Page 42 of Enemy of My Enemy
Dr. Voronov nodded. “It is your turn now,” he said gently.
Sasha held Dr. Voronov’s stare for a long moment before he started to speak in halting, shaking words.
* * *
Chapter 15
Saharan Desert
Madigan’s caravantracks traveled through the wadi, south out of the Libyan Desert toward the border of Sudan and into the northern Darfur region.
Adam had his men rest before they set out, getting a few hours of sleep before hopping back onto their camels and following the trail, this time by the light of the moon, hanging heavy and low over the empty desert. Adam watched their progress on his GPS, and he cursed when he realized they were about to cross into Darfur.
“Hold up,” he sent over his radio. The mic at his throat picked up the vibrations as he spoke. All he had to do was whisper. “We’re coming up on the border. We need to check it out.” He sent four men forward, Sergeant Wright and his partner on camels, and Fitz and Kobayashi on foot, to scope out the border.
They came back after an hour. “Nothing there, sir. Empty desert. No checkpoints. No military. No rebels.” Wright whispered into his throat mic, but his voice was clear as a bell in Adam’s ear.
Much more important was the lack of rebels. The Sudanese Army wasn’t a joke, but the rebels were fucking insane. He’d rather they not have any indication they were poking around in Darfur.
“Keep your eyes open.” Adam nudged his camel forward and wrapped his keffiyeh around his face again, covering all but his eyes. He, like his men, wore layers of loose cotton robes, muted shades of desert sand and mud brick tan, interspersed with pops of blue and black. Beneath all of their robes, their black combat uniforms had been sterilized. No rank, no country insignia, and no names. The only identification any of the men carried was a strip of duct tape with their blood type written in marker and wrapped around the radio receiver strapped to their chests.
They saw—and heard—their destination an hour later, glowing over the midnight sand dunes. Bonfires and trash fires sent sparks into the air, and bursts of gunfire spat toward the moon as raucous laughter mixed with shouts and wild boasts. Beat-up trucks with their cabins shorn off shared space with dozens of camels and four Humvees. Ratty tents made from leaning tree sticks and bent metal poles covered with torn fabric and empty UN food program sacks clustered around an oasis of scrub trees. US Army-issue green canvas tents sat primly some feet away, at perfect right angles to each other.
A sprawling market, filled with open-air stalls covered in rifles, machetes, grenades, rocket launchers, and belt-fed ammunition, surrounded a square of sand the size of several football fields. Inside, thousands of men relaxed together, laughing and shouting, some drinking and throwing their empty glass bottles into the trash fires before them. Others shot into the sky, wild gesticulations punctuating the stories they told.
The sheer number of weapons and men puckered Adam’s belly button. His guts slid against themselves as every muscle in his body clenched. Rebels and Madigan’s forces, mixing together? Madigan’s growing army joining another?
Whatever it was, a bad situation had just gotten worse.
Adam hopped off his camel and dropped to his belly, crawling with his binoculars through the rough sand to the top of the sand dune. Doc and Coleman crawled with him, and Doc passed over the camera plugin for his binos as he zoomed in on the crowd.
“I’ve got positive ID on target Baker.” Captain Cook, the Z Unit prisoner Madigan had gone to lengths to break out, was laughing and squeezing the shoulder of a rebel while other disreputable-looking men watched. He snapped a pic through the binos.
“Target Alpha?” Doc flipped through their who’s who list of known targets broken out of the South American prisons, and an updated list of missing SOCOM soldiers from Paraguay on a mini tactical tablet mounted on his forearm in a sleeve. “Madigan?”
Adam scanned the crowd again, zooming in on groups of men. He found three of the missing SOCOM soldiers, including the Executive Officer, and one of the high-value jihadist prisoners from Peru, but not Madigan. “Negative. Damn it.”
“Maybe he’s jerking off.”
Adam snorted. “Let’s set up a recon point. When it settles down in there, we can send a team in.” Once the wildness calmed down, maybe they could poke around in the market undercover.
His men took up position on the dunes, hiding in the shifting sands. They hid the camels a quarter mile back under a rocky overhang. One of the camels spat in its Marine’s face as a thank-you.
The dead hours of the night bled on, and the wild gathering never lessened. More men piled out of the shanty tents, adjusting their pants, and others headed in, unbuckling their belts on the way. The gunfire continued, bursts spitting into the night. Cook stayed up, moving from group to group, laughing with some, helping sight the targets on another group’s rifles. Some of the South American prisoners got into all-out fistfights, wailing on each other until they were down in the sand and blood wept from broken noses and shattered jaws. No one stopped the brawls.
As the sun peeked over the edge of the Sahara, more rusted-out trucks arrived, and the men in the wadi swelled. More market stalls opened, selling every type of military tech imaginable. Radios, rockets, machetes, binos, NVGs. Purchasers test-fired weapons into the air as men met and chatted, exchanging intel and battle plans. Payments were made between warlords: guns, ammunition, food, and captured women and men. The shanty tents under the limp scrub trees opened their flaps, and dozens of weary, bedraggled women shuffled out. Most were bruised, and some clutched obviously broken arms.
“Jesus Christ.” Adam exhaled slowly as he and his men watched the anarchy unfold, this meeting of rebels, warlords, and weapons.
“Can we just call in an air strike?” Doc mumbled. “Wipe all of this off the planet?”
Adam snorted. In the complicated mess of international politics, an unsanctioned air strike undertaken by the controversial president of the United States against a rebel camp in a disputed region of a terrorist state would ignite a powder keg of rage and furious instability around the world. But maybe it’d be worth it.
More trucks and men on camels were arriving by the minute. Adam squinted.
“All right. We need to go check it out. We can blend in. Let’s see if we can make heads or tails of what’s going on down there.” His binos zoomed in on Cook, still standing in the square and chatting to a new warlord. “And get close to Cook.”
“Soyou’regoing down there?” Adam saw Doc’s lips move, but his whispers were too low to hear without the mic amplifying his voice. “’Cause you speak fluent Arabic, and that’s most of what I’m hearing from down in that mess.”
