John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

There was a ton of hash in place – quality smoke, grown locally under the supervision of Hakim’s contacts in the Ministry of Defense. Even with an assembly line, getting the product ready to ship took time. Each “hand” weighed half a kilo and had to be packaged so that it would be undetectable as it moved across borders. This meant putting the product into small plastic bags, a pound at a time, then wiping down the bags with sponges soaked in gasoline.

When the bags were clean, a different set of workers would drag them on carts to the other end of the warehouse, where they would be put, one by one, in five-by-seven tins about an inch thick. The tins would then be taken to a separate room, where they’d be sponged down with gasoline, then placed in somewhat larger tins. The larger tin would then be filled with melted wax and soldered shut. After one last dip in a bucket of gas, the tins would be laid in the bottom of fifty-five-gallon drums. Then, a forklift hauled the drums to a large room at the far end of the warehouse, where each barrel was fitted with a metal plate, creating a false bottom, just above the hash. The drums were then filled with about fifty gallons of pomegranate molasses, and sealed. Finally, each drum was spray-painted with the words MELASSE DE LIBAN.

By Wilson’s reckoning, it was going to take upwards of two hundred drums to package it all. But when they were done, there wasn’t a sniffer-dog in the world who’d bark at it.

That night, he had dinner with Hakim. Though Wilson had been in Lebanon for nearly a week, he had yet to speak to the Arab for more than five minutes at a time. They’d come to Baalbek in separate cars, following the Bekaa Valley as it curved north, arid and blond, between opposing mountain ranges. Once in Baalbek, Wilson was left to himself (and his minders), while Hakim made arrangements about the hash.

The hashish was a recent development, and it was an unpleasant surprise. During their time in Allenwood, Bo had assured him that finding money for Wilson’s project would not be a problem – money was never a problem. At the time, Hakim’s military operations had been subsidized by a prince who occupied a high position in the Ministry of the Interior in Riyadh. In return for the prince’s financial assistance, Hakim had promised to restrict his operations to targets outside the Happy Kingdom. And so he had.

But all that changed after 9/11. The prince was killed in an automobile accident (or so the Saudis claimed), and Hakim’s money supply dried up almost overnight. By the time Wilson was released from prison, operations were being funded with cloned and stolen credit cards, bank robberies, kidnappings, and drugs.

Just as Hakim had once worked with a prince in the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, he now worked with a general in Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense.

The Bekaa Valley was quilted with fields of marijuana grown on large and modern farms. Harvested with tractors and dried in barns, the plants were hand-rubbed through sieves of cloth, creating a resinous dust that was easily compressed into blocks of hashish.

It was up to Hakim to package the product and move it – that’s where Wilson came in. He would have preferred to be given a suitcase full of cash, and sent on his way to carry out his operation. Instead, he found himself having to earn the money the hard way, plunging into a Triangle Trade of drugs and guns and diamonds.

Moral issues didn’t bother him. He was beyond that. What worried Wilson was the fact that he was putting his life in the hands of a man who hated Americans. All he really knew about Hakim was what Bo told him. And Bo was insistent that the less Wilson and Hakim knew about each other, the better it would be for both of them. Still, he’d learned a few things about his dinner companion.

According to Bo, “Aamm Hakim” was a Jordanian. An Islamist, he’d attended universities in Iran and the United States. In the 1980s, he’d fought with the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, and with Hezbollah against the Americans in Beirut. When the Lebanese civil war wound down, he formed his own organization to carry out operations under contract to foreign intelligence agencies and others requiring deniability.

Were Hakim and his group a part of al-Qaeda? Wilson asked. Bo turned the question aside. Al-Qaeda isn’t like that, he told him. There’s a big al-Qaeda, and a little al-Qaeda. The big al-Qaeda is more of a network than an organization. It’s like the Internet, he said, a cloud of constantly changing connections, with no central command, a loose association of people with shared affinities. Some know each other, most don’t.

Does your uncle know bin-Laden? Wilson asked.

Uncomfortable with the question, Bo replied with a non sequitur: “They don’t call him bin-Laden. They call him the Contractor.”

The FBI’s “Most Wanted” website had its own version of Aamm Hakim. According to the Bureau, Wilson’s dinner companion was an Egyptian, né Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi, aka Ali Hussein Musalaam, Ahmed Izz-al-Din, and half a dozen other names.

He had a degree in accounting and was “the alleged military operations chief of the Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth.”

Wilson had clicked on the FBI link that explicated the ideology of various al-Qaeda splinter groups. The Coalition was composed of Salafi jihadists “who believe that ridding the world of modernity will result in an Islamic Revival, returning Muslim peoples worldwide to Islam’s most righteous path. While not rejecting technology as such, Salafi jihadists do reject Western (and especially U.S.) cultural hegemony. Orbiting the true believers at the center of the Coalition,” Wilson read, “is the usual assortment of mercenaries and foot soldiers.” According to the website, the Coalition was responsible for “attacks on American facilities in West Africa and the Far East.”

Wilson and Hakim sat in the dining room of the Hotel Dumas, a dilapidated relic with high ceilings and dusty chandeliers. If anything, the guest rooms were even more decrepit, with wooden beds little better than pallets. In its heyday, the place had been a destination of considerable glamour, hosting the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles de Gaulle. But that was then; now the Bekaa’s dust had taken hold. Pipes clanked. Doors creaked. Towels and rugs were threadbare.

But the food was delicious.

With the exception of Zero and Khalid, sipping tea at a table near the door, Wilson and Hakim were alone. Their party seemed to be the hotel’s only guests, though whether this was by accident or design was uncertain.

By now Wilson was not shocked by the arrival of the bottle of wine or the pleasure Hakim took in the ritual. Despite the Islamic ban on alcohol, the Arab liked to peruse the label, take a careful sniff of the cork when the waiter presented it, and judiciously taste the small splash of wine poured into his glass.

Hakim smacked his lips, nodded, and dismissed the waiter. He poured a glass for himself, then Wilson.

It was as if Hakim had read Wilson’s mind. Holding his glass up to the light, he sent the liquid into a slow, centrifugal spin. Finally, he took a sip. “I’m Takfiri,” he explained, his voice low and matter-of-fact. “You know this word?”

Wilson shook his head.

“It means that for us, the rules don’t matter. Wine, a girl, even pork – everything is allowed. Nothing is haram. ”

“Sweet,” Wilson remarked.

Hakim ignored the sarcasm. “It’s not ‘sweet.’ Everything is different for us. It has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re in a war,” he said, “and because we’re ‘behind the lines.’” Hakim said this as if he were explaining the obvious. “For us, sin is a kind of disguise.”