2000 AFC Asian Cup

Soheil felt like he was trapped in a nightmare from which he couldn't awaken. He couldn’t breathe, and he wasn't sure which direction was up. Something was on top of him, and he violently pushed it away. His head broke through the surface of the water, and he struggled for breath but coughed up water instead. The sun was blinding, and he looked away from it. He recognized the color of the water around him and knew he was in the sea off Beirut. A dead body was floating beside him, apparently the object that had been smothering him. Several other people were flailing around in the water beside him, and nearby, an armored car belonging to the Lebanese army was sinking beneath the waves. Looking towards the shore, Soheil saw a black mushroom cloud with fire in its center rising hundreds of feet above the Beirut skyline. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but it was something terrible. The last thing he remembered was walking down the seafront on his way to deliver some hashish to Joey. He had almost reached his destination, and the Embassy was in sight just over a block away. Everything after that was a blank. Had a disaster befallen the Embassy? Had someone dropped a nuclear bomb? Although the plume of smoke was taller than the most powerful Israeli bomb, it couldn’t be a nuke, since even the smallest one would have vaporized him and Beirut. Perhaps he was already dying from a neutron bomb's radiation poisoning. The shoreline was rapidly filling up with spectators, and although…