Chapter 11
along the harbor in Beirut said it hadn’t sounded like a fire at all, not at the end. A child, a girl of eight named Adeline
Hamoud, who was picked out of the rubble of an apartment building half a mile away, said in the last seconds before the detonation,
there was a kind of rattling hiss, like a cobra, but so much louder. She said it sounded like a cobra as big as a plane, hissing and preparing to strike. It was the last thing Adeline
heard before the building collapsed on her.
When Warehouse 12 exploded, it went off with over a kiloton of force, flattening houses, melting twelve-story cranes like
birthday candles, flinging waterside bulldozers as if they were made of paper. The explosion was so powerful, it shook windows
in the Gaza Strip, two hundred miles away. In Cypress, a mere 150 miles away, people in the streets of Nicosia threw themselves
to the ground, taking shelter from what they believed was a nearby explosion. Later, the power of the blast was estimated
to be far in excess of the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima.
Doctors concluded Adeline Hamoud was suffering from PTSD when she spoke of hearing a giant snake that hissed and rattled in
the moments before her life quite literally crashed down around her, crushing her parents and older sister. They assumed much
the same about the other dozen or so who reported hearing the shriek and roar of some tremendous animal, laying waste to the
harbor.