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.
Spencer 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.