Conversations with Concrete E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In 2016 in Darayya, Syria, a siege is about to be lifted. Two young men, unaware of the impending truce, continue to fight on in the rubble.

Das E-Book Conversations with Concrete wird angeboten von BookRix und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
war, Syria, Darayya, young men, snipers, concrete

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

Conversations with Concrete

To the lemon trees, and their regrowth.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Conversations with Concrete

Darayya: Syria 2016

The bullet hit the concrete with a thwack but it did not penetrate.

Kareem pushed his automatic rifle through a hole the size of a football. He would get this f…er now.

He let off a random burst. Where was he? He did not know or care. Thank god for this wall, he thought, as another bullet slammed into the surface surrounding his shooting position.

It must be a sniper .. single shots, high velocity. If that guy was more accurate he would have been long gone.

Better break off; anyway, it was getting hot. He sat down at the foot of the wall his head in his hands.

Omar got it yesterday; they rolled him in an old carpet and dragged him low until they were out of line of sight.

Omar his childhood friend. He had wanted to be an architect. Kareem looked up and out at the skeletal remains of the city. He had even helped to build some of these blocks of flats, steel fixing the columns, then the floors, pouring the concrete then ever upwards. Shells, mortars and gunfire had knocked out the appartment walls and pocked the buildings, the skeleton remained, the reinforced pillars and floors took the punishment.

For this was a modern city war; old mud brick buildings just collapsed under the siege. Indeed the destruction actually created hiding places in the rubble. As long as it was concrete.

If the war ever ended there would be a need for architects, and steel fixers.

He crawled under a piece of corrugated iron for shade. Who would pay for all this to be reconstructed?

With a whoosh a mortar suddenly exploded in the air above him. The corrugated iron protecting him from the blast was blown away along with a huge chunk of wall.

He was exposed now to the sniper. Kareem felt the next shot whistle past his ear; in that second he dived down and wormed his way further along the wall where it still stood tall. The concrete reinforcing bars were exposed, twisted from the vertical at an odd angle outwards like the limb of a sapling.

There was no greenery here now. When they had first occupied the compound three fruit trees had stood in leaf, the lemons just beginning to ripen.

All the leaves had been blasted off in the first mortar attack then the barrel bomb had uprooted them.

He wiped the dust from his weapon. The smell of cordite drifted over him then the smell of the concrete as the sniper took another chunk out of the wall. What was he wasting bullets on the wall for? Was he trying to get him to move?

He saw a movement on one of the buildings behind his lines; someone had ducked behind a pillar. One of his own side. Their own sniper, perhaps aware of his predicament; had he seen how he was pinned down? A crack then silence. Had he fired? Had he been successful?

Kareem was experienced now; four years of this, he was not going to take chances.

He picked up a piece of the iron roof and tossed it into the opening. A twang and it spun away hit by a bullet.