“Khalid, fast!” he rasped.
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 spaks of shrapnel nicking the parked jeeps behind the barricade.
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.”
Khalid verged on protest a moment, but then thought the better of it. Yousaf was not one to have his wishes denied.
He nodded and went to follow his orders, his boot-heels sinking deep into the snow as he exited the coal truck.
Then the crack of a single bullet from its driver’s side made him stiffen, his breath catching in his throat with a little gasp. He glanced sharply over the hood and saw Yousaf standing over the sprawled body of the ranger, looking down at him, the bore of his Steyr pressed to the middle of his head.
“Gandu,” Yousaf said, using the Urdu vulgarism for asshole.
He spat on the corpse, straightened, turned to make brief eye contact with Khalid.
“I did the traitor a favor he didn’t deserve,” he said, holstering his weapon.
His fingers steepled under his chin, Lembock was waiting behind his desk when Delano Malisse arrived for their morning appointment.
“Delano, hoe gaat het met jou?” Lembock said in Flemish, offering the customary hi-how-are-you without rising from his chair.
Malisse took no offense. It was not discourtesy, but the depredations of rheumatism and chronic bronchitis that kept him off his feet.
Malisse sat down in front of him and unbuttoned his overcoat. As usual, Lembock had the office’s heat turned up suffocatingly high, its steam radiator hissing and clanking. Could this possibly be good for his ailing lungs? “Goed, bedankt,” he said. “You’re looking much recovered from that last bad spell.”
A gracious, soft-spoken man, Lembock smiled with the quiet skepticism of one who was appreciative of the polite words, but might have gently begged to differ. He looked at Malisse, his chin balanced on his hands. The fingers long, tapered, almost spindling, the skin tight and thin over knobby, inflamed joints, they reminded Malisse of the ribbed arches that supported the ceilings of the Gothic churches and palaces at the city’s centuries-old heart, seeming almost too delicate to last under the ponderous weight resting upon them. Yet last they did, their stability ever a marvel to him.
Rance Lembock’s office was about a mile west of the historic district, on the ninth floor of the Diamantclub van Antwerpen, this first and most prominent of Antwerp’s four diamond bourses located in a rather nondescript, even homely, building on Pelikaanstraat, a sidestreet running south from the Central Station rail terminal. Two stories above, on the top floor, was the seat of the Secretariat of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, which, as its name indicated, codified and oversaw the rules, regulations, laws, and bylaws observed by every reputable exchange in Europe and beyond, its influence spanning continents, ranging from Tokyo in the far east to New York City in the west.