On Target

by Mark Greaney

  “I got caught up with the NSS. And the Janjaweed.”

  “The NSS and the Janjas? You left the airport.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with some Canadian skank working for the ICC, would it?”

  “She spread the word, huh?”

  “She didn’t spread the word; mushroom clouds over NGO convoys spread the word! You must have charmed the socks off of her; she is saying she doesn’t even remember what you look like, but the Darfuris are saying some lily-white fuckwad blew up two of their trucks and killed a shitload of Janjaweed. What the hell were you doing?”

  “She needed my help.”

  “Yeah? Outstanding. But you know what? I need your help, too. I need you to do your goddamned job! Chasin’ tail across the desert when you are supposed to be over here getting ready for the most important SAD/ SOG operation in the past decade is not going to get the shoot on sight rescinded, Six.”

  “I wasn’t chasing tail. They were going to kill her.”

  “Cry me a fucking river! As a matter of fact, cry me the fucking Nile River, because me and the boys almost had to fucking swim the Nile to get over there to pull your ass out of Darfur.”

  Court knew the possibility that the CIA would send Whiskey Sierra into Darfur to save Sierra Six had never been on the table. It was a ludicrous assertion. Still, he also knew when it was best to just let Sierra One have his little rant unopposed. Like a forest fire that burns the mountain so thoroughly that no tinder remains to fuel it, Zack’s tirade would extinguish itself in a minute if Court didn’t fight back.

  “Look,” said Court, already tired of talking to Zack. “Everything is okay. Sid is sending a plane here to Al Fashir tonight. I’ll be in Suakin by tomorrow evening. I’ll be back on target in time for the op Sunday morning at six thirty. Everything goes ahead as planned.”

  “You’d better see that it does, dude. You better get back on target posthaste. There is a hell of a lot riding on this.”

  “Yeah, understood. Six out.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Court kept his eye on the properly functioning GPS computer on his new wristwatch while sitting on the bench in the back of the Antonov. It gave him his position over the land below him, and he had to monitor it constantly to be sure the pilot was doing what he was told.

  The plane was an AN-26, a much smaller transport than the one he’d ridden into the Sudan three days earlier. He wondered how many people were on board. He hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone in the cockpit since climbing onto the flight nearly two hours earlier. He’d been waiting at the end of the runway at Al Fashir airport, had spent four hours swatting flies and kicking away little scorpions and dinner-plate-sized camel spiders, lying in a hide provided by one of the broken wings of one of the broken planes that lay like slaughtered birds alongside the runway. He’d planned on waiting inside the cabin of the discarded wreckage but found the interior too hot and stuffy to bear, and he had no doubt there’d be snakes to contend with as well. He was down to his last bottle of water when he climbed the fence to get into the airport that afternoon, had drunk the last sip from it an hour before the Russian plane landed, which turned out to be nearly three hours before the plane took off again.

  He’d climbed through the hatch that they’d left open on his orders, relayed through Sid, through the FSB, and then on to the Rosoboronexport crew. When he made his way inside the dim cargo cabin, he found all the gear he’d requested cinched to a mesh bench. It was the same pack he’d had with him on his earlier flight, with a few new items, equipment crucial to the change in his operation necessitated by his three-day visit to Darfur. The crew of the Antonov had not bothered to even come out of the cockpit to check and make sure he’d made it in, that he had everything he needed.

  These Russians didn’t give a shit about him or his job. They were probably annoyed about the unusual flight plan they were ordered to fly, were certainly pissed about the unusual maneuver they’d have to execute, and they would no doubt blame him for the FSB heavies getting in their business and telling them how to do their job.

  As far as the man in the back of their plane right now, they made it 100 percent clear with the open hatch left unattended and the lack of a welcoming party when he boarded. They didn’t want to know him.

  And that worked for a guy like the Gray Man.

  He’d spent the first hour of the flight obsessively checking and rechecking all the equipment. He didn’t trust these Russians with his life, so he didn’t trust them to properly check the devices he’d need to keep himself alive and fulfill his objectives of the next forty-eight hours. Once he was satisfied everything was in working order, he sat back down on the bench and tried to relax.

  Court’s brain soon drifted off mission. He wanted a pain pill, but he was in no pain. His adrenaline was up, it stayed high when he was about to do this sort of thing, but still, he thought, he worried, he fretted now more than earlier in his career.

  He’d once been a well-oiled machine, back with the SAD and before.

  Somehow the Canadian woman had gotten inside him. He’d known better than to engage her in conversation, to try to justify himself to her, but there was something about her that got under his skin in ways both positive and negative. He would never admit to respecting her—her line of work and sanctimony he absolutely did not agree with—but he did not meet many real people out here in the black, on the dark side. And even though she was likely some tree-hugging, do-gooding, we-are-the-world-singing, flipper-fucking fool, she was, at least, a fool who went toe to toe with the real dangers of the world.

  The aircraft began a steep descent, sending his stomach up into his chest, and Court unlatched the buckle on his seat belt.

  Ellen Walsh pushed some of Gentry’s buttons during their day together, and even though this woman was likely right now preparing an indictment and opening an investigation and putting all of her energies into tracking him down and seeing that he was thrown in some cage somewhere, Court couldn’t say that he did not want to see her again.

  He shook his head. Shit man, snap out of it.

  The Antonov leveled out quickly, causing Court’s stomach to lurch in the other direction. With a metallic motorized cranking sound, the rear loading hatch opened behind him. Cold night sky appeared out past the red cabin lighting. The whoosh of air was audible, painfully loud even, but barely felt, as the aerodynamics of the craft kept the wind outside the cabin.

  Yes, he’d once been a well-oiled machine.

  Court stood, fumbled with all the equipment strapped to his body, and began lumbering towards the night.

  He was still a machine, he told himself, and he believed it. He knew it. He was just a machine that needed a bit more oil than in the old days.

  The Gray Man gave a quick test pull to the gear on his chest, between his knees, and on his back, walked slowly down the ramp, and tumbled out into the black sky.

  The night air was cool here near the east coast of the Sudan; gentle breezes pulled in from the ocean saw to that. This area of the Red Sea Hills, the topographical anomaly to the west of Port Sudan and to the northwest of Suakin, rose one thousand feet out of the Sahel, a rocky brown disfigurement to the otherwise flat landscape.

  At half past midnight, no light shone on the hillside save for a sliver of moon, not a single electrical source for a dozen miles in any direction, but these hills were not uninhabited. The Bejas and the Rashaidas lived out here. They tended goats or small farms on the plateaus, traded at the souks in Port Sudan or Suakin, subsistence-farmed where they could, lived off the hard earth, and did their best to stay out of the way of the Arabs, the tribes that had the power and led the government of Sudan.

  There was once gold in these hills. Since pharaonic times gold ore had been sought out and mined and transported overland to Alexandria and Cairo. The mining of precious metals in the area had all but dried up, but gypsum and iron ore and limestone were still scratched out of the rock an
d sent away to places that actually had a need for the raw materials used in constructing cities and buildings.

  It certainly wasn’t needed here.

  There’d been a war a few years back. Like the war in southern Sudan and the war in Darfur, the eastern minority tribes once tried to throw off the yoke of oppression. They were poorly organized, all but unfunded, and slapped into submission in what had become little more than a footnote after the bigger, badder civil conflicts at the other ends of the large nation.

  Now, on a cool, dark, quiet hillside on the eastern edge of a plateau that overlooked the flat coastal plain that ran twenty miles to Port Sudan and then to the waterline itself, there was nothing but rail-thin goats, left unattended during the night by Beja tribesmen. Many of the animals slept standing, a few chewed lazily at tufts of green grass.

  A gray Sahelian goat bleated loudly. Another followed, and then another. Soon a chorus of goats called out together, and then the tiny herd parted, ran out from the center, leaving an opening on the grassy hillside.

  A large brown backpack crashed into the vacated space, bounced, and rolled down the hill, whipping a twenty-five-foot cord behind it.

  And two seconds later a man in dark clothing landed on both boots, seemed to find his balance after a short skid, but the parachute above his head deformed and then re-formed in front of him, sucked in the draft down the hill towards the flatlands, and it pulled him off balance. He lost his footing on the hill, pitched forward, yanking and pulling on the leads to the canopy as he tumbled.

  Twenty meters down the hill he came to rest. The canopy deflated and was hauled in, the bleating of the goats subsided, and their community re-formed again as if this odd insult had never occurred.

  Gentry sat on his butt, hugged the fluttering canopy to his chest, and looked around in the dark.

  “Shit,” he said softly to no one, and then he doubled over, leaned on his left elbow, and vomited onto the dry grass.

  Once he collected himself, swigged water from a bladder in his pack, spat it out to perfunctorily clean out his sour mouth, he looked off into the distance. He faced east, and to the northeast he could see the lights of Port Sudan, twenty some odd miles distant across the coastal plain. He turned to his right a bit, towards the south. He knew Suakin was out there in the dark, twenty-five or so miles from him now. He needed to get there as soon as possible.

  He would have liked to be there already, reconnoitering the area, using the actual terrain instead of a map to fine-tune his plan.

  Court stood, found his left butt cheek to be sore and bruised and stiffening, but he ignored it. There were pain meds in his pack. Lots of them. He’d stuffed them deep in a feeble battle with himself, wanted to go as long as possible without taking them.

  The battle worked for now; he did not rip open the bag to dig for them. Instead he stood, spent several minutes among the thin goats, hiding his parachute and the other bags he no longer needed in the breeze-swept grasses and thatched bushes on the hillside. He changed his clothes, donned simple dark blue trousers and a dark green short-sleeved shirt, both purchased the day before in Al Fashir. He planned on using two forms of cover. The Rashaidas, a lighter-skinned Arab common in the area, often eschewed long robes and cloaks for clothing more conventional to Westerners. And if he had to get up close and personal, he knew no one would believe him to be a Rashaida; no native Arabic speaker would buy for a second his piss-poor command of the language, and what Arabic he did know was an altogether different dialect. So his plan was to avoid close contact if possible, but if not possible, he would claim to be a Bosnian Muslim who’d been studying Arabic in Egypt but had decided to complete the hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam, the Muslim’s required pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Suakin was not known for much, but it was known, among East African Muslims, anyway, as the port where one could find ferry embarkation across the Red Sea to Jeddah, from where one could make his way on to Mecca. Court had even picked up a simple prayer rug in the souk in Al Fashir to back up this story.

  It was, perhaps, the thinnest veil of a cover identity Gentry had ever attempted, for so many reasons Court had stopped counting them. He did not speak a damn word of Serbo-Croatian, the language of a Bosnian. He had concocted no good reason, and not even a bad reason, that a Bosnian studying in Egypt would need to sneak across the Sudanese border to find passage to Saudi Arabia. He would not be able to account for his big backpack, certainly not the sniper rifle and other curiosities inside it, nor the huge amount of money in his wallet and money belt. He would not be able to specify the route he took into the Sudan or even the neighborhood in which he supposedly lived in Cairo.

  In any real questioning he’d have to play dumb, which would clearly be the easiest aspect of this cover for him to manage.

  No, this particular legend would only work in the most casual of encounters. If he were stopped by police or army or any government official above the rank of the men who scooped camel shit out of the streets, despite his cover story, he would appear to them to be one thing and one thing only: an infidel assassin who dropped into their country from out of the sky.

  Just before one o’clock in the morning, the Gray Man hefted his canvas pack onto his back and began walking down the hill.

  By eight a.m., Court was sitting Indian style on a pile of straw stacked high on a two-wheeled donkey cart led by two Beja boys. The boys, barely in their teens, wore their hair in wild, messy afros and were dressed identically in baggy beige pants and brown vests, their milk chocolate skin ruddy in the rays of the ceaseless morning sun. Court had given them the Bosnian pilgrim story, they’d bought it, he’d given them a few Sudanese pounds, and they’d taken them. They were heading all the way to Suakin to an uncle’s house, delivering the donkey and the hay, and though this means of travel was no faster than Court walking himself, he surely preferred this means of travel to walking himself.

  He told the boys that he did not want any trouble from local authorities, being a foreigner and all, and they’d helpfully suggested, via common Arabic words and pantomime, that he bury himself and his pack in the straw if cars passed or checkpoints loomed. The boys made a game of it, and he’d bought them lunch and tea at a roadside stand set up for those heading to Suakin to catch the Jeddah ferry. He’d even bought the donkey his own lunch at the stand, identical to what the humans ate, which the kids found hysterical.

  In the afternoon, as the Red Sea coastline appeared in the hazy distance, Gentry dug himself deep in the straw and stayed there. He tried not to choke on the dust and avoided thinking too much about the constant creepycrawly sensations in his pants and his shirt. Traffic on the road had picked up considerably: buses, donkey and horse carts, men on foot, occasionally the odd private car. Twice even military transport trucks passed. Sidorenko had provided Gentry with a good deal of reading on Suakin. Court had ignored the majority of it, other than a map; the folio on the ancient port city had not seemed germane to his mission. But he had read a brief article on the city, and he was fascinated by its rich history. As well as being famous for its daily ferry to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Suakin was also known as the last active slave port in Africa, only cutting off the traffic in humans in 1946. Suakin was key to the African slave trade, whether Egyptians or Ottomans or British controlled the town. Many of the big, beautiful buildings in the town, virtually all of them in disrepair, were built in the furtherance of this cruel but lucrative industry.

  He knew not to expect much as far as infrastructure here, but President Abboud had a farm nearby and enjoyed performing the morning call to prayer in the high gallery of the tower in the mosque that looked out over the Red Sea.

  And that’s what put it on Court Gentry’s travel itinerary.

  THIRTY

  Nightfall found the Gray Man just to the north of Suakin, looking out to the water of the lagoon. The Red Sea itself was three miles or so farther to the east. This finger inlet protected the small port and had made the water-way a natural transportation
route for centuries, until 1907, when the opening of Port Sudan, forty miles to the north, rendered Suakin irrelevant. Gentry still wore his Sudanese clothing, Western in appearance but not at all out of the ordinary here. With his tan skin and his dark beard and hair, with the dust and grime of a full day of travel, with his white taqiyah prayer cap, he could pass from a distance and in the night as an Arab, perhaps a Rashaida, if no one looked too closely. The Bosnian pilgrim cover story was always there to pull out in a pinch, though it was no more plausible here than it had been twenty miles to the west.

  He’d stowed his pack deep in the boulders ten yards from the warm water’s edge. He’d found a dark cavelike indention in the rocks, and this he’d made a temporary LUP, or layup position.

  The breeze from the ocean was not cool, but it was moving air, certainly less hot and stifling than had been Al Fashir or his six hours on the donkey cart. Compared to most of the last ninety-six hours, the steady currents of air off the water here in the dark shade of the boulders felt like the soft touch of a woman, not that Court had much experience with that in the past several years. He lay back, let his mind drift, let his bare feet dangle in a pool of seawater while his head rested on his boots, and he wanted a painkiller to help him relax one last time before the action and danger of tomorrow morning.

  But he did not have time to relax now; he had to call Zack, needed to meet with him to pick up some equipment he’d need the next morning. He also needed to meet with Mohammed, the Suakin cop who was on the payroll of Russian intelligence.

  He pulled out the Thuraya phone, pushed a couple of buttons, and then waited.

  “You here?” Zack was all about the mission now. He was still angry at Court about Darfur, the teasing macho banter of their earlier conversations nowhere in sight.

  “Affirm.”

  “Let’s meet at Echo, four-five mikes.”