Oil spilled from the disintegrated lamp onto the table and chairs, igniting instantly, bathing them in fire. Burning puddles formed on the floor. White was caught in a shower of burning droplets, snaps of flame erupting on his sleeves and trousers. As he stood, trying to slap them out with his hands, Kealey ran across the room and tackled him across the waist, the momentum of his lunge sending both men down amid the spreading blaze.
His clothes on fire, White hit the floor on his back, grunting out an expulsion of breath, Kealey landing atop him, his weapon over his shoulder on its strap. He saw White’s hand come chopping up at his throat, blocked it with a muscular forearm, and then brought his elbow down on White’s neck and punched him squarely in the middle of his face. Blood gushing from his broken nose, White somehow wrapped his fingers around Kealey’s throat, his thumbs pressing up under his chin even as his shirt and trousers continued burning.
Kealey hit him again in the face, felt his fingers loosen around his windpipe, and tore them free. Suddenly, then, a gun muzzle came down against White’s temple, pushing it sideways.
“Don’t move, fucker!” Mackenzie, his legs planted wide, stood just to one side of the two men, the bore of his rifle steady against White’s head. “I ought to goddamn let you lay here and burn!”
Kealey got to his feet, swooped in a breath. He could smell White’s singed hair and flesh. He looked around, saw a field jacket on a wall hook to his right, tore it down off the hook, and used it to beat out the flames on White’s clothes and the floor around him.
“I want this son of a bitch alive,” he said. And then glanced at the doorway at the back of the room, where the hut had been partitioned with a plasterboard wall. Goggles on, Abby was just on the other side of the door in the darkness, holding her weapon across her body, looking down at the floor.
Knowing what to expect, Kealey swore under his breath, raced into the second room, and saw the oriental rug tossed back from the open wooden floor panel. Outside the hut the sound of gunfire had become light and sporadic.
He and Abby exchanged glances through the monocular lenses of their NVGs.
“Did you see Nusairi go down there?” he asked.
She shook her head no. “We can’t head in after him… If he’s waiting, he could easily pick us off.”
“He isn’t waiting,” Kealey said. “He intends to reach his forces at Suakim or Ed Damer. And he’s got enough of a lead so we’d never chase him down on foot. I-”
The heavy tramp of boots now, coming through the hut from out front. Kealey jerked upright, swung his weapon around at the door to the room…and then felt the tension drain from his limbs. It was Tariq, a silhouette against the deeper darkness, squinting down at the tunnel entrance with his unaided eyes.
“We’ve finished those ghabanat in the other hut… I lost Abdul, a good friend. And another, Mahzin, is badly wounded,” he said, shaking his head. Then he snapped his cell phone from his pocket and looked at Kealey through the gloom. “I left my men at the other end of the tunnel, over by the Gash.”
Kealey’s molars ground together. Yes, Tariq had left his men there. But wouldn’t Nusairi anticipate it? At any rate this would not be left up to them. Or anyone else.
Spinning toward the door without a word, he ran out to where Mackenzie stood with his gun still pointed down at White. A pair of Tariq’s fighters were trussing his arms and legs with strips of rawhide cord.
“The car keys,” he said, holding out his hand. “Now!”
Mackenzie got the key ring from his pocket and tossed it to him without asking questions…not that Kealey would have lost a moment pausing to answer before he raced from the hut into the night.
No longer wearing his goggles, Kealey white-knuckled the Cherokee’s steering wheel, its high beams lancing the night, his foot hard to the gas pedal as he roared over the curving, potholed road toward the river. It was two miles to the mountains, just over a quarter that distance to the bridge. Head start or not, Nusairi was on foot. He would not be able to gain much distance on him.
The rail station behind him now, Kealey sped past square patches of farmland to the grove of trees at the river’s edge, came to a short stop. Where had Tariq positioned his men?
He glanced over his left shoulder, then right at a copse of shrubs and trees. Yes, there.
Leaving the headlights on, he pushed out his door, hastened a yard or two through the screening brush…and then almost stumbled over something underfoot.
He knew what it was before looking down. The body lay sprawled faceup on the ground, a bullet hole in its forehead, the toe of its boot against its outstretched arm. The second of Tariq’s men was on his side only inches from the first, blood oozing from what was left of his mouth and chin.
Their old Ford sedan was gone. A few feet away from where its tires had flattened the surrounding vegetation, Kealey saw the hinged trapdoor to the tunnel. It was thrown wide open, the packed sod and twigs that had camouflaged it flapped aside.
He turned back to the Cherokee, keyed it to life, and tore off for the river crossing.
Kealey was coming off the east side of the bridge when he spotted the wink of taillights up ahead of him to the right, on the street turning off toward the souq at the heart of Kassala. There were no other vehicles on the road, no people around; the town had rolled up whatever damned sidewalks it had… He would have to take his chances that it was Nusairi.
He swung onto the narrow street, pouring on the gas. The taillights, where were they? The main part of town was a labyrinth of twists and turns, and he’d momentarily lost sight of them…
Mouthing a string of profanities, Kealey whipped his head back and forth, then thankfully picked up the gleaming red lights around another sharp bend to his right. He swung into it, found himself on a relative straightaway, and accelerated, noticing the car ahead had sped up, too. He’d gambled correctly, then-it had to be Nusairi.
He bumped on over the cobbled street, his foot to the pedal, gaining on the Ford. It would be no match for his Cherokee, but Nusairi probably knew the city’s layout better than he did, giving him that far from negligible advantage. Kealey was afraid he might yet reach another twisty section of town and shake him loose.
Reaching the next corner, the Ford took a sudden left, Kealey almost on its bumper now, able to see Nusairi hunched over the wheel. He swerved after him, realized they’d gotten to the wide-open central market-there were stalls and wagons all around, everywhere, some emptied out for the night, others with their wares covered with tarpaulins.
Kealey poured it on now, getting closer, closer, and then cutting his wheel to the left so he pulled directly alongside the Ford. He looked out his passenger window, briefly met Nusairi’s gaze through double panes of glass, and swung the wheel hard to his right.
He felt the collision of their doors jar his back, heard the tortured, scraping grind of metal on metal. Then Nusairi’s lighter vehicle half bounced, half skidded to the right and went plowing into a cart of woven textiles, knocking off its wheel so it spun wildly over the cobbles, the cart toppling onto its side, blankets and sheets of fabric spilling everywhere over the street.
Somehow, though, Nusairi managed to hang on to control of the Ford. Kealey swung hard into his flank again, this time almost lifting Nusairi’s wheels off the ground to send him careening through a high stack of packing crates. The crates broke apart over his hood and windshield, wood flying, the burlap sacks of millet and corn inside them breaking open to disgorge their contents. Nusairi tailspun across the square into a vendor’s stall and smashed into a long wooden table, upending it before he hit the back of the stall and brought its bare plank walls crashing down on him, demolishing the Ford’s windshield.