A Hostile State Adrian Magson (reading e books txt) 📖

a few minutes of silence I asked, ‘I know why I’m getting out, but what’s next for you?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. Orders is orders … and I think my time’s up, anyway. It happens. All I can tell you is that my controller said to drop what I was doing and leave right now, today, and to pick you up on the way. I think we’re both persona non grata, so that’s the end of our stay here.’

‘It happens.’

‘Not to me it doesn’t. A couple of others I know, in other locations, but that was a while back.’ She gave me a look. ‘My cover was as an agency for assisting aid efforts in the region. It worked, too, for a while. But I had a feeling it couldn’t last. Hezbollah are so fucking suspicious of anyone and everyone, even little old ladies who get kicked by shitty camels.’

‘What changed?’ I nearly laughed at her choice of language, but held it in.

‘The local security office kicked out a couple of small aid agencies recently for “suspicious activities not consistent with their stated aims”, if you can believe that. They didn’t grease the right palms is probably the real reason. I did but it clearly wasn’t enough.’ A short pause, then, ‘What did you do wrong to get you under the gun?’

‘I don’t know. I came in under the radar and other than buying some supplies, I stayed out of everyone’s way. Then I didn’t.’ I saw no need to tell her that the ‘supplies’ I’d bought included a gun and ammunition from a local armourer who did favours for the right kind of money. It had occurred to me briefly that he might have been the leak but that didn’t fit.

Logistically there simply hadn’t been time for him to contact anyone and get them on my tail because he didn’t know where I was headed. Ergo, not him and probably not his hawk-faced cousin the car dealer, either. But who?

‘Well, sweetie,’ she said philosophically in a truly terrible American accent, ‘shit happens and nobody asks our permission. Ain’t that the way?’ She yanked on the wheel to dodge a car broken down at the side of the road outside a small supermarket and waved cheerfully to the owner who stood open-mouthed, spanner in hand and watched us go.

‘The ordinary Lebanese civilians are a lovely people,’ she continued, waving a hand in apology. ‘Unfortunately they’re under the hammer here on all sides, from the government, Hezbollah, terrorists, militants and the presence of Palestinian and Syrian refugees. You might as well throw in Hamas further south, I suppose. All that has knocked the country off-balance and there are regular protests in built-up areas and cities which bring everything to a stop but achieve very little. Aarsal looked calm enough just now but there’s been a lot of violence there, too. Don’t be surprised if we come across armed patrols and roadblocks.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No. There’s violence all over this area of the Bekaa Valley. It’s sporadic and unpredictable and sectarian as well as terrorist-fuelled. Foreigners are targets at any time where there isn’t a heavy police or army presence, and sometimes when there is. They like to hit restaurants, cafés and markets, wherever they think they can score some shock value for whatever cause they espouse.’ She shook her head. ‘But you probably know that.’

I did. I’d been to other places with similar problems, like Somalia and the Gulf regions, where the sheer unpredictability was a part of daily life, something you had to expect and accept, otherwise you’d never go anywhere. Trying to factor in who might kill you next was an exercise in futility and fuel for paranoia.

As we drove I could sense the looming influence of Hezbollah everywhere, on every hoarding and telegraph pole, with flags or posters bearing the familiar AK-47 symbol on a red, green or yellow background, contrasting with political posters bearing unsmiling faces and slogans no doubt urging the populace to vote if they knew what was good for them. And everywhere there were signs that violence had passed this way like a bulldozer, with wrecks of vehicles and houses, of walls and infrastructure, and the collateral damage of blackened rubble lying everywhere. Yet all around, daily life seemed to go on, albeit at a pace unique to the local area.

Isobel pulled off the road at regular intervals. Once was to buy water and fruit, the other stops were at a filling station and other roadside pull-ins to allow other vehicles to go by. That and the crazy attitude of drivers on the road slowed our rate of progress but I wasn’t about to argue; we had plenty of time and she knew the country better than I did. It also demonstrated that she believed in a reassuring level of caution.

At the town of Laboue we turned north onto the Baalbek–Qaa Highway. Once out of the town we could see the hills rolling away into the distance, patterned with the regular shapes of a farmed landscape which was Lebanon’s agricultural heart. Settlements covered the slopes like a rash, the pale structures reflecting the sun and faintly misted under the heat rising from the parched earth.

‘Don’t be fooled by what you see,’ Isobel said at one point, and nodded to the east where a hillside a couple of miles away was dotted with white and blue squares in neat rows. She pulled off the road into a make-shift truck stop, and we studied the far hillside. The mist hung over the scene, screening the fine detail of what lay there. The coloured squares might have been an agricultural layout but I had a feeling it was nothing of the sort. ‘It looks almost peaceful, doesn’t it?’

‘I’m guessing it’s not.’

‘It’s a Syrian refugee camp. One of many around here. They slip across the border through the mountains. Not all of them make it during the winter months. It’s like a never-ending tide and it’s taking a lot of