by Mark Greaney
“Do you?”
“Of course. It’s obvious. Who has both the resources to pay you and to plan this, and hates me enough to set this in motion? Those American actors who are so against me and have so much money. I have seen them on television for years, speaking to your congress, making movies of lies that they call documentaries. I knew some day these infidels would make an attempt on my life.”
Court wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat. The barb in his back was causing all his muscles to seize and cramp in pain; even walking was difficult now. As they approached the open doorway, he said, “That’s right. I’m gonna be a primo player in Hollywood when this is done. Fucking star on that sidewalk and all that shit.”
“And I also know who sent you to kidnap me.” His voice trailed off at the end, as he stopped at the entrance to the tiny structure. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“Keep going.”
“What are you going to—”
Court struck him soundly on the side of the head with the butt of the gun. The big man staggered, turned to the shack, and began walking forward with no more questions. Once inside, he continued to the center of the dimly lit room, and then he turned around. Gentry could see his confusion.
“You are working with Bedouins?”
“Shut up.”
Abboud shook off his confusion and began a sales pitch. Court had expected nothing less. “I can arrange to pay you more, more than you are getting to do this, I assure you.”
“Shut up.”
“Not money from Sudanese banks, no. I have accounts all over the world. Friends in the West and in Asia. This could be a larger monetary event for you than you now realize. You can just double what you are being paid and I will see—”
“Shut up and listen!” Court holstered his pistol again, the agony showing in his face as he reached across his body and gingerly removed his backpack by unbuckling the shoulder straps. Then he began working on his brown shirt, tearing at it with grunts and winces. After several tugs it tore free, and he stood bare-chested in the dim shack. “I need you to help me get this out.”
“The arrow?”
“No, the coffee stain on my crotch. Yes! The arrow!”
The president’s thick eyebrows rose. “What if I do not agree to help you?”
“I will kill you.”
Court could see the gears turning in Abboud’s brain. The crafty man knew his kidnapper needed something from him. He was now trying to find a way to play it to his advantage.
“What will you do for me if I do help?”
“I won’t kill you. Yet.”
That slowed the gears down a bit.
“What do I have to do?”
“I am going to lie on the ground, facedown. I need you to put your foot in the center of my back, grab the arrow just behind the head, and pull it out of the bone.”
There was a flicker of fresh light in the president’s eyes, and Court Gentry knew exactly what he was thinking. “You will want to drive the arrow into my back or neck when you pull it out. If you do this, you better find the place on my neck that will kill me instantly, because I am going to roll over and shoot you sixteen times if you don’t.”
“Why sixteen?”
“Because my gun only has sixteen bullets. Remember, I gave you a lot of dope back there in Suakin. You are slower than you think, you are weaker than you think, and right now, you are not half as smart as you think you are. You need to consider your actions very carefully before trying anything stupid, because I swear I will blow off your fucking nuts and watch you flip around till you bleed out if you don’t succeed.”
Silence hung in the air like the cloying heat. Oryx’s face showed the unpleasant mental image dancing in his head.
Finally, Court asked, “Are you ready to try this?”
President Abboud paused a long time. Finally he said, “This will be extremely painful for you.”
“And that’s a problem for you, why?”
“You may think I am trying to kill you when I am only trying to help.”
“I will expect pain in my back, where the arrow is. If I feel pain anywhere else, then the president of Sudan will lose his balls. That means no more little baby despots for you. You understand?”
Abboud nodded. Court drew his pistol and worked his way slowly to his knees, then onto his stomach. The arrow was into his scapula. It would not come out easily, and when it did, Court knew he would bleed considerably. He had a small trauma kit with him but no real way to dress a wound he could neither see nor reach, and having the president of Sudan bandage him just seemed too damn weird to bear.
And while Oryx’s drug-induced lethargy and diminished capacity worked to Court’s advantage as a kidnapper, it certainly did not benefit him as a patient. For all he knew, big Bakri Abboud was going to fall on top of the arrow instead of pull it out, and thereby pin Court to the floor of this shit hole shack like a butterfly in a bug collection.
Any way he looked at it, the Gray Man knew this was going to suck. He wanted to pop some pills, but he was smack-dab in the middle of a massive operation. That the thought of narcotics even entered his brain at this moment was disappointing to him.
Court fingered the Glock in his right hand. For a while he heard or felt nothing. He wondered if Oryx was trying to sneak out the door. Finally the booming African’s voice called out from above. “Can you release my hands? It will make it easier for me to—”
“Hell no. Just grab it and pull.”
He felt the pressure of the large sole of a big shoe between his shoulder blades, the painful adjusting of the arrow in his muscle and bone as it was grabbed hold of, and then an excruciating yank that caused Gentry’s eyes to fill with tears and his throat to emit a cracking scream. The burning and tearing did not stop. Instinctively, Court flipped onto his back, raised his Glock at the attacker above him, and ran his finger tip from the trigger guard down to the trigger.
He sighted on his target, just a couple of feet from the tip of the gun’s barrel.
Oryx stood above him, his hands bound together and shielding his eyes. The bloody arrow fell from his fingers onto Gentry’s chest.
He’d done it. Oryx had not tried anything and, Court realized, he’d come incredibly close to shooting him between the eyes nonetheless.
The pain in his shoulder did not subside, but still he rose to his feet, found himself more mobile if only because he no longer had to move carefully to avoid bumping the long projectile.
“Good.”
“What is your name?”
“Call me Six.”
“Mr. Six. Fine. And you may call me President—”
“I’ll call you whatever the fuck I want. Now, shithead, I need to make a phone call, so I need you to sit in the corner and be a good boy. Can you do that?”
THIRTY-NINE
Zack and three of his men had made it out of the last kill zone. After the chopper went down, the GOS seemed to back off both in fear and in an attempt to regroup. Hightower and company followed the second-floor hallway of Mall Alpha through laundries and rug shops and bakeries and storage rooms. They’d engaged two GOS men who were surprised to see them and certainly sorry they did in those last few seconds before they were silently killed with daggers. Brad and Dan scavenged the Type 81 rifles from the men’s bodies, since both of their own weapons were down to the last magazine. Brad passed his FAMAS to Milo to use as a makeshift crutch, and it had increased the mobility of Whiskey Sierra significantly. At the end of the mall they’d gone back downstairs, where they saw the GOS infantry on the street pulling back a couple of blocks, so Zack gave the order for the men to break cover and head through the souk, one block closer to the water, to the other concrete row of buildings he’d dubbed Mall Bravo.
The crash of the big helicopter had started a fire in the souk, and the black smoke from fuel and fabric and rubber and wood had helped obscure the depleted team as they crossed the open ground. They received no return fire from the retreating GOS, and it seeme
d likely their repositioning had gone undetected. It was almost too much to hope for, but so far, he’d seen no evidence that the opposition knew where they were.
Hightower had seen enough combat in his life to recognize that the main thing they’d had going for them was the confusion on the part of their enemy. He was certain the Sudanese Army had no idea they were only up against five men, and these five men were not holding their president hostage as a human shield. If they did know the only threat was right here in these buildings by the souk near the water, they would simply concentrate all their forces here, blast the hell out of the malls, and kill everything that moved inside.
Five men, no matter how good their training, could do nothing against that sort of assault.
And it was starting to look like five men had become four. Spencer had not transmitted since disappearing out the window to divert the attention of the helicopter ten minutes earlier. It was possible he’d lost his radio or the signal between the buildings was broken, but Sierra One thought it likely that Sierra Five had made it across the souk, only to stumble into a superior force of GOS infantry on the other side.
Still, Zack and his men were heading carefully through mall Bravo now in an attempt to find their comrade.
Hightower’s sat phone vibrated. He pressed the answer button, which put the call through to his tactical headset.
“Hey, Six. You chillaxing on the beach with a mai tai?”
Gentry’s voice came through the line. “We’re secure. You?”
“Knee-deep in it. About fifty yards from the water, three blocks north of the causeway. Still in sporadic contact. Haven’t been able to shake the GOS long enough to slip away. How’s your back? Run into any more Comanches out on the trail?”
“I’ll live. You need me there?”
“Sure you can put Oryx on ice?”
“Affirmative. I’ll tie him up and drug him. He’s not going anywhere.”
“Alright, then get on your horse and get over here ASAP. We need you to bring us some wheels, get us some kind of sitrep as to the concentration of OPFOR in the streets. I was thinking you might be able to come in low-pro from the west, score us a ride, and then move close enough to lead our exfil back to it.”
“Shit, Zack, want me to pick you up a fucking Happy Meal while I’m at it?”
Zack chuckled as he knelt in a shop that made and sold tin pots and pans. Brad was ahead, clearing a doorway with his scavenged Type 81 rifle. Dan was behind with Milo. “Man, where did you learn to be such a smart-ass?” It was a rhetorical question; Zack knew the answer. “The only burger meat around here is going to be Whiskey Sierra unless you come and pull our asses off the grill.”
Zack heard the sigh, but he also knew his former operator would comply with nothing more than a little bitching and moaning. “Roger that, I’m on the way. I’ll use the radio when I get in range.”
“Good boy. On your way over here, I want you to call the Hannah and let them know where you stashed the president. Just in case none of us make it out, they can come in and pick him up.”
“Roger that. Six out.”
It took a half hour for Gentry to get Oryx secure, change his shirt to something less torn and bloodstained, cover his head with a turban, siphon fuel from a parked cargo truck to gas up the Mercedes, and get back into Suakin’s city limits. He almost took the truck and left the Mercedes behind, but the old, heavy, diesel sedan was serving him well at the moment, it had not been compromised by the enemy, and the truck looked like shit, even by the lousy standards of what passed for motor vehicles around here. Heading back into the target zone, he passed army trucks and police cars moving in all directions, and bewildered civvies doing the same.
Overhead a pair of old American F5 fighter jets, flown by the Sudanese Air Force, etched figure-eight-shaped contrails in the bright blue sky.
There did not seem to be much cohesion to the movements of the military forces, which Gentry took as a good sign. From the look of it, the Sudanese had no idea how big an opposition force they were up against. With Gentry’s movements to the southeast of the square, the two operators in buildings in the square, the van shooting its way around the entire town, and the brief engagement with the SLA to the west, it must have painted an incredibly confused tactical picture for the GOS military commanders. With the massive volume of gunfire and the shouted radio traffic reporting enemy contacts on all points of the compass, they may well have thought the president had been kidnapped by a local force one hundred men strong.
As Court downshifted his Mercedes to negotiate the narrow passageways between two rows of shanties, an army jeep shot up an alley from his right and passed directly in front of him as it continued to the north. At the paved road a two-ton truck full of troops pulled out into traffic next to him, and it was nearly T-boned in the process by an identical truck heading east.
There was no shooting in town, and the helicopter was gone. Sirens whined, and a thin pillar of dark smoke drifted over the harbor and lagoon to the east.
It looked like a battle had been fought here, and it looked like the battle was over.
Gentry parked the car on an open dirt soccer pitch four blocks west of the square. Immediately he was approached by men trying to sell turnips, even with the local equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge just a few blocks away less than an hour earlier. He wondered who the fuck would be thinking about buying a turnip for that evening’s soup at a time like this, and he brushed them away with a wave of his hand, trying to keep his beard and his shades and his turban covering as much of his face and head as possible while he moved. He purchased a long white thobe robe from a vendor in a shallow stall a block from the soccer pitch, and stepped into an alley to don his new garment.
There were cops everywhere now. Gentry figured most of them must have come down from Port Sudan, forty miles to the north. If so, then they would have just arrived, run face-first into the chaos and confusion of the scene, they would be trying to glean intel, and would be unsure about jurisdiction and jostling for real estate with the local cops and the military and the NSS. Now would be the last possible time to accomplish anything in Suakin for the rest of the day, and Court knew he needed to hustle. Up ahead he spied a disorganized police checkpoint next to a long wood and corrugated tin lean-to structure that covered hundreds of wooden cages, each cage housing an individual chicken or rooster. Dozens of locals were milling about. Only a few were going about their business; most were standing around and talking, trying to pick up gossip about what was going on. A few of them were getting hassled by the cops at the checkpoint, so Court looked for a different route.
The dust kicked up by the vehicles on the streets all but obscured the road, like a miniature haboob. Gentry could barely see fifty feet, and he hoped the cops and the other curious eyes in the streets were having the same problem so he could move closer to his objective with a bit more confidence.
To avoid the checkpoint, he made a left down an alley. In seconds he was lost. There were so few main roads in this town, it was easy to feel like you were caught in a maze of arbitrary passageways between shacks that went on for miles. But the town was set on a gentle slope towards the harbor, and Gentry’s objective lay at the harbor, so Court just kept moving downhill and away from people, and soon enough this led him into the square.
In daylight the square seemed smaller, even more dirty and congested. It was full of men and beasts and machines. Camels and goats and donkeys mixed in with military vehicles and government sedans and “technicals,” Toyota pickups with machine guns mounted in the back and filled with men. Two transport helicopters sat idle in the square, their troops already out hunting for the kidnappers of their president. Ambulance sirens blared from all ends of the open area, and men shouted and screamed at one another. A half dozen dead soldiers had been dumped in a pile by their fellow brothers-in-arms, and the wounded were everywhere. Court saw a makeshift clinic for injured civilians. Even from a distance some of the wounds looked serious,
and he quickly turned away from them, worried there would be hurt children, and he could not bear to witness their suffering.
“We had to destroy the village to save it,” he muttered under his breath and inside his hot turban.
His Thuraya buzzed on his hip under his clothing, and the call came through his covert headset. He answered with an explanation. “Almost to you, One. Need about five more minutes.”
“That’s good. We’ve been waiting on your ass so long the landlord is hitting us up for first and last month’s rent. How’s the town?”
“It’s getting stuffy, a lot of jurisdictional issues all these organizations have to iron out. Plus the dead and wounded everywhere adding to the confusion. We need to take advantage of this disorder. The time to move is right now.”
“Negative, we can’t exfil just yet.”
Court stopped in his tracks. “Why not?”
“Sierra Five is MIA. I need to know what happened to him.”
“Copy that. I’ll find us some wheels and get set. Six out.”
Zack had his three men ready to move seconds after Court hung up. They had spent the last half hour on the roof at the northern tip of Mall Bravo, not forty meters east of where the Hip crashed in the souk between the two malls. Their rooftop position did not give them any view, however. They’d found a ripped and rotting green tarpaulin held up by driftwood and wire, under which someone had stored firewood and empty water tanks, and Whiskey Sierra had ducked into the deepest recesses of the structure for maximum concealment. There they sat and waited, bled and perspired, thumped scorpions off of each other with gloved fingertips.
The four men had patched themselves up as well as possible. Zack had bandaged his forearm and effectively stopped the bleeding, consumed water and salts from his rations to replace that lost in his profuse sweating, and consolidated all his partial magazines of ammunition into one thirty-round mag in his gun, plus a partially loaded mag in his canvas chest rig. Brad now wielded a fully loaded Type 81. He’d hurt his back and knee while crashing the van. He thought he might have cracked a rib or two on his right side but had not reported himself as a casualty to Sierra One. Dan carried a scavenged Type 81 as well. Dan was the sole uninjured member of the team.
