Mark Greaney: On target

"In the arts and… So… are you saying movie stars are paying you to do this?"

"Well. Yeah. I guess I am."

"That is your story?"

He smiled. She was a smart woman. Too smart to believe him, but also too smart to not turn away the president handed over to her organization on a silver platter. She'd play along. "And I'm sticking to it," he replied.

"Okay." It was said with a worried tone, like she wasn't sure she'd be able to sell this fantasy to her superiors any better than Six had to her. "I'll call you back. Are you safe for now?"

Court exhaled. "Oh yeah, snug as a bug, Ellen."

"I'll hurry."

Dawn rose over the still waters of the Red Sea as Court drove the Skoda north on the coastal highway that led from Port Sudan to the Egyptian border. Out the driver-side window he could just see the Red Sea Hills, and out the passenger side, past Oryx's bruised and impassive face, he looked out over the water as the blackness of dark warmed into the softness of the predawn.

An hour earlier he'd skirted to the west of Port Sudan under cover of darkness, and now the Skoda had the flat road to itself. Court had worried about military checkpoints, but there were none. He'd seen several police cars hours earlier, but in his dark car he never once felt exposed.

The coastal road turned inland for a few miles, towards the hills but not that far to the east, and then it cranked back to the north. At seven a.m. he turned off the highway and followed a sand and dirt and coral path that headed back towards the water. He passed small towns on both sides of the road. They were higher than the road on rocky plateaus that continued on to the sea.

It had taken a full day for the ICC to put a plan together to take possession of Oryx, and Court was not privy to many of the details. All he knew was that he was to drive himself and his captive to a Dutch-run seaside scuba diving resort just twenty miles from the Egyptian border and wait for a pickup by a team of ICC investigators who were on their way from Greece. Ellen Walsh would not be with them, and Court found this unfortunate, though he did not want her exposed to danger.

Gentry himself had no intention of leaving with the ICC team. No, he would put Oryx in the speedboat, or the helicopter, or the SUV, or however the president was to be extracted, and then Court would go in the other direction. He figured he could get a small dive boat from the resort and head north towards Egypt. He'd run out of gas before the border, but then maybe he could land and hitchhike farther north, make the border crossing in the desert in the night with some friendly Bedouins.

He'd have to do this all with a raging infection in his back and no antibiotics or pain meds. He'd poured the last of his antiseptic on his wound before he and Oryx set out from their second hide the evening before, and he'd dumped the narcotics in a ditch fifteen minutes later, so great was his desire to consume them. He'd have to do without a respite from the agony, and he told himself that this would make him tougher, sharper, more ready for what was to come around the next corner.

But mostly it just made him even more miserable.

He still had the receiver that broadcast the GPS coordinates of the Hannah. He'd taken the time to disassemble the device with his multi-tool to ensure there was no tracking transmitter hidden inside that would have sent his own position back to Hightower and the Hannah. The receiver told him the CIA boat was still to the southeast, in international waters. Hightower had not called him in a day and a half, and Court was worried by the long silence. Zack could be anywhere, either on the Hannah, back in the States, or standing in the road just up ahead with an anti-tank launcher.

Zack was scarier than the GOS, the NSS, certainly scarier than the ICC.

The unpaved road turned to the north and continued on, but a driveway led towards the ocean and the resort. In the quickly growing sunlight Gentry could see a medium-sized main building, and on either side of it little individual bungalows on the beach, backlit by the orange sun one-third exposed on the horizon's line of the Red Sea. But a heavy chain sagged three feet off the drive, locked to upright posts in cement on either side. The chain did not look particularly formidable, but there was no way the little black Skoda was going to successfully ram through it and then keep going.

Two hundred meters, low sand dunes on either side, brown sea grasses blowing gently in the warm breeze. They'd have to walk the rest of the way.

Court pulled the car to the side of the road.

"Out," he ordered Abboud.

"I've never been here before," said the president. "But I know what this place is. There is decadence here. Alcohol was found once, five years ago. We could not punish the owners, a European couple, with more than fines. I think maybe they were shut down for a summer." He sniffed through his injured nose. "Infidels."

"Out," Court instructed once again. He climbed out of the driver's side and moved quickly around the front, opened the passenger-side door, took the president by the shirt, and lifted him to his feet.

"When will the transport arrive?"

"I don't know."

"How will they get past the coastal patrol boats?"

Court pushed him forward towards the bungalows. "I don't know."

"Where will the ship go when it leaves here? All the way to port in the west or will we-"

"I don't know."

"Mr. Six. You have no real plan, do you? Let me get in touch with some of my contacts in the West. I can make arrangements that would be satisfactory to everyone."

"No."

"We, my friend, are on exactly the same team here. You understand that now, don't you? I will contact some people with whom I have done business for many years. They are very loyal to me-"

"That's what I'm afraid of," said Court distractedly. He pushed the president forward again up the sand-strewn driveway, past a low sign in Arabic, but his eyes were off to the right, into the distance, into the deep morning shadows. Some six hundred meters away, a half kilometer back from the coastline to the south, the terrain rose sharply at the rocky plateau. There, in the morning shadows, the sun reflected off of the windows and tin roofs of squat, square buildings. Court could see no movement, no sign of life at all, but he felt exposed nonetheless.

He'd made it just over halfway to the bungalows with no more protest from Abboud. Then the president spun around abruptly. Court's eyes had drifted back to the south, but he quickly turned his attention back to his captive.

"I want you to make a promise to me. If we are still here tomorrow, it will be very dangerous for both of us. For you especially, because, unlike you, I do still have some friends out there, looking for me, wanting to help me. If we remain here for twenty-four hours, you can be sure that someone, one of the staff, one of the owners, someone who saw the car along the road to the beach, someone will report us. Then they will come, and by 'they,' I mean everyone. Friend and foe will descend upon us. I was a general long before I was president, and you have chosen for us absolutely indefensible ground. Our back to the ocean, our front to tens of thousands of square meters of sand dunes. This is a deplorable place for us to fight-"

"Shut up."

"-and you don't even know when help will arrive, or in what form the help will come? I should think you could have chosen a better-"

"Shut up!" Court said again, shoving Abboud forward, angrier than ever at the man, principally because the man was absolutely correct in everything he said. This was a mess, this one-man extraction attempt in denied territory by an unknown force.

Court shoved the president again. It made him feel a bit better to deflect some of the focus of his wrath on someone other than himself.