On target

THIRTY-SIX

Court heard Zack's transmission to him while he was still running with Oryx, then, a half minute later, he heard the crash in the distance. The continued transmissions on his radio told him Whiskey Sierra had made it out of the street, but it was clear they were knee-deep in shit.

But Court had his own problems. He and Oryx had ducked into a hovel full of locals to hide from a platoon of troops running towards the square. It was a dark and filthy open room, the only light coming from holes in the walls where the corrugated tin did not match flush with the driftwood. Gentry held his Glock to the president's temple. The Gray Man panted from the exertion of his run and the adrenaline pumping through him, wincing in pain with each breath as the muscles around the arrow tightened and spasmed. As he did all this, he stared at a family of nine who just sat on the floor and stared back at him. There were children in the room, small and black with big, wide eyes that made it clear to Gentry that he was the strangest sight any of them had ever laid eyes on.

The adults' eyes showed some fear and some surprise, as well, but more than that, there was a prideful anger, that this white man with his gun and his prisoner should just bash his way into their simple home and threaten them with his presence. These people's lives were borne of hardship, austerity, disease, work, hunger, an absence of liberty and free will. One more danger, one more insult to their existence, was met more with derision and fury than terror.

Though the adults had noticed that this white man had not pointed a gun at anyone except the man in the suit.

These people had no idea they were in the presence of the leader of their country. He meant nothing to their lives.

Court had ignored the arrow in his back as well as anyone could ignore such a thing. From the pain he could tell it was deep in the bone of his shoulder blade, but he could move his arm and shoulder. He recognized that he was lucky it had not hit him harder. Three inches deeper, and the bolt would have pierced the top of his heart and he'd be dead already, lying facedown in the alleyway where he took the hit. He guessed the bowman must have shot him from a great distance, or else it was a woman or a young boy; otherwise, the sharp projectile would have surely penetrated all the way through him.

It stung like hell, but it wasn't killing him, though he was certain it would not be long before he accidentally slammed the protrusion against a wall and really ruined his morning. Again he tried to reach back and grab the arrow, but again he could not quite get his hand to it. He thought briefly about having one of the locals help pull it out of his back, but right now he just wanted to get the fuck out of town, and he absolutely did not want to pause for what would surely be a slow and delicate procedure executed by a person he would not trust to do it correctly.

Soon the soldiers in the road were gone. Court nodded to the patriarch of the family, an ineffectual show of gratitude for not making trouble and a show of contrition at the inconvenience, and then he was out in the road again with Oryx. They made it to the car; it was parked where Zack said it would be parked, and Court got Abboud in with no trouble, then ran around to the driver's side. It was difficult for him to crawl into the seat with the arrow in his back and his backpack still in place; he had to lean forward and let the backrest down and turn slightly to the left. Finally he turned the key, and the engine started.

He felt his shirt, wet with blood, sticking to his back.

As he shifted the little two-door into gear, the helicopter flew right over their heads at no more than one hundred feet. The noise was so loud, the whump-whump of the rotors so malevolent, that Court ducked low in his seat.

The chopper moved on, directly towards the gunfire from Whiskey Sierra's battle a half mile to the north.

He released his boot from the clutch, pressed on the gas, and they lurched forward. The motion caused him to bump the arrow hard into the seat behind him.

"Fuck!" he shouted, the pain a jolt of blue flame in his back and up his arm and into his neck. Screaming, he made eye contact with the terrified president. Court shouted at him, the adrenaline and anger of the moment getting the best of him. "What the fuck, dude? What kind of a backwards-assed, piece of shit country are you running here? A fucking arrow? Seriously?" Court's right hand left the steering wheel, formed into a fist, and punched Abboud in the face. In doing this, he brushed the arrow again against the seat, and again he screamed.

Whiskey Sierra had broken out of the office building and into the alleyway to the east. They then leapfrogged as a team through a neighborhood of tents and shanties, burlap and canvas or corrugated metal and rusty car parts turned into the barest of housing. By zigzagging towards the northeast at each opportunity, Zack and his men were both changing their direction to throw off their pursuers, as well as slowly making their way towards the water. The helicopter was overhead, but Whiskey Sierra ducked under overhangs and stayed tight against the walls of the structures and kept running. If it was a Hip-Zack hadn't seen it to be sure-then it might have air-to-ground munitions mounted to its hard points. Even if it did not have ATG ordnance, it could still carry two dozen combat-outfitted troops, more than enough to make trouble for Whiskey Sierra.

Their run through the slum was slowed significantly by Milo. His right leg was bloody, and his foot wasn't cooperating. He was down to a hobble, weakening by the minute, and it was just one more thing Sierra One could not do a damn thing about.

Zack was losing blood himself, but his arm wound didn't even rank in his top ten list of priorities at the moment.

Still, it was remarkable how easily they had managed to break contact with the GOS forces. The warrenlike layout of the shanty town, with many passages no more than five feet across, made it a great place to not only hide but to move through without being seen from any distance.

Zack and his team would have been even farther away from their last contact point with the enemy if it wasn't for all the traffic in the alleyways and passages. Civilians were everywhere now. Dark-skinned men, women, and children ran all over the place, rickshaws nearly as wide as the paths they rode on bottlenecked locals who could not get out of the way of bloody, screaming, gun-wielding kawagas even if they tried. Twice Hightower literally bashed the butt of his Tavor into the side of a little hut to push the structure's corner, walls and roof included, just enough so he and his men could press through. They waved their rifles at anything that moved in their path, but these civilians did not want any part of this fight, so Sierra One and his men had not had to shoot any locals just yet.

Whiskey Sierra came to the end of the neighborhood of shacks and tents and found themselves on a ledge. In front of them a steeply graded hill, completely devoid of vegetation, ran down fifty yards to a road, on the other side of which lay the marketplace. There were tented stalls and wooden stalls and completely open-air stalls where the produce or other goods were simply laid out on fabric on the dirt, but there was also a cement building that ran three city blocks and housed permanent shops and small storage and warehouse facilities.

In the team's study of the town, this structure had been dubbed Mall Alpha.

On the other side of these buildings was another row of permanent structures, dubbed Mall Bravo, and just east of this was the waterline.

As One considered ordering his men down the hill, Sierra Five shouted at the back of the tiny five-man team.

"Contact rear!" He fired a burst from his Uzi. "Here they come!" The GOS had found them.

Zack knew in an instant they'd have to expose themselves on the hill. They needed to get to the heavier buildings to have any chance of holding back the troops on their tail.

The helicopter was a quarter mile to the west and low, but beginning a shallow bank that would bring it back around on Zack's position in twenty seconds. "Let's go. Three, help Four!"

The injured Milo ripped out of Dan's grasp, spun back to the approaching enemy up the alleyway, and dropped to his knees.

"You guys go! I'll stay back and hold them off!"

Zack Hightower just grabbed the younger man by his gear, yanked him back up. "Yo, hero! Shut the fuck up and do as you're told! This isn't Hollywood, goddammit."

"Sir!"

Zack shoved him roughly to Dan, who grabbed him around the waist, and they all started down the hill.

Within seconds Hightower lost his footing on the decline. It was earth hard as stone, covered with a thick powder of dry dust. His boots had no chance for traction, so as he ran, he fell forward and rolled and slid down the hill. He'd just made it to the bottom, climbed back up to his feet, and turned when Brad and Spencer slid down right next to him. Spencer jumped right up to his boots and turned back to cover, but Brad had gotten his rifle's sling caught up in his gear, and it took him longer to stand.

Dan and Milo were still scooting down the hill on their haunches, their weapons held high out in front of them for balance as well as to keep the barrels from getting fouled in the dirt, when Zack saw Sudanese troops appear on the ridge. He and Spencer each dropped a soldier with a burst to the chest at fifty yards, and this sent the rest of the GOS riflemen diving for cover at the top of the hill.

Hightower screamed over another long burst of covering fire from Spencer, ordered Brad to help Dan get Milo in the first door in the first shop of Mall Alpha. The wounded twenty-nine-year-old Paramilitary Operations officer was all but out of the fight for now; he could not get up to his feet without the other two men pulling on his massive amount of armor and gear. They moved out, and Spencer's rifle clicked empty.

"Cover!" called Sierra Five.

"Covering!" answered Zack, dropping to his knees and firing a single round at a head that appeared at the top of the hill. His round went low, digging into the hard dirt and creating a tiny avalanche of dust and rocks.

Spencer got his gun reloaded and back into the fight just as the helicopter flew over the hill directly in front of him and Hightower. Zack could confirm now that it was, in fact, an Mi-17 Hip, a Russian-made chopper that the government of Sudan was not known to possess. He did not dwell too long on this revelation, as the Mi-17 opened fire with a heavy machine gun hanging from one of its outboard pylons.

"Move!" Sierra One screamed to Sierra Five, and both men turned to run for their lives.