On target

THIRTY-TWO

Court awoke and looked down at his watch. Tiny bits of tritium gas-filled tubes illuminated the hands, told him it was time to get up.

It was four thirty in the morning; the air was cool with the ocean's breeze. He rolled into a sitting position and filled his lungs.

He'd slept fitfully for a couple of hours at most. The operation ahead had kept him tossing and turning, his mind spinning with details and contingencies and with a multitude of if/then statements that he could not seem to reconcile. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't imagine this day being anything other than a massive cluster fuck. He felt like a train wreck was coming, he was on the train, and it was too late to jump off.

From the pack Zack had handed off to him the night before he retrieved a peanut butter Soldier Fuel bar, a vitamin and protein-fortified energy bar created by nutritionists in the U.S. Army. He opened the package and ate it quickly and efficiently, his game face hardening by the minute as the day's operation approached. He washed it down with water from his CamelBak bladder.

Gentry crab-walked down the boulders to the water's edge. As he relieved himself into the lagoon, he considered changing clothes into something more tactical, but decided against it. He'd love to have pants with more pockets-pockets were important to an operator-but his grungy, grimy, local attire-clothes that he'd hiked in, swam in, slept in, even ridden on a donkey cart in-just looked too authentic to eschew for something clean and alien to the environment.

He crawled over to his Russian backpack, the one provided to him by Sid. He hefted it over a shoulder and stepped into the cool black water of the lagoon. The heavy bag was watertight and built with an air chamber that would allow it to float, and Gentry hung on to it as he swam across.

Twenty minutes later, his head appeared at the top of the minaret on Old Suakin Island. He climbed into the gallery of the structure, the open room just under the crown at the top of the tower. Back when the island was alive and the mosque open, two hundred years ago at the most recent, from here the muezzin sang the adhan, the five times daily call to prayer. Now it was dormant and home to birds; Court's arrival stirred pigeons from their sleep. They flitted off, but the noise and movement was no worry to Gentry. The cats around here certainly harassed the feathered creatures often enough to where a small group of them taking flight in the night would not raise the alarm. Court crawled carefully across the minaret, smearing fresh pigeon droppings with his knees and gloves, pulling his pack behind him. He was less concerned with being spotted and more concerned with the structure giving way, falling apart and falling down, taking him along with it. But it held, and Gentry unzipped his pack and pulled out the pieces of the Blaser sniper rifle and began assembling the weapon.

All of this was merely misdirection. He was not going to use the rifle, not going to snipe anyone today. This was all aimed at encouraging Sidorenko to believe the story that his top assassin had been compromised somehow and captured or killed outright by CIA assassins. When Abboud turned up alive, his shackled form on television from The Hague, Sid would wonder what happened to the hit man he'd sent to kill him. Carmichael had promised that Langley would let it be known that a SAD Paramilitary Operation's team had finally caught up with their most wanted man, killed him dead on the coast of the Red Sea, just moments before he killed again.

Court had no way of knowing for sure if this ruse would work. Sid was no fool. But, Gentry decided, the more evidence he could plant on site that would indicate that he was, in fact, in place for the Abboud hit, the more likely Sidorenko and his people would get word that the leaked story matched with the physical traces of Gray's last known location.

So the American took his time, laid out the scene exactly as he would if the sniping, in fact, were about to take place. The rifle was placed in position on its bipod, the scope cap was unsnapped, and the optics were ranged properly for a 400-meter shot in negligible winds. The gun was loaded, and extra cartridges were lined up neatly on his right-hand side.

Finally, when he was satisfied with his ruse, Court took one last look at his sniper's hide. How easy it would have been for him to assassinate President Abboud, make his way to a speedboat at the far edge of the island, shoot hard and fast over the gentle Red Sea waters to an awaiting larger craft, and then churn away into international waters. Sure, the Sudanese had gunboats-he might get unlucky and run into one during his escape-but the odds of avoiding the Sudanese navy were likely a hell of a lot better than they were for the success of Nocturne Sapphire. Court shook his head slowly. A shitload of things beyond Court's control needed to go very very right in the next few hours.

Gentry backed down the stairs. Out again on the predawn dirt roads of Old Suakin Island, he backed his way the three blocks to the water's edge, ensuring that no tracks of one man coming and going were anywhere to be found. He hefted his much lighter pack and stepped back into the warm water. It was as placid as a swimming pool, though the brackish smell left little doubt that it was not chemically cleansed.

When he was neck deep, holding on to his floating pack with both hands, he looked back at the island. When his planted evidence was found, whether in hours or in days, he would be linked to the scene. It would appear to everyone that the assassin had made it to his sniper's nest, set it up as per his requirements, and then lain in wait for his prey.

And then it would appear to everyone as if the sniper just simply vanished into thin air.

The Gray Man smiled darkly as he turned, gently kicked his feet, and began floating towards the shoreline one hundred meters away.

There wasn't a soul on the dirt streets of New Suakin at five in the morning. First light was not for another hour, Oryx would not pass by for ninety minutes, but Court was already in position, tucked deep into shadows at the long, tin-roofed fish market that composed the southeastern corner of the square. With him was his CIA backpack, nearly fifty pounds of gear stowed inside. His satellite phone was attached to the left side of his belt under his loose-fitting shirt, wired into the C4OPS radio hooked alongside it. The wireless earpieces were tucked in both ears, and the thin rubber-and-wire tube lay flat on his cheek as it snaked down to his mouth, allowing the covert headset to be nearly invisible in the hair on his head and of his beard.

Under his shirt on his belt he carried his suppressed Glock 19 and two extra magazines. Forty-six rounds of 9 mm ammunition in total. Not a lot for a battle, but this morning's action was supposed to go on around him and not on top of him.

Still, he sure as hell would have liked some more firepower.

Court took his time to tune himself in to his environment. Loose camels roamed the streets; donkeys were in corrals or tied to wooden hitching posts. The town around him looked, quite literally, like something from biblical times, with the one big exception being the old, crumbling mosque in front of him. There were no mosques here in the time of Christ, but surely this particular view that he had, sitting at the open-air fishmonger's stall, must not have changed one iota since the twelfth century. He imagined himself back in those days and wondered if some spy or assassin had crouched at this very place at this very time of morning, with nefarious designs on a target in that mosque or in that ancient-looking building across the square.

Only then did he notice the few anachronisms in the scene. Several donkey carts were in view, but all had thick rubber tires instead of ancient wooden cartwheels. Much of the metal roofing and siding of the shacks in view were rusted oil drums or even large tin coffee cans. A broken blue plastic bucket hung from a rope outside a second-story window.

Without warning a voice spoke, close. It startled him, and he grabbed for his pistol and rose, bumping his head on a loose wooden shelf above him in the shack before recognizing that the voice was Zack and that it had come through his headset. He knelt back down, mad at himself.

"Good morning, Six, wherever you are. Me and the boys are just finishing our second cup of coffee, then we'll get geared up and head to shore." The sound of a long stretch and a sigh. Obvious dramatic effect. "Damn. Sure as shit is nice working for the man, not running rogue, sitting scared by yourself in the dark somewhere, hoping like hell that rat running up your leg doesn't bite you in the balls because you can't afford to move and give away your position."

Court looked down. There was no rat on his leg. He chastised himself for looking.

"Pretty soon, bro, you'll be back workin' with us. Of course you'll still be the outsider, but I promise I'll let you join us for a cup of joe from time to time."

Gentry nodded. It would be good to be part of a team again, even if there were a few caveats to the relationship.

"First things first, though. Let's get through this morning. One out."

"Roger that," whispered Court to himself; he did not transmit to Hightower. He rose slowly, avoided the shelf above, and crossed the tiny alleyway towards the side entrance to the bank. He picked the lock in under thirty seconds; it was a simple tumbler job that needed just two narrow tools and a few jiggles of the torque wrench to defeat.

Inside it was pitch-black; stale dust wafted in the moonlight shining through circular and arched windows. Court pulled his penlight from his pocket and turned it on, put it in his mouth, and crossed down a small colonnade that ran along the eastern side of the large, open building. This place had been around for hundreds of years, Gentry could tell, but apparently banking was no longer such a big deal in Suakin. Most of the space was open and empty, with a few desks and telephones, wooden filing cabinets, and steps that went down to a basement. Court continued on to the main entrance and found it exactly as drawn up in the diagrams Zack had provided him. There were stairs to the left and the right of the front double doors. The steps went up to a narrow atrium over the doors, where large windows looked out over the square. Gentry took a few minutes to stage his gear, hustling a half dozen times up and down the spiral stone staircases to position equipment where he would need it when Oryx and his security detail came storming through the door, thinking they were saving themselves from an attack in the square.

Court looked out the open windows of the atrium, getting a good look at the square for the first time. It did not look like a square, in the sense that Court knew the word from his travels in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. It was the size of two football fields, completely unpaved, not a blade of grass, just a big, flat expanse of hard earth. On the opposite side of the bank were some rickety looking two-story buildings, whitewashed colonial-style architecture but dingy, their filth obvious even in the moonlight shine. To the northeast, the right side of the square, it was nothing but shacks-handmade driftwood, plywood, tin, and junk hammered together or tied together or, Court imagined with slight exaggeration, simply leaned together with a prayer to Allah and a hope for the best. The shacks stretched down a hill several blocks to the water's edge and the causeway to the island of Old Suakin.

To the left of Court's vantage point, the western side of the square, he saw the finest buildings Suakin had to offer. The hotel was there, the Suakin Palace. Court looked at the third floor and wondered if Sierra Five was watching. Gentry stood in pitch-blackness inside the bank, but he figured Spencer would have night vision gear of some sort. He raised his hand tentatively.

"Sierra Five to Sierra One," the transmission came over the net a second later.

"Go for One," Zack's tinny voice responded.

"Sierra Six is in position."

"Never a doubt in my mind," said Hightower. Court lowered his hand. It felt odd to be watched, especially at a time like this. He continued scanning the rest of the buildings of the square. They were whitewashed limestone and coral, looking as old as Methuselah, Gentry thought, then he wondered if Methuselah was from around here.

He eyed the street from where the SLA trucks should come, assuming they'd come at all. If they did not, then Court assumed he'd leave all his gear here and just scoot on out the side door of the bank. The Sudanese would find a curious array of gadgets lying around the building where their president was set to come if there was a ruckus, but the CIA would not be positively implicated in any sort of attack or potential ambush. All of this gear was available outside of the USA, and all of this gear had been procured outside of the USA.

But the CIA local field office, Sudan Station, had assured everyone involved, in no uncertain terms, that their rebels would come through. Everyone involved had believed them, to the extent that Court's source was discounted as unreliable for providing intel that said otherwise.

Fuck, thought Court. This is not how he operated his solo hits. Everything was so much simpler as a private contract killer.