On Target

wasn’t for all the traffic in the alleyways and passages. Civilians were everywhere now. Dark-skinned men, women, and children ran all over the place, rickshaws nearly as wide as the paths they rode on bottlenecked locals who could not get out of the way of bloody, screaming, gun-wielding kawagas even if they tried. Twice Hightower literally bashed the butt of his Tavor into the side of a little hut to push the structure’s corner, walls and roof included, just enough so he and his men could press through. They waved their rifles at anything that moved in their path, but these civilians did not want any part of this fight, so Sierra One and his men had not had to shoot any locals just yet.

Whiskey Sierra came to the end of the neighborhood of shacks and tents and found themselves on a ledge. In front of them a steeply graded hill, completely devoid of vegetation, ran down fifty yards to a road, on the other side of which lay the marketplace. There were tented stalls and wooden stalls and completely open-air stalls where the produce or other goods were simply laid out on fabric on the dirt, but there was also a cement building that ran three city blocks and housed permanent shops and small storage and warehouse facilities.

In the team’s study of the town, this structure had been dubbed Mall Alpha.

On the other side of these buildings was another row of permanent structures, dubbed Mall Bravo, and just east of this was the waterline.

As One considered ordering his men down the hill, Sierra Five shouted at the back of the tiny five-man team.

“Contact rear!” He fired a burst from his Uzi. “Here they come!” The GOS had found them.

Zack knew in an instant they’d have to expose themselves on the hill. They needed to get to the heavier buildings to have any chance of holding back the troops on their tail.

The helicopter was a quarter mile to the west and low, but beginning a shallow bank that would bring it back around on Zack’s position in twenty seconds. “Let’s go. Three, help Four!”

The injured Milo ripped out of Dan’s grasp, spun back to the approaching enemy up the alleyway, and dropped to his knees.

“You guys go! I’ll stay back and hold them off!”

Zack Hightower just grabbed the younger man by his gear, yanked him back up. “Yo, hero! Shut the fuck up and do as you’re told! This isn’t Hollywood, goddammit.”

“Sir!”

Zack shoved him roughly to Dan, who grabbed him around the waist, and they all started down the hill.

Within seconds Hightower lost his footing on the decline. It was earth hard as stone, covered with a thick powder of dry dust. His boots had no chance for traction, so as he ran, he fell forward and rolled and slid down the hill. He’d just made it to the bottom, climbed back up to his feet, and turned when Brad and Spencer slid down right next to him. Spencer jumped right up to his boots and turned back to cover, but Brad had gotten his rifle’s sling caught up in his gear, and it took him longer to stand.

Dan and Milo were still scooting down the hill on their haunches, their weapons held high out in front of them for balance as well as to keep the barrels from getting fouled in the dirt, when Zack saw Sudanese troops appear on the ridge. He and Spencer each dropped a soldier with a burst to the chest at fifty yards, and this sent the rest of the GOS riflemen diving for cover at the top of the hill.

Hightower screamed over another long burst of covering fire from Spencer, ordered Brad to help Dan get Milo in the first door in the first shop of Mall Alpha. The wounded twenty-nine-year-old Paramilitary Operations officer was all but out of the fight for now; he could not get up to his feet without the other two men pulling on his massive amount of armor and gear. They moved out, and Spencer’s rifle clicked empty.

“Cover!” called Sierra Five.

“Covering!” answered Zack, dropping to his knees and firing a single round at a head that appeared at the top of the hill. His round went low, digging into the hard dirt and creating a tiny avalanche of dust and rocks.

Spencer got his gun reloaded and back into the fight just as the helicopter flew over the hill directly in front of him and Hightower. Zack could confirm now that it was, in fact, an Mi-17 Hip, a Russian-made chopper that the government of Sudan was not known to possess. He did not dwell too long on this revelation, as the Mi-17 opened fire with a heavy machine gun hanging from one of its outboard pylons.

“Move!” Sierra One screamed to Sierra Five, and both men turned to run for their lives.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Court pulled the little Skoda Octavia into the open gate of the private home ten kilometers northwest of Suakin. The brown wall stood eight feet high all around, and from the looks of the security gate, Gentry expected to see a large dwelling inside, but once in the gate he found just a tiny, single-story building with glassless windows and several loose goats chewing on hay all around the dirt yard.

And Mohammed’s filthy white Mercedes was there, parked in a back corner of the courtyard.

Court could no longer hear gunfire in the distance, and his radio attached to his headset was out of range of any transmissions, so he had no idea what was going on with Zack and his team back in Suakin. He couldn’t see the helicopter in his rearview mirror, but that meant nothing, as the chopper had been flying so low that it would not be visible from this distance anyway.

Oryx was behaving himself. Twenty milligrams of OxyContin saw to that. He remained conscious—alert, more or less—but he didn’t really seem like he gave a damn about what was going on. He sat quietly in the passenger seat, buckled in with his hands secured together in his lap, and he just looked out the window at the scenery on the drive like he was a first-time visitor to the country he ruled. They’d passed many donkey carts full of people getting the hell out of town, desperate to avoid whatever craziness was going on in their normally quiet streets on a normally quiet Sunday morning. There was the regular morning commercial traffic of the day, as well, and even this far from the city, trucks and buses and camels and donkey carts were heavy on the road, even in front of this house. And Oryx just took it all in. He wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t freaking out, he was just watching everyone go by.

He was just the way Gentry wanted him.

Court, on the other hand, was miserable. The sharp pain in his back got sharper with each bump of the tiny car, and there were a hell of a lot of bumps on the road from Suakin. Sweat drained into his eyes, and some bug that looked like a horsefly and flapped around like a small bird had harassed him the entire drive, causing him to swat and duck and inevitably to jab the motherfucking arrow deeper into his motherfucking shoulder.

Court parked the car and took a look at Oryx. No, he’s not going anywhere. He climbed out of the vehicle and stood up straight for the first time in fifteen minutes. He drew his Glock and held it down to his side. Mohammed was nowhere to be seen. Court assumed he was sitting in his car waiting, but he couldn’t see into the tinted windows and had no idea if the police official was in the car or in the house.

As he approached, Mohammed climbed out of the Mercedes. His hands were empty, so Court holstered his gun. The tall Beja man looked agitated, which did not surprise Court in the least.

Mohammed walked towards Court, who stopped not far from his own car. Clearly the policeman had not noticed the black man in the front seat, nor had he noticed, apparently, the arrow in Court’s back. Some policeman, thought Court, but the man’s mind was focused on other confusions at the moment. “What has happened? On the radio they say there is shooting. A lot of shooting!”

“Yeah, it’s nuts down there.”

“They were shooting at you? The army was shooting at you?”

“Some of them.”

“Did you do it?” Mohammed asked.

Court shrugged. “I did what I came to do, yeah.”

“But if you are here . . . who are they shooting at now?”

Court looked back over his shoulder, past the arrow in his back, and at his car. Mohammed followed the white man’s eyes.

“Who is that?”

“Some guy I picked up along the way,” said Court.

Warily, but not warily enough, Mohammed passed by the white man and knelt down to look through the open passenger window. His body stiffened in shock. Quickly he rose back up. “It’s His Excellency. I don’t understand. I thought you were supposed to—”