Mike Bond Bound. Mike Bond

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      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.”

      43

      THEY WERE CHUBBY, DUSTY LITTLE GIRLS with wan faces and long chestnut braids. “We're all soaked and filthy,” Anne-Marie said. “Didn't want you to see me like this.”

      “We're human, Anne-Marie. We're alive.”

      “Everyone else in the building is dead.”

      “The ones who were knocking, they're still down there –”

      “I told the rescue team. They're looking.”

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