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them.
     
     

FOUR
     
    Sidon, Lebanon
     
    They hadn't driven a mile before all hell
broke loose. One moment the half-deserted streets were peaceful and
sunny, and the next, the roars and shrieks and thunderous
explosions of bombardment rent the air.
    It was as if the skies had suddenly broken
open and the apocalypse was at hand. A fusillade of forty
simultaneously launched Israeli rockets crashed to earth, five of
them smashing into a six-storey building not three hundred feet in
front of the taxi.
    'Allah help us!' the driver shrieked as he
slammed on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel abruptly to the
left, throwing the battered white Mercedes into a short broadside
skid.
    In the front passenger seat, Johnny Stone
grabbed the dashboard with one hand and the doorhandle with the
other. He held on for dear life as the balding tyres squealed
against the locked brakes and the car slid sideways, wedging him
against the door with its careening centrifugal force. When it came
to a halt, they were blocking both lanes.
    The building in front of them disintegrated
as if in slow motion. The front wall burst out and the roof blew
sky-high. A tree was uprooted and sent flying, and tortured pieces
of wreckage rained down all around, miraculously falling short of
the car. Already, a massive rising cloud of dust and debris was
hiding the destruction from view.
    'Another few seconds,' the Arab driver
muttered, 'and we would have been blown up also. But we are alive.
Insah Allah.'
    'Insah Allah ,' Johnny Stone agreed,
automatically reaching for the Leica which hung around his neck. It
was the professional photographer's instantaneous reaction, and he
had to fight against it, forcing himself to leave the camera be. He
had taken enough pictures of scenes just like this one. What good
would one more do? What good had any of them done?
    Just then a second fusillade of rockets
fell, and orange fireballs mushroomed all around. What sounded like
a sonic boom rolled at them, and the street ahead shimmered in the
heat wave as furious flames leapt and crackled and devoured.
    'We turn around,' the driver said, already
backing up and putting the Mercedes through a series of deft
manoeuvres. 'I know another way,' he said, flicking Johnny a
sideways glance. 'Allah willing, we will get you to Damascus in
time for your flight.'
    Johnny twisted around in his seat. His eyes
were veiled as he looked out through the dusty rear window. All
around, fires burned furiously. The cloud of dust was starting to
settle, and where the building had stood, he now saw furnished
rooms listing like some crazy giant doll's house. From somewhere,
he could hear distant ululating cries of grief.
    Lebanon.
    He sighed wearily.
    How he'd loved it, how wonderful had been
the energetic clash of East meeting West.
    His lips tightened grimly.
    How he had come to hate it.
    But he'd always returned for one more
picture, one more documentation of death and destruction and
suffering. Well, no more. This time he was off - arrivederci , baby! - and for good. Nothing could stop him,
not hell or high water, not his editor back at Life , not all
the bombs in the Middle East. Once his mind was made up about
something, Johnny Stone was unstoppable. The only drummer he
listened to was his own.
    Johnny Stone was an award-winning
photographer, a freelancer who dared tread where lesser - or wiser
- men refused. He was thirty-five years old, a mixture of Irish and
German. He had black hair and green-blue eyes and a decidedly
cynical cast to his mouth.
    He was not handsome, but he was virile: tall
and lean and hard-bodied. Women found him devastatingly
attractive.
    He also had an over-abundance of talent,
fame, self-confidence, and nerves of steel.
    And he needed them now. On both sides of the
taxi, the buildings were bombed-out ruins, jagged fingers of stone
and stucco reaching up into the sky. There was very little glass to
be seen: it had been blasted to smithereens. In the