We know it’s a big operation, a bunch of guys. It’s been going a while. That credit card’s four months old. And it’s got to be more than just a crash pad. The logistics don’t work. These ops are happening two countries away.”
“So a full-on training camp? A base?”
“At least a house where they plan missions. Maybe just a few guys, maybe a couple dozen.”
“All Saudi.”
“Hezbollah run the Bekaa. They’re Shia, and Iran’s behind them. Maybe Abdullah and Miteb have it wrong and this is an Iranian operation to destabilize the Saudi government.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“Abdullah, he’s old, angry, but he’s smart. His brother, too. If they think this is coming from inside their family, then I believe them. And the guy I saw in Italy, he was Saudi, not Iranian.”
“Anyway, what would the Iranians get out of it?” Gaffan said. “They’ve got their own problems.”
“True. Figure it’s Saudi-run. Even so, they can’t operate here without Hezbollah. They must be paying for protection. Which means if we make too much fuss, we’ll have a problem.”
“Will your friends help?”
“Don’t count on it.” Wells recounted his last conversation with Shafer. “Duto probably wants to see what we find before he decides to bail us out.”
“He’d do that?”
“He’d enjoy it. Any case, we’d best find them quick, before Hezbollah figures out we’re looking.”
“Then hit them?”
“Depends on the target. If it’s fortified, no. But if we can get in and out without waking the neighbors, maybe.”
“So how do we find them?”
“That’s a very good question.”
BEIRUT LOOKED LIKE A cross between Miami, San Francisco, and Baghdad, a hilly, densely packed city with a waterfront promenade—and every so often a bombed-out building as a reminder of the civil war that had raged from 1975 to 1990. Wells and Gaffan rented two rooms in a Sofitel in East Beirut, the Christian quarter, to shower, shave, and nap.
By noon they were up, following a highway that rose into the mountains. The Bekaa’s farms and vineyards were closer than they seemed. Lebanon was a bite-sized country, one hundred fifty miles from tip to tail but less than fifty miles wide.
At the crest of the highway, uniformed soldiers manned a checkpoint, backed by an armored personnel carrier under camouflage netting. A soldier waved the Jeep over. “Identification,” he said in Arabic.
“Excuse me?” Gaffan said in English.
“Identification. Passports.”
Gaffan handed over his passport, Wells his driver’s license.
“Your passport, please,” the soldier said in English.
The passport was a problem. Specifically, the lack of a border entry stamp in the passport was a problem. The agency specialized in handling these details.
Wells tried to look sheepish. “I’m sorry, Captain, I left it at the hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“The Sofitel. In East Beirut.”
“And why do you come to Lebanon?”
“Tourists. We’re headed for Baalbek.”
“You should—”
“The ruins—”
“Shh! I know. You should have your passport.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking.”
The officer flipped through Gaffan’s passport again, held Wells’s driver’s license close to his face. “Next time make sure you bring it,” he said. “You’re not in America. This doesn’t mean anything here.” He handed back the passport and license, waved them on.
They were halfway down the mountain before Gaffan spoke. “Captain was a nice touch.”
“Yes, but. This is going to be a problem, these checkpoints. Best travel separately, so if I get taken out, you don’t.”
IN ZAHLÉ, WELLS BOUGHT the first motorcycle he saw, an air-cooled Honda CB650, old but in good shape, worth maybe one thousand five hundred dollars. Wells paid twice that without blinking, another two hundred dollars for a helmet. Then he and Gaffan rolled northwest, toward Baalbek.
Hezbollah territory started east of Zahlé. Yellow and green flags hung from streetlights and telephone poles, proclaiming the group’s slogan: “Then surely the party of God are they that shall be triumphant.” Ten-foot-tall posters displayed larger-than-life photographs of Hezbollah’s leaders—heavy, scowling men wearing long black robes. On billboards, a pale white horse danced across an oddly lunar landscape. The horse symbolized the twelfth imam, and the billboards called the Shia to the festival of Ashura, which commemorated the death of Hussein Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and the third Shia imam. In the Bekaa, party, state, and religion were one.
Baalbek lay almost halfway up the valley. The town had grown around the remains of the Temple of Jupiter, built by the Romans about two hundred years after the birth of Christ. Its size was actually a sign of weakness, a futile effort to stop the new religion: Look at this shrine and know that our gods are stronger than your Messiah. But the majesty of a single God had overwhelmed the Roman pantheon. Wells wondered why Hezbollah had based itself here. Probably the group’s clerics viewed the temple as a simple tourist attraction, acres of meaningless stones.
North of Baalbek, traffic on the road thinned. The vineyards disappeared, replaced by scruffy farms of tomatoes and lemons. Here and there, Wells saw concrete mansions, set hundreds of yards off the road and protected by high brick walls. The homes were three and four stories high and garishly painted in yellow and green. McMansions, Lebanese-style. Wells assumed they belonged to hash farmers and Hezbollah leaders. Any of them could have served as the safe house he and Gaffan were looking for.
Farther north, the farms vanished. To the east, gray-brown hills rose toward the Syrian border. To the west, the Lebanon Mountains disappeared beneath low clouds. Qaa, the last village before Syria, was really just a mosque, a few houses, a small grocery store, and the gas station that had shown up on the credit card that the NSA had traced. Wells rode until a blue sign announced, “Syria 1 KM,” then made a U-turn and waited for Gaffan to follow.
At the gas station, Gaffan filled up the Jeep. “What are we doing, John?”
“They don’t teach recon in the army anymore?”
“This is Jamaica all over again. Worse. This valley is fifty or sixty miles long, twenty wide. A thousand square miles. We’re looking for one house. No way do we find these guys without comint”—communications intelligence—“or imagery. Even with a helicopter we might miss them.”
“Wrong. First. The camp’s around here. Not in the south.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because the credit card was used here. If you’re in Zahlé, you wouldn’t drive up here. And if they have a camp, they need space.”
“What if it’s just a house?”
“Then why did somebody put five hundred gallons of diesel on a credit card? For the miles?”
“Even if you’re right, we’re talking hundreds of square miles.”
“Wherever it is, once we get close enough, anybody within a couple miles will know.”
“You can’t be sure.”
Wells controlled his frustration. After the near disaster in Jamaica, Gaffan had the right to be gun-shy. “Think it through. Everybody’s everybody’s cousin here. You think they don’t notice if a bunch of Saudis come in? At least the neighbors would have called the paramilitaries, made sure it’s okay.”
“So. Assuming your instinct is right, and they’re somewhere close, and the locals know where, how do we find them?”
“We ask.”
The gas station was a concrete shed with a tin roof and a plywood counter. A middle-aged man in a dirty red shirt sat by the register. He barely looked up as Wells entered. He was focused on the television blaring out a call-in advice show from Beirut. The Lebanese loved these shows. They loved to give one another advice.
“Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam.”
On screen, a woman in a head scarf and a pound of makeup listened to a man complain that his brother had borrowed his car, dented the bumper, and refused to fix it. “First of all… are you sure it wasn’t your wife who dented the bumper?” the woman said. The audience chortled.
“Good show,” Wells said.
“Very funny.”
“Yes. I need another delivery. More diesel.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“For the camp.”
“What camp?”
Wells couldn’t tell if the guy was hiding what he knew, had no idea what Wells was talking about, or was just slow. The third seemed likely. He couldn’t push too hard, risk rattling the guy, but he thought he could get away with one more try. “The one in the hills.”
“You want it, come with your truck and pick it up. Like before.”
“Of course. Like before.” He’d hoped to catch a break, trail a tanker truck to the camp, but that would have been too easy. Still, he had confirmed that the camp was somewhere close. Within ten miles, twenty at most.
“What’s your name?”
“Jalal.” Wells had used the name for a decade in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By the end, he had known it as well as his own. Maybe better. “I’ll come back tomorrow. For the diesel.”
“As you wish.” The man turned back to the show.
WELLS RODE WEST, ONTO a road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. Over a rise, he stopped to make way for hundreds of sheep picking their way across the pavement. Two boys on donkeys and a single mangy collie herded the flock.
The older boy, maybe ten, shouted, “Vroom, vroom,” and grinned and waved the stick he was using to prod the sheep along. He wore a tunic and a freshly laundered red-and-white kaffiyeh that contrasted sharply with his dark skin.
Wells hopped off the bike. “What’s your name?”
“Hamid,” the boy said shyly. The sheep marched around them, as slow and implacable as time itself.
“I’m Jalal. These are your family’s sheep?”
“My father’s.”
“How many?”
“Two hundred and eighty-one.” His pride was obvious.
“That’s a lot of sheep.”
“Next year we’ll have even more, my father says. Is that your motorcycle?”
“I just bought it.”
“Do you ride fast?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you ride in the dark?”
“Yes. Do you study the Quran, Hamid?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what Sunnis are?”
“Muslim, but not like me.”
“That’s right. I’m Sunni.”
Hamid pinched his nose, apparently uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
“Do you know if there are other Sunnis around here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where they live?”
“That way.” Hamid pointed west with his stick, toward the mountains.
“Do you know how far?”
“Closer to the mountains. My father says to stay away from them. They make noise sometimes.” The last of the sheep had dribbled past them. Hamid kicked his donkey’s flank. The animal grumbled and trudged forward. “Good-bye, mister.”
Wells waved good-bye. Gaffan pulled up, lowered his window. “What was that?”
Wells explained. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Gaffan said.
“Don’t you know by now that sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good?”
THEY PASSED A ONE-LANE bridge over a dry streambed. Until now the land had been open and unfenced. Ahead, both sides of the road were fenced with strings of rusting wire that hung between wooden posts. Wells was a child again, on a road trip with his dad, east through Montana and Wyoming, on the way to Kansas City. His first big-league baseball game. He was six.
He rarely got to spend much time with his father, who spent most waking hours in the operating room at the hospital in Hamilton. More than once along the way, he’d told himself to remember, remember the diners where they ate and the gas stations where they stopped, as though he could make the trip last forever if he burned it deep enough into his brain. Of course, now the details had vanished. Wells remembered only being obscurely disappointed that his father didn’t seem more excited to be with him. But this landscape, so unexpected and so familiar, stirred an emotion stronger and purer than nostalgia.
He slowed. Gaffan stopped beside him, ending his reverie. “See something?”
“Nothing at all.” They moved on, approaching the flanks of the Lebanon range. The hills rose and the land crumpled and the road turned to gravel. Wells imagined lines tightening on a topographic map. He rode slowly, his legs spread wide for balance, feet off the pegs. The road turned along the base of a ravine and was blocked by a gate topped with thick strands of razor wire. Behind the gate, the road swung left and disappeared behind a hill. Wells clicked on the GPS in his pocket to save the location, then turned to Gaffan and twirled a finger: Let’s get out of here.
For the rest of the afternoon, they repeated the drill. Wells saved three more possible locations, fenced areas or walled houses that looked suspicious.
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains by the time they rented rooms at the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek. Directly across from the temple ruins, the Palmyra had a long and glorious history. The Germans had occupied it during World War I, the British in World War II. The hotel still had a certain faded glamour, with stained-glass windows and overgrown trees in its yard. But its rugs were threadbare, and its showers offered only cold water.
Wells and Gaffan cleaned up and sat in the back garden, drinking lukewarm, too-sweet coffee. As far as Wells could tell, they were the hotel’s only guests.
“You think we found it?”
“Could have. I already called Ellis. Asked for fresh day and night overheads”—satellite photographs. “For all four locations, but especially the first.”
Wells had also asked whether the agency had any new information on the Jeddah bombing or the earlier attacks. The answer was a predictable and dispiriting no. The agency was so focused on Al Qaeda that this new group had caught it wrong-footed. Wells had kept Abdullah’s suspicions about Saeed to himself. Wells trusted Shafer, but it was always possible that Duto or someone even higher up would decide that the United States would gain by leaking information about Abdullah’s problems to MI6 or the Mossad. Wells preferred not to take that chance.
“So will they help?”
“He wouldn’t promise, but I think so. It’s in their interest. Waiting will hold us up for at least one night, maybe two, but I don’t care. I want to know what’s on the other side before we go over that fence.”
“Then how do they get the overheads to us?”
“Gmail.”
“You really think they’re going to send Keyhole imagery to you on Gmail.” The Keyhole was the National Reconnaissance Office’s finest toy, able to read license plates from space.
“They may degrade them, but yes.”
“Because they want us to go in, even though Shafer told you not to.”
“Correct.”
“Hell of a game.”
“The best,” Wells said. “And the worst.”