"What is it? A royal family?" Lyons asked. He got into the van and sat on a trunk. "One prince fighting another for the throne?"
"Not royalty, just a gang of warlords."
"What's the difference?" Lyons snapped back.
"A few hundred years. Maybe Hafez is dead, maybe not," Powell said, helping Gadgets. "The fighting's going on but it might not be Hafez Assad against Rifaat Assad. That's the problem. If it's not the Assads fighting, who is it? Might be Ali Haidar, the brother-in-law of Rifaat. Maybe he's decided to be president."
"A brother-in-law?" Lyons shook his head at the politics. "What about the sister? Maybe she wants to be the queen?"
"Who knows what she wants? It could be the Muslim Brotherhood again. Or maybe the Shias or..."
Blancanales interrupted. "How does all this affect the mission?"
His hands on the truck's doors, Powell stopped. He looked to the east. "Listen..."
On the highway, over the sound of tires on the wet asphalt, they heard artillery. Powell leaned forward to Hussein and spoke in Arabic. The Lebanese driver passed him a battery-powered am radio. Powell spun through the dial, listening to snatches of Arabic and French and English. Some stations programmed rock and roll, others the music of traditional Islamic society. Powell listened to one announcer intone a solemn monologue in Arabic.
After a minute, Gadgets asked, "So what's he saying?"
"Another storm's coming. More snow."
"What about Syria?" Lyons asked.
"This radio can't bring in the Damascus stations. When we get to Akbar's, I'll listen in on what's coming out of Syria. That'll be interesting."
"I thought Syria was a controlled society," Blancanales commented. "If there were a coup in progress, would the regime allow news broadcasts?"
Powell laughed. "Who's talking about news? It's the jive line that I got to hear. Or the absence of jive. The music changes for a coup. If Hafez is dead, it'll either be upper music or downer music. If it's a serious coup, there'll be patriotic songs, military marches. If it's a veryserious coup, you might hear shooting on the radio. Heard that one time. Deejay's rapping right along, playing pop rock and bebopping, then it's a Shootout in Studio RKO."
The political speculation helped pass the time in the back of the closed van. The travelers heard traffic noise and distant shellfire outside. After an hour and three stops at checkpoints, the van descended a steep ramp and a steel door clanked shut behind it.
Opening the doors, they stepped into an underground parking garage. Bare lights ten meters above their heads illuminated stacks of open shipping crates.
Thousands of automatic rifles, squad automatic weapons, heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers and mortars filled the stacked crates. Tons of ammunition — in original boxes and boxes that once held cooking oil or detergent or stereo components — were piled nearby.
"Superior firepower," Lyons commented.
"There's a war right there," Gadgets added.
"You got it," Powell told them. "That's Amal weapons. The government's organizing a national reconciliation, so Amal retired all the second-string boys."
"Second string?" Gadgets asked. "You mean there's more out there?"
"Yeah, the trusted units, the ones directly under the command of the Shia leadership — the ones that take orders and maintain discipline — are still out there, loaded and locked. Waiting for the government to break down or fuck up or the Syrians to invade."
"Amal, huh?" Lyons's eyes narrowed. "We're going to the Bekaa to waste an Amal camp. We ought to start with a demo job here."
Powell shook his head. "You got to get the names straight. Could lead to real serious difficulties. This is Amal. They're okay. I work with them. They broke the fascist Maronites and forced the government to start counting the Shias as people. It's IslamicAmal out in the Bekaa. They're the ones working with the Iranians. Amal fights the Islamic Amal all the time, along with the Iranians and the Libyans and Palestinians. Sometimes Syrians, too."
"How do you keep the politics straight?" Blancanales asked.
"You don't!" Powell laughed. "You can't! It's insane." He reached into the van, removed his short-barreled Galil and slung it over his shoulder. "The rule is, They Shoot, You Shoot. Simple, easy to remember. Let's go look at the transportation we're making for your tour of the beautiful Bekaa Valley, heartland of Lebanon."
The Marine captain led Able Team along the wall of weapons and munitions. The racks of weapons continued the length of the garage. The end of the garage had been knocked out with jackhammers or explosives to connect with the garage of the next building. There, men worked on vehicles: a Land Rover, a Mercedes troop truck, and semitrucks and trailer.
Militiamen with wrenches and welding torches looked up at the four Americans. Powell rushed over to them, shaking hands, embracing them, looking at the work. Able Team waited three steps away.
Blancanales studied the Marine. Powell wore dirty slacks and an old sweater. His shaggy hair covered his ears and collar, merging with his beard. Though his skin and hair color did not quite match the tones of the Lebanese, he looked like one of them, standing there in the group, talking in Arabic and joking, the militiamen pointing to the vehicles and answering the American's questions.
Now he understood why the Agency had doubted Powell's loyalty. Captain Powell, USMC, had gone native. Some point after months of friendships and shared dangers, after days of working in street Arabic and then making formal reports in bureaucratic English, Powell had ceased to be an American officer working liaison with foreign militias and had become a soldier among friends. He had continued typing reports and answering questions and making evaluations of political shifts in the Shia militias, but his superiors had noted the shift in perspective. No longer did he stand outside, observing and reporting. After the change, he stood inside and attempted to explain.
In Southeast Asia, Blancanales had seen Green Berets go native. Month after month, soldiers had lived in remote hamlets without seeing any Americans but the Green Berets in their small units. They lived with Montagnards or Cambodians or Laotians, eating their food, caring for their children, fighting their enemies. Only radios had maintained the link to the American command. When uniforms rotted or wore out, the Americans wore the traditional handmade clothing of the people. When the last of their rations was gone, the Americans turned to local foods. Finally months of loneliness and isolation and the flirting of village girls made them overcome the official prohibition, and they took local women.
Once Blancanales had marched to a hamlet with a squad of men and a mission to execute. Looking for the U.S. Special Forces sergeant in charge of the tribal militia, he had been approached by a man taller and heavier than the others. Under the Montagnard clothing and sandals, the PAVN web gear, the sun-darkened skin, Blancanales somehow recognized the sergeant. He had briefed the sergeant on the objective, and the sergeant had conferred with the village men. Squatting, the sergeant scratched a map and two trails in the dirt, saying, "We'll go this way and you'll take the other trail." When the sergeant said "we," he meant himself and the Montagnards, not himself and Blancanales's squad of Americans.
The transformation of Captain Powell from CIA liaison officer to American with the Shias had alarmed his officers in the Agency. They doubted his loyalty. And Blancanales understood why. Powell's superiors in the Agency were graduates of the conservative Ivy League universities, men prejudiced by generation after generation of wealth and privilege, who often stepped from the conference rooms of the Agency to the boardrooms of multinational corporations. They could never understand why an American of a Godfearing Texas heritage, a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, would accept the customs and politics of an oppressed non-Christian people in a war-ravaged nation.