Central Umm Durmān
West of Khartoum, Sudan
March 20, 6:55 p.m.
“There!” Castillo hollered at Shaker, pointing through the windshield at the mob of twenty or more people. He couldn’t see McCoy, but had no doubt the kid was the object of the kicks and blows being delivered to the middle of the tight crowd, dust rising from the center. The Land Cruiser slid to a stop, and Castillo snatched the Sig Sauer assault rifle, opened the door, and stepped out onto the running board. Castillo saw a tall black man standing in the middle of the circle raise a long-handled axe over his head.
Oh, shit!
“Stop!” he screamed in Arabic and fired a burst of 5.56 into the air. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”
The tall man with the axe stopped mid-swing and turned to look at him in surprise.
Castillo placed the red dot of his holographic sight directly in the center of the man’s face.
The man, apparently no stranger to having a gun pointed at him, did not panic. Slowly, grudgingly, he raised his arms in surrender—axe still in his hand—and fixed Castillo with a fuck you stare.
The crowd, transfixed by the standoff and battle of wills, didn’t move.
“Go back to your homes,” Castillo ordered, using his command voice.
When no one moved, he shifted aim and fired two rounds into a mud wall beside the crowd. Jaw clenched and murder in his eyes, he swept his targeting laser across their chests and gave the command again. This time, they listened—fleeing in all directions except, gratefully, toward the Land Cruiser.
Castillo leaped off the running board, dropped into a tactical crouch and moved forward quickly toward McCoy, who still lay balled up tightly on the ground. The man with the axe stood over the Marine, defiance on his face and still in a position to deliver a death strike. Castillo stopped a few yards away and hovered his red targeting dot just above the bridge of the angry man’s nose.
“Back away!” he commanded in Arabic.
The man smiled, slowly lowered the axe to his side, then sauntered off to the corner twenty yards away where he stopped and watched.
Castillo repositioned so he could keep an eye on the threat and knelt beside McCoy.
“McCoy?” he said, shaking the Marine by the shoulder.
To his relief, the kid groaned and rolled onto his back.
“Where ya been, boss?” he said, blinking, staring up at Castillo in the fading light, a bloody grin stretched across his battered face.
“We gotta go, brother,” Castillo said, one hand pulling him up by his arm, the other still leveling the rifle at the axe man at the corner. “They’ll be back any second and this time they’ll be armed.”
McCoy surged to his feet, groaning again in pain and grabbing his side where Castillo imagined he was nursing one or more broken ribs. The Marine spit blood into the dirt, and Castillo pulled the kid’s arm around his neck, still keeping his rifle at the ready and scanning back and forth as they shuffled to the truck.
Just past the man holding the axe, two younger men emerged from a mud shanty, jogging with AK-47s in their hands. Castillo shoved McCoy roughly into the rear of the truck, stepped up on the running board again, and sighted on the wall just beside the armed men, firing a three-round burst that drove them back toward the shanty.
“Go!” he shouted to Shaker, ducking into his seat and slamming the door.
The Land Cruiser accelerated as Shaker turned back to the southeast, a rooster tail of dust spraying toward the man with the axe. Castillo heard gunshots as they tore away and a loud TING sounded as a bullet found the tailgate but didn’t punch through.
“Where we go?” Shaker asked.
“Anywhere, just get us the hell out of here.”
“No problem, boss,” Shaker said, shooting him a relieved grin. “What about the shooter who ran away?”
Castillo cleared around the truck through the windows, then glanced back over the seat. McCoy was awake, but collapsed against the door, half on the floor and half on the left captain’s seat, clutching his chest, streams of blood running down his bruised and battered face from wounds somewhere up in his hairline.
“Forget about him,” he said, crawling over the center console and dropping into the seat beside McCoy. He set the Rattler onto the floor beside the seat and leaned over his comrade. “We need to get Pick back to the safe house.”
Castillo leaned over his teammate, placing a hand on the Marine’s shoulder.
“What’s your sitrep, McCoy?” he asked. “You still in the fight?”
Castillo watched McCoy run his hands over his upper body and neck, then gently palpate his face. His right eye was almost swollen shut, but Castillo saw the pupil dilating normally in the fading light.
“Broken ribs, probably,” McCoy answered, his voice strained with pain. “Otherwise good. No broken bones in my face, I don’t think. Never lost consciousness, so I doubt a major head injury.”
“That’s good,” Castillo said. “Because from what I hear, Marines don’t have much in the way of spare brain cells in reserve.”
This made McCoy laugh, then cough.
“Damn it! Don’t make me laugh,” he wheezed, wincing at the pain as he struggled into the seat.
Castillo leaned over to help him, lifting him gently into the other seat. He searched for a towel, found one behind him in the back, and cracked open a water bottle, soaking half the towel and handing it to McCoy. “Here ya go.”
The Marine took the wet towel and began to dab gently at the blood and dirt on his face. McCoy managed a crooked smile, and Castillo felt an enormous weight lift off him. His teammate would be fine. “Good plan hanging back instead of following the sedan,” McCoy said, the gratitude in his eyes unmistakable.
“Yeah,” Castillo agreed with a tired sigh. “I get it right sometimes.”
“Well, thanks for saving my ass.”
“No one left behind, brother,” was all Castillo could think to say. Castillo checked in with Ani and Junior, sharing what they’d learned from their misadventure in Umm Durmān. For now, he decided to leave out the part about McCoy almost being murdered by a mob.
The Land Cruiser weaved through the confusing sea of poverty that was the shantytown—or shanty city, Castillo supposed—of central Umm Durmān, Ani occasionally calling a turn into his ear, which he relayed to Shaker. Shaker was a skilled tactical driver, and he quietly thanked Junior in his head for putting him on the team.
As the sun dipped below the horizon behind them and the dirt road again transitioned to pavement, Castillo finally began to relax. It wouldn’t be long until they were on the bridge crossing the White Nile River back to Khartoum. He glanced at McCoy, who was pressing the towel tightly against the back of his head to stem the bleeding wounds. The Marine’s eyes had regained their fire and alertness. Unless the kid had some internal injury they didn’t know about, they were probably out of the proverbial woods.
McCoy said, “Well, we learned one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re definitely pushing people’s buttons. First the hit on Ani’s apartment after we get the tip from Omar in Cairo, and now this kid and his wife get whacked right after we shook Khalil’s tree.”
“No coincidences,” Castillo said, finishing the thought.
“No coincidences,” McCoy agreed. “Maybe Khalil ordered both hits?”
Castillo shrugged. “We have to be careful not to mistake correlation for causality. We don’t know what role Khalil might have in all of this. He could be a true believer working for the Saudis or the Islamic Front inside the Sudanese government. He could be a geopolitical mastermind, pulling levers and planning the next coup. Or, most likely, he’s just your everyday corrupt politician who’s been taking bribes from bad guys, trying to cover his tracks, and suddenly realizes he’s in over his head.”
McCoy rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know, the way Khalil behaved in Al Qasr park gave me the impression he’s more than just your stereotypical bureaucrat trying to line his pockets.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just a gut feeling,” McCoy said, hedging. “It’s hard to explain, especially with the language barrier, but the Khalil at the park wasn’t the smiling diplomat we chatted with at the Ministry of Interior. He was the boss, issuing orders. It was the way he carried himself and more so the way the guy from the sedan responded to him. I’ve spent a lot of hours with tribal leaders and warlords in Iraq and Afghanistan, more time than I ever thought imaginable. And what I’ve learned is that men in power—or, more important, men who stay in power—learn how to manage their audience. When we met with Khalil this morning, he was exactly the man he was supposed to be. He managed us during that meeting, just like we tried to manage him, and he did a bang-up job at it. Hell, after six hours of listening to him on the phone, he even had me convinced he was just a bureaucrat. But in the park, I saw a different man. The collegial bureaucrat was gone and the warlord took center stage. Now I don’t know what all of that is worth . . .”
“In our business,” Castillo said, interrupting him, “it’s invaluable. Sure, signals intelligence is great, but what you just described is the human factor. You took a measure of the man in the park, and you saw a different side of him. That’s something you can’t get from a drone feed or a satellite image.”
McCoy nodded, then turned and looked out the window, deep in thought.
Castillo studied the kid—no, the man—and was impressed. This was the type of thinking and gut instinct that mattered in the spy business, and especially in the Presidential Agent program, where so often you were out completely on your own. And, in his experience, it wasn’t something you could teach—you either had it or you didn’t.
Maybe the Marine Raider did have what it took to be the Presidential Agent . . .
Someday.
They skirted through downtown Khartoum, sneaking south on Ghaba Street to circle around a protest near the government complex, before cutting back to the east on Ahmed Khair Street into the luxury neighborhood at the fringe of the embassy district. Turning onto the street that led to their safe house, Castillo spotted the black sedan parked just ten yards from the gate to the driveway. Anger flared in his chest. The government plates on the sedan confirmed what he suspected—that the Sudanese government, and therefore Khalil, knew about their presence all along, probably even before today.
“Pull behind that sedan, Shaker,” he ordered.
“Safe distance?” Shaker asked, slowing.
“No,” he growled. “Right fucking behind him. Tap him if you want.”
Shaker didn’t tap the sedan, but did stop mere inches away. Castillo was out of the Toyota before it rocked to a stop. He walked up to the driver’s door, finding only a single person in the vehicle, a Sudanese Arab in a dark suit. He rapped on the window, his face masking the fury inside.
The driver stared at him a second, then went to roll down the window. Castillo capitalized on the moment and jerked the door handle. The door went flying open, sending the driver off balance; he almost fell out.
Castillo seized the man by his ear, twisting and pulling as the man shrieked, and yanked him out of the car. As the man fumbled to his feet, he said, “I am an agent with the—”
“Shut up,” Castillo barked, reached into the man’s coat, and relieved him of the Glock 19 pistol on his hip. He handed the pistol to McCoy, who walked up to join him and—still twisting the man’s ear—dragged the government agent toward the safe house.
“Ani, open the gate, please,” Castillo said, and the gate began to swing on its hinges. “Shaker, pull the truck up, then pull his car into the drive.”
“You got it, boss,” Shaker called from behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser.
McCoy walked beside him with a slight limp.
“Ummm . . . what are we doing, boss?” he asked, real concern in his voice.
Castillo wanted McCoy’s caution to be contagious, but it wasn’t. He was furious, and he was going to find out more about their situation the old-fashioned way.
“We’re gonna have a chat with our new friend here. It’s high time we figure out what the hell is going on.”