Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2) by Sweeney John

Author:Sweeney, John [Sweeney, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781503940932
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Everything alive crawled into shade, away from the unbearable heat. In direct sunlight, it was 45 degrees Celsius. Even in shadow, the sun’s brilliant glare hurt the eyes. Khalid and Haroun were playing chess in a tea shop in Palmyra, surrounded by tourist bric-a-brac – stuffed toy camels, mini pyramids containing different layers of coloured sand, plastic scimitars, all of them covered in a fine film of sand – for which there were no customers, or to be more accurate, not the right kind of customers. The executioner towered over Haroun, his forearms almost as thick as the boy’s torso, but in front of the chessboard his forehead was knitted in a comic display of concentration.

Overhead, a trio of Russian fighter jets ripped up grooves of sound in the blue sky, delivering presents from Zoba. The bombs fell close – three, four miles away. They saw the smoke first, then almost immediately they felt the earth quiver under their feet, birds flapped and car alarms squawked and only then did they hear the explosions.

The boy moved his knight, said ‘checkmate’ and smiled, coolly, at the loser. Khalid, taken entirely by surprise, swept the board with an enormous paw and cried out, ‘This is the work of Satan!’ then made to strike the boy. Hadeed, sipping tea at a separate table with Timur, lifted one hand upwards and said, ‘Khalil, la.’ No.

The executioner stood up and barrelled out of the teashop, his muscle and mass no competition for the authority of Hadeed. They had been waiting for a reply from the Caliph for more than a week now, waiting for his permission to use the devil’s gas, and were beginning to tire of each other’s company.

To ask the Caliph for his religious judgement about whether or not they could fight jihad with the chemical weapons they had found, the simplest thing would have been for Hadeed to have used his cell phone to call the Caliph or his office. But that was forbidden. Instead, Hadeed had written out a letter in longhand and copied the video of the gassing of the four men onto a second phone, and given the letter and phone to one of the guards, who got on his motorbike to make the trip back to Raqqa. The problem, they intuited, was that the guard, not so very high in the pecking order, was clearly finding it difficult to locate the Caliph – or, if he had done so, to compete with all the other petitioners to enter his presence, to capture ten seconds of his time, so that he could show him Hadeed’s letter and the video. The goal of Islamic State was to turn back the clock to the seventh century. In terms of speed of communication, they were doing rather too well.

The logic of no phone calls to and from Caliph Ibrahim was sound enough. ISIS were fully aware of what had happened to the Chechen warlord Dzhokhar Dudayev back in the nineties. Dudayev had

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