In the bell tower of the artillery-shattered Greek Orthodox church, Colonel Viktor Dastgerdi put his eyes to the fifty-power lenses of the tripod-mounted siege binoculars. He spun the pan crank to scan the Bekaa Valley and the mountains of eastern Lebanon. Swirling snow blurred the images of rocks and abandoned fields and ice. He panned the optics across the landscape to the gray foothills of the Sahel Mountains. He found the red X.

Ten kilometers away, more than five kilometers into Syria, the Xof brilliant-red plastic — two crossed sheets a hundred meters long, ten meters wide — marked the position of a miniaturized transmitter.

Through the binoculars, Dastgerdi saw the red sheets shimmer as gusts of wind tore at the plastic. Storm clouds passed, the late-afternoon light coming in intermittent moments of sudden glare. Sunlight flashed from rocks white with snow. He turned the tripod's altitude crank to drop the aspect of the binoculars and surveyed the narrow, rutted track leading to the target. He saw the truck racing back to the base.

"They are away!" Dastgerdi shouted down to the technicians. "Confirm the signal."

The church had taken several high-explosive shells during the wars fought in the Bekaa. Only the bell tower and the walls remained, the stones and plaster pitted by shrapnel, the roof timbers and pews carried away by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards for their fires. Syrian technicians manned electronic consoles in the small rooms of the bombed-out sanctuary. Canvas tenting provided shelter from the falling snow.

A radio specialist flipped an audio switch. An oscillating tone came from a monitor. The technician called out to his commander, "Receiving the signal."

"Fire the rockets."

A voice shouted orders, first in Arabic, then Farsi. Below the bell tower, in what had been the main street of the village before the wars came to the Bekaa, Syrians and Iranians hurried away from a truck-mounted 240mm rocket launcher.