A brisk nod from Mackenzie, then Abby. Mackenzie edged from the window to the door along the outer wall of the house, stayed there to the right of the entrance. Abby, head tucked low, raced around the Cherokee, using it as a shield as she put herself to the left of the door.
Kealey looked over at Mackenzie, held up three fingers, ticked off a visual countdown. Three, two, one . . .
And then Mackenzie backed up a step, directed his fire at the lock plate, almost tearing it free of the door itself. He released the AK’s trigger, sent the door crashing inward with a high leg kick to the twisted remnants of the flimsy metal plate, and poured more rounds into the hut, Abby joining him now with a rippling burst from her rifle.
“Now!” Kealey shouted, and they momentarily ceased fire as he went in low, the stock of his weapon against his arm, his fist around the grip, finger squeezing the trigger.
Bullets streamed from his gun into the hut as he laid out a side-to-side firing pattern, sweeping the room, his eyes seeking out White through the goggles.
He was still kneeling behind the table, having shuffled behind a chair. Incredibly, the oil lamp on the tabletop remained unbroken, throwing its pallid orange light around the room. Not wanting to be a stationary target, Kealey dove to one side, swung the rifle in White’s direction, prepared to fire—and suddenly the chair was thrown across the room at him, flying through the air, nearly hitting him smack in the chest. He managed to avoid it on reflex and had some vague, marginal awareness of it hitting the wall directly behind where he’d stood as he arced the snout of his gun toward the oil lamp and blew it to bits and pieces.
Oil spilled from the disintegrated lamp onto the table and chairs, igniting instantly, bathing them in fire. Burning puddles formed on the floor. White was caught in a shower of burning droplets, snaps of flame erupting on his sleeves and trousers. As he stood, trying to slap them out with his hands, Kealey ran across the room and tackled him across the waist, the momentum of his lunge sending both men down amid the spreading blaze.
His clothes on fire, White hit the floor on his back, grunting out an expulsion of breath, Kealey landing atop him, his weapon over his shoulder on its strap. He saw White’s hand come chopping up at his throat, blocked it with a muscular forearm, and then brought his elbow down on White’s neck and punched him squarely in the middle of his face. Blood gushing from his broken nose, White somehow wrapped his fingers around Kealey’s throat, his thumbs pressing up under his chin even as his shirt and trousers continued burning.
Kealey hit him again in the face, felt his fingers loosen around his windpipe, and tore them free. Suddenly, then, a gun muzzle came down against White’s temple, pushing it sideways.
“Don’t move, fucker!” Mackenzie, his legs planted wide, stood just to one side of the two men, the bore of his rifle steady against White’s head. “I ought to goddamn let you lay here and burn!”
Kealey got to his feet, swooped in a breath. He could smell White’s singed hair and flesh. He looked around, saw a field jacket on a wall hook to his right, tore it down off the hook, and used it to beat out the flames on White’s clothes and the floor around him.
“I want this son of a bitch alive,” he said. And then glanced at the doorway at the back of the room, where the hut had been partitioned with a plasterboard wall. Goggles on, Abby was just on the other side of the door in the darkness, holding her weapon across her body, looking down at the floor.
Knowing what to expect, Kealey swore under his breath, raced into the second room, and saw the oriental rug tossed back from the open wooden floor panel. Outside the hut the sound of gunfire had become light and sporadic.
He and Abby exchanged glances through the monocular lenses of their NVGs.
“Did you see Nusairi go down there?” he asked.
She shook her head no. “We can’t head in after him . . . . If he’s waiting, he could easily pick us off.”
“He isn’t waiting,” Kealey said. “He intends to reach his forces at Suakim or Ed Damer. And he’s got enough of a lead so we’d never chase him down on foot. I—”
The heavy tramp of boots now, coming through the hut from out front. Kealey jerked upright, swung his weapon around at the door to the room . . . and then felt the tension drain from his limbs. It was Tariq, a silhouette against the deeper darkness, squinting down at the tunnel entrance with his unaided eyes.
“We’ve finished those ghabanat in the other hut. . . . I lost Abdul, a good friend. And another, Mahzin, is badly wounded,” he said, shaking his head. Then he snapped his cell phone from his pocket and looked at Kealey through the gloom. “I left my men at the other end of the tunnel, over by the Gash.”
Kealey’s molars ground together. Yes, Tariq had left his men there. But wouldn’t Nusairi anticipate it? At any rate this would not be left up to them. Or anyone else.
Spinning toward the door without a word, he ran out to where Mackenzie stood with his gun still pointed down at White. A pair of Tariq’s fighters were trussing his arms and legs with strips of rawhide cord.
“The car keys,” he said, holding out his hand. “Now!”
Mackenzie got the key ring from his pocket and tossed it to him without asking questions . . . not that Kealey would have lost a moment pausing to answer before he raced from the hut into the night.
No longer wearing his goggles, Kealey white-knuckled the Cherokee’s steering wheel, its high beams lancing the night, his foot hard to the gas pedal as he roared over the curving, potholed road toward the river. It was two miles to the mountains, just over a quarter that distance to the bridge. Head start or not, Nusairi was on foot. He would not be able to gain much distance on him.
The rail station behind him now, Kealey sped past square patches of farmland to the grove of trees at the river’s edge, came to a short stop. Where had Tariq positioned his men?
He glanced over his left shoulder, then right at a copse of shrubs and trees. Yes, there.
Leaving the headlights on, he pushed out his door, hastened a yard or two through the screening brush . . . and then almost stumbled over something underfoot.
He knew what it was before looking down. The body lay sprawled faceup on the ground, a bullet hole in its forehead, the toe of its boot against its outstretched arm. The second of Tariq’s men was on his side only inches from the first, blood oozing from what was left of his mouth and chin.
Their old Ford sedan was gone. A few feet away from where its tires had flattened the surrounding vegetation, Kealey saw the hinged trapdoor to the tunnel. It was thrown wide open, the packed sod and twigs that had camouflaged it flapped aside.
He turned back to the Cherokee, keyed it to life, and tore off for the river crossing.
Kealey was coming off the east side of the bridge when he spotted the wink of taillights up ahead of him to the right, on the street turning off toward the souq at the heart of Kassala. There were no other vehicles on the road, no people around; the town had rolled up whatever damned sidewalks it had. . . . He would have to take his chances that it was Nusairi.
He swung onto the narrow street, pouring on the gas. The taillights, where were they? The main part of town was a labyrinth of twists and turns, and he’d momentarily lost sight of them. . . .
Mouthing a string of profanities, Kealey whipped his head back and forth, then thankfully picked up the gleaming red lights around another sharp bend to his right. He swung into it, found himself on a relative straightaway, and accelerated, noticing the car ahead had sped up, too. He’d gambled correctly, then—it had to be Nusairi.
He bumped on over the cobbled street, his foot to the pedal, gaining on the Ford. It would be no match for his Cherokee, but Nusairi probably knew the city’s layout better than he did, giving him that far from negligible advantage. Kealey was afraid he might yet reach another twisty section of town and shake him loose.
Reaching the next corner, the Ford took a sudden left, Kealey almost on its bumper now, able to see Nusairi hunched over the wheel.
He swerved after him, realized they’d gotten to the wide-open central market—there were stalls and wagons all around, everywhere, some emptied out for the night, others with their wares covered with tarpaulins.
Kealey poured it on now, getting closer, closer, and then cutting his wheel to the left so he pulled directly alongside the Ford. He looked out his passenger window, briefly met Nusairi’s gaze through double panes of glass, and swung the wheel hard to his right.
He felt the collision of their doors jar his back, heard the tortured, scraping grind of metal on metal. Then Nusairi’s lighter vehicle half bounced, half skidded to the right and went plowing into a cart of woven textiles, knocking off its wheel so it spun wildly over the cobbles, the cart toppling onto its side, blankets and sheets of fabric spilling everywhere over the street.
Somehow, though, Nusairi managed to hang on to control of the Ford. Kealey swung hard into his flank again, this time almost lifting Nusairi’s wheels off the ground to send him careening through a high stack of packing crates. The crates broke apart over his hood and windshield, wood flying, the burlap sacks of millet and corn inside them breaking open to disgorge their contents. Nusairi tailspun across the square into a vendor’s stall and smashed into a long wooden table, upending it before he hit the back of the stall and brought its bare plank walls crashing down on him, demolishing the Ford’s windshield.
Kealey stopped the Cherokee and exited it in a heartbeat, rushing across the square to the Ford as Nusairi pushed himself out of its scraped and beaten driver’s door. Blood trickling from under his eye, cuts on his cheeks and forehead, Nusairi looked at him, turned away, and started to make a break for the shadows.
On him now, right behind him, Kealey took a running leap at Nusairi that almost knocked both men to the cobblestones, wrapping his arms around his back to try and catch hold of him. But Nusairi, staggering, managed to stay on his feet. He twisted around to face Kealey, locking eyes with him, his features distorted with rage and malice—the rage showing above all else, completely overtaking him, his eyes flaring, his lips peeled back from his tightly clenched teeth in an almost bestial grimace.
And then he dove at Kealey, literally dove, giving Kealey little time to realize that the bottom of his shirt had pulled out from the waistband of his cargo pants and bunched up to reveal the handle of his combat knife.
Nusairi snatched hold of the knife, pulling it from its sheath, the blade flashing in his right hand as it came up. He took a vicious swipe at Kealey, barely missed carving a deep gash across his abdomen, and might have done so if Kealey hadn’t feinted backward at the last instant. As Nusairi came charging at him with the blade again, Kealey recovered his balance, pivoted on the forward part of his left foot, and shot both hands out in front of him, his right clenching Nusairi’s knife hand, his left grabbing the same elbow, twisting it around, yanking it up and back toward Nusairi.
They grappled like that for an endless minute, strength against strength, their faces inches apart. Kealey could feel Nusairi’s breath, see his cheeks puffing with exertion, the blade suspended between them.
And then he felt something in Nusairi’s grip give way, just for a split second. He moved forward into him, knowing it might be his one opportunity, bending the knife back toward Nusairi’s chest, back so its point was directly under his rib cage . . . and, mustering everything he had, gave it a hard upward shove to bury it inside him to the handle.
Still on his feet, Nusairi produced a feral sound that was something between a grunt and a moan, his hands going to his chest, his blood pouring over them in crimson sheets. At last, after what seemed another long while, his legs began to sag.
Kealey pulled out the knife before Nusairi could fall, stepped back, and stood looking at him, looking into his eyes....
Looking into his eyes, his gaze calm and unwavering as the life faded out of them.
“That was for Lily Durant,” he said before the last spark was extinguished. Then, waiting for Nusairi’s body to finally hit the ground, he bent over him to add something that had struck him almost as an afterthought. “And by the way, all your tanks and choppers are about to get blown to kingdom come.”
True to Brynn Fitzgerald’s “chirping birdie,” the Israelis did indeed launch the Hermes “Ziq” 450s out of Navatim for their strikes at Sudan. Although the unmanned aerial vehicles were indeed a component of the 166th Squadron at Palmachim Air Base near Tel Aviv, moving them to the base outside Be’er Sheva in the southeastern part of the country—and closer to the Red Sea route to the Sudanese border—extended their tactical range both in terms of fuel usage and data communications.
Another tactical advantage to having the drones take off from Navatim, alternately known as Air Base 28, was that it put them at the same spot as the 116th “Defenders of the South” Squadron and the 140th “Golden Eagle” Squadron, both of which were home to the F-16 fighter jets that would be essential to destroying tanks and helicopters. The UAVs, with their respective payloads of two Rafael missiles, were formidable weapons against convoys bearing arms and missile launchers. But when it came to destroying thirty-three tanks and over a dozen choppers, they were best used in a support role, sending the Israelis real-time pictures, taking out a secondary target or two, and perhaps doing some cleanup.
Having Sudanese air space unrestricted to them, however, the F-16s left little to be cleaned up. Their massive array of air-to-ground missiles and laser-guided bombs took care of the convoy quite neatly in just three runs—the third precautionary.
It was not always the size of the strike force, but how it was used, that counted. Simon Nusairi’s purchase barely got out of the box, however, rendering even that observation moot.
CHAPTER 22
SUDAN • WASHINGTON, D.C.
As the Cairo-bound Gulfstream 550 charter jet taxied left onto the runway at Khartoum International, Ryan Kealey looked out his window and saw the Sudan People’s Armed Forces troops that had escorted his group through the airport break into spontaneous applause, standing there ranked alongside the tarmac.
Abby Liu sat beside him, Mackenzie in the seat facing her. Cullen White, in wrist and ankle cuffs, was next to Mackenzie and opposite Kealey. The rest of the charter jet’s cabin was occupied by a contingent of six dark-suited Agency men who had flown in from Egypt the day before.
“Well, Kealey, it seems you’re a local hero,” White said in a quiet voice. His eyes had fixed on him through his wire-frame glasses. “The man who saved the compassionate and lawful regime of Omar al-Bashir from scheming rebels . . . and their infidel coconspirator.”
Stone-faced, Kealey ignored him and stared out at the clapping soldiers in their dress regalia. He was glad when the plane angled off so they were out of sight.
“You should be proud,” White said. “You even bagged the Western devil alive. Here I sit, flying back to America in shackles. Shame on me, right?”
“Shut up,” Mackenzie said.
White glanced over at him. “What?”
“You heard me.” Mackenzie met White’s gaze with his own. “I don’t want to hear your fucking mouth.”
“Are you going to gag me?” White said with a small acid smile. “Or maybe just shoot me in my seat. If you’re careful, there’s very little risk of puncturing the side of the cabin. Though I know you all want me back in Washington so I can sing from my cage.”
Mackenzie just looked at him for a long moment, then slowly turned his head away.
“You’d might as well have killed me back in Kassala,” White said, facing Kealey again. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Kealey stared out at the runway without response.
“I’ve no stories to share,” White said. “Nothing to tell anyone. I was just a freelancer for Simon Nusairi. Hired help. Kind of like you were for a while, Kealey. Was it Blackwater . . . or Xe, as it calls itself now? I hear the company wanted to clean up its gunslinger image after your little exploit in South Africa.”
Kealey
turned from the window without speaking a word, not so much looking at White as past him. Abby, meanwhile, had shifted around in her seat.
“We have more than one bird in hand,” she said. “I think you know that, Mr. White.”
“Hassan Saduq? An arms peddler? Who’d tell you anything to save his neck? Is he going to be believed?” White said.
“Don’t pretend to be naïve,” she said. “There is a money trail.”
“You might want to mention Walter Reynolds, the senior diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum,” Mackenzie said. “Plus embassy staffers confirming this guy’s visits there, security videos . . .”
“Thank you, Mac.” Her almond-shaped brown eyes had settled on White again. “You see, no one needs to hear your song. There are others, enough for an opus. And your name and Nusairi’s will be in every refrain.”
“Your personal savior’s too,” Kealey said, breaking his silence. “We wouldn’t want to forget the man who’s as responsible for Lily Durant’s death as Nusairi.”
White’s eyes narrowed on him. “I don’t know who you mean.”
“Sure, you don’t,” Kealey said. “Keep on saying it. But your time’s running out and so is your line of bullshit.”
The two men looked at each other a moment, their silence only underscored by the loud whine of turbines as the plane accelerated for takeoff. Kealey felt the usual lurch inside him as it bucked against gravity and went wheels up into the air.
“It was Jonathan Harper who once demanded I leave the CIA,” White finally said. “The legendary Harper. Did you know he called me to his office at Langley to request my departure in person?”
Kealey shrugged. “Guess he probably didn’t think it was worth the cost of a phone call.”
“Good one. I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor.” White chuckled automatically, kept staring at Kealey through his metal rims. “I only bring up his name for one reason. And that’s to ask . . . without Harper, where would you be?”
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