The Syrian Sunset, page 17
Clapper leaned forward, looking agitated. “I don’t want an assessment for public release. Let’s get everything we know to Rhodes. Facts. What the inspectors have. Options. He can write it up. We’ll review for accuracy and sign-off on it.”
Rhodes spoke, his voice like sandpaper. “I want to see the videos; everything that’s out there on the internet. Photos. You’re asking me to justify our going to war.”
McE saw Rhodes would be knocked about in the scalding Congressional waters if it all went up in flames. McE thought about how much he loved operating hidden in his leafy apple orchards with an encrypted sat phone.
Obama said, “I want that UN team out of there by tomorrow.”
McEnnerney leaned back in his chair, a little shocked. He realized Obama would order a strike as soon as the UN team was safely out of Syrian airspace, Congress be damned. This was exactly what he and Shai had hoped for. It seemed if not for the mortal danger to the UN inspectors from missiles, ours and theirs, Obama would have pushed the 6th Fleet button on the spot.
“Get me Ban,” Obama said to McDonough. Now.” Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General. As McDonough grabbed a phone, Obama drummed his fingers on the polished conference table.
When Ki-moon came on the line, Obama put the call on speaker as he often did for the assembled.
Obama pressed that they needed the UN team flown to safety now, yesterday, immediately.
“I cannot,” Ki-moon said with the equanimity of a Buddhist monk. “Mister President, you must understand. They need to finish their work. Many sides make many claims. It is crucial that we have a full determination of what has occurred.”
“I cannot overstate the importance of their not remaining in Syria for a lengthy period of time,” Obama said.
“Forgive me. One minute, please,” Ki-moon said.
McE could hear a muffled conversation in Ki-moon’s office. Sounded like French.
“I’m afraid they will need three days. They were unable to secure authority to visit the site for five days, regrettably. It is complicated, as always. Not what I would wish. They could not go in while the government was shelling.”
“What’s Bashar agreed to?”
“A cease-fire for five hours today. Then the same for the following three days. The government is guaranteeing the team’s safety only through no-man’s land. They cannot on the other side. Sellestrom wants to finish.”
“Ban, I need them to leave by tomorrow night.”
“It is impossible. I am deeply sorry, Mister President. Three days. They must have three days. I now have a meeting. But please call for updates about their progress as you wish.”
“Where are the Brits?” Obama asked, after Ki-Moon disconnected.
“They’re voting Thursday,” Rhodes said. “August 29. Three days from now, so that syncs with the UN team’s timeline. Exactly seven days ahead of the President meeting with Putin at the G20 in Saint Petersburg. So everyone is looking at the ducks through the same sights. Cameron says he can deliver a vote for military action against Syria. His party obviously holds the majority. We’re moving fast.”
Joe Biden spoke. “I’ve talked to Cameron. He wants to launch immediately after the vote. Night of the 29th, morning of the 30th.”
Obama rose. “So I need you boys to figure out where we hit. Don’t be shy about a target assessment. Quietly make that ready.”
After a moment of collective silence, a chorus of “Yes, Sir” sounded through the room.
Obama turned to McE. “I have some time now. Let’s shoot a few. Someone will have some shoes you can squeeze into.”
“Sure, Mister President. Can’t say I have anything more important to do.”
Shortly after he moved in, Obama had yellow lines painted and baskets added at both ends to the outdoor chain-link and pine surrounded tennis court. The existing indoor court only had room for a single basket. The white tennis markings remained and the low net could still be rolled out from the adjacent pavilion.
Obama had sent the Secret Service packing. As the two of them came out on the green surface, the only sound was the whistle of a sparrow above the President rhythmically bouncing the ball as they stood at one end.
“See McE,” Obama said, nodding towards the heavy blue padding that covered the pole from below the net to the ground. “They said I agreed to this, I can charge to the basket through LeBron James, anybody I want.”
“Good decision, sir. I presume not the wounded warriors?”
The President released his smile. “I do hold the line at wheelchairs.” Obama banked a ball off the backboard that dropped softly through the netting. After it hit the ground, he let it roll. “Your opinion McE. Not the Agency’s. Nobody’s listening. Only my wide ears.”
“You remember what the Israelis did to the Egyptians in sixty-seven?”
“Historically speaking, yes.”
“Effectively ended the war before the sun came up. You could take out all the helicopter gunships, all the fixed-wing, massacre the runways, the hangers, the whole shebang. No need to dirty any boots on the ground. We know where they make most of the barrel bombs. Without them, without the ability to drop them, it would give the Free Syrian Army a chance to wallop him.” McE walked over and picked up the ball where it rested against the tarp covered fence. He arced a shot which hit the rim with a thud. “You’d give the Syrian people a chance at life.”
“If we do that will Bashar use the sarin on civilians in a whole lot of places? I take it he has plenty of the old Soviet mobile missile launchers. We can’t possibly get all those trucks.”
“Well, that’s the question, now, isn’t it?” McEnnerney retrieved the ball and went in for a lay-up as Obama kindly watched. “Mister President, nothing’s near certain. But I think not. He knows if he did that, your next volley is at his head. I’m sure you’ll find time to have a stroll alone with Putin at the G20. You raise the stick that the missiles were the warm-up to crossing your red line and you’re readying to send troops in. Then the carrot that the cruise missiles are a one and done. After a lot of insincere outrage, Putin’ll muzzle Bashar. In the end he wants to march into Syria, expand Russian naval and air bases there and doesn’t want American soldiers smiling on any roadblocks.” McEnnerney bounced the ball to the president who held it in his large hands. “Some indication Bashar has a set of bags already packed,” McE continued. “Comes from MI6 can’t confirm. The psych profiles all say he’s paranoid, vacillates, weak. Beauty queen wife still shags other women to buck himself up. As the Brits have it.”
“Which could mean if I humiliate him from the air, he then tries something very nasty to feel big and better.”
“Well, yes there’s that, isn’t there?”
Obama fired the ball, missed everything. As it skidded with a clink against the chain-link, he loped after it. He bounced it back in loud, hard slams against the soft tennis court.
“So it’s a coin toss whether he runs to the Black Sea or opens the gates of hell,” the president said slamming the ball higher against the ground.
“Or does nothing. Which is my take as well as some friends of mine. Other than maybe speed up a bit more of the regular murdering. I don’t think he’s going to risk anything that might get you to send in troops.”
“The Free Syrian Army ready?”
“Who’s ever ready? You open a window for them, they climb through it. Ninety percent of the civilian deaths in the country, more are blood dripping from Bashar’s hands. You silence the scream of the barrel bombs, it’s a brave new world for them. The FSA’s a hundred fifty thousand very determined hombre. Without fear of fire from the sky, they can put a whole lot of pressure on Assad on the ground.”
McE watched Obama bounce the ball pensively for a long time, saw the tug of war in his eyes. From the psychology of his youth, he was a community organizer, a peacenik. Didn’t want to send yet more boys in Humvees where modern IED’s flung them around like ragdolls. For what? To play Taps and watch them stagger back ignored as the drug companies held out colorful M&Ms. McE got that. But from the American, from Obama’s own, unique among recent president’s, moral center, and the R2P, The Responsibility to Protect, the international norm adopted by the UN in 2005 that the international community would never again fail to halt mass murder and crimes against humanity—this president had to at the least decimate the runways, adjacent aircraft, and the barrel bomb capability.
Obama bounced the ball to McE. “Shall we sweat a bit now?”
“You’re not already?”
Obama opened a wide grin. “I feel a good deal better when I’m sweating on the outside too.”
CHAPTER 11
AL-SHAALAN MARKET
FREE GIRL
Umbrellas with blue, yellow, green and orange panels shaded the shoppers from the powerful sun on the outdoor lane of the al-Shaalan Market. With plastic bags in both hands Fuad threaded through the women shoppers, most in headscarves and wearing pants or dresses that descended midway between their knees and shoes. Fatima was slipping with startling rapidity, both her memory and ability to walk distances. Fuad did all the shopping now. It was his duty, and he enjoyed the physical effort which carried him for a time from his thoughts. Yesterday they had gone to a movie at the modern Cinema City with its huge glass facades and broad cushioned seats. An hour later she had forgotten they had. That same evening, she had sung along to songs on television for over an hour she had not heard in thirty years, which made her very happy. Kassem explained they accessed different parts of the brain. They had ensconced her mother in a home where she could be cared for when she was a little older than Fatima’s seventy-one years. With a leaden heart he had begun inquiries at that fine residential facility.
Like a multi-car wreck everything accelerated now into a one crash slamming into the next. Fatima, Ghouta, and especially Kassem hurtling at high speed on a highway with no seat belt. Fuad did not believe he could survive the loss of his son.
Grapes, figs, oranges, apples, climbed outside shelves. For Fatima’s favorite pistachios, he would stop at the nut seller’s souq on Assad ah-Din Street, where men sat at square tables in the wide lane and drank coffee. He stopped and marveled at a crowded colorful boutique, all glass and above the glass door white lettering only in English: FREE GIRL. The Chinese company descended on the Middle East like locusts. Who in Beijing devised that genius name to entice young women, already eager to join the high fashion of their peers around the planet? Ladies’ clothes, purses, shoes, scarfs, colorful t-shirts with both D & G for Dolce Gabbana and Victoria’s Secret PINK ANGEL were visible inside, copyright complaints filed and forgotten. Mannequins in the floor-to-ceiling glass window sported orange shorts, turquoise mid-length pants, and a potpourri of orange, gold and turquoise blouses. Scarves circled the plastic necks, not the tumbling three different colored wigs. Inside he knew from a foray of curiosity, young women queued for the yellow and orange sweatpants. The only wave to the ongoing war was the pink number on the outside glass: 50%. Fuad thought that if the Americans tried to embargo Syria, as they had Iran, they’d slip and break their faces here too. America had abandoned the future to cultural bickering while the Chinese jet skied and waved in their wake, often holding hands with the Russians.
He sighed audibly. Damascus pretty much lived with the uprising the way those in London tolerated the traffic, and he supposed in Los Angeles the smog, without excessive notice. Cement barriers and roadblocks rose permanently outside all government offices, the way unpleasant change always encroached. Still rebel fighters nibbled at the periphery of the city from the east, south and west like mice at cheese.
After Ghouta, the military elite feared an American invasion or at the softest the thunderous rain of cruise missiles which Fuad secretly hoped for. In his paranoia, Bashar was terrified they’d strike the presidential palace. The elastic Mitqal believed at the first radar blips of American missiles, that Bashar would bolt for exile in Russia in the already waiting helicopter. The Council with Fuad and the likes of Mitqal at the tip of the spear would thrust out his young perfidious entourage. Still Fuad was accustomed to disappointment, and it was safer always to expect it to come with the inevitability of the sunrise. He got on with his shopping.
Beyond where a woman in head-to-toe black climbed into the back of an old, yellow Mercedes taxi, Fuad approached plastic crates on the ground brimming with tomatoes. He reached his stubby fingers in and felt for several that would both ripen soon and later. He brought a handful to his face and inhaled the freshness. This activity calmed the unaccustomed terror newly flooding through him. He had not told Kassem that he found common cause on occasion with the Israelis, though the boy suspected much had gone unspoken. Fuad was uneasy too, that his son still knew Afra only as Lilia from Daraa and scared about how he might react to the abiding deception. It had always played in the back of Fuad’s mind, that if Fuad was caught, Kassem would not survive at Institute 3000, or at all.
“How much?” Fuad asked inside, as the proprietor weighed the tomatoes on his scale.
Salim knew Fuad both by station and his recent regular appearances in his wife’s stead.
“For you general,” Abel said. “Special price.”
Fuad would not bargain, which some shopkeepers took as an insult to tradition. Everybody in the country was less fortunate than he. “Salim, full price, please. If not, I will have to leave a very large bill there.” He motioned to the bin of cucumbers on the floor below the scales. “Some young jackal may get it.”
“Anta labiq (you have a way with words,)” Abel spoke the traditional compliment.
Fuad responded in kind, from a cornucopia of far reacting tradition, “Atfaluka yabduna bishhatin wa quwwatin qayyidatayn (may your children be successful.”)
Next door, beside alternating bins of shiny black and green olives, Fuad repeated the same process for the finest figs. That a new Syria should be days away intruded into his thoughts again, and this time he could not elude his hope.
Fuad carried bags heavy with food, the narrow plastic pulling at his fingers, as he walked quickly. He passed bananas hanging from string and bags of oranges trapped in netting swaying beside them, in the strong warm breeze heavy with manure from the fields.
Though the danger focused Fuad on the moment and the possible sparkling future, his thoughts had headed elsewhere on their own. The mannequins behind glass in FREE GIRL had for many steps carried him back to the exhilaration so long ago on Carnaby Street in London, when everything changed. The Syrian Army then had resembled a train toppled off its tracks. During the French mandate, Paris had ferried troops to Damascus as Syrian soldiers had difficulty hitting the side of a house with a rifle. Ferocious frequent coups from the 1940s through the 1960s had left the country like one of those plastic clowns weighted at the bottom that hit the ground at a single punch. Each grand new government shook the military trees of the one before and tossed everything that fell behind bars. Soldiers regularly ignored orders issued by rival ethnic, religious or political persuasions. As a young recruit reaching for the stars, Fuad was uncertain how to climb the ladder to them, or of more immediate concern, how to keep his head attached to his shoulders.
In 1967, he had met Shai, entirely not by chance, he surmised very quickly, while both on a course with other freshly minted Syrian junior officers at the Department of War Studies at King’s College. He later wondered if the British had cooked up his group’s invite, to go fishing in the Syrian pond for anybody they might hook. Shai hadn’t seemed much of a soldier, freewheeling and portly even then. Shai suggested, in what he surmised was Palestinian Arabic dialect, that they have a stroll on Carnaby Street, the fashion apex of a now bygone world, whose psychedelic prints made Free Girl tame. They met outside the Lady Jane on Carnaby Street.
“The very first fashion boutique on the whole street,” Shai had informed him, with a penchant for history even then. “Opened last year. A dairy stood on this very spot. Imagine, Yussuf, if I may be so informal. Shows you how the world’s turning, and the Middle East has hardly gotten aboard the Ferris wheel.”
In the window, three women casually stripped down to their panties and bras. Fuad laughed at himself, literally out loud as he walked through the Syrian souq. He had been excessively excited by the tall blond with a Beatles mop of hair in her undies, preparing to step into the next wild attire. Then she removed her bra. He was shocked and embarrassed, and even more aroused. Short, he seemed to overcompensate with desire for tall women. A woman entered the window with a paint bucket and expertly brushed a blue bra on the nakedness and then dried it with a battery powered hair dryer. If that was not enough, the model dropped a plastic see-through dress over herself. To this day, Fuad loved the ease of the 60s abroad.
His memory was near photographic. They walked through the crowded Carnaby lane, three stories of red brick apartments and above the shops a jungle of signs jutted out: His ‘N’ Hers, Lord John, Chubbies Sandwich Bar, John Stephan Wig Centre. They passed a woman in a British flag dress. He was drawn to the low Triumph Spitfire parked at the corner, and everywhere bare legs that descended forever below mini dresses. A Bentley idled with a sign in the front grill: Free Lifts to Carnaby Street. STOP ME and I’ll take you to “TAKE 6.” The Bentley rested from its small labors under TAKE 6 in purple letters, of course, the men’s fashion retailer, loads of wool and cashmere coats in the windows and inside the door.
“This will all disappear soon,” Shai said, chatting in Arabic of no note in London even then. “Who knows what’s next? My point, actually. On your patch, particularly difficult to tell. Certainly must be hard to navigate waves in a perpetual storm. Everyone around you capsizing. I might be able to help you keep your ship steady as she goes. A long pull ahead of the pack. Do some good too, which I believe matters to you.”
“Israeli?”
“Of course. We go outside, breathe and Arabic comes in. Hear it everywhere if one’s listening.”
