Читать книгу City of the Lost - Will Adams - Страница 7

Georges Bejjani was tapping a cigarette from its soft pack when the bomb exploded a short distance ahead. He didn’t see the blast itself, for it took place on a side road and thus was obscured by the black glass exterior of the Daphne International Hotel. And, because it was a fraction of a second before the first sound reached them, he thought momentarily that he was suffering some kind of weird hallucination, perhaps an optical illusion caused by sunlight and the midday haze. But then a silver 4×4 came back-flipping out onto the road and he heard the sudden thunder of it, and alarms began tripping all around them as a canopy of thick black smoke spread low across the sky.

Faisal slammed on the brakes, began instantly to turn. He was trained, after all, for such emergencies. But the traffic had been squeezed into a single lane by an unloading lorry and an oncoming van screeched to a halt right beside them, pinning them in. A fist of stone punched the passenger-side window, buckling the frame and turning the glass seawater green for a fraction of a second before it shattered and fell away. Debris pattered and then pounded upon their roof like a sudden squall of hail. Even while it was still coming down, Georges whipped out his mobile to call his elder brother. ‘Bomb,’ he said, the moment Michel answered. ‘Get Father back to the boat.’

‘Are you okay?’ asked Michel.

‘We’re fine. Just get him safe.’

‘On our way now,’ Michel assured him. ‘Was it for us?’

‘I don’t know. It went off ten seconds ago. But it was right outside the hotel.’

‘Then it was for us,’ said Michel.

‘I’ll check into it.’

‘Be careful.’

Georges snorted. ‘Count on it,’ he said. He turned to Faisal and his bodyguard Sami. ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said. ‘But we’re out of here before the police show. Okay?’

They ran forward in a crouch, wary of a second device or of gunmen waiting to ambush the first responders. Childhood in Lebanon was a harsh teacher. Dazed people appeared like a zombie army from the smoke, clothes torn and ashen, faces bloody and smeared. The smoke grew black as night, choking and eye-burning. They passed cars on their roofs and sides, reached the front of the stricken hotel. Only the right-hand side of the road here had been developed, affording hotel guests uninterrupted views of Daphne’s gorgeous valley from the balconies. But the bomb had chomped a vast bite from this road, tarmac and hardcore tumbling in a great rubble avalanche down the hillside. The resultant crater had also been partially filled with shattered black glass, broken masonry and other debris from the hotel itself. A forearm protruded from beneath a chunk of grey concrete at such a grotesque angle that Georges couldn’t be sure it was even still attached. The block was too heavy for him alone, but Faisal and Sami helped him lift it high enough to reveal the man beneath. They looked away, sickened, let the masonry fall back down.

In the distance, sirens. Police, medics, maybe even the army. They were near to a war zone here, and this whole region was prone to earthquakes. They’d have experts and heavy lifting machinery. Staying here wouldn’t help anyone, would only invite the kinds of questions he wished to avoid. He needed to find answers before returning to the boat, but this wasn’t the place. Sami looked meaningfully at him. He gave the nod and they ran together back to the car, then pulled a sharp turn in the road and drove away even as the first emergency vehicles raced past them to the site.