On target

FORTY-SEVEN

Dawn rose over the still waters of the Red Sea as Court drove the Skoda north on the coastal highway that led from Port Sudan to the Egyptian border. Out the driver-side window he could just see the Red Sea Hills, and out the passenger side, past Oryx's bruised and impassive face, he looked out over the water as the blackness of dark warmed into the softness of the predawn.

An hour earlier he'd skirted to the west of Port Sudan under cover of darkness, and now the Skoda had the flat road to itself. Court had worried about military checkpoints, but there were none. He'd seen several police cars hours earlier, but in his dark car he never once felt exposed.

The coastal road turned inland for a few miles, towards the hills but not that far to the east, and then it cranked back to the north. At seven a.m. he turned off the highway and followed a sand and dirt and coral path that headed back towards the water. He passed small towns on both sides of the road. They were higher than the road on rocky plateaus that continued on to the sea.

It had taken a full day for the ICC to put a plan together to take possession of Oryx, and Court was not privy to many of the details. All he knew was that he was to drive himself and his captive to a Dutch-run seaside scuba diving resort just twenty miles from the Egyptian border and wait for a pickup by a team of ICC investigators who were on their way from Greece. Ellen Walsh would not be with them, and Court found this unfortunate, though he did not want her exposed to danger.

Gentry himself had no intention of leaving with the ICC team. No, he would put Oryx in the speedboat, or the helicopter, or the SUV, or however the president was to be extracted, and then Court would go in the other direction. He figured he could get a small dive boat from the resort and head north towards Egypt. He'd run out of gas before the border, but then maybe he could land and hitchhike farther north, make the border crossing in the desert in the night with some friendly Bedouins.

He'd have to do this all with a raging infection in his back and no antibiotics or pain meds. He'd poured the last of his antiseptic on his wound before he and Oryx set out from their second hide the evening before, and he'd dumped the narcotics in a ditch fifteen minutes later, so great was his desire to consume them. He'd have to do without a respite from the agony, and he told himself that this would make him tougher, sharper, more ready for what was to come around the next corner.

But mostly it just made him even more miserable.

He still had the receiver that broadcast the GPS coordinates of the Hannah. He'd taken the time to disassemble the device with his multi-tool to ensure there was no tracking transmitter hidden inside that would have sent his own position back to Hightower and the Hannah. The receiver told him the CIA boat was still to the southeast, in international waters. Hightower had not called him in a day and a half, and Court was worried by the long silence. Zack could be anywhere, either on the Hannah, back in the States, or standing in the road just up ahead with an anti-tank launcher.

Zack was scarier than the GOS, the NSS, certainly scarier than the ICC.

The unpaved road turned to the north and continued on, but a driveway led towards the ocean and the resort. In the quickly growing sunlight Gentry could see a medium-sized main building, and on either side of it little individual bungalows on the beach, backlit by the orange sun one-third exposed on the horizon's line of the Red Sea. But a heavy chain sagged three feet off the drive, locked to upright posts in cement on either side. The chain did not look particularly formidable, but there was no way the little black Skoda was going to successfully ram through it and then keep going.

Two hundred meters, low sand dunes on either side, brown sea grasses blowing gently in the warm breeze. They'd have to walk the rest of the way.

Court pulled the car to the side of the road.

"Out," he ordered Abboud.

"I've never been here before," said the president. "But I know what this place is. There is decadence here. Alcohol was found once, five years ago. We could not punish the owners, a European couple, with more than fines. I think maybe they were shut down for a summer." He sniffed through his injured nose. "Infidels."

"Out," Court instructed once again. He climbed out of the driver's side and moved quickly around the front, opened the passenger-side door, took the president by the shirt, and lifted him to his feet.

"When will the transport arrive?"

"I don't know."

"How will they get past the coastal patrol boats?"

Court pushed him forward towards the bungalows. "I don't know."

"Where will the ship go when it leaves here? All the way to port in the west or will we-"

"I don't know."

"Mr. Six. You have no real plan, do you? Let me get in touch with some of my contacts in the West. I can make arrangements that would be satisfactory to everyone."

"No."

"We, my friend, are on exactly the same team here. You understand that now, don't you? I will contact some people with whom I have done business for many years. They are very loyal to me-"

"That's what I'm afraid of," said Court distractedly. He pushed the president forward again up the sand-strewn driveway, past a low sign in Arabic, but his eyes were off to the right, into the distance, into the deep morning shadows. Some six hundred meters away, a half kilometer back from the coastline to the south, the terrain rose sharply at the rocky plateau. There, in the morning shadows, the sun reflected off of the windows and tin roofs of squat, square buildings. Court could see no movement, no sign of life at all, but he felt exposed nonetheless.

He'd made it just over halfway to the bungalows with no more protest from Abboud. Then the president spun around abruptly. Court's eyes had drifted back to the south, but he quickly turned his attention back to his captive.

"I want you to make a promise to me. If we are still here tomorrow, it will be very dangerous for both of us. For you especially, because, unlike you, I do still have some friends out there, looking for me, wanting to help me. If we remain here for twenty-four hours, you can be sure that someone, one of the staff, one of the owners, someone who saw the car along the road to the beach, someone will report us. Then they will come, and by 'they,' I mean everyone. Friend and foe will descend upon us. I was a general long before I was president, and you have chosen for us absolutely indefensible ground. Our back to the ocean, our front to tens of thousands of square meters of sand dunes. This is a deplorable place for us to fight-"

"Shut up."

"-and you don't even know when help will arrive, or in what form the help will come? I should think you could have chosen a better-"

"Shut up!" Court said again, shoving Abboud forward, angrier than ever at the man, principally because the man was absolutely correct in everything he said. This was a mess, this one-man extraction attempt in denied territory by an unknown force.

Court shoved the president again. It made him feel a bit better to deflect some of the focus of his wrath on someone other than himself.

His phone rang.

Seventy meters to go.

He answered it. He hoped it was Ellen with details that would cause his mood to improve. "Yeah?"

"S'up, Court? How's life treating you?"

Fuck. It was Zack, and a conversation with Zack right now would do nothing good for Gentry's disposition.

Still, Court thought, maybe he could glean some intel from Sierra One. If Zack was calling, that meant Zack was not sneaking up behind him at that very moment. "Things just could not possibly be any better, Hightower. Thanks for asking."

Sixty meters.

"Yeah? You come to your senses and draw a knife across your boyfriend's throat yet?"

"Sure did."

"How come I don't believe you?"

"' Cause there just isn't enough trust in the world."

"Yeah. That is a shame, isn't it? Look, bro, I just wanted to give you a bit of good news because, despite your bullshit, I think you could probably use it."

Abboud turned around as he walked, tried to ask Court who was on the phone, but Gentry just stiff-armed him forward again.

"Good news? Well, okay, I guess I'll take it."

"Figured as much. Here it is. Today, buddy, is your lucky day."

Fifty meters.

"Okay. I'll bite. Why is today my lucky day, Zack?"

There was a long pause. Court thought he could hear Zack's face rubbing his mouthpiece, his stubbled beard scratching the microphone. Finally, Sierra One answered. "Today is your lucky day, because you are my secondary target, and I am pretty sure I'm only going to have time to get one shot off."

Forty met-Huh?

Court stopped in his tracks. Jacked his head to the south. To the buildings some seven hundred meters distant. A flicker of light in a deep morning shadow flashed from the roof of the highest building on the plateau.

In less than one half second, Gentry turned his head back to president Abboud, propelled his body forward towards the walking man, reached out both arms, and dropped the sat phone. At the same moment he also screamed a single word.

"Down!"

President Bakri Ali Abboud's shoulders raised in surprise of the scream from behind. Then the right side of his neck seemed to quiver, as if slapped hard. The left side of his neck blew apart, blood and tissue flung towards the sand dunes to the north side of the road, leaving Oryx instantly decapitated save for some skin and muscle that remained. His head spun around on its axis and flopped backwards as his torso went limp and dropped straight to the sandy driveway.

Court landed on top of him as blood gushed about, recognized the man was dead in another instant, and then rolled off of Abboud to flatten himself on the driveway.

"No!" He shouted out to the air, just as the report from a sniper rifle rolled across the dunes. His collision with the president's body and his impact with the ground created excruciating agony in his shoulder blade. Still, the anguish he felt at the loss of the president, the loss of his mission objective, the loss of his opportunity to stop the civil war and the impending invasion, was paramount in his mind.

Flat on the ground now, he looked up towards the buildings. The roof where the sniper's bullet came from was behind the tip of a peaked dune just off the side of the road, but Court knew Zack would reposition after that shot, and if he managed to get any higher on the hill, he could get line of sight on Gentry's position on the drive. So Court clambered to his knees and shot forward, scooped up the Thuraya on his way to the dunes. He dove into a tiny gully off the drive, rolled to his right, to the east, back towards the car, and flattened out again.

He punched a blood-drenched fist again and again and again into the sand in utter frustration, the morning heat cloying against his clothes and sticky sand and dust coating his skin where Abboud's blood had smeared.

"Sweet!" It was Zack's voice over the phone in Court's hand. Quickly Gentry brought it to his ear. "Six hundred ninety meters, low light in a half-value eight-mile-per-hour crosswind. That was a Sierra Six quality shot, you gotta admit it!"

Court pressed his forehead in the dirt and sand. All his exhaustion, his infection, everything just sucked the life out of him right now. He began to sob and shake.

Hightower's booming voice continued to pour forth from the little speaker. "You are one quick son of a bitch. If you weren't so sick with that festering back, I bet you could have gotten in the way of my.308 boat tail and caught that round instead of your lover boy. How cool is this, Court? Last Christmastime you capped the ex-president of Nigeria, and I just bagged me the sitting president of the Sudan. Give us time, and you and me just might clean up this shit-assed continent, whaddya say? Wait a sec. Scratch that. You aren't going to live long enough to whack anybody else. Either the infection is going to get you, the thousands of GOS chuckleheads on your tail are going to get you, or I'm going to get you."

Court continued to lie there and shake, as if from extreme cold, a near complete physical and mental breakdown. His body and clothing were caked with matted bloodred sand. He gulped air for a long moment before saying, "You had… one chance to stop me from killing you. I was in your sights, and you made your choice. You chose badly, Zack."

There was a pause on the line. Court sensed concern on the other end. "Whatever, dude. You just need to stay in that hole and die. I'll be out of the country before you can pick Abboud's brain matter out of your teeth. And if you do make it out of the Sudan, Denny has already told me I'll be leading the task force set up to hunt you down."

"I'll save you some time. Come on down here right now. I'll be waiting."

"Love to, brother, but I think I'll get out of here before Johnny Law shows up to see about that dead president smeared all over your shirt like pizza sauce. But I won't be far. Milo and Dan and the rest of the guys on the Hannah have already hitched a ride out of the theater. It's just me and you now." He chuckled. "Oh yeah, plus the five hundred thousand members of the Sudanese Armed Forces."

"And I will burn through each and every one of them to get to you, Zack. Six out."

Hightower spoke up as Gentry made to end the call. "Court, Sierra Six was one of us, and you are no longer one of us. Your code name is no longer Sierra Six, it has reverted to Violator. You're the enemy again. Just in case you're keeping score. One out." Zack hung up the phone.

Court was sick as a dog, half-dead in a ditch, out-manned, outgunned, and outplayed. He had failed. He lay in the sand as the full sphere of the sun appeared between the bungalows on the water. Slowly he made it to his knees and began crawling towards the resort, head low in case Zack was still peering through a rifle scope up on the plateau.