Mark Greaney - On target

He had no time to wait.

As he ran down the stairs, he raised his weapon in front of him, not 100 percent certain of what he would find. Gentry entered the lobby quickly. He found them all incapacitated to one degree or another, six men in total, one of whom would surely be Oryx. One of the guards was up on his knees, both hands feeling around on the carpet for his weapon. Court shot him in the back of the head, and the man fell forward, his face slamming against the pistol on the floor that he sought. He then stepped over two unconscious guards' lifeless forms to reach an older man, who was lying faceup. Yes, this was his target. Oryx was out cold, and next to him, two younger guards were conscious but completely disoriented. They lay on their backs and writhed in their own vomit. Immediately Gentry ripped open the thick president's white dress shirt and pulled his tie loose. Stepping in front of him, he knelt down, reached under his underarms, and hefted him until their chests were leaning against one another. Court ducked down, let the dead weight settle on his right shoulder, then he used his legs to rise up again into a standing position, heaving Oryx up with him into the fireman's carry. The American walked the big Sudanese man over the legs of another bodyguard and out of the room. At the dead-bolted back door he laid him back down gently and drew his pistol again.

Court hurried back towards the lobby. Though his ears rang from the siren he'd just set off, he could hear incredible amounts of gunfire outside. He was thankful all the heavy fighting was to the north and west, which would not interfere with his escape route.

Inside the lobby Gentry raised his pistol and fired one suppressed round into an ankle of each of the four living bodyguards. He looked around the room hopefully for a dropped rifle or submachine gun but saw nothing but a few Lado pistols, which he ignored.

Outside, men beat on the front doors, yelling to be let in. Gentry left the lobby and the injured men behind. They'd recover soon, some perhaps in under a minute, and their heads would kill them for hours or days. Their ankles would incapacitate them for longer, but more important, they would require immediate care, care that would take more guards, police, soldiers, and other first responders to organize and carry out, leaving fewer available to hunt for the kidnapper.

Gentry returned to the back door while reloading his pistol, and here he rolled Oryx onto a two-wheeled hand truck that he'd been given by Zack. It was a small, collapsible, lightweight device, made principally of telescoping PVC pipes with a hard honeycomb plastic floor plate and fat rubber tires. He positioned the heavy body on the two-wheeler, took a moment to tuck the arms inside the attached bungee cord, and then paused a moment to catch his breath.

The gunfire outside continued in short bursts. It sounded confused, spread out.

It sounded like trouble, but still he heard nothing around his side of the building.

Court unhooked the dead bolt at the back door and opened it, looking first to the left, the direction of the square. It was clear.

Then he looked to the right. Two civilian men stood in the dirt road. They looked like Beja fishermen, and their arms were empty of weapons. Court pointed his pistol at them, and they raised their hands immediately. He told them to go in Arabic, and they just stood there. But when he waved the pistol with its long silencer attached, in a motion to mimic their getting out of the street, they seemed to understand, and they disappeared in seconds.

A minute later, Gentry jogged in the shadows, pushing the hand truck with the president on it in front of him. He'd made it two blocks to the south and had only seen the two confused civilians, who had done nothing to impede his progress. Court then ran past a long, low wall and turned inside an open gate to a private residence. In the small dirt courtyard he lowered the two-wheeler to the ground and knelt beside it. He was a hundred yards away from the front door of the bank now. He'd made one right turn and then a left down narrow passages and was semi-confident he had neither been spotted nor left any sort of a trail with his feet or his wheels.

The crackle of gunfire from the square continued.

As if on cue, Oryx's head began to roll to the left and the right. Court unstrapped the president and sat him up, slapped him a few times across the face. He pulled flexi-cuffs out of his backpack and fastened the Sudanese president's arms in front of his body. He reached for a bottle of water staged for quick access in a side pocket of his pack, opened it, and splashed it liberally across the big black man's face and poured a quick shot over his bald head.

Oryx came to fully. He was still disoriented, and his pupils were dilated. Gentry made him take a few swigs of the water, then he slapped him again.

Oryx spat the water up immediately, most of it hitting Court in the face. Abboud then tried to reach out and swat away the phantom bright lights in front of his eyes.

Gentry shouted over the inevitable ringing in Abboud's ears. "Wake up! Hey. Open your eyes! Look at me! Look at me."

He had the man's full attention now. His eyes were wide but clearly whited out in the center from the blinding light of the Big Bang. He took in the scene and the man in front of him by looking at him in a sideways glance. He was clearly shocked but recovering from what must have appeared little more than a dream a few seconds earlier.

Oryx shook his head, attempting still to clear out confusion, the bright dancing lights, the ceaseless ringing in his ears.

Court had been flash-banged many times in training, but the gizmo he'd used on Oryx and his guards was new, and it was nasty. Gentry was glad he'd never been on the business end of an acousto-optical stun device of this magnitude.

In Arabic Oryx shouted, "Who are you? Where… what is happening to-"

Gentry responded in English. "Listen up. I was sent to kill you. That was my job. But someone else wanted me to kidnap you instead. Do you understand?"

The president nodded slowly, as if he were still not certain this was not all some sort of a cruel hoax. Court stared him down several seconds, and then a wave of panic flashed in Oryx's eyes.

"I'm going to try to kidnap you, but here's the deal. If that gets too complicated, I'm going back to plan A. Plan A pays a lot more than plan B, anyway. Things get too rough, you make too much trouble when we try to get out of here, and it's plan A all the way. Plan A is a bullet between your beady eyes, and I leave you in the street, go home, and count my cash.

"You understand?"

Oryx nodded again. The panic was there, but there was an acquiescence in his expression. He understood now.

"So your job is to make sure plan A isn't the easy choice for me. Got it? We need to be on the same team here, so this all goes smooth, okay?"

"American? You are American?"

"Absofuckinglutely." Court was proud to say it. It had been a while since he'd operated in the interests of the United States.

"Good. What is your rank?"

"No rank."

"No rank? You are an officer, yes?"

Court laughed as he pushed the two-wheeler up against the wall to shield it from view of anyone walking down the street outside. "Just a grunt, dude. It was this or peeling potatoes, and I drew the short straw."

Oryx did not understand the joke. He shook his head again to clear the lights and declared, "I wish to surrender to your senior commander."

Gentry chuckled. "Sorry, I'm all you get for now."

"Very well." He said it in a disappointed tone. "My head-"

Gentry pulled two pills from his front pocket. "Take these for now."

Oryx took the pills in his hand, looked them over, but did not put them in his mouth.