On Target

by Mark Greaney

  Milo was stabilized for the time being. Dan had used massive amounts of duct tape to secure Brad’s F1 to his leg like a stiff-legged splint, and he’d rebandaged the young Croatian American’s shattered leg. But Sierra Four was without a rifle; he only carried a 9 mm H&K pistol, and all of his armor and gear had been left behind or passed around the team so that he could continue to move. He vigorously protested everything done for him, insisted he was good to go, but his bluster just annoyed the shit out of the older, more experienced operators. They understood his condition better than he did, and they treated him professionally, even if they continually berated him for trying to tell them he was fine.

  The four men left the roof in a tactical train, descended two floors in a tiny and darkened metal stairwell, and ended up in an east-west alley. Milo stumbled twice on the stairs. Zack then ordered him to keep his pistol in his right hand and Dan’s shoulder in his left. This helped his balance.

  The alleyway ran towards the harbor, and the team took it slowly. Men’s voices were heard on the other side of a wooden door, and Whiskey Sierra formed around it, but the voices faded. Sirens in the distance mixed with the guttural roars and cries of camels. The team did their best to shut out all the noises that were not tactically significant. Soon they made it to the mouth of the alleyway, and here they warily stepped into sight of the harbor.

  Dan was first out of the alley, into the open street in front of the water. The others moved close behind him.

  Dan stopped dead in his tracks. “Contact front!”

  FORTY

  Fifty yards in front of the mouth of the alley, atop the crystal green water in front of the island of Old Suakin, sat a Sudanese Navy coastal patrol boat. It was one hundred feet in length; men stood on the deck behind a 12.7-mm machine gun. Quickly they turned the barrel of the big weapon towards the white men appearing in front of them.

  Zack ground to a halt next to Dan. “Disperse!” shouted Zack, and his men broke left and right. Hightower himself grabbed the injured Sierra Four and pushed him back to the right, fell with him into a shop that wove and sold fishing nets.

  The time for well-coordinated movements was gone. No more covering fields of fire, leapfrogging from one piece of concealment to the next. The four men began running, crawling, and leaping over obstacles as fast as possible.

  The braying of the ship’s machine gun was ungodly. Its rounds sawed through the building above Zack’s head. He grasped Milo by the drag handle on his Australian body armor, found the shop had a back room, and the back room had a bent metal door that Hightower kicked open by spinning on his back on the dirt floor and shoving both boot heels up hard towards the locks. Through the door was another shop, and then a hallway that headed south. Zack crawled on his hands and knees, pulling Milo along with him.

  The patrol boat brayed again, shredding wood and metal and stone and fabric above their heads. A jug of black lubricant split in two on a shelf above them, spilling warm grease over their gear and clothing.

  A third burst came from the guns, and then it was quiet for a moment. “Whiskey team, report,” whispered Zack into his mic.

  “Sierra Three, I’m good to go. I’m with Two. His headset came off, but he’s cool.”

  Zack breathed a quick sigh of relief. “One and Four are okay. That’s going to bring the army down on us quick. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, break. Sierra Six, are you receiving on this channel?”

  Court replied, “Affirmative, One.”

  “Good. When you do come for us, do not go east of Mall Bravo. That ain’t the Love Boat out there.”

  “Roger that. Any sign of Sierra Five?”

  “Negative. Doesn’t look like he made it to the waterline, though. We’d have heard that belt-fed bitch light him up. We’ll move north a couple of blocks to see what we can see. And all elements: keep your heads down while we link back up.”

  Court spent the next fifteen minutes finishing work on a project he’d just begun when the patrol boat’s loud machine guns opened up a quarter mile to the east. He’d come across a four-man squad of young GOS infantry guarding a dirt track to the northwest of the square. The track ended at the one paved road that led out of Suakin to the west, where it linked up with the north-south highway that continued up to Port Sudan and down to the rest of the country. A gas station lay at the intersection. The station was surprisingly modern, considering the rustic nature of the town. Court attributed this to the fact that it was on the highway, and Sudan did possess a relatively robust system of bus travel between major cities.

  The soldiers’ jeep was parked in the unpaved lot of the gas station, and a Russian PKM light machine gun sat mounted in the back under a black plastic cover. Many locals stood around the station, finding refuge there after having fled the center of Suakin, and the soldiers had their hands full with the crowd of people milling about.

  Court had walked up to the jeep, careful to keep his turban covering virtually his entire face, and he took a look inside. The keys were not with the vehicle, which meant he needed to figure out which of the soldiers was the driver.

  He had a plan boiling in his head, but for now he just needed to wait for Zack.

  The two malls and the shacks and shops erected all around them were a flutter of activity now. Everywhere soldiers moved with weapons up, screaming at civilians to get out of the way, and the civilians screamed back. Beasts of burden clogged the alleyways, and a bucket brigade of rail-thin men dumped water on the last of the fire in the souk that surrounded the blackened helicopter and the charred remains inside. The soldiers pushed these men away, as well, but the locals re-formed their line and went back to work, so desperate was their need to keep their subsistence-level incomes alive by preventing their shops and their wares from going up in black smoke with the chopper.

  But Zack, Brad, Dan, and Milo were not moving, were not running away or blasting themselves clear to safety. Instead, they lay prone, fifty yards north of the two malls, on the second floor of a two-story mud-brick building ringed by a low wall. The men all looked out the open arched passageway to the balcony, across the balcony, over the wall, over the road, and across a sandy runoff depression that led east to the harbor. On the other side of the depression, some two hundred meters away, was the bus station. And outside the bus station, sitting in the dirt, propped against a wall and surrounded by over two dozen soldiers, was a muscular black man, obviously wounded but obviously alive.

  Sierra Five.

  Through the four-power scope of Hightower’s TAR-21, the only weapon with optics left on the team, he could see that Spencer’s shirt had been removed, and he bled from the face and neck and shoulders, and blood stained his brown pants. His torso was covered in the gleam of perspiration along with the crimson shine of his blood. He’d been handcuffed behind his back, he was conscious, and a civilian man knelt in front of him, talking to him. Every now and then, he turned the American’s face towards him to ask him a question, then slapped him or punched him. Zack knew Spencer wasn’t going to say a word in response to a little rough stuff, but he also knew the harsh treatment he was now being subjected to would deteriorate in seconds into real torture.

  And there was nothing he could do to save him.

  “Sierra One for Sierra Six.”

  “Go ahead for Six.”

  “You ready to try an exfiltration?”

  “Affirmative. I just need to know where you are. As soon as you find Five, let’s do it. Every second we wait is another second where I risk compromise.”

  Zack relayed his exact coordinates and then said, “They’ve got Five. We have eyes on. He’s alive but unreachable.”

  No transmissions came through the headsets for several seconds. Finally Court responded. “Okay. Understand you have line of sight?”

  Zack nodded in the darkened room. A dingy white curtain blew in the hot breeze in front of him, momentarily obscuring his view of his man. Zack knew what Court was asking. Court was a pro among pros. Of course
he understood what must be done.

  Hightower flipped the safety on his Tavor, rendering his weapon hot. “Affirmative, Six. I have line of sight. He’s at the bus station just north of us.”

  Gentry’s next transmission broke a short still. “I’ll do it. I’ll head down the hill and get eyes on. You just sit tight, and I’ll take care of it.”

  The other three men in the room with Zack said nothing. Hightower knew that they all understood what was going to happen, but only Gentry offered to do it.

  Court Gentry was one hell of a guy.

  “Negative, kid. I appreciate it, but this is my job. It’s what they pay me for, I guess.”

  “You sure?”

  “Affirm. Just tell me you’re ready to pick us up.”

  “I’ve got a diversion set up here. I’ll need about thirty seconds to be under way, and another two mikes to be right on top of you guys.”

  “Roger that. Make ready. We go on my mark.”

  Dan was closest to Zack, just two feet off his left shoulder. He reached out and patted his boss on the arm, gave him a sympathetic squeeze.

  Hightower shrugged off the hand.

  Everyone on the team knew what was about to happen. They played by a set of rules that included this eventuality.

  “Goddammit,” said Zack softly. The men beating the shit out of Spencer now were blocking his shot; the aiming reticle on his Tavor was lined up on the tailbone of a secret policeman. Hightower wanted to squeeze the trigger, but killing one NSS officer was not worth exposing their position.

  At this point, there was only one thing worth exposing their position: preventing Sierra Five from revealing his identity or mission to the Sudanese. He wouldn’t do it willingly, but he would do it, and there was only one way to stop it.

  Just then Hightower squinted into his scope. There was a ruckus of some sort on the other side of the secret policeman. Soldiers ran forward, one fell back in the dirt, another spun away down to his knees. The NSS officer blocking Sierra One’s view was pushed aside, and then Sierra Five appeared, bloody and shirtless still, his hands shackled behind him.

  “Six, execute in five seconds,” said Zack.

  “Go in five, roger,” came the terse reply.

  Spencer ran free of the scrum of men, showing incredible balance and fitness to do so. He head-butted another soldier and made it ten yards closer to Hightower’s position, near the edge of the sandy depression.

  “He’s trying to get away,” said Milo, watching without benefit of a rifle scope.

  “No, he’s not,” said Zack softly. He blinked. “He’s trying to help me get a better shot.”

  To the west, they heard handgun rounds and the boom of an explosion, Court’s diversion, and in his scope Zack saw Spencer drop to his knees, saw his bloodied mouth move in a shout, and an instant later the distant sound made it to Hightower’s position.

  “Send it!”

  “Sending.” Sierra One pressed the trigger on the Tavor, sent a 5.56-mm round down the barrel, through the arched passageway, across the depression, and into the forehead of his man. Spencer’s head snapped back, and he dropped still in the dirt, his body coming to rest on top of his restrained arms.

  Within seconds, close gunfire began pocking the walls in the room, the white curtain whipped and tore and shredded, and dust from impacts between steel and clay bricks turned the air around the remaining members of Whiskey Sierra a smoky brown.

  FORTY-ONE

  “Sierra Six is Oscar Mike! ETA four-five seconds!”

  Zack acknowledged Court’s transmission. “Six is on the move, roger.”

  Court drove out of the gas station in the open-topped jeep. Behind him flames rocked seventy feet into the air from a burning fuel line that spun and bounced across the concrete, swinging wildly in all directions from the gas pump.

  Two of the soldiers were dead by Court’s gunfire, and two more had been stabbed in the liver and lay facedown and injured in the street. Civilians ran for their lives, sprinting away from the flamethrower igniting everything in sight with a wild mind of its own. Minivans and buses slammed into one another in attempts to get clear of the station. Locals in the street, safe from the flames, now found themselves forced to dive out of the way of the military jeep that lurched in a wide arc to turn around, heading down the hill now and driven by the maniacal turbaned kawaga who had started this catastrophe.

  Court headed east as fast as the jeep would go. The cover had popped free of the machine gun on the fixed base behind him; in his rearview he could see the weapon bouncing with the undulations of the uneven dirt track.

  A pack of hobbled camels crossed in front of him, and he yanked the wheel to the right, crashed through a wooden stall selling fruit, sending a dozen bunches of bananas hanging from ropes flying into the air. He kept crashing through to the other side of the stall and found himself a block south of the road that would have led him to Whiskey Sierra’s hide site. Just then, two military jeeps pulled up to the intersection in front of him.

  Fuck!

  Court whizzed past them, and they turned in behind and began giving chase.

  “Tangos on my ass, Zack!”

  “Copy that.”

  “Can you go one block south, or do I need to come to you guys?”

  “We’ll meet you in the alleyway, a left turn behind the hotel. When you pick us up, scoot over. Brad will drive.” And then, “You never could drive for shit.”

  “Roger that.” Court did not deny Hightower’s charge.

  The passages and alleyways were a thick congestion of man, animal, machine, and other impediments to an operator trying to make haste in a motor vehicle. Gentry leaned on the horn as he drove. A rickshaw and a donkey cart with a fifty-five-gallon water drum blocked the way just ahead of Court on his new route, so he jacked the wheel, went right one more block, and then took another hard left. Here he was forced to slam on the brakes to avoid a small crowd of children and sheep in the street, and he knew the two army jeeps pursuing him were right behind. Quickly he pulled the emergency brake, leapt up in the driver’s seat and vaulted into the back, his shoulder injury protesting even through the painkilling effects of the massive amounts of adrenaline coursing through him. The two jeeps made the turn, and they, too, skidded and stopped, a huge lingering dust cloud formed by the act. Court spun the PKM machine gun back around at the vehicles, and pulled back the charging handle to rack a round. He was close enough to see the eyes of the driver of the closest jeep widen in surprise, and the black soldier ground his transmission, frantically yanking his gearshift into reverse. Court pointed right at the hood of the jeep and pulled the trigger of the big Russian weapon.

  Click.

  The weapon was unloaded.

  Goddammit!

  Court drew his Glock 19 and fired an entire magazine at the two jeeps as they backed around the corner, their green bodies slamming into one another more than once in a desperate attempt to flee the withering handgun fire. It was no belt-fed machine gun, but at the moment the nine-millimeter handgun was a hell of a lot more valuable.

  As soon as they disappeared from view, he leapt back into the front seat, released the brake, and lurched forward.

  He’d popped the clutch, stalling the jeep.

  The windshield next to his head exploded in a spider-web of cracks as a rifle round struck it.

  “Shit!” He refired the engine and launched forward again.

  Thirty seconds later, he finally made it to the rally point, and he found the surviving four members of Whiskey Sierra engaged in a fierce firefight, their weapons cracking and snapping as they sent rounds towards a row of buildings at the end of the alleyway to the east. Enemy grenades exploded just short of their targets, and return fire whistled by. Court put the jeep in park and leapt into the back—again his left shoulder hated him for doing so—and he went to work immediately loading a can of ammunition to the machine gun. Sierra Two climbed into the driver’s seat. Brad carried only a pistol now, which he fir
ed over the front windshield.

  Seconds later Hightower leapt into the passenger seat, took up a forward firing position, and Two dropped down behind the wheel to reload his sidearm and put the jeep in gear. Sierra Three next came out from behind a row of barrels next to a big generator; on his back was Sierra Four, and in his right hand was a Sudanese Marra pistol that, Court assumed, he’d gleaned from a fallen enemy. Dan dumped his wounded colleague in the jeep’s bed next to Court and then dove in on top of him.

  Brad hit the gas, turned the jeep to the left, sending Court reeling in the back; only his handhold on the machine gun kept him upright. Court reracked the slide on the now-loaded weapon and opened up with a burst on the barrels on the corner as they drove off. Immediately the fuel inside ignited, and a massive explosion erupted across the alley, black smoke obscuring the Americans’ retreat.

  In under a minute they were on the paved road that led out of town. Twice they’d passed infantry while negotiating the maze of alleys in the shanties, but the speed and the confusion of the quick encounters had kept both meetings bloodless. Sierra Three remained at Gentry’s feet, his handgun and his eyes trained on the six o’clock to nine o’clock sector around the vehicle. His pistol could not do what Six’s machine gun could, but if he saw threats, he knew he could direct the Gray Man to engage them with the jeep’s heavy weapon. He also knew the Gray Man would cover from three to six o’clock, and Brad and Zack would cover the two quarter-slices of the pie in front of them.

  Sierra Four was in the back, as well, but he was unconscious now from blood loss.

  Court leaned nearer to Zack’s head and shouted over the noise of the speeding vehicle, “Hey! You make a left up here, and I can get us a new ride!”

  Zack thought it over for less than a second. “Let’s do it!” He instructed Brad to follow Court’s instructions. They made the turn to the south at the top of a hill and ran directly into a military checkpoint. Easily a dozen GOS infantry were in the middle of a road lined on both sides by clay walls of private homes. Court aimed the PKM and blasted a parked technical, exploding the pickup truck and blowing men down to the dirt at twenty yards. Other troops fired at the Americans as they shot up the road at fifty miles an hour. Brad sped through the smoke and came out on the other side. To the left of the jeep a wounded infantryman lying on his back in the street rolled quickly to his knees, raised his weapon, and raked the open-topped vehicle with automatic rifle fire from fifteen feet. Court had been shooting in the opposite direction and therefore saw the threat late, but he spun the PKM towards the gunfire, blasted the soldier back against a brown wall in a splatter of blood, and then looked down at his exposed body, fully expecting to see he’d been shot.