Andrew Britton - The Exile

Kealey looked across the seat at Tariq. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move in.”

Tariq nodded and hurriedly returned to the Outback.

The plan was to hit hard and fast, using the element of surprise to their best advantage, and to keep their targets from scattering into the night.

Tariq sped up to the farthest hut, the one occupied by Nusairi and White, jolting to a halt directly behind it. His wheels spinning up dirt and pebbles, Mackenzie simultaneously sheered up in front so no one could rabbit through the entrance, the Cherokee’s doors flying open even as it stopped, Kealey and Abby springing from inside with their night vision goggles down over their eyes, Mackenzie following an instant later.

Behind them, Tariq’s fighters in the Wrangler and Volkswagen stuck to the same execution, the Wrangler shooting around back of the second hut, the VW screaming up to its front door, its occupants spilling from both vehicles. The Hyundai wagon took up a rear position, its men doubling as lookouts and backups in case anyone managed to escape from either of the two huts.

Semiautomatic gunfire tore from inside the huts at once, the staccato bursts shattering their windowpanes amid explosive sprays of glass. Kealey rushed over to the first hut in a crouch, flattened his back against it to one side of a broken window, peered inside. And then he saw them in shades of gray through the lenses of his NVGs-Cullen White and Simon Nusairi. White held what appeared to be a Kalashnikov in his hands and had ducked behind a table with an oil lamp on it. Nusairi was scrambling through a door on the far side of the room, an identical weapon in his fist spitting bullets ahead of his path.

Kealey pivoted on the ball of his foot and returned fire, the Sig 552 quivering in his hand. Then he went flat alongside the window again. He heard guns answering Nusairi’s volley out back-Tariq and his men. Abby, meanwhile, had shuffled up next to him even as Mackenzie backed against the opposite side of the window frame and triggered a salvo of his own into the hut.

A dozen yards away the second hut was also caught in a storm of semiauto fire, the salvos blowing out its windows, bullets pecking splinters from its wooden door. Kealey heard an extended peal from one of the guns inside the hut and then saw one of Tariq’s fighters go down to the ground with a howl of pain, clutching his stomach as he curled into a semifetal position.

He zoned in on his goal, looked across at MacKenzie and Abby.

“ Cover me! ” he called, motioning toward the door.

A brisk nod from Mackenzie, then Abby. Mackenzie edged from the window to the door along the outer wall of the house, stayed there to the right of the entrance. Abby, head tucked low, raced around the Cherokee, using it as a shield as she put herself to the left of the door.

Kealey looked over at Mackenzie, held up three fingers, ticked off a visual countdown. Three, two, one…

And then Mackenzie backed up a step, directed his fire at the lock plate, almost tearing it free of the door itself. He released the AK’s trigger, sent the door crashing inward with a high leg kick to the twisted remnants of the flimsy metal plate, and poured more rounds into the hut, Abby joining him now with a rippling burst from her rifle.

“ Now! ” Kealey shouted, and they momentarily ceased fire as he went in low, the stock of his weapon against his arm, his fist around the grip, finger squeezing the trigger.

Bullets streamed from his gun into the hut as he laid out a side-to-side firing pattern, sweeping the room, his eyes seeking out White through the goggles.

He was still kneeling behind the table, having shuffled behind a chair. Incredibly, the oil lamp on the tabletop remained unbroken, throwing its pallid orange light around the room. Not wanting to be a stationary target, Kealey dove to one side, swung the rifle in White’s direction, prepared to fire-and suddenly the chair was thrown across the room at him, flying through the air, nearly hitting him smack in the chest. He managed to avoid it on reflex and had some vague, marginal awareness of it hitting the wall directly behind where he’d stood as he arced the snout of his gun toward the oil lamp and blew it to bits and pieces.

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.