On Target (36 page)

Sierra One, Two, and Four bounced around the inside of the cargo van as it bottomed out, lurched back into the air, and began climbing a little hill. The back doors were wide-open, but Four had strapped himself in with a belt tied to the bolted-in center seats and affixed to him with a quick-release buckle. No one knew where they were exactly, even though they had all spent weeks studying maps of the town. Brad even had a satellite photo of Suakin taped to the steering wheel in front of him. But all the streets looked the same, all the alleyways looked the same, the endless sea of dilapidated burlap and driftwood shacks looked the same, and apparently all the road signs had long ago been used for roofing material or firewood.

The three men had spent the past three minutes stumbling into and then out of little engagements with government of Sudan soldiers from the Sudanese People’s Armed Forces. The GOS units in town seemed disorganized as hell. As often as not, Brad had turned their van onto a road only to find themselves
behind
a column of men. Twice they’d come face-to-face with army trucks, and both times not a shot had been fired as both vehicles backed up to get out of danger.

This was a confused ambush, if that’s even what it was, but what the government troops lacked in organization, they made up for in sheer numbers. As the Whiskey Sierra van blasted through the little streets lining a seemingly endless vista of hovels on the north side of town, more and more Sudanese troops seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. Sierra Four had emptied an entire magazine from his weapon at enemy threats during and since breaking through the corral, and now Milo reloaded quickly, certain there’d be more fighting to come.

Sierra Five’s voice came over the net between bursts of automatic fire a quarter mile from the van.

“Yo, One. I could use some help over here. GOS has backed up out of my line of sight, and I’ve repositioned to a second-floor window, but it won’t be long before they come back and blow the shit out of this hotel.”

“Roger that, Spence,” said Zack. “We’re coming to pick you up ASAP; we’re just a little turned around over here.”

“Just follow the sound of the shooting. I’ve got a dozen or so of Oryx’s guards taking potshots at me from the square. You ought to be able to orient yourself on that.”

“We’re trying,” Zack replied, as Sierra Two made two quick turns to his left, pulled right behind an army jeep with an unmanned Russian machine gun mounted on its rear bed.

Brad made an immediate right.

“Sierra One to Sierra Three, gimme a sitrep on your position.”

Dan did not stop firing to communicate. “They’re hitting me from two alleyways.” Two cracks of his rifle distorted the transmission in Zack’s headset. “Not coordinated fire, and I’ve got the high ground on the roof here, but there sure as hell are a lot of them. They get in below me, and I’m toast. How copy?” Several more cracks delayed Hightower’s response.

“Good copy. We’re on the way.”

“Contact rear!” Milo shouted from behind Zack. In the small metal space of the van, his machine gun sounded like a jackhammer amplified by a heavy metal band’s amp stacks. Zack spun around to engage with his Tavor, but Brad made another quick turn that took them out of the line of fire.

“One, this is Three. I’ve got eyes on a chopper approaching from the north.”

“A chopper? Civ or military?”

“Uhhh, wait one, break. He’s military. Big, fat fucker. Looks like he’s about seven or eight klicks out, low and fast, headin’ this way like he’s got someplace to be . . . Looks like an Mi-17.”

“The Mi-17 is a Hip. The Sudanese don’t have Hips.” Hip was the NATO designation for the Russian-built MI-17.

“Pretty sure it’s a Hip, boss.”

“Roger that, goddammit,” Zack growled. Not much he could do about an assault from the air right now.

“Five for One!”

“Go Five.”

“I’ve got small arms fire to my west. Not on my position. Sierra Six isn’t a klick to the west of the square, is he?”

“He shouldn’t be. Six, if you are able to transmit, let me know if that’s you.”

“Six, to One.” Court came over the net. His voice was sure and succinct. “Negative. I have Oryx, and we are southeast of the square. We’re making a try for the harbor.”

Zack thought it over as the van made another hard turn, this time to the left. “Must be the SLA rebels. Better late than never, I guess. I’ll take whatever I can get at the moment. Sound like much, Five?”

“I’m not impressed. Doesn’t sound like half of what I’ve got going on right on top of me!”

“Wait a sec,” interrupted Sierra Two from behind the wheel of the van. “This is that alley that runs into the northeast corner of the square.”

“You’re sure?” asked Zack. He had no idea. It looked the same as the last dozen alleys they’d driven through.

“Yeah. We stay on this, we’re in the square in thirty seconds. We want to do that?”

Zack thought it over for a second, then said, “What the hell. We don’t want to get lost again, and Spence and Dan are going to run dry if we can’t pick them up.”

“There are gonna be troops in the square. And Abboud’s guard force,” Sierra Two noted as he drove on.

Hightower just nodded. He began transmitting, “Three and Five, we’ll hit the square in twenty seconds, blast through it shooting, whip around behind the bank, and pick both of you up outside your positions in the alley one block west of the square. Keep your heads down!”

A pair of “Roger thats.”

“Four, it’s gonna get crazy,” Zack shouted back to Milo.

“Bring it on!” came the shout from the trunk monkey behind him.

Gentry was less than five blocks from the square when the Whiskey Sierra van drove through it. He heard squealing tires, then questioning and answering rifle and pistol fire that continued unabated.

He also heard a smattering of fire farther to the west, probably outside of Suakin, AKs both inbound and outbound, and this he took for the lopsided battle between a portion of the GOS force and the SLA guys the CIA had managed to browbeat into showing up. They were getting their asses handed to them, from the sound of it. It would probably be a while before Sudan Station convinced the SLA to do any more fighting at its behest.

With all the action in the early morning town, as near as Court could tell, his sector was clear. He and Oryx were on their knees under the shaded lean-to that covered an old brick oven and served as a tiny open-air bakery. They were only fifty yards from the boats. He could see the little wooden craft on the still water of the bay, red hulls rocking back and forth invitingly. Just fifty yards, yes, but fifty yards of open ground. Gentry worried about GOS men to the north along the beach or the causeway to Old Suakin Island, but more than this, he worried about the reports of a helicopter above. Even if he and Oryx could snake down to the boat, traveling over the water would leave them totally exposed to that chopper.

He thought it over for a few more seconds. “Forget the boat,” he said aloud, then turned to Oryx. “I have a car, eight blocks southwest of the square.
That’s
where we’re going. Now!” Court pushed Oryx into the alley, and they both began running.

They’d made it just one block up an alleyway when Oryx broke off quickly to the left, dodging down an even smaller alley that ran up a gentle hill. Court chased after him, reached out to grab the big man by the neck and get him back on track, but a squad of five GOS soldiers on foot came out the back door of a small coral building, not fifteen feet from their president. They raised their weapons in confusion, took a moment to size up the situation they had just stumbled upon. Court took advantage of the delay. He put himself between the soldiers and Oyrx and shoved the president out of the way roughly, raising his weapon at the same time. He fired two rounds from his pistol into the chest of the first man in the squad, got his free hand around Oryx’s tie, and yanked his prisoner back out of the tiny alleyway as he dropped another soldier with a round to his forehead.

The remaining soldiers scrambled for cover in the building they’d just exited, and Court let go of Oryx, darted towards the rifle lying next to one of the dead trooper’s bodies. But a long burst from an unseen shooter’s rifle stitched bullets down the alley just feet in front of Gentry, so he turned and retreated back around the corner, grabbed his prisoner again, and ran away as fast as he could with one hand on his weapon and the other on the neck the president of the Sudan.

Suakin is a town filled with Rashaidas and Bejas, mostly, but as it was a market and a port town, and somewhat of a port city still, there were transplants from all over the country. Dinka, Fur, Nuba, Masalit, Nuer, most all of the tribes came here to trade and to live. There were also some Nubians, dark black non-Arabs who congregated principally around the Nile River to the west.

One such Nubian family lived in a burlap, driftwood, and tin shack to the southwest of the square. The shack was also their business, as the man of the house made goat-hide sandals with tire-tread soles and sold them in the dirt alleyway in front of their hovel.

The man’s son was dead, so the sandal maker helped raise his four grandchildren: three girls and one boy.

The man of the house huddled over the girls, called to his twelve-year-old grandson Adnan to come over to his side of the shack and lie in the dark with the rest of the family, but Adnan refused to cower. Instead, Adnan opened an old chest next to the sleeping mat, and from this he took the prized possession of his dead father, a longbow. As his grandfather yelled at him, young Adnan scooped up three arrows before running out of the house and towards the sound of gunfire.

His shack was on a hill, and from the front door he could see smoke and flashes of light towards the square. There was more shooting behind him to the west, but it was farther away. Adnan ran to a flight of rickety stairs that led down his hill. He leapt down the stairs, took them three and four at a time, his young, sinewy, coal-black legs comfortable with the exertion. With the gunfire around, he instinctively tucked his head tight into his neck as he ran.

He passed an old man on wooden crutches standing in front of his shack. The cripple shouted to the child, demanded he go back to his home, but Adnan wasn’t listening.

Adnan was going to save his family and his town from whoever threatened it.

The Nubians were fearless and ferocious warriors since the times of the pharaohs, and their weapon of choice had always been the bow. Nubia itself means “land of the bow.” Nubian archers served as highly coveted mercenaries in ancient wars as far away as distant Persia.

Adnan’s family had descended from a dozen generations of bow makers, but bows made them no money, as AK-47s and the Chinese AK knock-off, the Type 81, hung from the shoulders of everyone around here with cause to wield a weapon. An AK is more powerful than a bow, an AK is easier to master than a bow, and, it could be argued, an AK is only slightly more technologically complicated. For this reason Adnan’s grandfather switched to making sandals, but Adnan had learned as a child how to use the large bamboo bow with leather at the handgrip, with bone and horn inlaid at the tips and just above the leather wrapping.

Adnan barreled through a small driftwood and baling wire gate, into another dusty alley. The gunfire from the square reverberated on the walls and carried down to him. He tucked his neck in tighter as he turned to race towards it, his father’s weapon in his right hand and the arrows in his left.

Other townspeople were out now, running away mostly. Adnan passed them at a sprint as he moved towards the action.

He rounded a narrow passageway and stumbled to a halt. Thirty meters ahead, at the entrance to this alley, a black man in a black suit skittered around the corner, as if shoved from behind. His hands were bound in front of him, and he slipped and stumbled forward on the shiniest shoes Adnan had ever seen in his life. The young Sudanese boy ducked quickly into an unused doorway to the back of a derelict butcher shop, hid himself in a morning shadow, his back to the wall, and then lowered to a squat. He ducked his head around the corner and saw the black man being pushed towards him by a bearded white man.