The Devil's Light by Richard North Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

headfirst into the smoking crater left by the plastique. The truck behind it squealed to a stop.
    Their quarry was trapped.
    Cries came from the road. The rear panel of the last truck flew open. Soldiers spilled from the inside, bent low, scurrying with weapons pointed to surround the truck holding the bomb. The trucks on both sides of it shuddered with direct hits from RPGs. Their gas tanks exploded; caught by flames, a burning, writhing figure emitted a wail that pierced the babel of shouted orders. Placing the radio to his lips, Sharif said, “Claymores.”
    From the hillside thirty mines detonated at once, each expelling three hundred lethal pellets across a five-foot range. The men facing the hillside crumpled like prisoners at an execution. The one soldier not decimated fell to his knees, blindly returning fire before he pitched forward. In the light of the burning wreckage, Al Zaroor saw the heads of Sharif’s fighters appear above the ditch on the far side of the truck, their fusillade cuttingdown the soldiers who faced them. Dying, a wounded ranger staggered into a wall of flames.
    The gunfire trailed off. There was a single shot, a fighter putting a bullet through the skull of a man writhing on his back. Then Sharif began loping down the hill, Al Zaroor at his shoulder.
    Fighters poured from both ditches, surrounding the only truck that survived. “Take it,” Sharif snapped into his radio.
    Launched from the shadows, an RPG blew open the rear panel. At once a mass of fighters fired semiautomatic weapons into the truck, the sound of the bullets pinging off metal mingling with the cries of the soldiers inside.
    As the firing ceased, Sharif and Al Zaroor climbed onto the road.
    Al Zaroor glanced around them. The only word for this carnage, he decided, was “biblical.” The rangers decimated by the mines were doughy masses of ruined flesh and khaki, illuminated by the flames of burning vehicles. Al Zaroor stood over a man with no face.
    Turning, he followed Sharif to the rear of the truck. With the same eerie calm, Sharif raised a flashlight to inspect its contents. Ten Pakistani soldiers lay around a gray steel container like sacrifices at an altar. The container was shaped like a coffin.
    Softly, Sharif asked, “What is this?”
    Al Zaroor stifled his awe. “Gold, as I said. With this we wage jihad.”
    His tone brooked no more questions. Walking away from the truck, he spotted two black vans waiting on the far side of the blast hole. “Carry it there,” he called to Sharif. “Quickly.”
    On Sharif’s orders, four fighters scurried into the truck. Within seconds, they had borne the heavy steel box into the irrigation ditch, hurrying along the side of the road. Sharif and Al Zaroor followed, watching them as they labored up the slope toward the vans. “The second one,” Al Zaroor instructed.
    The men opened its rear panel and shoved the box inside. The first van sped into the darkness, a decoy. As Sharif’s fighters began filtering into the night, Al Zaroor looked into the young man’s face. “You are a warrior,” he said. “But far more.”
    Sharif’s eyes glinted. “Peace be with you,” he said. This time without irony.
    Al Zaroor jumped into the remaining van beside a nameless stranger half his age. “Go,” he directed.
    The operation had taken nine minutes.
    Two swift miles later, they swerved onto a rutted dirt path. In the shadow of a tree sat a Pakistani van, its surface festooned with the intricate colors favored by freelance truckers.
    A squat bearded man got out. He adjusted his turban, then helped Al Zaroor’s driver move the box from one van to the other. The first man did not know where the box was going; the second where it had come from. Wheels spinning, the van headed for the highway.
    For once, Al Zaroor thought, perfection.
    For forty minutes Al Zaroor and his companion drove without