by Mark Greaney
It stung like hell, but it wasn’t killing him, though he was certain it would not be long before he accidentally slammed the protrusion against a wall and really ruined his morning. Again he tried to reach back and grab the arrow, but again he could not quite get his hand to it. He thought briefly about having one of the locals help pull it out of his back, but right now he just wanted to get the fuck out of town, and he absolutely did not want to pause for what would surely be a slow and delicate procedure executed by a person he would not trust to do it correctly.
Soon the soldiers in the road were gone. Court nodded to the patriarch of the family, an ineffectual show of gratitude for not making trouble and a show of contrition at the inconvenience, and then he was out in the road again with Oryx. They made it to the car; it was parked where Zack said it would be parked, and Court got Abboud in with no trouble, then ran around to the driver’s side. It was difficult for him to crawl into the seat with the arrow in his back and his backpack still in place; he had to lean forward and let the backrest down and turn slightly to the left. Finally he turned the key, and the engine started.
He felt his shirt, wet with blood, sticking to his back.
As he shifted the little two-door into gear, the helicopter flew right over their heads at no more than one hundred feet. The noise was so loud, the whump-whump of the rotors so malevolent, that Court ducked low in his seat.
The chopper moved on, directly towards the gunfire from Whiskey Sierra’s battle a half mile to the north.
He released his boot from the clutch, pressed on the gas, and they lurched forward. The motion caused him to bump the arrow hard into the seat behind him.
“Fuck!” he shouted, the pain a jolt of blue flame in his back and up his arm and into his neck. Screaming, he made eye contact with the terrified president. Court shouted at him, the adrenaline and anger of the moment getting the best of him. “What the fuck, dude? What kind of a backwards-assed, piece of shit country are you running here? A fucking arrow? Seriously?” Court’s right hand left the steering wheel, formed into a fist, and punched Abboud in the face. In doing this, he brushed the arrow again against the seat, and again he screamed.
Whiskey Sierra had broken out of the office building and into the alleyway to the east. They then leapfrogged as a team through a neighborhood of tents and shanties, burlap and canvas or corrugated metal and rusty car parts turned into the barest of housing. By zigzagging towards the northeast at each opportunity, Zack and his men were both changing their direction to throw off their pursuers, as well as slowly making their way towards the water. The helicopter was overhead, but Whiskey Sierra ducked under overhangs and stayed tight against the walls of the structures and kept running. If it was a Hip—Zack hadn’t seen it to be sure—then it might have air-to-ground munitions mounted to its hard points. Even if it did not have ATG ordnance, it could still carry two dozen combat-outfitted troops, more than enough to make trouble for Whiskey Sierra.
Their run through the slum was slowed significantly by Milo. His right leg was bloody, and his foot wasn’t cooperating. He was down to a hobble, weakening by the minute, and it was just one more thing Sierra One could not do a damn thing about.
Zack was losing blood himself, but his arm wound didn’t even rank in his top ten list of priorities at the moment.
Still, it was remarkable how easily they had managed to break contact with the GOS forces. The warrenlike layout of the shanty town, with many passages no more than five feet across, made it a great place to not only hide but to move through without being seen from any distance.
Zack and his team would have been even farther away from their last contact point with the enemy if it 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.
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“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—”
Mohammed spun around, the irises of his wide eyes narrowed on the silencer three inches from his forehead.
He did not hear the gunshot that killed him.
“Who is this man?” Abboud asked as Court helped him out of the car. Already the American had lifted the man’s car keys out of the dirt, had wrapped the bloody head in a blanket. He turned away from the president and began dragging Mohammed by his arms to the back of his own vehicle.
“Local policeman. He was working for the people who hired me to assassinate you.”
“What?” And then, “Traitor!”
The American opened the trunk of the Mercedes. With the arrow piercing muscles in his upper torso it was torture to scoop the dead weight off the ground and then lift it, then roll it into the back. But he got the job done. He then looked up at Abboud. “How’s your heart?” He unzipped his pack and retrieved a clear plastic bottle of water.
“My heart?” Abboud asked, unsure if he understood the question. “My head feels a little strange. But my heart is good. Why?”
“Your health okay? Blood pressure? Any respiratory issues?”
Abboud walked closer, stood behind the car next to the white man with the arrow in his upper back and the odd questions. The man dropped the water bottle in the trunk with the body. What sort of insanity was this white devil a part of?
“I am very healthy. What are these inquiries about my condition? And why do you give a dead man a bottle of water?”
Court pulled the president’s tie from around his neck, then he unbuttoned the remaining buttons of his starched white shirt. He pulled it free of his black slacks and let it hang loose, exposing a white V-neck undershirt. “It’s not for him. Hop in.”
“Hop?”
“Get in the trunk. Now!”
“With—”
The white man pulled Abboud by the back of the head, shepherded him more than pushed him into the back of the car, then used a folding knife to cut out the internal trunk release cord. The thick Sudanese man pushed the dead body out of the way to comply with his instructions. He did not want to cross this man.
He did not want to assist the man attempting to kidnap him. He did not want to climb into the dark sedan with this bloody carcass of a traitor to his country.
But more than anything, he did not want the American’s operation to switch to plan A.
Ten kilometers southeast of Gentry’s position, Zack Hightower had managed to get all of his men into the first of two long, symmetrical, uniform, two-story buildings. The shopping center had a nongovernmental-agency cold and efficient construction look to it, and handmade wooden stalls with low-hanging eaves were built haphazardly around it. It was more like a low-rent urban flea market than an American mall. The floor inside the building was full of dirt, like runoff from the hillside washed through the ground floors during the rainy season. Also, along with the goods for sale inside shuttered and gated kiosks, trash was everywhere in the open center, as if squatters were common. This was no great surprise, considering these buildings were a hell of a lot more secure than the actual homes of the majority of those living in and around Suakin. Hightower assumed there must be some security here, but the security had apparently cleared out when five wild-eyed and bloody white men, dressed like soldiers and firing machine guns at helicopters and government troops, came rolling and sliding down the hill outside.
The row of buildings was ruggedly built but certainly not impenetrable. There were waist-high windows without glass, doorways without doors, and behind this shopping center was another, identical two-story block of shops, literally dozens of windows and a long rooftop from which someone could get line of sight into an open window on Whiskey Sierra’s position.
And the motherfucking helicopter was circling right over them now.
Four’s leg was a mess, bleeding from multiple points. Zack guessed he’d lost well over a liter of blood already. Most men would not have been on their feet, much less still in the fight, but Milo was a former Navy SEAL; he’d
been pushed physically further than 99.99 percent of the rest of the American population, so he could shrug off this battle wound for a few minutes more.
But, Zack knew, once he’d lost two liters, he’d be down, unconscious or close to it. He was desperate to find his men some cover, to tend to Four’s wounds, to consolidate ammo, to catch their fucking breath.
They were three blocks from the sea now. Two had used a hatchet to knock a hole through the wall of a small basket shop into the back of a post office. It was only just after seven a.m., so the office was still closed, but there were voices coming from the other side of the shuttered front door and windows. The team moved into the room, low and behind the counter. Five went to the front door, cracked it open, and then quickly closed it. He turned back to Sierra One, who had positioned himself to cover the hole in the wall they’d just crawled through.
“No dice, Zack. GOS out the wazoo. They’re hanging back, thinking it over, but they’ll see us if we break cover.”
“Roger that,” said Hightower. He knew this force against him must at least be entertaining the possibility that the president of their nation was a captive of the men they were shooting at. It should have made them think twice before engaging, giving an advantage to Whiskey Sierra. But this was a chaotic and confused situation, and Zack knew he could not trust the training and reasoning of his enemy to check their fire.
He nodded to a metal circular staircase that rose into a dark hole above them. It looked more like a small storage space than a second floor. “Three, punch out and try and get access to the roof, but watch for that chopper. We want to keep moving southeast, towards the port.”