"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.
FORTY-EIGHT
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.