Beehive Read online

  “Amir,” I called. “We have to get the General in Beka’a.” I saw him look past me, back to where Brian’s voice murmured to me.

  “Go where?”

  He came toward me. “Beka’a. Elizabeth says he’s in Beka’a.”

  Amir pulled his gun from the back of his waistband. “We cannot go to Beka’a.”

  “You can’t go. I can go.” I brushed past him to the driver’s door. I saw the glint of the gun behind my head and heard Amir say something to me, but I could not tell you what. I didn’t hear. I was too busy falling to the ground from the jolt of a gun butt smacking my head.

  75.

  It ought have felt like déjà vu: the same room, the doctor, Andrea, a guard by the door. But this time the guard had his gun at the ready, Andrea sat sulkily in a corner, and the doctor was talking to Harbison and Amir. The room hummed with artificial light; the shades on the windows were drawn, but I could tell that nothing but deep black night lay behind them.

  And at least this time I could talk without trouble. “Where is Elizabeth?”

  The doctor, Harbison and Amir froze with their eyes cast suddenly to the bed. Andrea sprung out of the chair to my side.

  “She’s debriefing in the Embassy. She came here on a State Department detail, so they claimed first dibs on her.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “All right?”

  “She’s not hurt?”

  “Oh no, she’s fine. Except for the stress of a week as a hostage, and the pain and poison of the bee stings.”

  Harbison advanced to the foot of the bed. “That will be all, Captain.”

  Andrea stood and tossed a half-hearted salute. She was wearing her uniform and looked very military, but she gave her Colonel no answer.

  Amir came to the other side of the bed. I tried to sit up to face him, but the lightning down the back of my skull made me flop back. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “You’re so much bigger than me I really didn’t have a choice.”

  Harbison said, “That’s enough, Captain.” I flicked my eyes to Andrea, but she was just settling back down in her chair. Amir acknowledged the command with a mumble. I shot him a question with my eyes, but all he could muster was a shrug.

  “So you see, we didn’t leave you entirely on your own,” Harbison said, “though Amir tells me you would have gotten your friend out even if he hadn’t been with you.”

  I looked at Andrea, who rolled her eyes. She looked bleached, as though she’d received a bad scare not long before. I wondered how I looked.

  Harbison said, “The doctor is very discouraged with you. You should have been taking it easy.” I saw the doctor’s slicked-down head bob. “But we’re very pleased with you, very impressed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We owe you the thanks, not the other way around.”

  “A whack on the head is your way of saying thanks?”

  “What’s a little pistol-whipping between friends?” I could tell by the way he lifted his invisible eyebrows that Harbison thought this was a stone riot.

  “So what do you want me to do for you?”

  “You’ve already done enough, son, we don’t need you to do anything more.”

  I wished I could stand up to face Harbison. “You don’t have the guard at the door waving his gun around to protect me, do you?”

  “Actually, we do. Word of your actions travels fast. There are a whole lot of people out on the street who wouldn’t mind killing you.”

  “This is new?” I’d felt like a target since I’d arrived in Lebanon, like it was always night, I had a spotlight on me, and strangers shot at me from the dark.

  “Three car bombs since dark, that’s my count.” Harbison turned to Amir.

  “I think four. I just heard a rumble a little while back.”

  “Amir has good ears for car bombs; he’s set a couple in his time. And a van of insurgents unloaded some ammunition at our gate patrol just after dark. Some people here are very unhappy with you.”

  “But not you.”

  “Me? What do I have to complain about? You freed the girl and you’re both safe. I would have preferred no one got hurt, of course, but . . .” He opened his hands in front of him, as though he was helpless, a supplicant. “But there is one small thing you can do for us, as I think about it.”

  I laughed, his ploy was so obvious.

  “When you tell your story, will you leave out that Amir works for us? This really isn’t so funny. He won’t live long if they know he’s an American soldier.”

  “How long will he live anyway? If they’re after me they’re after him, too.”

  “I suppose that’s so.”

  “So why do you want to stay out of this?”

  Harbison put on a face of forced confession. He leaned forward on his arms and supported himself against the bed frame. “You got me there. You sure are right. The truth is, we feel our operation here is secret and we’d like to keep it that way. It’s important that it continues to appear that the US has no military presence in Lebanon.”

  “Important to you.”

  “Important to all of us. Important to the free world.”

  “And Amir?”

  “We’ll reassign Amir somewhere safe. We just want to make sure no one thinks the liberation was our plan. It wasn’t. You know I tried to stop you, and I’d hate for it to appear to the American public that we were trying to take credit away from a man as brave as yourself.”

  He wanted me to believe this so badly that I agreed — no mention of Amir’s connection, no involvement of the Army or Marines or whatever branch Harbison belonged to. Of course, I didn’t believe that was all he wanted. I just believed he would keep on talking at me until I agreed, and I couldn’t stand it.

  76.

  The doctor examined me, the Colonel debriefed me, Amir apologized to me, and no one left me alone for a second. They would not let me see or talk to Elizabeth, who they claimed was either busy with her work or sleeping. I couldn’t sleep for wondering where and how she was. The doctor eventually gave me a shot, he claimed for the pain, but if I had to bet, I’d blame Harbison’s desire to keep me quiet. I can’t say I minded the shot that much, though. Having the tip of your finger shot off hurts more than you might even imagine, hurts like sand in your eye, but there’s no way to stop the pain, except with drugs.

  The doctor harrumphed about my hands and my head and said he was certain that the wallop Amir gave me would ruin any chance I might have had of recovering my hearing. I was hardly listening, only waiting for the salve on my palms and the drugs to ease my pains. “You will have to spend a week in the hospital in Tel Aviv,” he told me. “Do not expect to go home for at least a week.”

  And Harbison said, “I gave your people a jingle, and they’ll be here in the morning to take you home.”

  But the mention of home just made me long for Elizabeth more, and the Colonel’s questions about street names in Dahya and the position and layout of the house where Avai had held Elizabeth only irritated me more. When Harbison took the doctor aside, and Amir made his tenth attempt to apologize, I knew I was in for a sedative. Maybe I was asking for one all along.

  They never left me alone with Andrea, but as I was sinking into the medicinal haze, she sat beside me and held my left hand. “You really proved something,” she told me. “You really did.”

  77.

  Oddly enough, the battalion that escorted us to the airport Sunday morning encountered no resistance. Even I offered none, though Harbison and some other official-looking people insisted that Elizabeth and I ride in separate cars. Safety, they said, protection. Maybe the drugs the doctor shot me with still coursed through me, but I felt grey as a cold wet day, though the weather was anything but. Summer had arrived in Lebanon with fearful vengeance. I couldn’t imagine the sun would do anything to cool the fire b
etween the warring sides.

  Jacobs was not on the plane, but I can’t say that surprised me. Instead, we were escorted by a contingent of American guards and a military psychologist. At first I figured they must have thought I was crazy for doing what I did, but the brain doctor was there more for Elizabeth than for me. The head of the guard drippingly told me that we could use the conference room after the plane cleared the range of ground-launched anti-aircraft. No one fired on us, no one wanted us that badly.

  Except the psychologist. He introduced himself. “I’m a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD we call it. People in high-stress or in war-like situations, such as being held hostage, experience a checklist of resultant aftereffects, such as deep identification with the oppressors.”

  I tuned him out. The guy wore a uniform, Air Force I think, and talked like someone trying to sell Congress a new weapons system. He talked for the full forty-five minutes the flight gave him.

  Elizabeth said, “Like a transference of parental relationships?”

  The shrink said, “Exactly,” and droned on like the engines. Elizabeth seemed to pay close attention. Maybe something he said made some sense to her. Maybe she saw him as a puzzle and tried to figure out what the duck was yammering about. Who knows, maybe what he had to say came close to her experience.

  Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to me. I sure got that feeling. Most of the time she just acted like I wasn’t there, accepting a hug when I offered it to her, but accepting it the way you accept a bellhop’s help with your coat.

  When the plane set down we taxied near the terminal, but we didn’t get out. Jacobs came on instead. He replaced the psychologist, but what he said was just as nearly incomprehensible. “The press is waiting inside. I’ve briefed them — “

  “The press?” I asked. “What the hell for?”

  “To cover Betsy’s rescue. It’s news, Ron. You’re news.”

  “I don’t want to be news.”

  “I’ll handle them,” Elizabeth said. “I’m more used to it.”

  “They want something from Ron.”

  “Will a photo do?”

  “The photo goes without saying, but they want some words, some kind of statement.”

  “I’ll make some excuse, his injury, the stress, something.”

  “Can’t he give a statement, just a couple of sentences?”

  Elizabeth at last looked at me, but she didn’t ask me a thing. “I’m sure he can.” Her eyes were flat. For the first time in our life together, I noticed the thin trace of a wrinkle around her mouth. Smile lines, but she wasn’t smiling.

  “Can you handle that, Ron?” Noah asked me, as if I had just suddenly appeared. “A short statement, that’s all. How happy you are to have done your job well, looking forward to recovery. Nothing much. Can you do that for us?”

  “And a picture?”

  “Yeah, you can’t stop that. They’ll be snapping bulbs at you even before you enter the room.”

  “Hell.” I looked at Elizabeth, who was ducking her head down to glimpse out the porthole windows. “Sure, I’ll make a short statement. I don’t want to answer questions.”

  “Fine. No Q&A.”

  “Can you keep the whole thing down to five minutes? We haven’t been left alone since I blacked out.”

  “I’ll try for five, but expect closer to ten.”

  I shook my head in refusal, but I knew I had no power. I was the hero, sure. That only meant I had to play my role well. No rewrites.

  “Your father will be here in an hour.”

  “My father?” I gulped. But I saw Jacobs was talking to Elizabeth; he pointed his chin at her in answer to my question. A rush of embarrassment trampled up my back, rekindling the burn on my neck.

  Elizabeth smiled now. “Good. I can’t wait to see him.”

  The press conference matched my imagination. Cameras flashed from all over, and we had to stand on a podium so everyone could see us. The picture you all probably saw was Elizabeth and me caught in the crush at the door, my hand raised, Elizabeth seeming to lean back against me. I think she was bowled back into me by the flood of the room’s excitement.

  Noah introduced us with a lot of fluff and I said my little piece, but Elizabeth was the star. “You’ll have to forgive Ron. He’s not only injured,” she told them right off, “he’s also the strong and silent type.” People laughed and clapped. After the tension of the week, the sound came over me like peace. Elizabeth portrayed herself at the podium as the woman I lived with, the woman I’d gone halfway around the world to free. She charmed the press and told them nothing at all about what really happened.

  On the way out I said something to her about it, and she whispered to me, “Why give away for free what you can sell later?” I turned to look back at the podium. My back creeped as though we’d left our own ghosts up there behind the microphones.

  78.

  We all went right to the hospital, a vast and modern place, as clean as the one in Beirut was dirty. Everywhere we went, the American guards went with us, and the psychologist. An Israeli detail guarded our guard. Elizabeth and I were separated again for our exams, but we waited together while they ran the tests to see if I was fit for surgery. I wanted to talk about her, how she held up, how they treated her, but when I asked she said, “Me? Look what they did to you!”

  “They didn’t do this to me. I did.”

  “You didn’t have a gun. You couldn’t have shot yourself.”

  Then her father came in, straight from the airport. He didn’t look like he’d spent twelve hours travelling. Did he have two planes like the one I’d travelled on, another like the one that fetched us?

  The door frame seemed to expand around his bulk. He wasn’t even as tall as I was, I realized, and small-boned under his weight. For the first time I noticed his face had a skew to it, as if the left side always attempted a poor imitation of the lead right. He didn’t grumble now, he almost bellowed, “My little girl!”

  Elizabeth bolted up and threw her arms around him. We were both in johnnies and hospital robes and I imagined the feel of her near nakedness pressed so close. “Daddy! You’re here!”

  “And you’re safe?” Elizabeth nodded but couldn’t speak. Her arm around his neck reached up to cover her own face. I stood up slowly, embarrassed wearing so little in front of the Grumbler. I could see clearly now: Elizabeth was crying, at last. She might have cried while we were separated, I don’t know, but she hadn’t cried to me.

  Jacobs came in the room and brought a chair up for Elizabeth’s father. Elizabeth would not let go of him as he comforted her with whispers, “My Betsy, my Betsy.” But still he found a way to free his right hand and extend it to me for a shake. I held up my bandage and gave him my left instead. He nodded his head toward his daughter and said, “I didn’t think you could do it.”

  Most of me wanted to say, Then why did you send me?

  I said, “I wasn’t sure I could either.”

  “I will never forget you for this, son. Never.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Roger. Call me Roger, Ron. Let’s all sit down.”

  Roger led Elizabeth to her chair, between us. Though she sat, she wouldn’t let go of his guiding hand.

  “This is her first cry,” I told him.

  “Well, it’s good for her.” With his free hand he petted her hair, which seemed to bloom back to its rich color under his touch. “I have some news that might cheer you up,” he told her. “On my way over here I got word that the General returned.”

  “Her General?”

  “Watkins? Yes.”

  “I thought he was dead.”

  “Obviously not.” Elizabeth sat back and let go of her father’s hand, but still she said nothing.

  “Well, who freed him?”

  “Freed him? No one. From what I gat
her, he just drove away.”

  “Drove away?”

  “He wasn’t captured at all, it turns out. He was in negotiations with the Syrians all along, secret negotiations. The kidnapping, the ambush, that was a cover.”

  I looked at Elizabeth. If the General had been involved in negotiations, Elizabeth would have known he hadn’t been killed, hadn’t been captured. So why the hell did she go to Lebanon in the first place? “They staged it? They staged the killing, planted a story about the General being taken hostage?”

  Roger shrugged. He pointed to Elizabeth. “This is the family expert on the Middle East. I suspect she knows the purpose of the sham.”

  “What about her?” I asked Roger. “What about you?” I asked her.

  Now she spoke. “I can’t tell you yet.”

  “I risk my life going after you and you can’t tell me whether or not you were really a hostage?!”

  “I was really a hostage. You really did get me out. But I can’t tell you anything more until I hear what happened with the General.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said to her, and then to myself: “I just don’t understand.”

  Nurses and orderlies flooded into the room with a gurney. Elizabeth said, “I just don’t know what I’m allowed to tell you yet. I don’t know what’s protected.”

  “From me?” I felt myself almost shouting. “Something’s protected from me?”

  “Now settle down there, Ron.”

  I burned. “I feel like I earned a little respect here!”

  “At the expense of national security?” the Grumbler shot. “Respect gives you the right to shout at my daughter?”

  I raised my hands in concession. The head nurse called my name. I nodded to her and got up. “We can work on this later. I want to know. I deserve to know.”

  “You’ll know what the government thinks is safe for you to know,” Roger mumbled.