On Target (30 page)

A gray Sahelian goat bleated loudly. Another followed, and then another. Soon a chorus of goats called out together, and then the tiny herd parted, ran out from the center, leaving an opening on the grassy hillside.

A large brown backpack crashed into the vacated space, bounced, and rolled down the hill, whipping a twenty-five-foot cord behind it.

And two seconds later a man in dark clothing landed on both boots, seemed to find his balance after a short skid, but the parachute above his head deformed and then re-formed in front of him, sucked in the draft down the hill towards the flatlands, and it pulled him off balance. He lost his footing on the hill, pitched forward, yanking and pulling on the leads to the canopy as he tumbled.

Twenty meters down the hill he came to rest. The canopy deflated and was hauled in, the bleating of the goats subsided, and their community re-formed again as if this odd insult had never occurred.

Gentry sat on his butt, hugged the fluttering canopy to his chest, and looked around in the dark.

“Shit,” he said softly to no one, and then he doubled over, leaned on his left elbow, and vomited onto the dry grass.

Once he collected himself, swigged water from a bladder in his pack, spat it out to perfunctorily clean out his sour mouth, he looked off into the distance. He faced east, and to the northeast he could see the lights of Port Sudan, twenty some odd miles distant across the coastal plain. He turned to his right a bit, towards the south. He knew Suakin was out there in the dark, twenty-five or so miles from him now. He needed to get there as soon as possible.

He would have liked to be there already, reconnoitering the area, using the actual terrain instead of a map to fine-tune his plan.

Court stood, found his left butt cheek to be sore and bruised and stiffening, but he ignored it. There were pain meds in his pack. Lots of them. He’d stuffed them deep in a feeble battle with himself, wanted to go as long as possible without taking them.

The battle worked for now; he did not rip open the bag to dig for them. Instead he stood, spent several minutes among the thin goats, hiding his parachute and the other bags he no longer needed in the breeze-swept grasses and thatched bushes on the hillside. He changed his clothes, donned simple dark blue trousers and a dark green short-sleeved shirt, both purchased the day before in Al Fashir. He planned on using two forms of cover. The Rashaidas, a lighter-skinned Arab common in the area, often eschewed long robes and cloaks for clothing more conventional to Westerners. And if he had to get up close and personal, he knew no one would believe him to be a Rashaida; no native Arabic speaker would buy for a second his piss-poor command of the language, and what Arabic he did know was an altogether different dialect. So his plan was to avoid close contact if possible, but if not possible, he would claim to be a Bosnian Muslim who’d been studying Arabic in Egypt but had decided to complete the hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam, the Muslim’s required pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Suakin was not known for much, but it
was
known, among East African Muslims, anyway, as the port where one could find ferry embarkation across the Red Sea to Jeddah, from where one could make his way on to Mecca. Court had even picked up a simple prayer rug in the souk in Al Fashir to back up this story.

It was, perhaps, the thinnest veil of a cover identity Gentry had ever attempted, for so many reasons Court had stopped counting them. He did not speak a damn word of Serbo-Croatian, the language of a Bosnian. He had concocted no good reason, and not even a bad reason, that a Bosnian studying in Egypt would need to sneak across the Sudanese border to find passage to Saudi Arabia. He would not be able to account for his big backpack, certainly not the sniper rifle and other curiosities inside it, nor the huge amount of money in his wallet and money belt. He would not be able to specify the route he took into the Sudan or even the neighborhood in which he supposedly lived in Cairo.

In any real questioning he’d have to play dumb, which would clearly be the easiest aspect of this cover for him to manage.

No, this particular legend would only work in the most casual of encounters. If he were stopped by police or army or any government official above the rank of the men who scooped camel shit out of the streets, despite his cover story, he would appear to them to be one thing and one thing only: an infidel assassin who dropped into their country from out of the sky.

Just before one o’clock in the morning, the Gray Man hefted his canvas pack onto his back and began walking down the hill.

By eight a.m., Court was sitting Indian style on a pile of straw stacked high on a two-wheeled donkey cart led by two Beja boys. The boys, barely in their teens, wore their hair in wild, messy afros and were dressed identically in baggy beige pants and brown vests, their milk chocolate skin ruddy in the rays of the ceaseless morning sun. Court had given them the Bosnian pilgrim story, they’d bought it, he’d given them a few Sudanese pounds, and they’d taken them. They were heading all the way to Suakin to an uncle’s house, delivering the donkey and the hay, and though this means of travel was no faster than Court walking himself, he surely
preferred
this means of travel to walking himself.

He told the boys that he did not want any trouble from local authorities, being a foreigner and all, and they’d helpfully suggested, via common Arabic words and pantomime, that he bury himself and his pack in the straw if cars passed or checkpoints loomed. The boys made a game of it, and he’d bought them lunch and tea at a roadside stand set up for those heading to Suakin to catch the Jeddah ferry. He’d even bought the donkey his own lunch at the stand, identical to what the humans ate, which the kids found hysterical.

In the afternoon, as the Red Sea coastline appeared in the hazy distance, Gentry dug himself deep in the straw and stayed there. He tried not to choke on the dust and avoided thinking too much about the constant creepycrawly sensations in his pants and his shirt. Traffic on the road had picked up considerably: buses, donkey and horse carts, men on foot, occasionally the odd private car. Twice even military transport trucks passed. Sidorenko had provided Gentry with a good deal of reading on Suakin. Court had ignored the majority of it, other than a map; the folio on the ancient port city had not seemed germane to his mission. But he
had
read a brief article on the city, and he was fascinated by its rich history. As well as being famous for its daily ferry to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Suakin was also known as the last active slave port in Africa, only cutting off the traffic in humans in 1946. Suakin was key to the African slave trade, whether Egyptians or Ottomans or British controlled the town. Many of the big, beautiful buildings in the town, virtually all of them in disrepair, were built in the furtherance of this cruel but lucrative industry.

He knew not to expect much as far as infrastructure here, but President Abboud had a farm nearby and enjoyed performing the morning call to prayer in the high gallery of the tower in the mosque that looked out over the Red Sea.

And that’s what put it on Court Gentry’s travel itinerary.

Nightfall found the Gray Man just to the north of Suakin, looking out to the water of the lagoon. The Red Sea itself was three miles or so farther to the east. This finger inlet protected the small port and had made the water-way a natural transportation route for centuries, until 1907, when the opening of Port Sudan, forty miles to the north, rendered Suakin irrelevant. Gentry still wore his Sudanese clothing, Western in appearance but not at all out of the ordinary here. With his tan skin and his dark beard and hair, with the dust and grime of a full day of travel, with his white taqiyah prayer cap, he could pass from a distance and in the night as an Arab, perhaps a Rashaida, if no one looked too closely. The Bosnian pilgrim cover story was always there to pull out in a pinch, though it was no more plausible here than it had been twenty miles to the west.

He’d stowed his pack deep in the boulders ten yards from the warm water’s edge. He’d found a dark cavelike indention in the rocks, and this he’d made a temporary LUP, or layup position.

The breeze from the ocean was not cool, but it
was
moving air, certainly less hot and stifling than had been Al Fashir or his six hours on the donkey cart. Compared to most of the last ninety-six hours, the steady currents of air off the water here in the dark shade of the boulders felt like the soft touch of a woman, not that Court had much experience with that in the past several years. He lay back, let his mind drift, let his bare feet dangle in a pool of seawater while his head rested on his boots, and he wanted a painkiller to help him relax one last time before the action and danger of tomorrow morning.

But he did not have time to relax now; he had to call Zack, needed to meet with him to pick up some equipment he’d need the next morning. He also needed to meet with Mohammed, the Suakin cop who was on the payroll of Russian intelligence.

He pulled out the Thuraya phone, pushed a couple of buttons, and then waited.

“You here?” Zack was all about the mission now. He was still angry at Court about Darfur, the teasing macho banter of their earlier conversations nowhere in sight.

“Affirm.”

“Let’s meet at Echo, four-five mikes.”

“Roger that. Echo in forty-five.”

“One out.”

Echo was the code name for the ruined treasury building in Old Suakin, which was an island of shattered coral and stone buildings connected by a causeway to el-Geyf, or the new town of Suakin, which lay on the mainland shore. Court had ignored the causeway; instead he put his shoes and pants and his pistol in a small backpack, slipped it around his neck, and then swam across the lagoon at its narrowest point, not more than five minutes in the crossing. The lagoon channel on the other side of the island was deeper and wider. He could see it in the distance under the light of a large but antiquated-looking prison on the far shore. Several small wooden fishing boats anchored in the water near the causeway; farther on, pleasure yachts moored in the black water, their generators lighting their bows and sails, powering stereos that blasted Western-style music, and no doubt providing electricity to kitchens on board more modern than anything in the darkened city beyond the reach of their mast lights.

On the ruined island of Old Suakin itself he was enveloped by darkness, save for dull illumination from a crescent moon. The wreckage of ancient coral rag buildings, erected in the twelfth century, back when this was a main port in North Africa, had deteriorated down to piles of rubble under majestic walls, stairs to nowhere, regal colonnades and columns alongside overgrown bushes and roads of dirt and broken stone. The only human inhabitants of the island were a few caretakers in wooden huts on the far side. The only other residents were four-legged. Court was nearly surrounded by cats before he’d made it fifty feet inland. He followed a path up a hill, kept low in the dark so as not to be seen, and the cats followed him on all sides. But they were quiet and stealthy like he was; other than an occasional rumbling purr, they did not give away the movement of this odd entourage. After another fifty yards Gentry approached the old treasury warily and heard a noise in the brush too big to be feline paws. He pulled a silenced Glock 19 from his pack, only to find himself staring down his sights at a kneeling camel chewing its cud lazily and staring back at him.

Court holstered his weapon and watched the building from between two large, felled coral pillars, his ears tuned to any noises other than the music from the boats in the distance, the camel behind him, and the cats all around. After a short time a penlight flicked on and off twice from the second story of the building, and Gentry rose and approached across a narrow dirt road.

The building was little more than a two-story facade, a spiral staircase in one corner, and a couple hundred square feet of flooring on the second level. Everything else—roof, side and rear walls, the rest of the second floor—was all in a huge pile of stones and ancient wood piled where the first floor should have been. At the bottom of the staircase Court saw Sierra Two, Zack’s second-in-command. The oldest in the Whiskey Sierra clan, Brad wore a salt-and-pepper beard and was dressed in local attire: a white turban on his head, a Kalashnikov cradled in his arms.