On Target (22 page)

Gentry drew his gun like a phantom’s blur, pointed it at the threat on the ground, and then scanned the area for more attackers.

Ellen stood ten feet away, her face white with horror.

Five minutes later all was neither forgiven nor forgotten, but the sixty-year-old Italian
had
been hauled back to his feet, brushed off, and his hat had been returned to his head. He needed a minute to compose himself, so he sat on the running board of one of the trucks, drinking a cold orange soda and smoking a cigarette. Ellen Walsh sat with him and spewed apologies, more like a diplomat than the lawyer she was, or the journalist she claimed to be. Court stood off the side of the road by himself, a pariah to all, for what he saw as simply having the temerity to carry a fucking pistol in the middle of a fucking war.

“No guns! No guns!” One of the African aid drivers, a middle-aged man with silver hair, stood ten yards away from the American and waved his hand in a no-no gesture over and over as he chastised.

“You aren’t getting my gun,” Court said, definitively.

“No guns. No guns!” Court listened to what was, apparently, the only two English words this man knew, over and over and over, and watched him wag his finger back and forth.

“Say that one more time, dickhead,” Court snapped. The man did just that—twice more, actually—before he stopped and stepped to the side to allow his boss and the white woman access. From their gait and fixed expressions, Court could see that Ellen and Signor Bianchi were still mad.

Court looked to Ellen. “You don’t put your hand on someone else’s weapon,” he said.

“You mentioned that already, Six,” she responded angrily. “Look.
I’m
riding to Dirra with them. They will still take you along, as a personal favor to me, if and
only if
you give Signor Bianchi the pistol.”

“What’s he going to do with it?”

Mario Bianchi spoke for himself. He was still rubbing the back of his neck. He wondered aloud if there was a physical therapist or a chiropractor at his Dirra clinic doing volunteer work today. Then said, “I will throw the gun out in the desert. What were
you
going to do with a gun?”

Court rolled his eyes. “I might have come up with something.”

“We don’t need guns in our convoy. We aren’t looking for trouble.”

Court eyed the older Italian for a long time. Finally he said, “That’s the funny thing about trouble. Sometimes
it
comes looking for
you
.”

Bianchi’s stare was every bit as intense as Gentry’s; it conveyed the same measure of loathing for the man in front of him. “You do not get in one of my trucks with that gun.”

This was a dangerous waste of time, and Court knew it. No other car had passed in the ten minutes they had been in the road with the Speranza Internazionale convoy. If he wanted to get out of here before either brigands, the GOS Army, or the secret police happened by, he was going to have to play along. With an exasperated sigh he drew his weapon. Bianchi reached out for it, but Gentry turned away from him, back towards a shallow dry streambed on the south side of the road. He dropped the magazine from the pistol and thumbed the bullets out onto the ground, kicked them down the indentation. Some fell into the cracks of the dry earth, some remained visible. Then he ejected the round from the chamber and disassembled the weapon, pulling off the slide, popping out the slide spring, the barrel. He threw these items as far as he could in the distance.

Ellen stepped up to him. Her voice was softer; she wanted to put the matter behind them. “Now then. Was that so hard?”

Court looked out at the vast landscape and scratched a fresh sand flea bite on his left wrist.

“I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.”

Ten minutes later Court was in the center seat of the third truck of four in the convoy. He could see little out the windshield ahead save for the dust of the two vehicles in front of them. Ellen was with Mario in the lead vehicle. The Italian had segregated the two, probably, thought Court, so that the geezer could hit on the dust-covered but still attractive Canadian. In the cab with Gentry was Rasid, the white-haired driver, and Bishara, a young loader for SI. Bishara spoke surprisingly good English, even if his geography wasn’t quite as practiced. He asked Court if he was from the same town as David Beckham. Court said no, ignored him mostly, and kept his eyes peeled out the windows. He knew they weren’t free of the NSS just yet. It would be another couple of hours to Dirra, Mario had told them. They should arrive just about midday. Once there, he would get Ellen to safety in the Speranza Internazionale camp for internally displaced people. She would have access to communications there and could arrange some way out of here either via air with a helicopter or overland with an escort of UNAMID troops. Court, on the other hand, planned to hire a car and driver to take him right back to Al Fashir. In the city he would find someone who could sell him a black market mobile phone, and he would call Sid, put as much blame for his missing the Ilyushin flight on the Russian flight crew, the pilot’s canoodling with the girl from the ICC, and he would get Sid to find him some other way out of Al Fashir. If he could do all this in a day and a half, he would still just be able to make it to Suakin in time for the operation there.

He’d be cutting it close as it was, and he just hoped there were no more snags along the way.

Court sipped a bottle of tepid water that Bishara had passed him. He’d checked it carefully before opening it to make sure it was not a refilled container. The two SI Darfuris were listening to awful music on a poorly tuned transistor radio that hung right behind Gentry’s head on the latch to the sliding access port to the cargo hold of the truck. The radio coms between the trucks were all but drowned out by the wailing away of some woman. Bishara sang alone for a moment until the older Rasid laughed and joined in.

The men continued singing into the next song, then the next. Court wished, momentarily, that he still had his gun on his hip and was still waiting in the heat by the side of the road for a ride.

Bishara only stopped his singing to question Court about various American hip-hop artists, a subject on which the Gray Man was not terribly well versed. He continued ignoring the kid, who finally went back to his music.

From time to time the convoy radio would crackle to life with the Italian-accented English of Signor Mario Bianchi up in the lead vehicle, usually reporting one thing or another to those in the convoy behind him. A large outcropping of bundled roots from the remains of a dead baobab had broken free from the hard pack alongside the road and needed to be negotiated, a dry wadi that crossed the highway required downshifting to safely cross, a hobbled camel had decided to stop in front of them, so there would be a short delay.

Court would have felt a lot better if this convoy had an armed escort. “Why don’t you have UNAMID soldiers with you out here?” he asked Bishara.

The young man just shrugged while he moved to the lousy music. Then he said, “Darfur is as big as Texas in your America, and there are only ten thousand UNAMID soldiers. Most of them are at the camps. Not enough left for every little convoy.” He smiled again. “It’s no problem. The Janjas don’t attack SI. Everybody knows that.”

Court looked down at the young man, surprised. “And why is that?”

“Mr. Mario is a friend to the Janjas.”

Court just looked out the window at the dust. “Perfect.”

Court had not noticed that Bianchi had not transmitted in some time. He could barely hear anyway with the music and the sing-along in the stuffy cab. But when the Italian’s singsong voice finally did come back on the radio, Court immediately sat up straight. Something in the man’s tone was different. His cadence and sudden protocol caught the American’s attention, and he reached out and turned the dial up quickly.

“SI IDP camp Dirra, this is SI Convoy, Truck One, over.”

Court hushed the singing in the cab with him, reached back, and fumbled with the transistor radio to turn it down.

“Go ahead Truck One, over.” A female voice. Australian.

“Margie,” Bianchi’s disembodied voice sounded official and serious. Court had studied voice stress patterns for over a decade. He knew this radio transmission meant trouble even before the Italian spoke. “Our convoy has picked up a woman who claims to be an investigator for the International Criminal Court. She is with a colleague. Can you contact their office and Khartoum and confirm her credentials? If she is who she says she is, we need to have them send a helicopter—”

“Dammit!” Court shouted. The two local tribesmen in the cab with him just stared.

Court realized these transmissions would surely be picked up by the NSS, who, though certainly no tier-one intelligence organization, could sure as shit figure out that the people the SI convoy had just picked up were the same two killing government agents and blowing up shit in front of the Ghost House the night before.

Fucking lawyer bitch,
thought Gentry, but he caught himself. She had no reason to trust him over Signor Bianchi. She must have felt safe up there with the head of this aid organization and just confided in him about the danger. It was understandable, even if it did just create a potential disaster.

Gentry’s mind began working full throttle. What were the chances the NSS had picked up that transmission? What were the chances that they would put two and two together? What were the chances they could mobilize assets in the area and either intercept the convoy or be waiting for it outside the IDP camp at Dirra? What were the chances, failing that, that they would be allowed to march right past the UNAMID guards at the camp and grab the girl?

Court looked out into the haze and dust. He thought to himself in a near frantic mental scream,
Think! Think, Gentry! What are they going to do?
He struggled to channel the thought process of the leadership in Sudanese intelligence. They could not just let Ellen waltz into the camp at Dirra. She would reveal all about their sanctions violation. They would not wait for UNAMID peacekeepers to link up with the aid convoy. Then they would be outgunned, even if the gunners themselves were not particularly energetic about using their weapons.

No, Court thought, if
he
were running the NSS,
he
would hit them as soon as possible, out here in the open. Kill everyone in the little convoy so as not to put the focus on the ICC woman as the target of the attack.

He thought about all these possibilities for less than a minute. Processing them in his fertile brain, a brain conditioned to danger, to battle, to intrigue, to deceit, and to threat.

The NSS might be able to get a platoon of GOS soldiers in the area mustered in time to cut off the convoy. But that did not seem likely. They were only a few hours from their destination.

No, the NSS had communications with and control of another fighting force who would be right in the area and ready to do their bidding.

Oh God, he thought. Not
those
assholes.

As much as he hated to admit it, Gentry could only see one likely conclusion. He nodded to himself. The muscles in his jaw flexed with resolve. He looked to Bishara.

“Give me a map.”

Bishara fumbled through some papers on the floorboard. While he did so, he laughed. “Why you need a map? There’s only one road. You can’t get lost out here, man.” Still, he pulled out the folded map, and Gentry took it from him quickly and began studying it.

It was nearly featureless, but there were some fatal funnels in the landscape, shallow crevices and narrow valleys that they would have to negotiate on the way to Dirra. Any one of these places would be a good place to be hit.

“Listen to me, kid. We’re going to be attacked. Out here, on the road.”

Bishara’s bright brown eyes widened. “Attacked? Who gonna attack us?”

Court looked past the young Darfuri, out the passenger window, and into the near infinite landscape. The terrain rose to the south, fat acacia as big as boxcars amid dry hillocks protruding in the distance.