Nothing happened until he noticed a cloud of dust behind them on their right.
His heart began to beat faster.
The dust cloud shrank and Malko could make out vehicles that had turned off the track onto the paved highway.
It was almost certainly Abu Bukatalla’s armada, which was now after them. Cynthia and Ibrahim hadn’t noticed anything.
Suddenly a tanker truck appeared in the middle of the road ahead of them, forcing Tarik to slow to about forty miles an hour.
Malko turned around. He could now identify the vehicles following them: a column of pickups.
In front of them, the tanker truck was still driving quite slowly, and Tarik began furiously honking his horn. The pickups were getting closer.
When the column was no more than a hundred yards behind it, the tanker truck finally pulled over. Tarik shot by him, honking furiously, but then, oddly enough, didn’t speed up. It was as if he’d gone to sleep.
Malko was as tight as a violin string.
He looked in the rearview mirror. If he saw the front bumper of even one pickup passing the tanker truck, his life would soon be over.
Abu Bukatalla gazed at the highway, his folding AK-47 across his knees. He thanked Allah for his great gift. He was going to kill not only Ibrahim al-Senussi, but a CIA agent in the bargain.
He couldn’t have hoped for anything more.
His eight pickups drove in the middle of the highway, preventing other vehicles from passing them.
Suddenly they found themselves behind a tanker truck. Abu Bukatalla’s driver honked, but the truck didn’t move aside.
“The dog!” muttered Abu Bukatalla.
Now, as they drove a few dozen yards behind the truck, an unexpected smell suddenly reached his nostrils. It took him a few moments to realize that it was gasoline. He turned to his driver and asked:
“Do we have a leak?”
But he immediately realized his mistake. All his pickup trucks ran on diesel.
The pavement in front of him seemed strangely wet. But before he had time to wonder why, he caught sight of a pickup parked beside the road with a man standing next to it.
As his pickup passed them, the man raised his arm and threw something onto the highway, then immediately dropped to the ground.
“Stop!” Abu Bukatalla screamed.
But it was too late: the entire convoy was suddenly surrounded by a sea of flames.
A stretch of highway more than a hundred yards long was burning. Orange and red flames rose around the pickups.
Abu Bukatalla saw the fire licking the sides of his pickup.
His driver, who didn’t know what else to do, unwisely hit the brakes, and flames immediately engulfed the vehicle.
Its paint and fuel caught fire, and black smoke darkened the windshield.
Abu Bukatalla threw the door open and jumped out, immediately becoming a human torch.
The flames from the gasoline that the tanker truck had sprayed on the highway were burning everything, stopping the column in its tracks. Some of the pickups’ ammunition began to explode. Men tried to flee, engulfed in flames.
By now the tanker truck was far away, almost out of sight.
Rising from the road was a huge cloud of black smoke that could be seen for miles.
Sheikh Obeidi drove along the column of blazing pickups, at a safe distance from the fire, his twin 23 mm cannons systematically raking the paralyzed vehicles and their occupants. He yelled:
“La illah illa Allah!”
Vengeance was sweet.
His magazines empty, he stopped. Once the guns were reloaded, he took another pass by the column going in the other direction, but there was no need. Abu Bukatalla’s militiamen were all dead, either shot or burned to death.
As he drove by, the Obeidi man who had thrown the incendiary grenade to ignite the sprayed gasoline gave him a joyous wave.
They had wasted several hundred gallons of gasoline, but the result was well worth it. In an irony of fate, the gasoline had just been delivered by a tanker from Abu Bukatalla’s ally, Qatar.
Malko felt as relaxed as if he’d just had a good massage. Behind him, the column of smoke continued to rise into the sky.
Clutching the steering wheel, Tarik stubbornly stared straight ahead.
“You okay, Tarik?” asked Malko teasingly.
The driver didn’t answer, merely nodded.
Cynthia had turned around and was looking back.
“What’s that behind us?” she asked.
“Must be an accident,” said Malko calmly.
He would have plenty of time to tell her about it, later. They exchanged a long look, and Malko realized that he was now in a hurry to get to Cairo.
About the Translator
William Rodarmor (1942– ) is a veteran French literary translator in Berkeley, California. He recently translated The Last King of the Jews, by Jean-Claude Lattès (Open Road, 2014) and The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles, by Katherine Pancol (Penguin, 2013), and was a fellow at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. He served as a Russian linguist in the Army Security Agency and worked as a French interpreter for the U.S. State Department.
The Madmen of Benghazi Page 20
