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Jack Mars

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.