some sort of local disturbance?”
The ranger ignored his question, his bearded face showing no flicker of expression. His eyes skimmed the inside of the cab, lingered on Khalid a second, then returned to Yousaf.
“I see you’re with Daud Fuel and Energy out of the capital,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Headed where?”
“The power station at Chikar,” Khalid said.
The ranger’s eyes were steady on him.
“I’ll have a look at your papers, if you please,” he said.
Khalid had them ready on a clipboard. He leaned over and passed it out the window.
“Is it not late for a delivery?” the guard said, flipping through the permits and manifests
Yousaf had kept his left hand on the steering wheel. Now he flapped it in a gesture of long-suffering resignation and let it drop onto his seat near the floor-mounted stick shift.
“In winter our rail shipment from Dera Ghazi comes when it comes… and what can we do but wait for our pickup?” he said. “Today a storm in the valley put them — and us — three hours behind schedule.”
Silence. The wind blew across the snow-decked summits and ledges of the vast mountain range, swirling shrouds of powder into the air. They drifted under the moonlight and sprinkled crystalline glitter onto Yousaf’s hood and windshield.
He glanced into his rearview mirror and watched the second border guard continue down the left side of the truck toward its flatbed. He’d expected the rangers would not leave well enough alone, although his answers to the questions posed him had been verifiable. The shipment’s destination, his explanation for its lateness… that was all true as far as it went. Daud was a legitimate coal and petroleum company, and nine times out of ten its trucks to points out along the country’s eastern and western territories carried only their declared cargo.
Yousaf doubted it was any coincidence that this stop had occurred at the odd trip out. Someone had been clued to something. Presumably something vague and largely dismissed, though. Otherwise there would have been more than a token military presence out on the road.
“Respectfully, might we be allowed to get underway?” he asked. “The drivers are tired, and we still have a distance to travel.”
The ranger looked at him.
“I’ll let you go as soon as possible,” he said. “But my men will need to inspect the back of your trucks.”
Yousaf made a surprised face, eased his left hand down into the space between the driver’s and passenger seats.
“To what purpose?” he said, and felt his heartbeat quicken. In a moment, he knew, the soldier would radio the jeeps. “Each is carrying upwards of forty-five thousand kilos of coal. It will be this time tomorrow before you’re finished.”
“Relax, I didn’t say we’d have to shovel it all onto the road.” The ranger started to pass the clipboard back through the open window. “You have your job, we have ours.”
And that was the regrettable catch, Yousaf thought.
With the ranger’s arm still inside the cab, holding out the clipboard, Yousaf grabbed his wrist with his right hand to pull him forward and off-balance. At the same instant he brought his knife up from the space behind the clutch with his other hand, swept it in front of and across his own chest, and plunged it into the ranger’s throat under the angle of the jaw to penetrate the trachea, sharply turning its serrated blade in the wound, then jerking it to the right to cut a wide horizontal slit that severed both carotid arteries.
The ranger’s eyes rolled and he emitted a barely audible sputtering sound. His hot blood steaming in the cold night air, pulsing over Yousaf’s hand and arm from the ragged gash in his throat, he slumped forward as Yousaf held on to his wrist to keep his body pressed up against the side of the truck a little longer.
Khalid had already thrown open the passenger door. Now he whipped his sound-and-flash-suppressed Steyr tactical machine pistol from inside his coat, leaned out, and twisted around at the waist to where the second ranger now stood by the trailer, his back to the truck’s cab.
In the loud throbbing of wind between the mountain flanks, the soldier hadn’t yet heard anything unusual. Nor did he notice until after Yousaf had released his dying companion to let him hit the ground with the knife buried in his throat, and then clenched the steering wheel in one hand, rammed the truck’s gearshift into “forward” with dripping, blood-slicked fingers, and lowered his foot onto the gas pedal.
It was only as the truck lurched toward the barricade that the second ranger looked to see what was happening and was struck by a muffled, flashless volley from Khalid’s polymer-skinned weapon. The ranger went down at once, collapsing as if deflated, his legs folding underneath him.
The passenger door still open, Khalid pulled his head back into the cab and faced forward.
Tensing, he dug the fingers of his free hand into the side of his bucket seat, holding the grip of his TMP with the other. The coal truck trundled slowly forward, the barrier growing larger in its windshield. Khalid saw soldiers pour out of their jeeps in disorganized haste, expecting to be rammed broadside, firing at the truck as they split toward the opposite shoulders of the road.
His head ducked low as bullets peppered the windshield, Khalid triggered a return salvo out his wide-flung door and saw one of the evacuating soldiers go down. In back of him the two other coal trucks remained at a complete stop, their doors also thrown open now. The men leaping from their cabs onto the road carried heavier firearms than his own compact machine pistol, Kalashnikov AK-100s with night optics and GP-30 underbarrel grenade launchers.
Shattered windshield glass flying over him, blood streaming into his eyes from cuts on his cheeks and forehead, Khalid fired the Steyr until its clip was spent, then tossed it onto his seat, reached down between his legs, pulled open a camouflaged access panel in the floor of the cab, and extracted an AK-100 from a hidden compartment. A moment later it was stuttering in his hand.
Now a pop from behind, a whistle overhead, and Khalid knew one of his confederates at the rear had sent a 40-mm VOG projectile arcing over the barricade from his tube. He mentally counted down and heard another streak past him at a level trajectory — this grenade issued from the same weapon, its direction and angle of elevation changed to confuse its targets about their enemy’s position. The first air-burst round lit the night above the left side of the road where several of the rangers had scrambled for cover, its nose detonated by a timed fourteen-second fuze, pelting the area below with a hail of fragmented metal. The next bounding round exploded an almost imperceptible three seconds later and shredded apart lower to the ground on the right. Khalid could hear high, piercing screams through the blast, punctuated with sharp little
And then the barricade ceased to exist, Yousaf plowing into its crossbeam with a final surge of acceleration, reducing it to scraps of broken wood. They buffeted the front end of the truck, and jutted from the crashed barricade’s toppled uprights in splintery bits and pieces.
Khalid braced in his seat, his upper body jolting against its backrest as Yousaf came to a hard, sudden halt scarcely a heartbeat before they would have slammed into an abandoned jeep.
They sat a moment looking out their partially disintegrated windshield. A wounded ranger lay in the snow near Yousaf ’s door, clutching his chest and groaning in pain. There was still some light, spotty gunfire coming from the roadsides, and Khalid could see the men who’d sprung out of the trucks at his rear sprint on ahead, fanning left and right in the darkness. It wasn’t long before the opposing volleys had been squelched.
“We’re wasting time,” Yousaf said. “Remove all our papers from the truck and have one of the others help us transfer the component and some spare containers of gasoline into one of the jeeps.”
Khalid wiped his bloodied face with his sleeve.
“Do you think there might be others waiting for our trucks farther on toward Chikar?” he said.
“Forget Chikar, we can’t take the chance,” Yousaf said. “We head north now. I know passes that are rarely patrolled and will take us toward the Neelam Valley crossings.”
“Neelam?” Khalid said. His eyes widened. “That’s a journey of almost a thousand kilometers. Even should the weather hold, it will take us two days over the mountains—”
“Then we’d best get started, drive on while we can make the most of the darkness,” Khalid said. “We’ll need to leave the men to clean up here, and travel off-road as much as possible tonight to be safe.”
