They sat next to Ann and me in the back of the plane and spent part of the flight tossing the gold bricks back and forth for fun. Each of the boys in the family had a specially fitted money belt containing six gold bars strapped around his stomach, and one of them also had a shoe box filled with the precious metal. The Swiss police immediately swooped in to inspect our fellow passengers, who turned out not to be hijackers bearing guns and knives, although they were carrying plenty of metal they were an Armenian family of jewelers bringing bricks of gold back to Beirut.
As each stepped through the metal detector, it would erupt with a buzz and a flashing red light, like a pinball machine about to tilt. When we got in line to walk through the metal detector at our boarding gate, we found ourselves standing behind three broad-shouldered, mustachioed Lebanese men.
It was the start of the nearly ten-year journey through the Middle East that is the subject of this book. In June 1979, my wife, Ann, and I boarded a red-and-white Middle East Airlines 707 in Geneva for the four-hour flight to Beirut.
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