On target

THIRTY-NINE

Zack and three of his men had made it out of the last kill zone. After the chopper went down, the GOS seemed to back off both in fear and in an attempt to regroup. Hightower and company followed the second-floor hallway of Mall Alpha through laundries and rug shops and bakeries and storage rooms. They'd engaged two GOS men who were surprised to see them and certainly sorry they did in those last few seconds before they were silently killed with daggers. Brad and Dan scavenged the Type 81 rifles from the men's bodies, since both of their own weapons were down to the last magazine. Brad passed his FAMAS to Milo to use as a makeshift crutch, and it had increased the mobility of Whiskey Sierra significantly. At the end of the mall they'd gone back downstairs, where they saw the GOS infantry on the street pulling back a couple of blocks, so Zack gave the order for the men to break cover and head through the souk, one block closer to the water, to the other concrete row of buildings he'd dubbed Mall Bravo.

The crash of the big helicopter had started a fire in the souk, and the black smoke from fuel and fabric and rubber and wood had helped obscure the depleted team as they crossed the open ground. They received no return fire from the retreating GOS, and it seemed likely their repositioning had gone undetected. It was almost too much to hope for, but so far, he'd seen no evidence that the opposition knew where they were.

Hightower had seen enough combat in his life to recognize that the main thing they'd had going for them was the confusion on the part of their enemy. He was certain the Sudanese Army had no idea they were only up against five men, and these five men were not holding their president hostage as a human shield. If they did know the only threat was right here in these buildings by the souk near the water, they would simply concentrate all their forces here, blast the hell out of the malls, and kill everything that moved inside.

Five men, no matter how good their training, could do nothing against that sort of assault.

And it was starting to look like five men had become four. Spencer had not transmitted since disappearing out the window to divert the attention of the helicopter ten minutes earlier. It was possible he'd lost his radio or the signal between the buildings was broken, but Sierra One thought it likely that Sierra Five had made it across the souk, only to stumble into a superior force of GOS infantry on the other side.

Still, Zack and his men were heading carefully through mall Bravo now in an attempt to find their comrade.

Hightower's sat phone vibrated. He pressed the answer button, which put the call through to his tactical headset.

"Hey, Six. You chillaxing on the beach with a mai tai?"

Gentry's voice came through the line. "We're secure. You?"

"Knee-deep in it. About fifty yards from the water, three blocks north of the causeway. Still in sporadic contact. Haven't been able to shake the GOS long enough to slip away. How's your back? Run into any more Comanches out on the trail?"

"I'll live. You need me there?"

"Sure you can put Oryx on ice?"

"Affirmative. I'll tie him up and drug him. He's not going anywhere."

"Alright, then get on your horse and get over here ASAP. We need you to bring us some wheels, get us some kind of sitrep as to the concentration of OPFOR in the streets. I was thinking you might be able to come in low-pro from the west, score us a ride, and then move close enough to lead our exfil back to it."

"Shit, Zack, want me to pick you up a fucking Happy Meal while I'm at it?"

Zack chuckled as he knelt in a shop that made and sold tin pots and pans. Brad was ahead, clearing a doorway with his scavenged Type 81 rifle. Dan was behind with Milo. "Man, where did you learn to be such a smart-ass?" It was a rhetorical question; Zack knew the answer. "The only burger meat around here is going to be Whiskey Sierra unless you come and pull our asses off the grill."

Zack heard the sigh, but he also knew his former operator would comply with nothing more than a little bitching and moaning. "Roger that, I'm on the way. I'll use the radio when I get in range."

"Good boy. On your way over here, I want you to call the Hannah and let them know where you stashed the president. Just in case none of us make it out, they can come in and pick him up."

"Roger that. Six out."

It took a half hour for Gentry to get Oryx secure, change his shirt to something less torn and bloodstained, cover his head with a turban, siphon fuel from a parked cargo truck to gas up the Mercedes, and get back into Suakin's city limits. He almost took the truck and left the Mercedes behind, but the old, heavy, diesel sedan was serving him well at the moment, it had not been compromised by the enemy, and the truck looked like shit, even by the lousy standards of what passed for motor vehicles around here. Heading back into the target zone, he passed army trucks and police cars moving in all directions, and bewildered civvies doing the same.

Overhead a pair of old American F5 fighter jets, flown by the Sudanese Air Force, etched figure-eight-shaped contrails in the bright blue sky.

There did not seem to be much cohesion to the movements of the military forces, which Gentry took as a good sign. From the look of it, the Sudanese had no idea how big an opposition force they were up against. With Gentry's movements to the southeast of the square, the two operators in buildings in the square, the van shooting its way around the entire town, and the brief engagement with the SLA to the west, it must have painted an incredibly confused tactical picture for the GOS military commanders. With the massive volume of gunfire and the shouted radio traffic reporting enemy contacts on all points of the compass, they may well have thought the president had been kidnapped by a local force one hundred men strong.

As Court downshifted his Mercedes to negotiate the narrow passageways between two rows of shanties, an army jeep shot up an alley from his right and passed directly in front of him as it continued to the north. At the paved road a two-ton truck full of troops pulled out into traffic next to him, and it was nearly T-boned in the process by an identical truck heading east.

There was no shooting in town, and the helicopter was gone. Sirens whined, and a thin pillar of dark smoke drifted over the harbor and lagoon to the east.

It looked like a battle had been fought here, and it looked like the battle was over.

Gentry parked the car on an open dirt soccer pitch four blocks west of the square. Immediately he was approached by men trying to sell turnips, even with the local equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge just a few blocks away less than an hour earlier. He wondered who the fuck would be thinking about buying a turnip for that evening's soup at a time like this, and he brushed them away with a wave of his hand, trying to keep his beard and his shades and his turban covering as much of his face and head as possible while he moved. He purchased a long white thobe robe from a vendor in a shallow stall a block from the soccer pitch, and stepped into an alley to don his new garment.

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 amp;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!"