On Target (42 page)

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.

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!”

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.