Our Sacred Honor

CHAPTER ONE

December 9th

11:45 p.m. Lebanon Time (4:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

Southern Lebanon

“Praise God,” the young man said. “Praise Him. Praise Him.”

He took a long drag from his cigarette, his hand shaking as he reached to his mouth. He hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. For the past four hours, the world around him had been entirely black. He was a truck driver, skilled at driving the biggest rigs, and he had driven this one across the border from Syria, then through the hilly Lebanese countryside, moving slow on winding roads, lights off the entire way.

It was a dangerous drive. The sky was filled with drones, with helicopters, with spy planes, and with bombers – Russian, American, and Israeli. Any one of these could become interested in this truck. Any one of these could decide to destroy the truck, and do so effortlessly. He drove the entire way expecting that at any moment, a missile would hit him without warning, rendering him a flaming skeleton sitting inside a burned out steel relic.

Now he had just pulled the truck up a long, narrow path and parked it under an awning. The awning, held up with wooden legs, was made to look from the sky like typical forest cover – in fact, the top of it was covered with dense brush. Its location was right where they had said it would be.

He turned the truck off, the engine farting and belching, black smoke pouring from a stack on the driver’s side as the thing shut itself down. He opened the door to the cab and climbed down. As soon as he did so, a squad of heavily armed men materialized like ghosts, emerging from the surrounding woods.

“As salaam alaikum,” the young truck driver said as they approached.

“Wa alaikum salaam,” the militia leader said. He was tall and burly, with a thick black beard and dark eyes. His face was hard – there was no compassion in it. He gestured at the truck. “Is this it?”

The young man took another shaky drag from his cigarette. No, he almost said. Some other truck is it. This one is nothing.

“Yes,” he said instead.

“You’re late,” the militia leader said.

The young man shrugged. “You should have driven in that case.”

The leader stared at the truck. It looked like a typical tractor-trailer – perhaps something carrying lumber, or furniture, or foodstuffs. But it wasn’t. The militiamen went right to work on it, two climbing the back ladder to the top, two kneeling near the bottom. Each man had a battery-powered screwdriver.

Moving quickly, they removed the screws one by one that held the tractor-trailer fiction together. Within moments, they pulled a large piece of aluminum sheet metal off the side. A moment later, they pulled a narrower sheet off the back. Then they were working on the other side, where the driver could no longer see them.

He turned and looked out at the nighttime hillsides and forest. Across the darkness, he could see the lights of a village twinkling several miles away. Beautiful country. He was very glad to be here. His job was done. He was not a militiaman. He was a truck driver. They had paid him to go across the border and pick up this truck.

He was also not from this region – he lived far to the north. He had no idea what arrangements these men had made for his return home, but he didn’t care. Rid of the infernal machine he had just driven, he would gladly walk from here.

Headlights were coming up the narrow rutted road, a whole series of them. Seconds later, a line of three black Mercedes SUVs appeared. The doors opened in unison and gunmen poured from each car. Each man carried a heavy rifle or machine gun. The rear door of the middle car opened last.

A heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses pulled himself from the SUV. He leaned on a knobby wooden stick and walked with a pronounced limp – the residue of a car bomb attempt on the man’s life two years ago.

The young driver recognized the man instantly – he was certainly the most famous man in Lebanon, and well known throughout the world. His name was Abba Qassem, and he was the absolute leader of Hezbollah. His authority – in matters of military operations, social programs, relations with foreign governments, crime and punishment, life and death – was unquestioned.

His presence made the driver nervous. It came on suddenly, like a stomach sickness. There were the nerves that came with meeting any celebrity, yes. But there was more to it than that. Qassem being here meant that this truck – whatever it might be – was important. Much more important than the driver had realized.

Qassem hobbled to the truck driver, surrounded by his bodyguards, and gave him an awkward hug.

“My brother,” he said. “You are the driver?”

“Yes.”

“Allah will reward you.”

“Thank you, Sayyid,” the driver said, calling him by a title of honor, suggesting that Qassem was a direct descendent of Mohammed himself. The driver was hardly a devout Muslim, but people like Qassem seemed to enjoy that sort of thing.

They turned together. The men had already finished removing the sheet metal covering from the truck. Now the real truck was revealed. The front of it was much as it had appeared to be – the cab of a trailer truck, painted a deep green color. The long rear of the truck was a flat, two-cylinder missile launch platform. Resting inside each of the launch cylinders was a large silver missile, shiny and metallic.

The two parts of the truck were separate and independent of each other, but were attached by a hydraulic system in the middle, and steel chains on either side. That explained why the truck had been difficult to control – the rear section was not secured to the front as tightly as the driver might have chosen.

“A transporter-erector-launcher, they call it,” Qassem said, explaining to the driver what he had just driven here. “And just one of many the Perfect One has seen fit to bring us.”

“Yes?” the driver said.

Qassem nodded. “Oh yes.”

“And the missiles?”

Qassem smiled. It was beatific and calm, the smile of a saint. “Very advanced weaponry. Long distance. As accurate as anything in this world. More powerful than we have ever known before. God willing, we will use these weapons to bring our enemies to their knees.”

“Israel?” the driver said. He nearly choked on the word. The urge came upon him to start walking north right this moment.

Qassem put a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “God is great, my brother. God is great. Very soon, everyone will know exactly how great.”

He stepped away, limping toward the missile launcher. The driver watched him go. He took one last drag on his cigarette, which he had smoked down to the nub. He was feeling a little better, calmer. This job was over. These maniacs could start another war if they wanted – it likely wouldn’t reach the north.

Qassem turned around then and looked at him. “Brother,” he said.

“Yes?”

“These missiles are a secret, you know. No one can hear of them.”

The driver nodded. “Of course.”

“You have friends, family?”

The driver smiled. “I do. A wife, three children. Little ones. I still have my mother. I am well known in my village and the nearby areas. I have played the violin since I was very young, and everyone demands a song from me.”

He paused. “It’s a full life.”

The sayyid nodded, a little sadly.

“Allah will reward you.”

The driver didn’t like the sound of that. It was the second time Qassem had mentioned such a reward. “Yes. Thank you.”

Near Qassem, two big men took rifles down from their shoulders. A second later, they held them ready, aimed at the driver.

The driver barely moved. This didn’t seem right. It was happening so fast. His heart pounded in his ears. He could not feel his legs. Or his arms. Even his lips were numb. For a second, he tried to think of anything he might have done to offend them. Nothing. He had done nothing. All he had done was bring the truck here.

The truck… was a secret.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait! I won’t tell anyone.”

Qassem shook his head now. “The All-Knowing has seen your good work. He will open the gates of Paradise to you this very evening. This is my promise to you. This is my prayer.”

Much too late, the driver turned to run.

An instant later, he heard the loud CRACK as the first gun fired.

And he realized, as the ground came rushing up to meet him, that his entire life had been in vain.

CHAPTER TWO

December 11

9:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

The Oval Office

The White House, Washington, DC

Susan Hopkins almost couldn’t believe what she was watching.

She stood on the carpet in the sitting area of the Oval Office – the comfortable high-backed chairs had been removed for this morning’s festivities. Thirty people packed the room. Kurt Kimball and Kat Lopez stood near her, as well as Haley Lawrence, her Secretary of Defense.

The White House Residence staff were all here at her insistence, the chef, the servers, the domestic staff, mingling among other invited guests – the directors of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Park Service, to name a few. A handful of news media personalities were here, as well as two or three carefully selected camera people. There were many Secret Service agents, lining the walls and peppered among the crowd.

On a large TV monitor mounted near the far wall, Stephen Lief, a man whom Susan could expect to never see in the flesh until her term as President was over, was about to take the Vice Presidential Oath of Office. Stephen was late middle-aged, owlish in round glasses, hair gray and thinning and receding across the top of his skull like an army in disordered retreat. He had a vaguely pear-shaped body, hidden inside a three-thousand-dollar blue pinstriped Armani suit.

Susan had known Stephen a long time. He would have been her main competition in the most recent election, if Jeff Monroe hadn’t interceded. Before that, in her Senate days, he was the loyal opposition across the aisle from her, a moderate conservative, unremarkable – pig-headed but not deranged. And he was a nice man.

But he was also the wrong party, and she had taken a lot of heated criticism from liberal quarters for that. He was landed aristocracy, old money – a Mayflower person, the closest thing that America had to nobility. At one time, he had seemed to think that becoming President was his birthright. Not Susan’s type – entitled aristocrats tended to lack the common touch that helped you connect with the people you were supposedly there to serve.

It was a measure of how deeply Luke Stone had gotten inside her skin that she considered Stephen Lief at all. He was Stone’s idea. Stone had brought it up to her playfully, while the two were lying together in her big Presidential bed. She had been pondering out loud about possible Veep candidates, and then Stone said:

“Why not Stephen Lief?”

She had almost laughed. “Stone! Stephen Lief? Come on.”

“No, I mean it,” he said.

He was lying on his side. His nude body was thin but rock hard, chiseled, and covered with scars. Thick bandaging still covered his recent bullet wound – it was molded to his torso along the left side. The various wounds didn’t bother her – they made him sexier, more dangerous. His dark blue eyes watched her from deep inside his weathered Marlboro Man face, half a mischievous smile on his lips.

“You’re beautiful, Stone. Like an ancient Greek statue, uh, wearing a bandage. But maybe you better let me do the thinking. You can just recline there, looking pretty.”

“I interviewed him at his farm down in Florida,” Stone said. “I was asking him what he knew about Jefferson Monroe and election fraud. He came clean to me very quickly. And he’s good with horses. Gentle. That has to count for something.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Susan said. “The next time I’m looking for a ranch hand.”

Stone shook his head, but kept smiling. “The country is fractured, Susan. Recent events have made the feelings worse than ever. You’re still doing okay, but Congress has the lowest approval ratings in American history. If you can believe the polls, then politicians, the Taliban, and the Church of Satan all rate well with a similar percentage of Americans. Lawyers, the IRS, and the Italian Mafia have much higher approval numbers.”

“And you say that because…”

“Because what the American people want now is for right and left, liberal and conservative, to come together a little bit and start to get some things done on behalf of this country. The roads and bridges need to be rebuilt, the train system belongs in a museum, the public schools are falling apart, and we haven’t built a new major airport in almost thirty years. We’re ranked thirty-second in healthcare, Susan. That’s low. Can there really be thirty-one other countries ahead of us? Because I tell you, I’ve been around the world, and I run out of good countries at twenty-one or twenty-two. That puts us behind a bunch of bad ones.”

She sighed. “If we had some buy-in from conservatives, we might be able to get my infrastructure package through…”

He tapped her forehead. “Now you’re using your noodle. Lief did eighteen years in the Senate. He knows the game as well as anybody.”

“I thought politics wasn’t your thing,” she said.

“It’s not.”

She shook her head. “That’s what scares me.”

He started moving toward her. “Don’t be scared. I’ll tell you what is my thing.”

“Do tell.”

“Getting physical,” he said. “With someone like you.”

Now she shook the memories away, a ghost of a smile on her face. She had drifted there for a bit. On the TV monitor, Stephen Lief was getting ready to take his oath. It was happening in her old study at the Naval Observatory. She remembered the room and the house well. It was the beautiful, turreted and gabled Queen Anne–style 1850s mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. For decades, it had been the official residence of the Vice President of the United States.

She used to stand at the big bay window that was visible on the monitor, staring out at the beautiful rolling lawns of the Naval Observatory campus. The afternoon sun would come through that window, playing incredible games with light and shadow. For five years, she had lived in that house as Vice President. She’d loved it there, and would move back in a heartbeat if she could.

In the old days, in the afternoons and evenings, she would go out jogging on the Observatory grounds with her Secret Service men. Those years were a time of optimism, of stirring speeches, of meeting and greeting thousands of hopeful Americans. It seemed like a lifetime ago now.

Susan sighed. Her mind wandered. She remembered the day of the Mount Weather attack, the atrocity that had catapulted her out of her happy life as Vice President and into the raging tumult of the past few years.

She shook her head. No thank you. She would not think about that day.

Through the looking glass, on a small dais, two men and a woman stood. Photographers milled around like gnats, snapping pictures of them.

One of the men on the dais was short and bald. He wore a long robe. He was Clarence Warren, Chief Justice of the United States. The woman’s name was Judy Lief. She wore a bright blue suit. She was smiling ear to ear and holding a Bible open in her hands. Her husband, Stephen, placed his left hand on the Bible. His right hand was raised. Lief was often thought of dour, but even he was smiling a little.

“I, Stephen Douglas Lief,” he said, “do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“That I will bear true faith…” Judge Warren prompted.

“That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” Lief said. “That I take this obligation freely, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office which I am about to enter.”

“So help me God,” Judge Warren said.

“So help me God,” Lief said.

An image appeared in Susan’s mind – a ghost from the recent past. Marybeth Horning, the last person to take that oath. She had been a mentor to Susan in the Senate, and something of a mentor as Vice President. With her thin, small frame and her big glasses, she looked like a mouse, but she roared like a lion.

Then she was shot down and killed because of… what? Her liberal politics, you might say, but that wasn’t true. The people who killed her hadn’t cared about policy differences – all they cared about was power.

Susan hoped the country could move past that now. She watched Stephen on the TV monitor, embracing his family and other well-wishers.

Did she trust this man? She didn’t know.

Would he try to have her killed?

No. She didn’t think so. He had more integrity than that. She had never known him to be underhanded during her time in the Senate. She supposed that was a start – she had a Vice President who wouldn’t try to kill her.

She pictured reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post asking questions: “What do you like about Stephen Lief as your new Vice President?”

“Well, he’s not going to kill me. I feel pretty good about that.”

Then Kat Lopez was at her side.

“Uh, Susan? Let’s get you over to the microphones so you can congratulate Vice President Lief and give him a few words of encouragement.”

Susan snapped out of her reverie. “Of course. That’s a good idea. He can probably use them.”

CHAPTER THREE

11:16 p.m. Israel Time (4:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

The Blue Line, Israel-Lebanon Border

“Listen not to the liars, to the unbelievers,” the boy of seventeen whispered.

He took a deep breath.

“Strive against them with the utmost effort. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them.”

The boy was as battle-hardened as they came. At fifteen, he had left his home and family and joined the Army of God. He had crossed into Syria and spent the past two years fighting street-to-street, face-to-face, and sometimes hand-to-hand, against the apostates of Daesh, what the westerners called ISIS.

The Daesh were unafraid to die – indeed, they welcomed death. Many of them were older Chechens and Iraqis, very hard to kill. The early days of opposing them had been a nightmare, but the boy had survived. In two years, he had fought many battles and killed many men. And he had learned much about war.

Now he stood in the black dark on a hillside in northern Israel. He balanced an anti-tank rocket launcher on his right shoulder. In his younger days, a heavy rocket like this would drill into his shoulder and after a short time, his bones would begin to ache. But he was stronger now. The weight of it no longer made much impression on him.

There was a small stand of trees around him, and very nearby, a group of commandos were on the ground, watching the roadway below them.

“Let those who fight in the way of Allah sell the life of this world for the other,” he said, very low, under his breath. “He who fights in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, he shall receive a vast reward.”

“Abu!” someone whispered fiercely.

“Yes.” His own voice was calm.

“Shut up!”

Abu took a deep breath and let the exhale slowly come out.

He was an expert with the anti-tank rocket. He had fired so many of these, and he had become so accurate with them, that he was now a very valuable man. That was something he had learned about war. The longer you lived, the more skills you amassed, and the better you became at fighting. The better you became, the more valuable you were, and ever more likely to remain alive. He had known many who didn’t survive long in combat – a week, ten days. He had met one who died on the first day. If only they could last a month, things would start to become clearer to —

“Abu!” the voice hissed.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Ready? They’re coming.”

“Okay.”

He went about his business, relaxed, almost as if he were just practicing. He hefted the rocket launcher and unfolded the stock. His placed his left hand along the length of the barrel, lightly, lightly, until the target came into view. You didn’t want your grip too firm, too soon. The index finger of his right hand caressed the trigger mechanism. He put the gun sight near his face, but not to his eye. He liked to have his eyes free until the last moment, so he could acquire the entire picture before focusing on the details. His knees bent slightly, his back ever-so-slightly arched.

He could see light from the convoy now, behind the hillside to his right, approaching along the road. The lights reached upward, casting strange shadows. A few seconds later, he could hear the rumble of the engines.

He took another deep breath.

“Steady…” a stern voice said. “Steady.”

“Lord Allah,” Abu said, his words coming quickly now, and louder than before. “Guide my hands and my eyes. Let me bring death to your enemies, in your name and in the name of your most beloved prophet Mohammed, and all the great prophets in all times.”

The first jeep came around the bend. The round headlights were clear now, cutting through the nighttime mist.

The boy Abu instantly became rigid under the weight of the heavy gun. He put his right eye to the sight. The vehicles in the line appeared, large, like he could reach out and touch them. His finger tightened on the trigger. The breath caught in his throat. He was no longer a boy with a rocket launcher – he and the launcher melded together, becoming one entity, a killing machine.

All around his feet, men moved like snakes, crawling toward the roadway.

“Steady,” the voice said again. “The second car, you understand?”

“Yes.”

In his gun sight, the second jeep was RIGHT THERE. He could see the silhouettes of the people inside it.

“It’s easy,” he whispered. “It’s so easy… Steady…”

Two seconds passed, Abu slowly sweeping the rocket launcher from right to left, following the target, never wavering.

“FIRE!”

For Avraham Gold, this was the part he hated.

Hate was the wrong word. He feared it. Any second now, coming right up.

He always talked here. He talked too much. He felt that he would blurt anything, just to get past this place. He took a long drag from his cigarette – against the rules to smoke on patrol, but it was the only thing that relaxed him.

“Leave Israel?” he said. “Never! Israel is my home, now and forever. I will travel abroad, certainly, but leave? How could I? We are called by God to live here. This is the Holy Land. This is the land that was promised.”

Avraham was twenty years old, a corporal in the Israeli Defense Forces. His grandparents were Germans who had survived the Holocaust. He believed every word that he said. But it still sounded hollow to his ears, like a corny pro-settler TV commercial.

He was at the wheel of the jeep, driving the third in a line of three. He glanced at the girl sitting next to him. Daria. God, she’s beautiful!

Even with her close-cropped hair, even with her body covered primly in her uniform. It was her smile. It would light up the sky. And her long eyelashes – like a cat.

She had no business being up here, in this… no-man’s-land. Especially with her views. She was a liberal. There shouldn’t be any liberals in the IDF, Avraham had decided. They were useless. And Daria was worse than a liberal. She was…