On Target cg-2 Read online

  The remaining soldiers scrambled for cover in the building they’d just exited, and Court let go of Oryx, darted towards the rifle lying next to one of the dead trooper’s bodies. But a long burst from an unseen shooter’s rifle stitched bullets down the alley just feet in front of Gentry, so he turned and retreated back around the corner, grabbed his prisoner again, and ran away as fast as he could with one hand on his weapon and the other on the neck the president of the Sudan.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Suakin is a town filled with Rashaidas and Bejas, mostly, but as it was a market and a port town, and somewhat of a port city still, there were transplants from all over the country. Dinka, Fur, Nuba, Masalit, Nuer, most all of the tribes came here to trade and to live. There were also some Nubians, dark black non-Arabs who congregated principally around the Nile River to the west.

  One such Nubian family lived in a burlap, driftwood, and tin shack to the southwest of the square. The shack was also their business, as the man of the house made goat-hide sandals with tire-tread soles and sold them in the dirt alleyway in front of their hovel.

  The man’s son was dead, so the sandal maker helped raise his four grandchildren: three girls and one boy.

  The man of the house huddled over the girls, called to his twelve-year-old grandson Adnan to come over to his side of the shack and lie in the dark with the rest of the family, but Adnan refused to cower. Instead, Adnan opened an old chest next to the sleeping mat, and from this he took the prized possession of his dead father, a longbow. As his grandfather yelled at him, young Adnan scooped up three arrows before running out of the house and towards the sound of gunfire.

  His shack was on a hill, and from the front door he could see smoke and flashes of light towards the square. There was more shooting behind him to the west, but it was farther away. Adnan ran to a flight of rickety stairs that led down his hill. He leapt down the stairs, took them three and four at a time, his young, sinewy, coal-black legs comfortable with the exertion. With the gunfire around, he instinctively tucked his head tight into his neck as he ran.

  He passed an old man on wooden crutches standing in front of his shack. The cripple shouted to the child, demanded he go back to his home, but Adnan wasn’t listening.

  Adnan was going to save his family and his town from whoever threatened it.

  The Nubians were fearless and ferocious warriors since the times of the pharaohs, and their weapon of choice had always been the bow. Nubia itself means “land of the bow.” Nubian archers served as highly coveted mercenaries in ancient wars as far away as distant Persia.

  Adnan’s family had descended from a dozen generations of bow makers, but bows made them no money, as AK-47s and the Chinese AK knock-off, the Type 81, hung from the shoulders of everyone around here with cause to wield a weapon. An AK is more powerful than a bow, an AK is easier to master than a bow, and, it could be argued, an AK is only slightly more technologically complicated. For this reason Adnan’s grandfather switched to making sandals, but Adnan had learned as a child how to use the large bamboo bow with leather at the handgrip, with bone and horn inlaid at the tips and just above the leather wrapping.

  Adnan barreled through a small driftwood and baling wire gate, into another dusty alley. The gunfire from the square reverberated on the walls and carried down to him. He tucked his neck in tighter as he turned to race towards it, his father’s weapon in his right hand and the arrows in his left.

  Other townspeople were out now, running away mostly. Adnan passed them at a sprint as he moved towards the action.

  He rounded a narrow passageway and stumbled to a halt. Thirty meters ahead, at the entrance to this alley, a black man in a black suit skittered around the corner, as if shoved from behind. His hands were bound in front of him, and he slipped and stumbled forward on the shiniest shoes Adnan had ever seen in his life. The young Sudanese boy ducked quickly into an unused doorway to the back of a derelict butcher shop, hid himself in a morning shadow, his back to the wall, and then lowered to a squat. He ducked his head around the corner and saw the black man being pushed towards him by a bearded white man.

  An infidel.

  The white man held a long pistol in his right hand, and he shouted as the two men ran up the alley towards Adnan’s hide. “Move! Move! Move!” The foreign word meant nothing to young Adnan, but the tone told him he was forcing the black man forward.

  Adnan had never seen the president of his country and had no idea of the identity of the big man with the bound hands.

  Here was Adnan’s moment. In seconds they would pass, and he had no doubt he could put a steel-tipped arrow through the back of the infidel. He only had to wait a few seconds and take him down from behind.

  As the footsteps and the angry foreign shouting closed on his position, Adnan changed his focus to the other side of the doorway, one meter from the tips of his bare feet. A dead rooster lay in the shadow, his feather-covered carcass maggot-infested and putrefying. The Sudanese boy’s eyes narrowed with purpose. He chose an arrow and laid the remaining two on the dusty stoop next to him. He pointed the razor-sharp barb of the arrow in his hand at the most rotten morsel of the dead bird and stabbed it deeply, turning the point around to the left and the right like a key in a lock.

  Covering the tip of the missile in bacteria, a determined smile covered the young boy’s face.

  The suited black man passed the doorway, again nearly falling forward. Behind him no more than a few steps was the shouting infidel, his long black handgun a blur as he ran.

  Adnan rose and stepped into the alleyway behind his target. He threaded his arrow into the bow, pulled back the bowstring tightly as he raised the tip to eye level, and centered it on the sprinting white man, who was nearing the turn to the back of the building. The man wore a backpack, so Adnan adjusted his aim so that his arrow would strike high in his target’s neck.

  “Allahu Akbar.” Like two thousand years of proud Nubian archers before him, Adnan let the missile fly.

  “Left turn! Left turn!” Court shouted at President Abboud. The older man stumbled; no doubt his balance was affected by his bindings, but also no doubt, decided Court, the man was crafty enough to willfully hamper their escape. Gentry was having none of it, though, and he lifted his right arm high to strike the man in the back of the head, to convince him of the urgency of the situation.

  Just as the butt of his gun connected with the president’s sweaty head, Court felt an excruciating pain in his left shoulder blade above the top of his backpack, just three inches from his spine. The impact knocked him forward and spun him slightly, not to the ground but nearly, and he stumbled past the president but then caught himself as he followed the man around the corner.

  “Ugh!” He grunted with the impact; the blistering sting did not dissipate as he slowed and looked back over his shoulder.

  A long brown arrow protruded from his shoulder blade.

  Court’s run slowed as he stared at it. His brain had difficulty processing what was right before his eyes for a long moment. He looked down to his chest to make sure it had not gone all the way through his body. It had not. He then tried to reach back for it and failed. Finally, he began jogging forward again, still looking back at the arrow. Softly, he muttered, “No fucking way.”

  The beige van slammed on its brakes at the side entrance to the three-story hotel, a colonial-style building that must have been an architectural gem a hundred years earlier. With wooden balconies, gabled hoods above the windows, white shutters, and ornate latticework columns, the hotel looked more New Orleans than Arab African. Zack looked through the windshield, scanning for targets, but he could not help but notice the dilapidated state of this building and those on either side of the road. Spencer ducked into the side door of the vehicle, and it lurched forward again. Milo fired a pair of bursts down the street to keep the infantry’s heads down, but it appeared that the SLA attack to the west had drawn many of the troops away from the southwest corner of the square.

  Spe
ncer had been roaming Suakin in cover for two days, therefore he was dressed in local attire and carried only a small Uzi submachine gun. Quickly he grabbed a chest rig with body armor that had been waiting for him inside the van. He struggled to put it on in the back as the Econoline bounced on the bad road.

  Whiskey Sierra’s vehicle turned north and accelerated quickly up a wider unpaved road. Civilians’ heads could be seen in windows and doorways and peering through the gates of walled buildings. The locals were staying off the roads themselves, which was good for them and good for Zack. He had no doubt the Sudanese Army would not think twice about collateral damage, though he and his men were doing their best to avoid it.

  Less than thirty seconds after collecting Sierra Five at his hotel, the van again slammed on its brakes, this time at the doorway to a two-story building. Spencer opened the door.

  They were parked less than a second before Zack transmitted. “Three, we’re not gonna sit here all damn day for—”

  A crash on the roof of the van shook it to its chassis, the impact like a dull thud to the battered eardrums of the occupants. It was Dan, jumping from the roof of the building. He slid off the side of the vehicle and ducked into its open door. Sierra Three slammed the door shut behind him, and Sierra Two once again stomped on the gas pedal.

  Zack called into his headset for Court, “Sierra One for Sierra Six, break. I’ve got my guys, and I’m getting the fuck outta here. You are on your own for now. Good luck, and watch out for that damn chopper. One out!”

  They’d made it no more than fifty yards up the paved street when three policemen in dark uniforms stepped to the edge of the roof of a small blacksmith’s shop. Each man heaved two large concrete blocks off the roof. The heavy cement arced into the air in front of the van, forcing Brad to jack the wheel to the right, nearly scraping the paint from the right side as he passed an old parked Chevrolet sedan. He pulled back to the left and just missed a pair of unoccupied rickshaws by the side of the road.

  Another group of locals was up ahead on the roof of another building with cement blocks and large tires, ready to throw them at the van. Hightower knew it would be dangerous to try to drive under them.

  Zack shouted from the front passenger seat, “Left up here, Brad, hard left!” The van turned hard into an alley even narrower than the road they’d just left.

  Before he could even finish his turn, Brad shouted to the passengers of the van, “Contact front!”

  The windshield of the van popped and cracked. It did not shatter entirely, but a stitch of white-rimmed bullet holes drew across it from right to left, from low to high.

  Zack felt a vicious tug to his forearm and stings to his face and neck. He lifted his rifle over the dashboard and fired back through the glass fully automatic, emptying his thirty-round magazine at targets in the road in front of him and pulverizing the windshield into bits of white sand.

  The van veered hard to its left. Zack knew there was no room for error at this speed in such a narrow alleyway. He braced for impact, and the impact came, a hard jolt to the left, then the vehicle bounced back hard right, and this time Hightower knew the impending impact would be vicious and directly on his side. He pulled his legs up just as the big van slammed into a white building on the right, slowed, and came to a stop four feet from the broken wall of concrete blocks.

  Steam from the radiator shot into the air in front of the broken window. The van was dead.

  Zack shouted without hesitation, “Bail! Bail! Bail!”

  After ordering his team to de-bus, Hightower rolled out the front passenger-side door, fell to the hard ground, landed on his shoulder and hip, and found himself facing away from the direction from which the gunfire had come. He looked back over his shoulder. One of his men had already tossed a white smoke grenade to obscure the view of the gunners ahead of them in the road. A decaying but occupied coral stone building was just a few feet away from his head, a window waist-high just above him, and Zack wasted no time scrambling to his feet, launching himself from the street and into the air, tucking into a ball, crashing through the plate glass, and slamming again hard now onto the ground floor of the building. It was a dark office of some sort. There was a government feel to the setup, but no one was inside this early, and the generators for the lights were not running. Zack rolled quickly to his knees and began reloading his rifle. He could not help but take note of the blood; it was on his arms and his gloves and the shattered glass and the floor where he landed, and it was smeared all over his tan-colored gun. But he went about his work, did not pause an instant to check the severity of his injuries.

  Gunfire outside in the street continued ceaselessly. Just as he racked a fresh round into the chamber and began to stand, Sierra Two came flying through the same window. Their bodies hit, a glancing blow, and Brad slammed to the ground, his unslung FAMAS F1 rifle skittering free of him and sliding several yards across the floor.

  “Four is hit!” came the call through Zack’s headset; it was Dan’s voice, and Dan was still outside in the street full of flying lead.

  Zack shouted into his mouthpiece. “I’m suppressing to the north; Two will open the door by the van. Get Milo in here!” Hightower leaned his rifle out the window and fired short bursts up the alley. Without looking he knew that Brad would already be rushing to the building’s back door to help the others inside.

  Zack did what he could to conserve ammo, but his weapon soon ran dry. He called for cover, but the other men on his team were still fully involved with the rescue of their injured colleague. Hightower dropped his empty rifle and pulled his Sig pistol from his drop-leg holster, fired out the window and up the street with his right hand, had to lean his head out and expose his upper torso to do so, while his left felt for a fragmentation grenade in a pouch on his chest.

  As his pistol’s slide locked open with the firing of the last round, Sierra Five shouldered up on his left and opened up with his small Uzi. Zack threw the grenade as far up the street as he could. “Frag out!” He then stepped back inside the room to reload and assess the situation.

  Four sat on the floor. With his HK machine gun in his hands he covered the door through which he and two others had entered the building. His lower right leg was bloody, and Three checked it quickly. Two had already crossed the big room, pushing desks and chairs out of the way as he did so, and was looking out a window on the south side, trying to find a fast exit to get the team moving again. Hightower noticed that Sierra Two was limping as he moved.

  Zack reloaded; he had six rifle magazines left. His 150 remaining rounds did not seem like a lot of ammo, considering he’d already blown through ninety in a sporadic fight that was less than five minutes old.

  As he moved across the room to link up with Brad, he took a look at his own wounds. There was a clean, almost perfectly round bullet hole in his right forearm. Blood ran from it, soaked his brown shirt and his gear, but his hand and arm seemed to be working just fine. He then found an exit wound just above his elbow. Both arms and hands were covered in blood, but he could find no more injuries other than some abrasions from the broken glass on his cheeks, just under his goggles.

  “Three, can he walk?” Zack asked into his mouthpiece as he arrived at Two’s side.

  “Affirmative. I think his fibula’s cracked, and he’s losing blood. He’ll need treatment ASAP, but he can walk for a few minutes, anyway.”

  “Good enough. Everybody on me, we’re busting out of here now. We are not gonna let these knuckleheads surround us.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Court heard Zack’s transmission to him while he was still running with Oryx, then, a half minute later, he heard the crash in the distance. The continued transmissions on his radio told him Whiskey Sierra had made it out of the street, but it was clear they were knee-deep in shit.

  But Court had his own problems. He and Oryx had ducked into a hovel full of locals to hide from a platoon of troops running towards the square. It was a dark and filthy open room, the only li
ght coming from holes in the walls where the corrugated tin did not match flush with the driftwood. Gentry held his Glock to the president’s temple. The Gray Man panted from the exertion of his run and the adrenaline pumping through him, wincing in pain with each breath as the muscles around the arrow tightened and spasmed. As he did all this, he stared at a family of nine who just sat on the floor and stared back at him. There were children in the room, small and black with big, wide eyes that made it clear to Gentry that he was the strangest sight any of them had ever laid eyes on.

  The adults’ eyes showed some fear and some surprise, as well, but more than that, there was a prideful anger, that this white man with his gun and his prisoner should just bash his way into their simple home and threaten them with his presence. These people’s lives were borne of hardship, austerity, disease, work, hunger, an absence of liberty and free will. One more danger, one more insult to their existence, was met more with derision and fury than terror.

  Though the adults had noticed that this white man had not pointed a gun at anyone except the man in the suit.

  These people had no idea they were in the presence of the leader of their country. He meant nothing to their lives.

  Court had ignored the arrow in his back as well as anyone could ignore such a thing. From the pain he could tell it was deep in the bone of his shoulder blade, but he could move his arm and shoulder. He recognized that he was lucky it had not hit him harder. Three inches deeper, and the bolt would have pierced the top of his heart and he’d be dead already, lying facedown in the alleyway where he took the hit. He guessed the bowman must have shot him from a great distance, or else it was a woman or a young boy; otherwise, the sharp projectile would have surely penetrated all the way through him.