The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

Professional diplomats, some of them the most certified of cynics who hadn't
seen the inside of a church since childhood, felt the weight of such pressure as
they had never known. Sketchy reports from Vatican custodial staffers spoke of
solitary midnight walks down the nave of Saint Peter's, strolls along outside
balconies on clear, starlit nights, long talks of some participants with the
Holy Father. But nothing else. The highly-paid TV anchors stared at one another
in awkward silences. Print journalists struggled and stole any good idea they
could find just so that they could produce some copy. Not since Carter's
marathon stint at Camp David had such weighty negotiations proceeded with so
little reportage.
And the world held its breath.
***
The old man wore a red fez trimmed with white. Not many continued the
characteristic manner of dress, but this one kept to the way of his ancestors.
Life was hard for the Druse, and the one solace he had lay in the religion he'd
observed for all of his sixty-six years.
The Druse are members of a Middle Eastern religious sect combining aspects of
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, founded by Al-hakim bi'amrillahi, Caliph of
Egypt in the 11th Century, who had deemed himself the incarnation of God
Himself. Living for the most part in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, they occupy a
precarious niche in the societies of all three nations. Unlike Muslim Israelis,
they are allowed to serve in the armed forces of the Jewish state, a fact that
does not engender trust for the Syrian Druse in the government that rules over
them. While some Druse have risen to command in the Syrian army, it was
well-remembered that one such officer, a colonel commanding a regiment, had been
executed after the 1973 war for being forced off a strategic crossroads. Though
in strictly military terms he'd fought bravely and well, and had been lucky to
extract what remained of his command in good order, the loss of that crossroads
had cost the Syrian army a pair of tank brigades, and as a result the colonel
had been summarily executed . . . for being unlucky, and probably for being a
Druse.
The old farmer didn't know all of the details behind that story, but knew
enough. The Syrian Muslims had killed another Druse then, and more since. He
accordingly trusted no one from the Syrian army or government. But that did not
mean that he had the least affection for Israel, either. In 1975, a
long-barrelled Israeli 175mm gun had scoured his area, searching for a Syrian
ammunition depot, and the fragments from one stray round had mortally wounded
his wife of forty years, adding loneliness to his surfeit of misery. What for
Israel was a historical constant was for this simple farmer an immediate and
deadly fact of life. Fate had decided that he should live between two armies,
both of which regarded his physical existence as an annoying inconvenience. He
was not a man who had ever asked much of life. He had a small holding of land
which he farmed, a few sheep and goats, a simple house built of stones he'd
carried from his rocky fields. All he wanted to do was live. It was not, he'd
once thought, all that much to ask, but sixty-six turbulent years had proven him
wrong and wrong again. He'd prayed for mercy from his God, and for justice, and
for just a few comforts – he'd always known that wealth would never be his – so