many passages no more than five feet across, made it a great place to not only hide but to move through without being seen from any distance.
Zack and his team would have been even farther away from their last contact point with the enemy if it wasn’t for all the traffic in the alleyways and passages. Civilians were everywhere now. Dark-skinned men, women, and children ran all over the place, rickshaws nearly as wide as the paths they rode on bottlenecked locals who could not get out of the way of bloody, screaming, gun-wielding kawagas even if they tried. Twice Hightower literally bashed the butt of his Tavor into the side of a little hut to push the structure’s corner, walls and roof included, just enough so he and his men could press through. They waved their rifles at anything that moved in their path, but these civilians did not want any part of this fight, so Sierra One and his men had not had to shoot any locals just yet.
Whiskey Sierra came to the end of the neighborhood of shacks and tents and found themselves on a ledge. In front of them a steeply graded hill, completely devoid of vegetation, ran down fifty yards to a road, on the other side of which lay the marketplace. There were tented stalls and wooden stalls and completely open-air stalls where the produce or other goods were simply laid out on fabric on the dirt, but there was also a cement building that ran three city blocks and housed permanent shops and small storage and warehouse facilities.
In the team’s study of the town, this structure had been dubbed Mall Alpha.
On the other side of these buildings was another row of permanent structures, dubbed Mall Bravo, and just east of this was the waterline.
As One considered ordering his men down the hill, Sierra Five shouted at the back of the tiny five-man team.
“Contact rear!” He fired a burst from his Uzi. “Here they come!” The GOS had found them.
Zack knew in an instant they’d have to expose themselves on the hill. They needed to get to the heavier buildings to have any chance of holding back the troops on their tail.
The helicopter was a quarter mile to the west and low, but beginning a shallow bank that would bring it back around on Zack’s position in twenty seconds. “Let’s go. Three, help Four!”
The injured Milo ripped out of Dan’s grasp, spun back to the approaching enemy up the alleyway, and dropped to his knees.
“You guys go! I’ll stay back and hold them off!”
Zack Hightower just grabbed the younger man by his gear, yanked him back up. “Yo, hero! Shut the fuck up and do as you’re told! This isn’t Hollywood, goddammit.”
“Sir!”
Zack shoved him roughly to Dan, who grabbed him around the waist, and they all started down the hill.
Within seconds Hightower lost his footing on the decline. It was earth hard as stone, covered with a thick powder of dry dust. His boots had no chance for traction, so as he ran, he fell forward and rolled and slid down the hill. He’d just made it to the bottom, climbed back up to his feet, and turned when Brad and Spencer slid down right next to him. Spencer jumped right up to his boots and turned back to cover, but Brad had gotten his rifle’s sling caught up in his gear, and it took him longer to stand.
Dan and Milo were still scooting down the hill on their haunches, their weapons held high out in front of them for balance as well as to keep the barrels from getting fouled in the dirt, when Zack saw Sudanese troops appear on the ridge. He and Spencer each dropped a soldier with a burst to the chest at fifty yards, and this sent the rest of the GOS riflemen diving for cover at the top of the hill.
Hightower screamed over another long burst of covering fire from Spencer, ordered Brad to help Dan get Milo in the first door in the first shop of Mall Alpha. The wounded twenty-nine-year-old Paramilitary Operations officer was all but out of the fight for now; he could not get up to his feet without the other two men pulling on his massive amount of armor and gear. They moved out, and Spencer’s rifle clicked empty.
“Cover!” called Sierra Five.
“Covering!” answered Zack, dropping to his knees and firing a single round at a head that appeared at the top of the