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.