Twelve Days (23 page)

“When they find us, do we tell them that this was a Hezbollah action?” Jafar asked.

“Yes.” The Americans would know the truth anyway.

“Good.”

—

The next night, the reports came in from India. They’d lit the sky with United 49.

Ayoub sent a third man to Mumbai, too, a truly clean operative who could travel on a Turkish passport. Not to help the other two, just to walk the streets and watch the local television channels so Ayoub might have a few minutes of advance word when they were caught. But the cousins managed better than he’d expected. A week passed with no word of their arrest. Ayoub wondered if the Americans had snatched them in secret.

He heard nothing from Ali, either. Probably the man wasn’t even in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, he had other concerns. That morning, the Syrian Minister of Defense had called to tell him that the Sunnis were preparing a major offensive. No surprise, they figured a potential war with the United States might distract Iran from helping the Syrian government. The minister asked Ayoub to send another two thousand men. Ayoub put him off, spent the day debating with his deputies what course to recommend to Sayyed Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s ultimate leader. If America invaded Iran, Hezbollah would be on its own. Maybe this wasn’t the moment to risk fighters he might need to defend Hezbollah’s own territory from the IDF.

The debate was exhausting. They all felt the pressure of war rising. Finally, after dinner, Ayoub sent his men home. The choice was ultimately Nasrallah’s anyway.

Ayoub arrived at 10 p.m. to a dark house, his wife Rima and their five children asleep. Rather than wake her, he pulled out the cot in his office. He could have slept on a stone pillow this night. He closed his eyes—

Bees surrounded him, buzzing wildly. He pulled himself from the dream, reached for his phone. His fourth phone, the least used and most important. Even Rima didn’t have the number. It was one of six that Hezbollah’s most senior commanders used to send one another coded text messages, a way to set meetings when they didn’t have time to rely on couriers.

Adhan Habibi, Nasrallah’s second deputy and his top military advisor, had sent the message. It consisted of the first five words of the fifth verse of the Quran’s first Surah:
You alone do we worship . . .
A few seconds later, another message popped up from the same phone:
10059.

The system was simple. The first message set the meeting’s location, in this case a disused warehouse fifteen kilometers west of Baalbek, near the town of Zahle. Habibi and Ayoub had met there once before. The commanders had five pre-agreed meeting sites, each signaled by a different Quranic verse. The second message set the time: one hour from now.
One hour . . . fifty-nine minutes . . .

It was 1:45 a.m. Ayoub had no idea why Habibi would call a meeting so late, but when they created the system, they agreed never to question these summonses. They all knew that the more they used the phones, the more vulnerable they would be to American and Israeli spies. Ayoub would have to trust that Habibi had a good reason to ask for him.

Ayoub rubbed the sleep from his eyes, washed his hands and face. In his bedroom he pulled on a light jacket and the hundred-euro Adidas sneakers that were his only indulgence. He had fifty pairs, in every conceivable color.

His wife snored lightly, her arms cradled around their youngest
daughter. He wished Rima wouldn’t keep the girl in their bed, but his wife didn’t care.
I need something warm to hold when you’re not around
. He kissed her cheek. She mumbled his name but didn’t wake.

He walked through the lemon grove that separated his house from the outbuildings where his driver and personal guards lived. A cool wind rustled the empty branches, and a low ceiling of gray clouds obscured the stars. This night’s watchman was the weakest of Ayoub’s men, a dullard named Hamid. He sat on a folding chair, his eyes focused on what seemed to be an Arabic translation of a vampire novel. Not exactly full combat readiness. Ayoub crept close, tossed a pebble, hitting Hamid in the arm. He grabbed his rifle and jumped, the book sliding off his lap. Ayoub had never seen him move so fast.

“Halt!” His eyes opened wide as he looked at his commander. “Sir?”

“Vampires, Hamid?”

Hamid bowed his head, as if the paperback would become a Quran if he stared at it long enough.

“We’ll talk about that later. Wake the others. We have a meeting in Zahle.”

—

Baalbek was dark, its streets empty, its eighty thousand inhabitants tucked away until dawn. At the Hezbollah guard post that watched the intersection of the Beirut and Tripoli roads, Ayoub’s two-car convoy stopped only long enough to be waved through. Twenty minutes later, they reached the dirt lot behind the warehouse.

A lemon grove had once sat behind this building, but a mysterious blight had hit the trees years before. The farmer who owned the orchard had burned it to keep the sickness from spreading. Now charred stumps covered the fields, speckled with a few taller trunks that had survived the fire. Hamid wandered into the field, then pulled back, like a scared child.

“You want vampires, go that way.” Ayoub pointed east. Toward the
Anti-Lebanon range, the low mountains that split the Bekaa from Syria and the brutal fighters of the Islamic State.

“Sir?”

“If you weren’t so useless, I’d send you there now.”

The inside of the warehouse still smelled faintly of lemons. Ayoub’s lantern revealed a space twenty meters by forty. Empty crates lined the walls, awaiting the day when the groves were replanted. Ayoub’s guards waited by the door. He’d waved them off when they tried to follow him inside. He needed a few minutes to himself. He’d beaten Habibi here. No surprise. Habibi lived in West Beirut, an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. After the 2006 invasion, Hezbollah had decided that not all of its leaders should live in the Bekaa Valley, its strongest territory but also the easiest to blockade.

Fifteen minutes passed before tires crunched on the gravel outside. At least four vehicles. Through the open warehouse door, Ayoub glimpsed their lights. Suddenly, he worried he’d made a mistake coming here. Maybe a Maronite hit squad had somehow cracked their code. Then he heard his men shouting greetings at Habibi’s guards.

He walked outside as Habibi’s men poured out. Habibi never traveled without at least a dozen guards. He was in the middle of the scrum, a heavy man with a beard too dark to be anything but dyed. He pushed his way through his guards, reached out for Ayoub.

“Hussein.”

“Habibi.
Habibi!
”

“
Habibi
,” Habibi said. A minor joke.
Habibi
translated into
“
friend
.”
“You drag me out of bed, over the pass in the middle of the night. This better be important.”

“I dragged
you
out? It’s the opposite, my friend.” He reached for his phone. “Look, look—”

But Habibi was already pulling out his own phone—

Both men realized at once.

“NSA.”

“NSA.”

Ayoub’s stomach lurched. He had misjudged his enemy, underestimated its cunning. He hadn’t known what he didn’t know. Just like those Israeli soldiers in Tyre. For a moment, he felt their anguish—

Habibi pushed him away, turned for his Toyota. “Go—”

—

Two miles overhead, two F-22A Raptor stealth fighters looped, hidden from the ground by the clouds and from Lebanon’s air-defense systems by their radar-defeating composite skins.

The Air Force had initially envisioned the Raptor as a pure air-combat fighter. But aerial dogfights were in short supply these days. The Raptor had a three-hundred-sixty-million-dollar price tag and not enough to do. So the Air Force had modified the jet’s missile bays to carry a pair of thousand-pound bombs. With stealth a priority for this operation, the Raptors were the natural choice.

The jets took off at 0130 from Incirlik, the giant NATO base in southeastern Turkey, on what was pegged as a routine night-training flight. They flew south over the Mediterranean until they were fifty kilometers northwest of Beirut, then east over the Mount Lebanon range, the mountains that separated the coast from the Bekaa Valley. After crossing the mountains, they made a ninety-degree right turn, south again.

The Raptor could reach nearly Mach 2 with its afterburners at full power, but these jets flew at four hundred knots. No need to speed. They had time, and if radar did scrape them they’d get less attention flying slowly.

But neither plane picked up a hint that it had been painted. No surprise. The Raptor’s twenty-year-old technology was no longer unbeatable. China and Russia had developed radar systems powerful enough to pick up its electronic traces. But the F-22A’s magic still worked in Lebanon.

At 0210, the jets reached the target—named Tango United, an unsubtle reference to the reason for the mission. They would have to stay in Lebanese airspace at least thirty minutes. But since Israel had the only jets within two hundred miles remotely capable of engaging an F-22A, having to stay on station a few extra minutes shouldn’t matter.

The Raptors weren’t the only planes the Air Force had sent to Lebanon. As Ayoub left his compound and headed for the warehouse, an Avenger drone followed. The Avenger was the newest drone in the American fleet, a major advance over the Predator and Reaper. Unlike its predecessors, the Avenger was powered with a jet engine. It could fly eighteen hundred miles at twice the speed of the propeller drones, without producing the distinctive mosquito-like buzz that jihadis all over the world now recognized—and ran from.

The Avenger didn’t carry bombs or missiles. But its payload was arguably even more lethal: the newest radar, cameras, and electronics intercept systems in the American arsenal. Now it was flying at four thousand feet, inside a thick cloud layer, so its optical cameras were no use. But it didn’t need them. Nestled in its wings were two infrared cameras sensitive enough to track the heat signature of a groundhog in a burrow, much less a man in a basement. In its tail was a radar system whose software could monitor two hundred different targets simultaneously.

But the Avenger’s most important tracking device was the three-foot dimpled sphere that hung below its composite belly. The ball was an electromagnetic sniffer as powerful as sixty-five cell phone towers. It could be used only when the Avenger was airborne. On the ground it emitted enough radiation to cause permanent damage. It was so precise that it could distinguish the signature of an iPhone from a Samsung Galaxy at a mile away. The Air Force techs who serviced the Avenger called it the Great Ball of Death.

Ayoub thought he’d taken adequate precautions. He thought he was safe.

He had all the protection of an ant under a magnifying glass.

—

The brave new world of drone warfare had pushed tricky technical issues on the Air Force. Foremost among them was the fact that drones were controlled through encrypted satellite links, while fighter pilots mostly radioed to local bases or E-3 Sentries that were effectively airborne command posts. Called AWACS—Airborne Warning and Control System—the E-3s were modified Boeing 707s instantly recognizable by the thirty-foot radar domes attached to their fuselages. The satellite and radio networks didn’t overlap. As the Air Force integrated drones into its fleet, the need for real-time links between drone controllers and fighter jocks became more obvious by the day. The service was now installing drone workstations in the cabins of five E-3 Sentries, a tricky and expensive proposition. The first retrofit had been finished only a few weeks before to a Sentry that was flying a slow loop one hundred kilometers off the coast of Beirut.

For the first time ever, a drone pilot was actually airborne.

The Avenger had arrived at Ayoub’s house a few minutes before the NSA spoofed the phones belonging to Ayoub and Habibi. The Hezbollah commanders had made one crucial mistake. They’d believed that they could risk leaving the phones on as long as they didn’t use them. They were wrong. Twelve months before, an analyst at Fort Meade had noticed an odd coincidence, a series of phones with sequential numbers that were rarely used but popped up only in houses and offices belonging to Hezbollah’s most senior leaders.

Ayoub and the other Hezbollah commanders used the phones to set up only a handful of meetings in the year that followed. But the connection was obvious once the NSA looked, the code even more so. The Quranic verses were not encrypted, merely correlated with meeting sites.

The broken coms system neatly solved the issue of how to kill Ayoub and Habibi without civilian casualties—a problem acute in the case of Habibi, who lived in a fifteen-story apartment building filled with
families and who surrounded himself with women and children in his rare public appearances. As a bonus, the operation would grab the attention of Hezbollah and Quds Force in a way that a simpler bombing would not. At its best, the NSA’s technical wizardry came off as nearly God-like, and not every commander in Baalbek or Tehran contemplated his own mortality with as much detachment as Ayoub. This mission would send the message clearly:
Worry less about
Allah
and more about
America,
habibis.

Meanwhile, if Ayoub and Habibi no longer used the phones or had switched to a more sophisticated code, they simply wouldn’t leave their houses. No harm.

But the messages did the trick. Eight minutes after Ayoub received his, the Avenger’s sensors spotted a man leaving his house. Seven minutes after that, it picked up two cars leaving the compound. The Avenger then took the only real chance of the operation, dropping below the cloud layer for eleven seconds, long enough to get its optics on the convoy. At Langley and the Pentagon, analysts agreed they were looking at Ayoub. A few seconds later, the Sentry’s coms officer radioed the Raptors.

“Tiger 1, Tiger 2, this is Sorcerer. We have confirmation on Alpha.” Ayoub. “Repeat, Alpha has left his nest.”

“Copy. ETA to our station?”

“Fifteen to eighteen minutes. Two vehicles. Small arms only, no SAMs.”