Cloudburst (54 page)
The driver tapped the brake hard, then released, throwing himself and his partner forward with a jerk.
“Watch it!” the passenger screamed. Both men were equal in rank, lieutenants, but the one riding shotgun was easily the leader.
“There was an animal of some kind. It darted across the road.” The driver geared down, the engine whining as it pushed the truck back to speed.
A quick look behind eased the passenger’s worry: Both barrels were there, and still upright under the tarp. Inside each one was one hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough weapons-grade material for several crude atomic bombs. This was the third move in a week for the barrels, as the Libyan Army tried to stay one step ahead of the American spies and satellites that were certainly watching.
“Damn!” the driver swore.
“What?” the question came, along with a reflexive tightening of his grip on the Kalashnikov.
“Another truck, with goats in it.” The gear was dropped again as they reached the grade that would leave them on the plateau of the city, though still ten miles from it.
Both vehicles were heading up, each beginning to struggle with the angle of the road. The lead truck, heavily laden with its cargo of livestock, was old, at least ten years older than the one that followed it.
“This road should have been closed, or cleared,” the driver said, the nerves obvious in his voice and the sweat already heavy on his forehead.
His passenger looked over. “And that would please the Americans greatly, wouldn’t it? Think, idiot! They are probably already here, in our country, and they would easily notice such blatant security measures.” He shook his head.
The driver’s stomach tightened. He had been with his precious cargo constantly for three weeks, eating and sleeping with it, and he had grown to hate it.
Both trucks rounded a right turn at the base of a flat spot on the grade, just below the final climb to the plateau. Neither the driver nor the passenger had noticed anything out of the ordinary, an oversight that was about to prove very costly. The five-ton truck ahead fishtailed intentionally as it braked just short of the incline, forcing the Mercedes to slow quickly and hard, but not skid. It stopped fully three feet from the left rear of the truck. Immediately the driver reached for the gearshift lever, ready to back up hard.
There simply wasn’t enough time. The Mercedes was a regular model, with no armor or bulletproof glass to protect the occupants. The first volley of fire from the truck impacted the window at an angle from the right. No fewer than thirty 5.56mm rounds hit, shattering the glass into tiny shards of shrapnel, and tearing a zipper-like row of holes across the front of the vehicle from the right door to the hood just forward of the steering wheel. The truck, thrown hastily into reverse, rolled backward off the roadside, sticking in the soft sand only twenty feet away.
Buxton knew that his first burst had been enough. Through the night-vision goggles he could see that the cramped cab of the truck was demolished, his stream of fire missing the bed entirely. Nothing in the front could have lived. He kept the M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon trained on the now quiet vehicle, his finger off the trigger, as three forms approached the truck from each side. Antonelli, lying prone next to him, brought the Galil assault rifle close to his cheek.
The team approached quickly and cautiously. Graber led the three from the right side. On the left, Makowski, Jones, and Lewis stopped twenty feet short of the side. Sean and Quimpo moved in, leaving Goldfarb back. It took only a rapid check of the truck’s cab to see that no resistance would be met. Quimpo hopped down from the running board. “Clear.”
Sean did a circular scan of the area. “Let’s do it.”
Antonelli saw the hand motion and stood up in the middle of the baaing goats. He moved to the front of the bed and pounded on the back of the cab. The native CIA agent put the truck back in gear and swung it around, driving back fifty feet before stopping and reversing to the rear of the other vehicle.
The men of Charlie Squad were up on the truck, removing the tarps. Sean walked close to the two black barrels. He removed an instrument from his equipment bag and checked the readings of the containers. “They’re hot, but safe.”
“Just like the spooks promised,” Antonelli said, his toothy smile appearing cartoonlike in the night-vision world.
“Okay, let’s move them,” Sean directed. The barrels were edgerolled onto the friendly truck in just a few minutes.
The captain hopped down while the transfer was being done and walked to the bullet-riddled cab. Everything had gone perfectly. The disinformation campaign done by the Agency was masterful, keeping the Libyans concerned about ‘snatch teams’ that never existed. Their reaction, a continuous series of moves that U.S. satellites were able to follow precisely, was predicted and planned for. The result was a perfect example of ‘spook and follow’, and it had given Delta its radioactive quarry. Sean was glad the mission was successful, but there was something else to do.
He stepped onto the running board on the passenger side and looked in. The bodies were both slumped to the left, away from the force of the fire that had shredded them into a tangle of skin, bone, and muscle. Sean couldn’t discern any colors in the permanent green environment created by the goggles, but the sight was unmistakably grotesque. He reached into his breast pocket and removed a card, then tossed it onto the seat to the right of both bodies. It landed face up. The face of the Jack of Spades was stoic, Sean thought, as it stared skyward.
He jumped down and returned to the other truck. The loading was done.
“Ready,” Buxton reported.
“Let’s get out of here,” recently promoted Major Sean Graber directed his squad. The last ones climbed into the truck bed. The driver started back the way they had come. Two miles down the road he turned right, to the south, onto a roughly graded dirt road. In a few minutes they would stop, dismount, and take their ‘prize’ a few hundred meters to the waiting Blackhawk.
Then the eight Delta troopers and the native CIA agent would be gone, absent from a place they had never officially been.
The message left, however, was very real.
If you enjoyed
Cloudburst
, all the books in the Art Jefferson Thriller Series are available from Amazon at the following links.
About The Author
Ryne Pearson is the author of several novels, including
Cloudburst
,
October’s Ghost
,
Capitol Punishment
,
Simple Simon
,
Top Ten
,
The Donzerly Light
,
All For One
, and
Confessions
. He is also author of the short story collection,
Dark and Darker
. His novel
Simple Simon
was made into the film
Mercury Rising
. As a screenwriter he has worked on numerous films. The film
Knowing
, based on his original script, was released in 2009 and opened #1 at the box office, going on to gross more than $180 million worldwide.
He lives in California with his wife, children, a Doberman Shepherd and a Beagle Vizsla.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents