On target

FORTY-THREE

Gentry spent the next ninety minutes telling president Abboud to shut up while writhing in agony from the pain in his back. The extraordinary heat and humidity simply piled on to the misery of the afternoon. Twice Court fished through his backpack for hydrocodone pills, but both times he refrained from taking them. His pain was real, as was his body's desperate need for a moment's respite from the agony, but Court knew he should hold out and wait to hear from Zack.

Zack finally called around four p.m. He and Milo were back on the Hannah; Dan would be arriving in the mini sub within the hour. Court was told it was likely they would use the same exfiltration point in the mangrove swamp, as they had not been compromised. The pickup time would be midnight, meaning Gentry would just have to sit tight for the next seven hours or so before getting Oryx to the water.

Court hung up the call with Zack and looked at Oryx. The president stared back at him. His black bald head was covered in sweat beads that hung like ornamentation, glistening whenever a warm breeze fluttered one of the torn burlap walls enough for the sunlight to filter in to illuminate them. His hands were unbound.

Court next looked to his backpack. Seven hours, with nothing to do but sit here and suffer… he thought about the pain and the cramping in the muscles around the pain site and the fact that he would need to have his body and his muscles as limber as possible for any eventuality as soon as he was on the move again. The only means to that end, he told himself, would be to get some relief for the pain now.

He did not need much convincing.

Sixty seconds later, Oryx had his right wrist zip-tied to the center beam of the shack. His left arm was free to drink water or eat food or to take out his manhood and piss in the dirt if he were so inclined. Gentry made sure there was nothing within reach he could use as a weapon or a tool. Court told himself that Oryx was secure, and Oryx could take care of himself for a while.

Next the American opened his backpack, went right past the hydrocodone pills, and pulled out the most potent injection of morphine the CIA had given him. He tore the preloaded injector from its sterilized package and popped off the plastic tip to expose the needle.

Oryx backed away, afraid.

"Don't worry," said Gentry. "This one's for me."

He injected twenty milligrams of the heavy opiate into his left arm. Immediately he sat down and leaned back against the wall of the shack, out of reach of his captive.

Within a minute and a half his eyelids began to flutter, his pupils became smaller, and the pain began to subside.

Oryx could clearly see the effect the injection was having on his captor. "Madness. What kind of a soldier or spy takes drugs during a mission?"

"Shut up," Gentry said. The room around him softened into a gentle blur. He then said, a tad too defensively, "The pain will slow me down later if I don't take the edge off now."

"And your heroin will not slow you down?"

"It's not heroin, asshole," Court snapped back, but he knew the drug was similar in effect to heroin, though it did not produce its high for as long a duration.

"You are a drug addict," Abboud said flatly.

"And you are a genocidal despot. Get off my back."

Any self-flagellation Gentry may have felt for taking the heavy narcotic while operational went away in seconds, as the rush of the drug's initial effect gave way to an exaggerated sense of well-being. Within ten minutes of injecting himself, he was deep in conversation with Abboud, a 180-degree turnaround from his earlier behavior.

But Court was not entirely incapacitated. During the course of their polite conversation over the next half hour, Oryx asked him for his real name and his home address, asked to borrow his phone, and asked if he could get a closer look at his very fine pistol. The Gray Man was under the influence of a mood-altering opiate, but he was not insane. Each time he just smiled genuinely. When the gun was requested, he even laughed and replied that Abboud had made a nice try.

By a quarter till five, Court was at peace in the dark shack. It was a chemically induced peace, and a peace at a decidedly inopportune time for a warrior like Gentry. As he chatted with Oryx or talked to himself, he found himself incredibly proud to be on this mission, proud to be sent along with the brave men of Whiskey Sierra, God rest the souls of two of them, and proud to be trusted by the legendary Denny Carmichael.

With his eyes closed in blissful tranquillity, he began to fall asleep, the heavy sedation edging out the loss of inhibition that had him deep in conversation with his captive. Just as his head lolled to the side, his phone beeped.

Court stared at it, his eyes as wide as saucers. He looked up at Oryx and smiled. "Oh shit. I'm in trouble."

He answered it. "Hello?"

Hightower said, "Okay, Six, we're gonna have to push up the timetable."

"Oh boy. Um… I don't know. How is everything out there on the boat?"

"Fine, but I'm going to need you to recon another site for the pickup. I think the north side of the mangrove is going to be better at low tide. Get over there and see if it's clear of civvies. There are some Bedouins that have built structures up and down-"

"You mean… right now?"

"No, dude. At your fucking leisure. Of course I mean now."

"Oh, okay. I mean, no. Don't be mad… but I need to hang out here a little bit longer."

"To do what?"

Court looked up at the ceiling. He noticed the intricate weave of the thatch; even in the dark it was as if each strand of the thick straw had its own personality, its own purpose, its own path through the others as it tucked into and out of the-

"To do what, Six?"

"C'mon, Zack. Don't be pissed off. I just need to…" Court's voice trailed off.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Nothing. I wish you could see the ceiling in this hooch though, it's fucking beautiful. They dry the reeds and then tie them into little bundles, and then they tie those together to make bigger bundles that-

"Jesus, Court! Are you high?"

Court laughed into the phone.

"Where's Oryx?"

"He's sitting right here. You wanna talk to him?"

"Fuck no, I don't want to talk-

"Here he is."

Court got up, carried the phone over to Abboud, who reached out slowly and took it with his untethered hand.

"You are speaking to President Bakri Ali Abboud. Who is this?"

Hightower did not answer at first. When he spoke it was slow, tentative. "What's happened to my man?"

"Your man has injected himself with some sort of tranquilizer."

"Accidentally, you mean?"

Oryx looked at Gentry. He'd gone back to the wall and leaned against it. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling of the shack, his head back against the burlap and driftwood wall.

"Deliberately. Very deliberately, in fact."

It was clear Zack Hightower did not know how to respond to this. "Okay. Well… you listen. I've got many more assets in the area. You try to take advantage of this situation and-"

"Don't worry, Mr. CIA. Before your man decided to enjoy himself, he made sure I was restrained. Your operation is delayed, but I am unable to escape."

"Give the phone back to him."

Oryx looked down at the Thuraya and smiled. He pushed a red button to end the call. Six's eyes were still on the ceiling. They were unfixed, the eyelids sagging low. Desperately the Sudanese president tried to think of the phone number to his office, to his security detail… to anyone. Yes, a secretary at his Khartoum presidential palace; the number just popped into his head. He did not know where he was, exactly, but he could move an entire army into the area north of Suakin, south of Port Sudan, west of the coastline and east of the Red Sea Hills with a single order. He still thought it likely that Six, if he could, would kill him if he felt his kidnapping operation was no longer feasible. But if Six stayed incapacitated for a while, there might just be enough time for a rescue!

He began thumbing the numbers on the phone.

He looked back up to his kidnapper as he brought the phone to his ear.

The small black pistol with the long silencer was centered between his eyes. "I'm going to need that back."

"Yes."

"Nice try, though," said the American.

Gentry slept for two hours and awoke at dusk. He was still heavily under the influence of the morphine, still felt relatively free of the pain in his back, though the euphoria had dissipated enough for him to dread his next conversation with Hightower. Oryx himself had nodded off in the heat, and Court took the quiet moment to sip bottled water and eat a Soldier Fuel bar. As he chewed, he idly picked up the phone and saw that Sierra One had called six times in the past two hours.

Court set the phone back down in the dirt and finished his dinner. Then he built a tiny fire, using grass and twigs and bits of larger pieces of driftwood lying around. He hardly needed the warmth, but the light was helpful now that darkness had fallen on the eastern coast of the Sudan.

"How are you feeling?" Oryx asked from the center of the room. Gentry looked up to see him standing, facing away and relieving himself with the aid of his free hand.

"The back feels better. The rest of me feels great." Court smiled at his own humor.

"Your phone keeps ringing."

"Yeah," said Court. "I'll need to call them back in a bit. In a couple of hours I'll be hauling your ass to the coast. In a day or two, you'll be locked up." Court smiled at him, "I guess you figured killing four hundred thousand of your countrymen wouldn't have a downside, huh?"

"You have killed more people today than I have, friend."

"We're not friends."

Oryx sat back down and wiped his face, smearing the sheen of sweat across his forehead. The soft firelight danced over his ebony features in the reflection of the dampness. "I think we are more than friends. We are almost brothers."

"You need to take a look in a mirror."

"I mean, our sensibilities are similar. As is our chosen course of action. We both kill, and we both have decided that it does not bother us to do so."

"You've all but eradicated a people. You and I are not-"

"So then it's not the act of killing that bothers you. It's merely the scale of the killing. But I could counter-argue that what I do, I do through political policy, not with my own hands. I think it takes more cruelty to kill a man, face-to-face, than a people via laws and declarations of war. You are the more dangerous man here. Just think how many people you would kill if you ran a nation, an intelligence service. You would slaughter everyone you were against."

Bakri Ali Abboud, president of Sudan, leaned very close now, his head just above the burning wood, the sheen of sweat glowing across his face. "Just like me… brother." He smiled. "You and I, Mr. Six, are the same thing. Eradicators of the debris of humanity." Oryx let the phrase hang in darkness a moment. "Only I am better at it than you, so I am deemed more evil than you. Interesting how one's perspective commands one's concept of right and wrong."

Gentry stoked the fire with a long stick. He recognized that it was the opiate in him causing him to continue the conversation. "You were better than me, but the party is over. You'll be locked up for the rest of your life."

Oryx smiled again.

Court eyed him in the firelight. "You don't seem so worried about spending the rest of your days behind bars."

"Oh, if that were truly going to be my fate, I would be extremely disturbed, I can assure you. But I will not spend the rest of my days behind bars."

"Not if I change my mind and shoot your ass right here."

President Abboud laughed, low and rhythmic. "I don't know if you can operate your weapon in your present condition.

"Try me."

"No, no," Oryx waved his hand. "I am happy to have you for an escort to Europe."

"To prison," Court said.

"Oh, for a few months, I'm sure you're right. But offers have been extended to me, offers that I have refused until now, that will allow me to seek exile in any one of many third-party nations. The Ivory Coast is close to home, but at the moment I am leaning towards a certain Caribbean island that has been suggested. I enjoy the occasional cigar, though I pray you do not tell my wives."

Court sat up straight, still Indian-style, against the wall of the shack. "Bullshit."

"Diplomacy," answered Bakri Ali Abboud with a smile.

"The Europeans are going to let you walk?"

The president shook his head slowly. He exposed his teeth in a smile. "Not just the Europeans. The Americans, too."

Gentry was gobsmacked. He knew he was way too fucked-up to evaluate the micro-expressions set off by the president's limbic system, to check for clues of deception. But the bastard unquestionably seemed sure of himself.

Abboud's smile remained, but through it he said, in an exaggerated American accent, "As you said before. Nobody tells you nothing, eh, Mr. Six?"

"Why?" Gentry's voice cracked.

"For the good of the world," Abboud chuckled again. "What do you think would happen if I were assassinated in my hometown by SLA rebels? A civil war ten times larger than what we have now, except this would be worse. China wants their oil, so they will back my successor just as they did me. But Russia will support a military coup of the civilian successorship, and they will aid our neighbors to the west. Chad will invade, take north Darfur, and hand the bulk of the oil there to the Russians as payment. The IDP camps will be threatened, and UNAMID will be forced out, since the original agreement was with me and not with the government of Chad. China will push my successor towards a total war with Chad to retake Tract 12A, and my successor is, fundamentally, a weak man. He will submit to their will in ways that I would never agree with. China can own him with weapons and power and money.

"One year after I am gone, East Africa will be the center of a superpower conflict, tens of thousands will be dead, another million uprooted."

"But won't kidnapping you have the same effect?"

"There will be short-term chaos, but I will agree to terms that have been offered to me in secret for three years now. If I reveal details of Russia's illegalities here in the Sudan, if I tell my followers, directly and forcefully, that the Russians are prepared to fan the flames of war against us, then there will be no Russian influence on the citizenry, and consequently, no civil war. If there is no civil war, then it is doubtful that Chad would invade. I can even let it be known that China was involved in my kidnapping. This will hurt Chinese interests in the region and return the minerals of the Sudan to the Sudanese."

"China had nothing to do with this kidnapping."

Abboud shrugged. "My followers will believe me. There is evidence to back me up, as well. Chinese Special Forces have been secretly training my troops in Port Sudan, to provide security to Tract 12A along the Chad border. China has known good and well that Russia covets their oil, and they knew that Russia wanted me dead. I can convince the Sudanese people that China and I had a disagreement, so they decided to get me out of the picture by trading me away."

"That's brilliant." Court said. It sickened him to say so.

"Thank your coworkers. This was all part of a CIA plot, a plot to get me to voluntarily turn myself in to the ICC. As I said, I turned their offer of exile down." He shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly. "So here you are to enforce the offer."

"So you are more beneficial alive than dead."

Abboud shrugged. "Apparently so. You get me out of here alive, and I will play my part. As you said early this morning in Suakin, you and I are on the same team. Only you did not know the truth of that statement."

The Thuraya phone rang.