Holy War. Mike Bond
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each.”
“Like I told Emmaus, no full automatic.”
The man snorted. “You really think those poor kids are going to be into a paradise of solid pussy, where you're sending them?”
A rocket screamed into the floor upstairs and after the explosion there was a long roaring sound like oil catching fire and with a great shrug the floor above them fell outwards. “You heard me,” Mohammed said. “I told them to pull back.”
“To that building that makes the L,” the man said. “And where the hell are they going to pull back to from there?”
Another rocket blew out the ceiling and people were leaning out of the windows to escape from the fumes but the Christians in the Life Building saw them and raked the windows just as Rosa ran screaming at them. “Get down! Get down!” And now there was another to add to the pile of thin young men who lay in the corner uncomplaining, dressed in their own blood.
“Get that sniper!” Rosa screamed.
“More sandbags!” someone was yelling down the stairs. “Bring up more sandbags!”
It was the radio operator who'd been hit, half his head taken off, like a biology textbook, she thought, “Look inside your brain”. But now they couldn't send messages and Hassan ran downstairs to get the girl off the machine gun in the street who knew the signals.
Skidding on blood, Rosa ran into a bedroom. There was a canopied double bed and two dressers with a crucifix high between them. She tore the spread off the bed and swept the snapshots off the dressers into it, some clothes from the drawers, silk scarves, an alarm clock, a pair of heels, tied it all up tight. Bullets were hitting the front of the building like rain, singing up and down the stairway like lost birds. She took down the crucifix, broke it in two, shoved half in the bag and half in her gown.
Back in the living room people were stacking sandbags against the front wall. An AK47 stood against a wall beside a stack of 30-round magazines. Its stock was split and had been wrapped carefully with black tape. Rosa set it to single and crossed halfway to the sandbagged window, aimed across the smoky darkness at a shred of window in the hulk of the Life Building, fired a shot, thought she saw a spark ten feet high, to the left. She backed away and stood rubbing her shoulder where the splintered stock had punched it.
She took one extra magazine. Mohammed was talking into the radio, gave her a surprised look as she left. She went down the seven sets of stairs to the front hallway and stopped ten feet from the door. The hallway was a vaulted dark tunnel to the shallow darkness of the street; something lay on the floor – rubble maybe, or a person. No, just sandbags, two of them, broken.
She crept nearer the door. A chunk of glowing metal fell into the street, writhing and twisting. In its light she saw a burnt car on bare rims, behind it a tall façade with sky through its windows. A rocket hammered overhead, stone crashing and crunching into the street.
Her hands were shaking, her thighs shivering, the rifle kept sliding off her shoulder. She felt as if she'd throw up any moment. She started back up the stairs but forced herself to turn round, go down to the door, look out. Men were running down the street, one with a rocket on his shoulder – fedayeen. She ducked into the hallway, waited till they passed, and edged forward to the door.
More footsteps – a fast shuffle, uneven. Dogs, she worried. No, a single man, bent over, leaving a black trail on the street. Bearded, dirty, head uncovered, unseeing, stumbling, clenching his stomach. Shia? Amal or Hezbollah? Palestinian? Just another refugee?
If she followed him he’d attract snipers before she did. Head down, she stepped into the street holding the bedspread of trinkets loosely over the AK47. The man wobbled and weaved down the hill between the narrow burning buildings, his trail of blood glinting. The way it was spurting and slacking, it had to be an artery, an artery in his gut.
He fell over a pram lying sideways in the street and writhed, shrieking. She ducked into a doorway. If anyone was going to shoot him, they'd wait now, let him suffer. Watching him grovel sideways, in a circle, she was suddenly shocked by this idea of suffering: we like to make others suffer. That was war. That was its purpose.
But why do we like to make others suffer?
He'd risen to his knees. A few rounds whined down the street, twanged off a façade. In a collapsed building somewhere someone was screaming. With a faraway whoosh a Mirage was climbing after a bombing run. The man stood, clenching his gut, stumbled bent over in a circle, looking for his way. He fell, got up and continued down Rue Weygand toward the Green Line.
At the end of the street the glowing carcass of a tank lit up the dark stumps of buildings on Place des Martyres. Tracers were trading tiny yellow and red fires, like electrons, Rosa thought, back and forth. A shell hit a building, a red-white flash and contorted black smoke boiling up. The man staggered boldly out into Martyres, stumbled over something, straightened, and fell down.
He lay flat and unmoving in the red glare of the tank; she couldn't tell if he'd been shot or had just died. Maybe he was resting. Anyway she couldn't chance it.
She backtracked to the first row of standing buildings and turned south. She'd go down Rue Basta and cross at the Museum, hide the gun before she went across and get another on the Christian side. From a corner she glanced back but could not see Mohammed's outpost. Rockets were still coming over, a big recoilless rifle hitting near, 155s in Martyres now. Even if she reached the Life Building it might be too late, and she'd lose him. No, she decided, Mohammed would never be so stupid as to let the Christians kill him.
13
THE RECEPTION ROOM was bigger than his parents' Normandy farm, a three-story ceiling with crystal chandeliers and a double staircase spiraling down from a gallery where a few guests ambled arm in arm. There were Louis XIV chairs and settees and ancient Persian rugs on the polished herringbone oak, Renaissance tapestries on the stone walls.
The whole place curdled André's stomach. Over the heads of well-dressed silver-haired men and hard-smiling jeweled women he looked for Monique but couldn't see her. Her kind of place, really. Her husband would eat it right up.
Hammurabi, as broad as he was tall, held court on center stage, an eager flock around him. Humans just like roaches, André thought; a little excrement pulls them right in. A little money.
Walid Farrahan, code-named Hammurabi in French secret service files, had plenty of that. Every war is fought primarily for profit, and Hammurabi had always been one of the first to shove his face into the trough. Fancy receptions in his Marais mansion to which company presidents and members of Parliament and ministers and ambassadors from nearly every country came scurrying by the hundreds, to clasp his great hard paw and beg for the tools of death.
And for the really lucky there were the soirées intimes in the mansion's back rooms, the saunas and spa rooms, the swimming pool on the roof. A French citizen now, Hammurabi was, they couldn't throw him out. Even if they wanted.
“Ah, the Legionnaire,” Hammurabi rumbled out of his great chest when André forced his way through the throng. “My office told me. Enjoying yourself?”
“Of course.”
Hammurabi waved a sausage finger at the others. “Give us a moment?”
Magically they vanished. “I'm leaving in a few days,” André said. “I don't want to promise anything I can't do.”
Hammurabi fondled a piece of metal round his neck, beneath his tuxedo – a huge diamond-studded cross. “My staff has already confirmed you.” He squeezed André's arm. “See how fast we work? When you get to Beirut and have your order, cable it through with payment. Normal procedure,” he smiled. “Don't worry, my dear Legionnaire, you'll have your scramblers.”
“Conforming to specs?”
“A laser-guided bomb works on very simple principles, as you know. I wouldn't offer you scramblers if they didn't work, would I?”
WATCHING FOR MINES Rosa crossed over the shattered crest of Beirut on Rue Basta