Miraculously, he had not.
"Hang on!" shouted Brad, and Court knelt in the jeep with his hands on the machine gun just as the vehicle went airborne at the top of a crest in the road, sending it crashing down on its axle before it bottomed out and cleared the area.
A few seconds later, Brad reached for his chest rig, hugging himself with his right arm while he drove with his left. "Dammit."
"What is it?" asked Zack, still scanning his sector.
"Think I fucking popped a rib when we hit back there."
"You good?" asked Hightower.
"Yeah, I'm good, I just-"
The break in the response turned Sierra One's head to his driver. Brad continued to hold the wheel with his left hand, his foot almost to the floor, but his right hand was up in front of his face.
His fingers were coated in thick, rich, blood.
"Son of a…
Sierra Two's hand slowly dropped in his lap, his head bobbed to the side and then fell forward towards the steering wheel.
"Three, drive!" Zack pulled Brad out of the driver's seat and across his own body. The entire left side of Two's torso was drenched in blood. An enemy round had pierced his side between his underarm and his armor.
Dan crawled over the backseat and slid behind the wheel as the jeep began veering to the left. He pushed down on the accelerator and turned just in time to avoid a crash with a high gravel mound by the side of the road.
Gentry knelt over Dan seconds later and yelled to be heard. "Hey, man. I think you're hit. There's fresh blood all over the place back here, and I can't find a leak in me!"
As he drove, Dan felt over his own body. After several seconds Gentry leaned back over again.
"GSW, left shoulder!"
Dan looked, found that he'd taken a gunshot wound high in the front of his left shoulder, less than two inches from the jugular vein in his neck. He bled like a stuck pig but kept driving on.
Soon they arrived at the home where Court met Mohammed earlier in the day. The small Skoda sedan was still in the courtyard. It took Gentry a couple of minutes to find the keys where he had tossed them in the dust. During that time, the wounded Dan took the one rifle left with the team and guarded the front gate, and Zack gave CPR to Brad on the ground next to the jeep.
"Come on, Bradley! Don't fucking chicken shit out on me! Walk it off!" he shouted at a man who, Court could tell even from across the yard, was clearly dead. But Zack didn't want to see it himself. Court wondered if Sierra One was trying to revive both Sierra Two and Sierra Five with the futile treatment.
Zack did not give up for nearly five minutes. By then Gentry had the injured Sierra Four in the back of the Skoda, with Dan bandaged perfunctorily and sitting next to him. He helped Zack put Sierra Two's body in the trunk. Court then led Hightower to the passenger seat. Court took the wheel, and the vehicle left the gate of the home and headed north, its four white men of war hidden behind tinted windows.
FORTY-TWO
Twenty minutes later the Skoda drove under a flight of four Sudanese Army helicopters that were following the highway from Port Sudan down to all the activity in Suakin. The choppers continued on and disappeared in Gentry's rearview mirror.
Hightower had not spoken at all. He seemed utterly spent, dejected, nearly unconscious. The injured Four was passed out in the backseat, and Three looked like his moderate blood loss from the shoulder wound, plus the other wears and tears of the morning, had left him completely worn out.
After a while, Zack pushed himself up from his seat with difficulty. He had Court lean forward over the steering wheel as he drove, and Sierra One pulled the robe off his shoulder to check his wound.
"Your back smells nasty."
"Yeah," Court replied distractedly, scanning the skies ahead for another chopper. This tiny team of wounded and virtually unarmed men was in no condition to fight anyone. Gentry was desperate to keep them away from any threat more potent than a head cold.
"I know this place is filthy, but how does a wound get that kind of putrefied stink in four hours?"
"Dunno. You got any antibiotics?"
"Negative. We just brought basic trauma shit. Used most all of it, didn't we, Danny?"
"Yeah, boss." But Sierra Three took some of the clean bandaging from his shoulder wound, tore it free, and handed it up to Zack.
Hightower took some tape from his med pouch and positioned Three's gauze over the hole in Gentry's back to stanch any more bleeding. It was a perfunctory job, just marginally better than nothing. "You'll make it. When we get to the Hannah, we'll get you fixed up."
"Cool," said Court. He wasn't that worried about it, though it hurt like hell.
Hightower's satellite phone buzzed in its chest pouch. The device was blackened with dirt and soot and oil and blood, but at least it was still functional. Sierra One had pulled off his headset while attempting to revive Sierra Two, so he just pressed the speakerphone button.
"Go for Sierra One."
It was Denny Carmichael. There was no "Hello." No "How are you?"
"I just got a call from the White House. They say the U.S. ambassador to Sudan is asking if there is some sort of Agency involvement in what he is describing as, and I quote, 'a Black Hawk Down incident up in Port Sudan.' How am I supposed to respond to that?"
Zack smiled, his head back on the headrest and his eyes closed. His face was black from filth and red from the blood that had smeared to nearly every square inch of his body, except for where his eye protection had kept the mess away.
"Well, sir, if I were you, I'd say that it looks like State's intel sucks as bad as CIA Sudan Station's intel. We're forty miles south of Port Sudan."
"That's not the point, is it? Do we have, or did we have, a Black Hawk Down incident?"
"Absolutely not. You didn't outfit us with any Black Hawks to go down."
"Don't get snippy with me, One. Did you secure Oryx?"
"He's secure."
"Have you extracted him to the Hannah?"
"Negative. But that's the next item on my to-do list."
"Sierra Six has him?"
"Uh, negative. Six is with us, what's left of us. I lost a couple of operators to enemy fire. Thanks for asking about my guys, by the way." Court turned to look at Hightower. It was shocking, even after all that had happened in the past several hours, that Zack would snap at his superior like that.
Denny's response showed his focus was on Nocturne Sapphire, not on the health of the team members of Whiskey Sierra. "Who is with Oryx right now?"
Court Gentry answered while driving. "Oryx is secure. He's not going anywhere."
"Why are you and he not in the same damn place?"
"Whiskey Sierra was compromised. I came back to help. I did not put Nocturne Sapphire in jeopardy."
"And if you had been killed?"
"I transmitted the location of Oryx to the Hannah before I set off."
Denny's anger and frustration were evident in his voice. "It is not the job of the men on the Hannah to extract Oryx from the Sudan. The Hannah does not have operators of your supposed caliber, Six, although I can't possibly express to you how disappointed I am with your decision-making abilities in the past week! You should have gotten Oryx out of the country before going back for the others."
Court began to respond, but Zack grabbed the phone and pulled it up close to his mouth. "I've got one hundred percent casualties! Two KIA! We just spent almost four hours battling an infantry force several hundred troops strong, with supporting air assets. Infantry and air that was not supposed to be there. And our local support, support that was supposed to be there, didn't fucking show!"