Holy War. Mike Bond

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 and down to the Museum, stored the AK47 in the side-street ruins of a store called Anita's Gifts. There was less war here, just the constant whiffle and swish of things going over, the rattle of guns and thump of mortars. There was a line of overturned buses across Avenue Abdallah Yafi with two armored cars and at least one tank lurking in caves in the rubble, their snouts pointing into the street, and machine guns and rockets in the windows behind. Beyond the shell-shocked intersection, on the Christian side, it was the same.

      Behind the overturned buses was a space with gleaming concertina wire and sandbagged positions with fifty calibers. A mujihadeen checked Rosa's papers and spoke on the radio while she sat quietly on a sandbag and it seemed as if the whole cool heavy night weighted down her neck and shoulders. She let it wash over her, told herself she would do this one last thing and no more. It would be enough and if it weren't, she'd tell them she'd given up.

      The mujihadeen came back. “You really need to go?”

      “My father's in a basement by the Sacre-Coeur.”

      “There's surely people there...”

      “The building's empty. He's confused, doesn't understand, won't leave.” She looked down, at the mujihadeen's dirty yellow-blue running shoes, how they wouldn't stand still on the ground littered with empty cartridges and cigarette butts.

      “They're animals,” he said, “over there. Shot a Palestinian girl last night. Twenty-three, going over to look for food.”

      “She looked up into his fair, troubled eyes. “You remind me of my brother.”

      “How was he?”

      “Very sweet.” She stepped round him past the barricade and down the middle СКАЧАТЬ