On Target

by Mark Greaney

  “So?”

  “So the White House has ordered the director of National Intelligence to order Denny to order us to exfiltrate immediately, just drop all our shit and go. They do not want CIA fingerprints anywhere near the Sudan operation, for fear it would jeopardize the deal.”

  “What about me?”

  “I’m going to pick you up in the sub. I can be at the mangrove swamp at midnight. Can you make it by then, or do you need to go on another bender with your party drugs?”

  “I can be there, but what’s all this going to do to Nocturne Sapphire?”

  “There is no Nocturne Sapphire, and we all need to forget that there ever was. The rug’s been pulled out from under us. We just need to get out of Sudanese waters, get down to Eritrea, and not get compromised. Sudan Station will dump all the blame for this on the SLA.”

  Court looked out at the grasses blowing in the evening breeze. “But . . . what the hell am I supposed to do with Abboud?”

  “Give the fucker a dirt nap,” Zack said flatly.

  Court hesitated. “But . . . he’s the one that can convince his people what the Russians are up to.”

  “We’re not supposed to be here. There is no way we can hand Abboud over to the ICC now. Think about it! If we hand Abboud to the Euros, the Chinese Communists will get wind of it, and the Chicoms will pull out of the deal.”

  “But Abboud is more important alive than dead. Isn’t that what the White House has been thinking all along?”

  “Yeah, but the knockdown of the Chinese chopper was a game changer.”

  Court shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a trade agreement. What is one trade deal in the scheme of things?”

  “It makes the politicians look good.”

  “So would ending an African genocide!”

  “Not by risking a superpower war! The average Joe in the USA does not want to hear about us shooting it out with the Chinese over some dumb savages living in mud huts.”

  “The Chinese aren’t going to go to war over this.”

  “What are you, a fucking poli-sci PhD now? You are an operator, not a diplomat. The dips have their job and you have yours. Abboud needs to die! Kill the fuck! That’s an order!”

  But Gentry would not let it go. “The only way to stop what is going to happen is with Abboud alive, in front of a camera, laying out to his people the involvement of the Russians and Chinese in his country’s internal affairs. That was the original motivation behind Nocturne Sapphire, because that is the only thing that will work. It can’t be done any other way.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen. You’re going to cap him and get your ass to the northern tip of the mangrove swamp for the exfil. What the hell is wrong with you? I thought you’d be happy to dump some hollow points into that bastard’s snot box.”

  “C’mon, Zack! We extract Abboud from here, get him to The Hague, and we can stop a war!”

  “It’s not our job to stop a war! It’s our job to do our job, and our job is to waste Abboud, dump his corpse by the side of the road, and then get our happy asses out of here!”

  Court’s jaw tightened, and he leaned his head back on the rear bumper of the Skoda sedan. “I need to think it over.”

  “Think it over? Who the fuck do you think you are? You do what—”

  “I’ll call you back. Six out.” Court ended the call. He dropped the phone to the grass and dropped his head into his hands.

  Dammit. Court knew he could stand up right now, walk back into the shack, and put a nine-millimeter bullet into the head of the president of the Republic of Sudan without a single shred of remorse for the act. The man was a monster, certifiable and dangerous.

  Go kill him. Just get up and go kill him.

  But he understood the logic that Oryx’s power could now be turned back against the atrocities and used for good. Yeah, it was complete and utter bullshit that down the road he’d get the last laugh. He’d be banging hookers in Havana after a lifetime of murder and corruption.

  But hell, Court thought, that’s a problem for another day. Gentry himself could go to Cuba on his own dime and settle that score. He’d kill Abboud for his crimes, but not until the impending chaos of a post-Abboud Sudan was minimized.

  And that could only happen with Abboud alive.

  Court had been played by the Russians, lied to and manipulated to where he almost helped start a war, and now, he realized, killing Oryx would mean he’d been played by Langley into the same thing.

  No. He would not kill Abboud. Could not. He would bring him to the International Criminal Court to stop one war and prevent another.

  It would, no doubt, get the shoot-on-sight sanction reinstated, but it was the only hope for thousands of innocent Sudanese. Court put his head between his knees and covered it with his hands. He realized he wanted to storm back into the shack not to shoot Abboud but instead to shoot himself up with more of the morphine.

  Its effects were wearing off quickly, with the struggle to concentrate obviated by the events of the past ten minutes.

  Court picked up the Thuraya and called Zack back.

  Hightower answered immediately. Court knew he must have been furious, but he masked it well. “You back with the program, bro?”

  A long pause. “No can do, Zack.”

  Court felt the tension on the other end of the line. He’d never defied Zack Hightower a single time in their five years together on the Goon Squad until, of course, that day when it all went to hell. Finally Zack spoke. His voice was light, but the menace was more than implied. “Look, kid, I’ve already lost a couple of really good guys today. I don’t want to lose you, too. Let’s make lemonade from lemons, here. Shoot that asshole, get yourself to where I can come and pick you up, and you and me will sail off into the sunset. Langley will drop the SOS, we’ll get debriefed, we’ll shit, shave, and shower, and inside of seventy-two hours we’ll be tossing back two-for-one Budweisers at a lobby bar in Bethesda. One for us and one for our homies. Cool?”

  “As awesome as that sounds, Zack, it’s not going to happen. I’ll go it alone if I have to, but I’m getting Abboud to the ICC alive.”

  Anger welled in Zack Hightower’s voice, as if every word served as a demonstration as to how his frustration grew exponentially. “How the hell you going to do that? You got a boat, a plane, an army?”

  A pregnant pause, a quiet “Negative.”

  “No, you don’t, do you? I’ll tell you what you do have. You have a hole in your back that stinks so bad it could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. That’s what you have! You need a doctor a lot more than you need some fucked-up one-man crusade to save the most hated man on God’s green earth. I know you think of yourself as the fucking Lone Ranger, but you’re on a fool’s errand if there ever was one. From where I’m sitting, you need four things to accomplish your objective. You need guys, guns, gear, and guts. Court, you got the guts, I’ll give you that. But you are sorely lacking in every one of the other categories. No singleton operator is going to get that fucker out of the Sudan! You’ve got the Sudanese Army, the NSS, and Abdul Q. Public on your tail. Everyone is looking for their president and trying to smoke the guy who snatched him . . . You really want to cross me on top of that?”

  “You’re going to come after me?”

  Without hesitation Hightower said, “Yes, I am. I swear to God if you don’t cap Oryx right this second, I’m going to report it to Denny, and you and I both know he’ll send me after you. Neither of us wants that to happen, Court.”

  Another long pause. “See you, Zack.”

  A pause again, this time on Hightower’s end of the conversation. Then, “No, Gentry. I’ll see you, right through the scope of my Remington 700. Just before your head turns to pink mist. We wanted to make you part of the team again, but you know what? You’ve been solo for too long; you never were going to fit in, dude. Guess it’s inevitable that it had to end like this.”

  Zack ended the call.

  Court rose from his position of
the past hour, against the bumper of the car. Slowly he stepped back into the shack. Oryx was there, of course. Standing in the middle of the dark room. It was clear he had not overheard the specifics of the phone conversation, but certainly he’d picked up some of the tone.

  “What is going on?”

  “Nothing. We need to move.” Court had given the location of the shack to the CIA operators on the Hannah . He knew he needed to get out of here before Zack or someone else came calling.

  “Tell me, Six. What was all the arguing?”

  Court cut the president’s zip tie from the center beam with a small folding knife. He said nothing to the man as he closed the blade and slipped it back into his pocket.

  “What is happening?” Abboud was extremely agitated. Court imagined he himself would be even more stressed-out right now but for the remnants of the drugs in his system. He wondered how much it affected him. Would he be able to drive? Would he be able to find a new hide without stumbling into all the people who were searching for him and his captor right now?

  Oryx began to ask once more about the phone calls. Court stood in front of him and pulled two new zip ties out of his backpack to restrain the man’s hands in front of his body. Before he had done so, Court shrugged. Whatever. “I’ve been ordered to kill you.”

  “By the American actors.” The big black man made it as a statement, but it was clear he was asking. He pulled his hands back and away.

  “Negative. The CIA wants you dead, too. It’s pretty much a unanimous consensus, at this point. Give me your hands.”

  Oryx’s face contorted in shock, like he’d been doused with cold water from an ice bucket. “No! We had an agreement. They need me alive. The European—”

  “Shut up! We need to get out of here so I can think without worrying about them—”

  “I can help them with their—”

  “Calm down! Give me your hands!”

  “They cannot just change the arrangement like—”

  Court pulled his Glock. The drugs slowed him, and his stiff gun arm wavered. He pressed it against Abboud’s throat.

  “I said, calm the fuck down!”

  Oryx’s hands went up in surrender, and then they went for the pistol.

  FORTY-FIVE

  President Abboud was a big man, taller and broader and thicker than Gentry by a wide margin, but he was sixty-six years old and did not possess even a modicum of the training in the brain and muscles and soul of the American warrior. It should have been no match.

  But for the morphine. Abboud knocked the Glock pistol away with his first strike, wrapped a meaty hand around each of the American’s wrists, and pulled their bodies together. Six moved slowly and sluggishly, did not even realize he was being attacked for the first few seconds of the action. He thought Oryx was just freaking out about the possibility of having the CIA’s backing pulled out from under him and was just slapping at Court like a frustrated child.

  But when Gentry hit the ground, slamming into his wounded back under the weight of the huge Sudanese president, the danger of the situation became apparent to him through the dulled reality of his doped-up senses. The drugs were not enough to block the flash fire of excruciating agony as it registered in his shoulder and then transferred to his brain. He screamed out, and a series of punches rained down on him from above. Court covered his face, focused on the pain in his back to wake his adrenaline, to jump-start his muscle memory and to get this big bastard off of him.

  From the light of the tiny fire, Court’s narrow eyes located the next punch, a right hook already on its way from on high. Gentry short-circuited the attack with an attack of his own: he hit Abboud hard in the nose. The president’s hook landed a quarter second later, but it was weak and poorly targeted, the fist turned quickly into a hand that reached up to his face as he fell on his back, holding his broken nose and wiping free-flowing blood from the swollen nostrils.

  Gentry kicked Oryx off of him the rest of the way, rolled over, and began crawling around looking for the pistol. He found it against the wall, retrieved it as he stood, then retrieved Oryx by his shirt collar and pulled him into a standing position. Within seconds he had the moaning man’s hands zip-tied behind his back, and a minute later the Skoda tore through the high grasses on its way back to the main road.

  Gentry thought over his options, and this did not take long, as there were so few. He had no idea where he was going, other than to just find some new hide so he could work out a plan. Oryx rubbed his face against the upholstery in the backseat of the car because he could not use his hands to wipe the blood away, and he moaned and cussed softly in Sudanese Arabic.

  The phone rang. Gentry had no interest in listening to one more petition from Zack to do what he was told, but he answered the phone anyway. The rage and adrenaline from the fight in the shack still had his emotions in high gear.

  Court said, “The time for talking is over, asshole. If you’re going to come after me, come on, because the quicker I kill you once and for all, the quicker I can break cover and get my job done!”

  But it was not Zack on the other end of the line. It was Denny Carmichael. He said, “Young man, Sierra One explained the problem at hand. I am calling to see what I can do to rectify it.”

  Carmichael was scared, nervous about having one of his men on a rogue mission. Court could hear it in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Killing Oryx at this point will create a disaster I am not prepared to be a part of.”

  “I understand how you feel. I was one of the architects of Nocturne Sapphire. All along, we knew that if we could take him alive, he could be very useful to us and to his country. But unfortunately we cannot leave any trace that the CIA or any U.S. operator was in Suakin yesterday. If evidence comes out, then we will have a massive international superpower crisis, which is, frankly, a hell of a lot more important than civil war in a third-world nation.”

  “So you agree there will be war. A civil war with the backing of the Chinese and Russians?”

  “Civil war, yes, in the short term it is likely. But we do not see the superpowers playing an active role.”

  “Maybe you don’t have the assets in place to see it happening.”

  “I can assure you, we have close contact with officials very high in the Sudanese government.”

  “How close is your contact?”

  “Extremely close.”

  “How high are the officials?”

  “Extremely high.”

  “Well, I have the fucking president sitting in the backseat of my car, so when you can get a source higher and closer than that, maybe you’ll impress me.”

  There was a long pause. “There is an important trade deal in the works.”

  Gentry couldn’t care less. “Yeah, so maybe we take it on the chin from the Chinese. That sucks. But we’ll get over it.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “Actually, it is. I’ve got the president. I intend to get him to the ICC alive. I am going to do the right thing here. There are a lot of people in this country who are depending on it. You guys had the right idea; Nocturne Sapphire was the right op. Yeah, it was hopelessly fucked-up because Sudan Station doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground, but we were damn close to pulling it off. I’m going to finish this. You guys at Langley need to realize that what I am doing here is the right thing, and you need to rethink your—”

  Denny’s calm but annoyed countenance of all their earlier conversations morphed in an instant to screaming, shouting vitriol. “I don’t have time to listen to a sermon from a pissant like you! Let me explain something. The past four years have been a cakewalk for you. There are people up here who have a soft spot for Court Gentry. You did good work for a long time for precious little thanks, and that earned you a great deal of respect in the SAD. When the shoot-on-sight went out on you, there were some in the bureaucracy here who were borderline insubordinate in their conviction to the cause, and the operation to eliminate you suffered
for it.

  “But now, Mr. Gentry, now there is not a man left in the agency who’s on your side. Not only will I reinstate the SOS, but I will bump it up to the top of the priority list. It won’t be some half-assed Echelon tracking, intradepartmental memoranda and Interpol watch request. It will be coordinated teams of tier-one hunter-killers, SAD/SOG Paramilitary Operations officers, Combat Applications Group, proxy teams of bounty hunters. I will personally arrange that every available SAD asset will be brought to bear against you.

  “There won’t be a rock big enough for you to crawl under, a handler foolish enough to sponsor you, a country brazen enough to allow you inside its borders.

  “Zack is going to hunt you down. He will stop you, and he will kill you. You may still have a pulse for a bit, Mr. Gentry, but as of this very moment . . . your life is ended!”

  Carmichael did not say anything else. Neither did Court. He liked getting the last word . . . but at this moment it seemed as if the last words on the subject had been spoken. No clever quip could blunt the impact of Carmichael’s rant. This man was not threatening anything that he did not have the power to put into motion.

  After an extremely long pause, the man from Langley spoke quietly. It sounded to Court as if he were hanging up the phone as he did so.

  “That is all.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Tuesday was Ellen Walsh’s first day back in her tiny office in The Hague since leaving for the Sudan five weeks earlier. Her supervisors in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court had offered a week for her to tend to herself upon her return from Africa, but the thirty-five-year-old Canadian had only taken a day to go to a local dermatologist to look at her sunburned face, and a GP to give her a prescription for migraines she’d been having since the truck explosion on the road to Dirra.

  When she appeared through the elevator doors to her office, her coworkers were shocked to see her. Snippets of her adventure had made it out. The international media had covered the attack of the Speranza Internazionale convoy and the murder by the Janjaweed militia of world-famous Mario Bianchi and two of his local staff. There was no mention in the reports that other Westerners had been in the convoy, but Ellen herself had spoken to the administrative heads in the Office of the Prosecutor, and the story had filtered its way downstairs like water poured through cracks in the flooring. From there, administrative assistants of the top brass told friends and friends of friends who worked throughout the building. Her brutal sunburn and a sad and distant look in her eyes lent credence to the rumors, and Ellen knew it would not be long before she would be forced to send out an e-mail thanking everyone for their concern, and simultaneously asking everyone to please respect her privacy and understand that she just wasn’t quite yet up to talking about what she had witnessed in Darfur.