The Syrian Sunset, page 16
The siege against this Sunni rebel stronghold had scattered the population like rats bolting from a flame licked building. Now a ring of regime tanks and troops blocked all departure. People boiled weeds to eat. Children roamed the streets like wolf cubs searching for a teat. Even the garbage they poked through offered no sustenance as those on two feet had already licked there. The Covert Intelligence Command Center in nearby Jordan, staffed by the CIA, the General Intelligence Presidency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, with an occasional furtive visit from the increasingly restless Israeli Deputy Director of Operations, Shai Shaham, saw nothing of note on their screens that dawn. Rocket fire often lifted with a flash of light from the hills north of Damascus and arced a short distance eastward, or southward. This barrage was larger than most, like rage trying to assuage frustration at the recalcitrant. Such rage succeeded no better than in marriages.
Everybody on the ground, those who survived, reported the same surprise at the near silence. After the dull landings, this time no explosions rocked the buildings. One elderly man, who had survived Hafez and remembered Hama, came out from under his bed wondering if all the rockets could have misfired. Had young rebels sabotaged them all before launch, he asked himself gleefully. Then tears involuntarily dripped down his cheeks. That was too good to be true. Allah had turned his face from Syria. The soft booming continued and continued. A muffled hour passed for those farther away and not yet dead. The old man had heard confusing loud thumps. Then one landed near his home which shook gently.
After that hour, the climbing sun gradually brightened the horizon. The black plumes refused to rise in the sky and, as if exhausted, dropped and blanketed the ground. The old man crumpled dead on the spot and did not hear the approaching regime conventional bombers. Designed for World War I trench warfare, chemical gas was heavier than air and sank to where people were breathing.
A younger man, 24, not a rebel, not a believer in Bashar, but an artist who captured the struggle on canvas, staggered outside gasping. His breathing inside had been like acid screeching down his throat. He inhaled hard over and over noisily, but his throat was blocked and nothing entered. His head pounded. The street spun. He was strong, lifted heavy weights and pulled himself up repeatedly on the door frame. It felt like daggers struck his eyes. He wanted to vomit. Choking, he noticed the smoke hovering at the ground in the distance though the air was clear on his street. Suddenly a rasping breath drove through. He put both hands on the sides of his head and sucked life in. Instinctively he ran towards a hill to get above the dark death. As he forced one heavy leg in front of the other, bodies lay still in the street, eyes bulging. Blood tracked from a young girl’s eyes and nose. He stumbled at the end of the block, heard voices inside a lower floor of a tall building. Crying, wailing. Mortar shells shrieked towards him and exploded on all sides destroying buildings, as dust and pieces of homes soared.
He staggered inside, skidded on blood. A woman in traditional dress, threw buckets of water at her screaming children. Men pounded the chests of people lying in the blood. An old man with a long gray beard like a ghost stabbed the young intruder’s shoulder through his shirt with a syringe. The old man shouted, “We have to get to higher floors.” He did not know himself how he knew, he just did. The artist felt lopsided, like his face had been contorted by a stroke. Fury coursed through him like a new friend as he ran and stumbled up the stone stair hall. For the first time, he craved an AK-47.
As they emerged on the roof, they saw makeshift ambulances, cars and flatbed trucks with lights and somehow sirens racing to take people to the hospital and nearby clinics. To his surprise, he saw two buses similarly outfitted.
Nearer, those sounds were drowned out by the crunching of tank tracks tearing up the streets as they came for those who had emerged. Free Syrian Army fighters, some in gas masks, appeared and the tanks charged after them like parents after mischievous children. Lured to explosive devices, the lumbering giants rose into the air in flames and then crashed back loudly, their flight inordinately brief. This smoke rose.
Regime troops arrived clad entirely in chemical gear, looking like giant black insects, their eyes behind gas masks. As the sarin dissipated, men of every age in bulletproof vests spilled from the buildings firing AK-47s and M4 assault rifles. Regime troops greeted them with mortars. The ragtag hurled grenades. The heavily clad Bashar troops could not maneuver in the narrow streets and were cut down on block after block. Russian manufactured tank shells loudly decimated buildings. Then the tanks themselves were hit by American anti-tank devices and set ablaze in the street, the smell of burning everywhere. A regime soldier on fire climbed from a turret, fell down the side of the tank and continued to burn beside his blackening tank. Ghouta was on the clandestine rebel weapons supply route from Jordan that circumvented the crossing.
Two hours later, a free fighter grabbed a dead soldier’s radio and heard Bashar’s 4th Army commander’s call to retreat.
✽✽✽
That afternoon in Jerusalem, Shai watched the video feed somehow already broadcast from Ghouta. His mouth was dry as he absorbed the bodies in rows, mostly children, infants, and babies, many in pajamas or underwear. Without visible injuries, they looked like the Angel of Death has winged over them, hand outstretched as they slept. White foamed from some mouths and noses, but most were unblemished and serene. The feed shifted to men carrying adult bodies, one by the arms and another the feet; they lowered them in rows. Two women in dark Arab dress from head to toe, marked the names in masking tape on the foreheads. Orient News, the Dubai channel, broadcast this clip. It then turned to men, like the children laid in rows, these on prayer rugs on the stone floor.
Elsewhere two children sat together propped against a wall. In diapers, the girl was softly dead. About the same age, three or four, tape secured both an oxygen line to the boy’s mouth and three EKG electrode patches to his chest. A man and woman sat on the floor, each pressing oxygen masks to a different infant. The screen jumped inexpertly to a man in a checkered shirt, his wife’s head darkened by a black scarf; they sat beside three small bodies shrouded in white sheets on a long length of plastic sheeting. The man’s hand obscured his face as he cried. A young girl of maybe ten, in a green floral dress, lay dead as a man held her head up to the telephone video. Blood clogged one nostril, her lips white; both eyes slid into her head. A small boy sat against the wall, a tuft of brown hair peeking through head bandages. Pock-marked and red, his face was ruined. Blood congealed below one eye, both pupils screaming. Another girl, maybe seven, held a portable oxygen mask to a younger mouth, likely a sister, and cradled her to her chest with one arm.
Everywhere rescue workers poured water on the faces of those newly hurried in. Some shook in spasms, some screamed, some moaned. Some soon stopped breathing. Slippers had been eased from all the dead of all ages in preparation for washing their feet before mass burial. Everywhere Shai saw the dead in straight rows. Preliminary estimates, an announcer intoned, were a thousand killed and numbers were expected to climb.
The feed switched to a spent chemical bomb in the dirt, a huge 330mm surface-to-surface rocket, Shai recognized with such rage that he thought his own head might literally split. The fins at the top like a torpedo propeller stabilized the descent, stem to stern 2200 meters. After the fins came the motor housed in a long round metal encasing, followed by the amber warhead. On impact a soft explosive charge detonated and the thin metal casing disintegrated. Then sixty liters of sarin fled the two containers. Shai bet some old M-14 Soviet 140mm rockets mounted on trucks with a maximum range of 9.8 kilometers, a little over six American miles, had been mobilized for the near target, where precision was optional.
Outside on the pavement a bevy of volunteers dipped cups in buckets and washed the injured. This was all wobbly bystander footage forwarded to friendly news agencies. The videographer must have run inside then, the ceiling images bouncing. They steadied into people lying crowded and haphazard on the floor. Tall green tanks fed oxygen through translucent tubes to masks, some bodies below them convulsing. A camera moved into contracted pupils. Everybody was wet, the floor puddled from washing off the sarin. Outside again, dead animals filled the screen—dogs with blood running from their mouths, pigeons after abrupt unguided landings. Beside a small cinderblock building with a large square hole in the wall, three dozen sheep lay tangled in the dirt, some mouths desperately open. Sounds of sirens rose during the presenter’s pauses.
Shai darkened the small TV screen in his office. He wanted to talk to his son, who would see some of this in his electronic universe and should, but later. Shai hurried through the shocked hall, people speaking in a symphony of ranges from whispered flutes to the rise of violins to angry percussion. When he heard his name called, even by Goodman, Shai did not respond or slow.
Outside, in air that he was fortunate to breathe, he walked without destination or clear thoughts. When he stopped at an intersection to slow his breath, tears tracked down his face.
An hour later his legs aching, Shai collapsed at in an outdoor cafe in the Old City behind the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The proprietor arrived, and hardly hearing him, Shai thought he ordered an espresso, which must have been right because soon he noticed a small, drained porcelain cup before him. Packs on their backs, Palestinian school boys played in the stone lane. Bells from the black cupola sung on the hour and began their deep chant. To the left stood a postcard stand, to his right. in front of the coffee bar, a large table with mounds of oranges and pomegranates. The Palestinian shopkeepers immediately recognized Israelis and spoke Hebrew. Colorful shawls and small carpets hung behind Shai. Leather purses and backpacks of a startlingly breadth of quality—you had to know which to pluck down, Shai thought, fingering the rose in a vase before him—climbed the wall below the shawls.
As the bells continued their pounding, Shai watched a small boy hiding behind a table next to a customer. His skin was perfect olive brown, dark hair barbered short, and he stared at his friends down the limestone blocks of the lane with more curiosity than concern. The boy lifted a single finger vertically to his lip to alert a friend not to betray him. Four boys, a good distance away, looked to see if he had ducked into a shop there.
Down the lane, two men sat in plastic chairs against a stone wall beside a closed grate with carved stone lions hunched on both sides. Shai was more at home in the Old City than anywhere in the rush of modern Jerusalem. He took the red rose from the tiny vase on the table and willed himself not to pluck the petals. The proprietor startled Shai as he set down a double espresso and small plate with four almond cookies from the glass case between the pomegranates and the coffee bar.
“With my compliments,” he said with a small smile. “I was worried you’d eat the rose.”
“Thank you,” Shai said. “You have time to sit?”
Inside was empty and the proprietor dropped into the pliable rattan.
“Have a cookie,” Shai said as he lifted one. “I’m certain they’re excellent.”
The proprietor demurred with a smile.
“You watch the gassing in Damascus?” Shai asked.
The Arab let out a long sigh like the moan of the wind. “The Russian, that Lavrov, is saying that the American charges of a chemical attack are well, ill-informed. Other Russian leaders are saying the people gassed themselves to bring the UN and America to help them. Lavrov says why use chemical weapons when Assad is already winning the war. Maybe this is horrible enough for the world to act. They have kicked away Obama’s red line like it was chalk.” The proprietor shrugged. “Then again hardly anyone comes to our aid. I expect it will be no different for the people of Ghouta.”
Shai inhaled two cookies in the sudden quiet as the boys had moved on and the bells rested.
“There’s always a chance,” Shai said, “for them and us.”
The proprietor placed both hands on the small wood table and pushed himself up. “I have hope,” he said. “Everything changes over time. On occasion for the better.”
Shai’s phone screamed in his pocket. As the proprietor disappeared inside, Shai fumbled it out and saw it was McEnnerney. He had to push the green button three times as his finger was damp before it connected.
“You got what you wanted,” McE said.
“Expected,” Shai corrected him.
“Not among your most brilliant prognostications, if I may.”
“Agree. Boys with toys like to play with them.”
“Russians are doing their usual tap dance for the cameras,” McE said.
“I think we can ignore it,” Shai said. “For exactly that reason.”
“I’m going to the White House later this week. Big pow wow. All the chiefs and a few of us Indians.”
“Maybe one line crossed and one door opened,” Shai said hopefully.
“Nah. Never works that way. Always have to have a few doors slammed in your face first.”
Despite everything, a small laugh escaped Shai. There was an opening now to rebalance the scales of justice in favor of the Free Syrian Army and the civilian population.
The competing despair at the dead and the opportunity the gassing afforded, as well as his sidestepping Goodman about his actual plan, exhausted Shai. He had expected to feel better now that he and McE, were about to turn up the heat on their long simmering pot.
“Let me know if the chiefs call for the peace pipe or tomahawk.”
“What I live for,” McE said.
Shai heard the line go dead in his ear.
✽✽✽
President Barack Obama strode into the National Security Council room in the White House where Chief of Staff, Dennis McDonough, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marty Dempsey, Vice-President Joe Biden, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, John Kerry, Secretary of State, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor, various greater and lesser generals, and the CIA’s Paul McEnnerney filled every seat around the conference room table littered with papers, laptops, binders, and water bottles already drained and toppled from the battle.
“New suit?” President Obama asked McE, shrouded in double-breasted white linen.
“Wife had it at the back of the closet, rotates the stock. Like in a paint store. She wants everything used. Little tight around the waist, if I’m confessing.”
“Come shoot some hoops. I’ll work it off you. Call up to the residence anytime.”
“Love to. Good thing I’m not competitive.”
Obama released that big smile of his, not long captive even in the worst of times. He slid elegantly into a cushioned chair, his demeanor somber before he landed.
“So Bashar did this while the UN chemical inspection team was two miles away cooling their heels in the Sheraton swimming pool?” Obama said matter-of-factly.
The avuncular, bald Clapper said, “After a delay, they’re on scene in Ghouta. Collecting samples. All signs point to the Assad regime having launched a sarin attack. The case is not a slam dunk.”
Obama spoke immediately, “Jim, no one asked you if it was a slam dunk.”
McEnnerney saw the stress in the deep webs at Obama’s eyes. Rhodes too seemed agitated, was unfolding a paperclip with vengeance. He was half-Jewish by birth and understandably highly sensitive about killing gas. Everybody was elevated on eggshells because of Iraq. George Tenet, Bush’s CIA honcho, had promised Saddam’s stockpile of nuclear weapons was a “slam dunk.” McE hadn’t bothered to read his book to see if it contained a mea culpa, with the “but” these chiefs always appended.
Obama turned to him, “McE?”
“We have a high confidence assessment it’s sarin. Good deal more than a thousand dead. The regime is saying the rebels bombed themselves. I supposed they hauled the missiles to the rooftops and then pitched them over.”
Dempsey spoke, had been arguing that if they charged into Syria’s quicksand, they’d sink and disappear. Now his face reddened with the convert’s conviction. “We can’t remain on the sidelines any longer. We need to take decisive action. Even if we cannot predict the outcome with any certainty.”
“I’m concerned about the UN inspectors,” Obama interjected. “Can something be done to get them out of Damascus before we launch?”
Kerry spoke softly. “They’re going to say they want to finish. They’ll need maybe three days.”
“We cannot wait any longer than that,” a miscellaneous general said. “Enough pussyfooting. We need to hit them hard, a lesson they’ll feel. Otherwise, we’re complicit in mass murder.”
Clapper said, “They may already be moving civilians into the potential targets to deter us. They like to crowd prisoners into the military airports, make them sleep on the runways.”
“They could, even will,” McE informed. “But haven’t yet.”
Obama looked at him, absorbed this contentedly as if he was at the law school podium and McEnnerney his star student.
McDonough said, “Legally, we’re on thin ice. Congress is demanding approval. The real question is what happens the morning after? What’ll this petulant boy, Bashar, do? Drop all hell from the skies?” He turned to the boss. “Are we willing to send in troops to seize the stockpiles? What do we know about how they’re guarded?”
“Assad or we burn the country, seems to be their theme song,” McE said quietly. “Top of the charts. More than a few of them mean it. We’re not sure about Bashar. Maybe he has a villa waiting in Sochi? My take, he does—for the nickel it’s worth.”
