Free On Target by Mark Greaney

a man moving towards him. He felt a Kevlar vest under his dark clothing and knew he’d done no damage.
    As he struggled and fought, he recognized plainly that the men attacking him were competent. No, they were damn good. They were fast, strong, and well-trained. More important, they worked together and didn’t shout or scream or freak out as they fought him. He managed a solid elbow to the side of a smaller man’s head, sending him hard against the headboard of the bed and then off the side onto the wooden floor. But the others filled in the gap left by their wounded comrade in an instant, their body weight pinning his appendages to the bed as he wrestled desperately to get free.
    Looking to his left, he saw one of the men had retrieved something from somewhere in the darkness and approached now with careful confidence. Court saw the sharp glint of thin metal, a stubby piece of clear plastic. Even in the negligible light he recognized the outline of the syringe. The needle approached, and whatever noxious goo it had been filled with was on its way to his bloodstream unless he could stop the man trying to punch it against his skin.
    Instantly Gentry decided these were CIA Special Activities Division Paramilitary Operations officers, an entire field team, and he knew he was in deep shit. There was a termination order on him. He’d ducked them for years, but they had found him now.
    Bound to happen sooner or later.
    Court relaxed his left arm for an instant, gave the man holding it down a moment’s respite from the struggle. The ruse worked, and Gentry shot his arm down, under the man’s grip and to his side. From here it was free, and he jetted out a fierce jab to the needle man’s face. The needle man’s head snapped back, and he dropped the syringe as he folded back on his legs and grabbed his nose, but the operator pinning his left leg down reached out and grabbed the instrument off the floor, buried its business end into Court’s thigh, and pressed the plunger as Gentry tried and failed to kick free.
    “Son of a bitch!” Court shouted, not knowing what he’d been injected with but recognizing that, no matter what he did now, he had just lost the battle.
    He stopped moving immediately. There was no point. He was as good as dead.
    A sixth man entered the room—slowly, but with an unmistakable swagger in his step. Court tried to focus on him, but already he could feel a drug taking hold of his central nervous system. Whatever they’d given him was powerful; he’d worked with poisons and incapacitating anesthetics enough to know that he’d been dosed with a hard and potent sedative. His muscles relaxed; he felt as if his body were melting into the mattress.
    The new man in the room leaned over him as the others climbed off. Two of the original five were down; the other three calmly tended to their associates’ injuries, while the new visitor to the dark room just looked down on Court with curiosity. Gentry tried to focus on the man, to fight against the growing fuzz from the drugs in his blood. For a moment he thought the face looked familiar, but a wave of dizziness wiggled the image out of his mind.
    The man above him spoke. “Hiya, Court.”
    Through the haze Gentry knew the voice somehow. The man grabbed Court’s cheeks and pinched them until his mouth opened. Saliva oozed out past his protruding tongue and down his chin.
    “Twenty seconds and he’s out,” said the man above him to the men standing around. Then he turned his attention back to Gentry. “Predictable. I knew you’d sneak out of the hotel and come here. Haven’t you picked up any new travel tips in the past eight years?” He smiled. “Unlucky for you I just happened to remember this shit hole.”
    He turned back to his colleagues. “Sierra Six never was the luckiest dude around. We used to say that if it were raining pussy, Court Gentry would get hit with a dick.”
    Sierra Six?
    As Court felt himself falling into blackness, his numb