On Target (49 page)

“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.

The moon had gone for the month; the Red Sea caught and amplified the light of a million stars, but it was not enough illumination for Gentry to see the
Hannah
in the distance. He squinted to the southeast, following the direction indicator of the GPS beacon locator in his hand. He was less than a mile out, so he cut the engine of the four-man rigid inflatable boat.

His GPS also told him he was four miles offshore now, but he could not see the land in the dark. With the engine off there was all-encompassing nothingness, dark in all directions but up, and up was untouchable infinity.

The ocean was not still. It rose and lowered silently, no breakers or whitecaps out here, just gentle surges that lifted the Gray Man and his boat a few stories into the air and then let him back down again. It was more felt than seen in the darkness, but an occasional reflection off the water’s surface showed him hills and valleys all around, hills and valleys of black water that undulated with the undercurrents of the Red Sea.

It had been a long day. After making his way to the dive resort, he’d found it empty except for the husband and wife owners of the establishment. The few Western guests had all been rounded up and trucked to Port Sudan for lengthy interviews, a fishing expedition by the NSS for the kidnappers of the president. Court did the greatest favor he could imagine for the Dutch couple. He leveled his Glock at their heads and tied them up in the dining room of the establishment. He knew the Sudanese would find the president’s body close by, and he knew these two senior citizens would be questioned. If Court had, in any way, made them accessories after the fact, then they might have tripped over their stories or provided some sort of evidence that would incriminate them. It was also very likely that the NSS had installed listening devices throughout the Western resort as a matter of course.

So Gentry played the role of the bloodstained maniac to the hilt, shouted and ordered the frightened Europeans. He took from them food and water and medical supplies and a pickup truck and a small RIB with an outboard motor and dive gear without so much as a nod of thanks. He drove the truck ten miles to the south, waited in a mangrove swamp until dark, and then set off for the
Hannah
, following the coordinates on the GPS tracker.

He knew the two surviving members of Whiskey Sierra other than Zack had already been evacuated from the area, along with the rest of the crew. It was Gentry’s hope that Hightower was still on the mainland searching for him, but he knew it was possible that Zack had come back to the
Hannah
. He had the mini submarine, after all, so he could easily come and go as he pleased. Court wanted to get to the
Hannah
to use it to flee the Sudan. His earlier idea about crossing the border was fantasy now. When the body of the president was found, that part of the nation would be 100 percent impassable.

So Gentry hunted the black ocean for the yacht with the idea of stealing it and steaming away to safety, though he knew next to nothing about yachting.

Court’s boat moved with the gently rolling surface of the sea. The GPS tracker indicated the boat was not far ahead, so Gentry waited to catch a surge that brought him higher than the other waves so he could see the yacht in the distance.

There, a quarter-mile off, a blacker silhouette on a sea of dark, dark gray. Not a single light visible aboard.

Nobody home?

Court strapped a mesh bag to his waist. Inside were his Glock 19, down to the last seven rounds of ammunition, a folding knife, and his satellite phone in a plastic, waterproof bag.

Next he slipped a buoyancy control device over his shoulders, upon which a scuba tank had already been attached. Then he put on his mask, snorkel, and fins. He took a few test breaths into his regulator, and slipped silently into the warm water.

As he swam, he focused on his mission to keep his mind off the excruciating pain in his left shoulder, a pain that was always there, but a pain that snapped to the forefront of his consciousness every time he reached forward in his breaststroke.

Soon his mind slipped off-mission, and onto one of many of the hundreds of tidbits he’d gleaned about this theater of operations, whether by reading Sid’s material or Zack’s material. This particular tidbit didn’t seem that important at the time, but at present it was allencompassingly crucial.

Nurse, white-tip, gray reef, hammerhead: the four species of shark common to the Red Sea.

Court kept swimming, pissed that he could not get the thought of being eaten by a hungry fish out of his mind.

He remained just below the surface and checked the compass on his wristwatch from time to time to make certain he was headed in the right direction. After ten minutes he surfaced silently, waited for a moment to catch a lift to get a better vantage point. It came soon enough, and the yacht was right there, some seventy yards ahead.

As he began dropping with the wave once again, the bow of the yacht caught his eye. The name of the boat was written on the black hull at the bow, written in either white or yellow lettering.

Arabic lettering.

What the hell?

He had never seen the
Hannah
, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t disguised as an Arab boat. No, he was more than sure. Zack had told him they’d passed themselves off to the Sudanese as Aussies. This would have been difficult to do with a yacht with an Arabic name.

Gentry dog-paddled closer, squinting in the dark to try to read the bow. At forty yards he could make out the characters, but his written Arabic was even poorer than his spoken Arabic.

He said the letters aloud. “F-a-ti-ma.” The
Fatima
.

Not the
Hannah
.

But the homing beacon was emanating from the yacht, which meant, clearly, that someone had taken the transmitter from the
Hannah
and placed it on this vessel.

Someone?
No, not someone.

Zack Hightower.

It also indicated one other thing to Court.

Goddammit
, he said to himself.

This was a motherfucking setup.

Court looked back in the dark. There was zero chance he’d be able to find the skiff he’d left behind him ten minutes earlier on the open water.

He’d have to press on.

He lowered his mask back over his eyes and began to submerge again but stopped himself. He thought he’d heard a noise. He shook water from his ears and cocked his head.