Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 54

42

THEY CAME QUICKLY when they came – bulldozers shaking the earth, the concrete slab creaking over him. She kept hammering the wall and stopping and hammering and stopping, and someone hammered back.

A shovel or pick, clanking the earth. Every time they stopped, she hammered. Every time they started again they were closer.

“Tell them,” André called, “not to shake this slab.”

There was the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer and the nearer clank of shovels, then something crashed down on the slab making him yell out and the air was full of dust and he realized he could see. Gray grainy light making him blink.

“André?”

“Can you see?”

She was calling out in Arabic, the same word, over and over. The noise stopped. A voice, a man's voice, coming down a tunnel from far above.

“Please!” André couldn't help himself. “Please get us out.”

“They're coming!” she called. “I've told them not to shake the slab. They're going to dig in from next door.”

MOHAMMED’S MUJIHADEEN came to Nicolas and Samantha's back door and took Neill, sleepy and cold with a black hood over his head, to another car, not a Mercedes but a smaller, jolting sedan with an importunate whining engine. They drove across early morning Beirut, the streets already loud with trucks, car horns, boys hawking papers –”Jumblatt declares truce!” Strange how it goes on, he thought, in the middle of the war. Like new cells growing while you die of cancer. The farmer plowing his field. A jet went over, low, he couldn't tell which kind. Never, he realized, have I felt so bad. It's going to kill me, Beirut. Breaking my heart.

They walked him up fifty-nine stairs and down a long corridor that turned twice. They stopped and knocked. “Who's that?” a man beyond the door said.

“Your grandmother, dinkhead!”

The door opened and they shoved him into a room with a carpet and the smell of coffee. There was a short-wave radio receiving in the background but he couldn't understand it. Someone snatched off the hood. The lights were bright. He rubbed his eyes. There were a lot of mujihadeen with Uzis. They led him down a corridor to another room where a lean, balding man with a full beard, dressed in a white robe, sat on cushions in the corner. The two mujihadeen who were with him got up and left. “Sorry to wake you so early,” he said. “Can we get you coffee or tea? Some bread?”

“Coffee and bread. Might as well be sleepy with a full stomach.”

“Sir down. We have half an hour.”

“You're?”

“The one you've come all this way to see.”

“You don't look like your picture.”

“They're all mistaken, the intelligence agencies. Even yours.”

“I don't deal with MI6, the CIA –”

“I hear from Michael Szay in Bratislava that perhaps you do. He warned me to avoid you.”

“I asked him to find you because I hope to tell your side to the West. Michael doesn't want that.”

“Why not?”

“He likes selling you guns. He likes the war the way it's going.”

“Everybody uses Lebanon to get something for himself. Britain, France, you...” Mohammed tried to settle himself on the sofa. “So tell me. Where do you think this war's going?”

THE RESCUERS BROKE through the next basement and jacked up one side of the concrete slab an inch so André could slide out. He tried to stand and fell down. “Get her.”

“We're fine,” she called. “Don't worry.”

They tried to jack the floor up higher but it was pinned by debris above. Someone wrapped him in a blanket and gave him hot sugared tea and bread. They dug a trench out of the floor with the jackhammer but could go no further because the hose wasn't long enough. André crawled back under the slab, past the place he had been pinned, but could not reach her. The concrete was rough like sandpaper and cold as the bottom of the sea. He was sure it was going to fall on him.

“Anne-Marie!” he called. She did not answer. Someone came in with another length of hose and a short skinny crippled man dragged the jackhammer further under the slab.

“He's going to shake it down on us,” André said. The others were shoving pieces of plank on top of each other to hold up the slab.

The jackhammer chattered, the hoses hissing, the generator in the street outside revving and dying down. The jackhammer noise stopped, the slab shivered, slid lower. Voices echoed under the slab, hers, the jackhammer man's. They grew louder, Anne-Marie's voice coming toward him, and he took her hands as she crawled out from under the slab, a tall, pretty, short-haired woman squinting in the generator lights, two little girls behind her.

A camera flashed. “That's forty-two today!” someone said in French, slapped André's shoulder. The jackhammer man came sliding out, dragging his tool and hose.

“Thank you,” André said to him. “Thank you, God!” He knelt and Anne-Marie with him. Hugging each other and the two little girls, they wept and prayed in French and Arabic to God and Allah for their salvation.

“YOU DENY bombing the American Marines?” Neill said.

Mohammed's eyes turned on him. Exactly like a hawk's, Neill decided. A blue-eyed Shiite hawk. Something else for Freeman to chew on.

“A month before the American and French barracks were bombed,” Mohammed said, “do you remember what happened?”

“Let's see, that was October eighty-three. In September?”

“In September, as you would count it. When Ronald Reagan ordered the USS New Jersey, the John Rogers, and the Virginia to shell the Muslim and Druze villages in the Shouf. Have you seen what they did?”

“I'm American. I don't dare go to the Shouf.”

“They killed five thousand people, nearly all women and children. They killed my brother and his wife and their seven children and her parents, and half the people in their village. My brother and his wife were cooking dinner for their family when the shell from the New Jersey hit their house. And while my cousins were digging through the ruins, trying to find their children, French planes killed them with phosphorous bombs.” Mohammed looked away, and Neill had a moment of pity for him, realized he was trying not to weep. “You Westerners think because we are Arab we do not feel?” Mohammed said. “You think that the death of an American child is more important than that of my four-year-old nephew?”

“I left America after Vietnam,” Neill said. “It hasn't changed. I'll never move back.”

“Have you ever seen what a phosphorous bomb does to someone? Or a high-explosive shell the size of a car? If you had, you would understand why Hussein Musawi said that if America kills our people then we must kill Americans.”

Neill reached out, his hand on Mohammed's wrist. “I'm not your enemy.”

“You're a journalist. What I don't understand is why your newspapers won't tell the truth.”

“American newspapers will never print the truth about what caused this war.”

“But you are here representing a British paper.”

“In Britain most of the newspapers are owned by very rich conservatives and staffed by people with little experience and lots of opinions.”

“But yours is supposed to be the best, liberal –”

“Liberal in England means seeing things through a cloud of preconceptions. Having a lot of ideas you've never tested because you went from university to a nice desk somewhere and you've never seen much of the real world.”

“So you see why we've taken prisoners – hostages you would call them. We have no faith in your ability to police yourselves, to say the truth and act upon it. Knowing you are very sentimental and will raise a fuss about one person in a Hezbollah prison while you help to kill thousands of innocents in Lebanon, even let thousands of your own innocents die on your roadways, we've decided to act on your sentimentality by taking an occasional prisoner.”

“So who bombed the Marines, the French paratroopers, the US Embassy?”

“If you knew, would you print it?”

“I'd try. But before I left London my editor told me he couldn't be even sure he'd print this interview.”

“What would make him decide?”

“If he felt the story had a UK draw. Said he's tired of hearing about Beirut.”

“You mean he's tired of hearing about Arabs.”

“My editor, like much of Anglo-Saxon England, scorns Arabs.”

“And you?”

“I scorn the human race.”

“Seven years I've fought the Christians. I've fought the Syrians and the Druzes and the Israelis and Amal. I've killed people from across the sea and people from my own village. I've killed people whose faces I've never seen, and I've killed the friend who shared his goat cheese and bread with me at school every noon. I shot him in the face...”

“I'm learning war and religion are the same thing. It's best to be what we want, not what we’re told.”

“If you asked the Druze what are their terms for peace, what would they say?”

“As we've said – their hegemony and punishment of Christian war crimes.”

“No, I mean with us.”

“They'd want you back where you were. Out of their hills.”

“They would compromise a bit?”

“Surely.”

“What if you got a good compromise and came to us and we said yes?”

“What have I got to do with this?”

“You're one of the few journalists here right now who has any credibility with us.”

“I don't have a whole lot, right now, with the other side.”

“Why? You're certainly not pro-Arab.”

“Westerners have a complete inability to understand this place. Anyway, nobody wants to hear the truth if it's inconvenient.”

“Once somebody has said something to the papers it's harder to back out.”

Neill shook his head. “You don't know the human race.”

Mohammed smiled. “Talk to the Druze – Walid Jumblatt. He says he wants peace.”