On Target (24 page)

Court had also created a second stage to his diversion, presuming that the few seconds of confusion by the enemy would not be enough for him to take any sort of advantage. He struggled and fought and pulled and pushed the iron acetylene tank to the top of the cargo load, positioned it in the back by the sliding door, with its nozzle facing the bags of combustible chemicals and its blunt bottom towards the door. He pointed it slightly downwards, and then built an extremely crude wooden cage around it, essentially rails above and below that it could travel on, like a missile on a launching pad.

Last, after the truck stopped, he opened the tank’s nozzle slightly and began backing out of the cargo hold, moving the bags in front of him as he did so. At the cab end of the cargo space, he set the alarm clock, triple-checked the lighter to make sure the hammer of the timepiece would make contact with the lighter’s flint wheel, and then left it there next to one of his oxy-bombs.

He backed out of the hatch to the cab, covered in sweat and exhausted beyond belief, just as the driver backed his vehicle up several meters and then turned off the engine.

A turbaned man on a horse rode by the driver’s-side window, barked an order to the driver, who opened the door. Immediately the Janjaweed horseman struck Rasid several times with a heavy, braided whip before heading back to the last truck to hassle that driver as well.

Gentry followed Rasid and led Bishara out of the cab, worried as much now by his own contraption as by the armed enemy force around him.

Bianchi climbed out of the lead vehicle as the Janjaweed slowly enveloped the convoy. Half had dismounted and pulled their horses by their leads as they waved rifles around with their other hands. The other half, the senior men of the raiding party perhaps, remained on their mounts as they rode down both sides of the four vehicles on the hot road.

Bianchi identified the commander by his stature and by the heavy necklace of amulets hanging on his chest over his rifle magazines. These brown, square, clay charms were common among the Janjas, but the man on the largest camel, who wore the newest looking chocolate-chip patterned camouflage uniform and sported the longest beard, also wore the necklace with the most amulets. The charms were blessed by a holy man and were purported to ward of bullets.

This man was in charge, and Bianchi addressed him politely.
“Asalaam alaykum.”
He put his hand to his breast in a sign of peace.

“Wa a salekum asam,”
responded the man with a slight nod. His head was ten feet in the air as he sat astride the huge camel.
He
made no sign of peace.

Bianchi continued in Arabic. “Brother, why do you stop us? Commander Ibrahim is a friend. He allows us to pass to Dirra.”

The man on the camel just looked down at him. Then his eyes rose to the other people from the trucks, who were being led over to the side of the road. Bianchi turned to make sure everyone was accounted for and behaving themselves. His four drivers, his four loaders, the Canadian woman, who still wore a terrified expression on her face, and the American man. He was sweat-soaked, his hair matted to his forehead, his face low to the ground in supplication. Bianchi regarded him for a long time. So brave he was with a gun in his hand and facing an old man. Now, with these true warriors around him, he looked like he just wanted to disappear.

Right before turning back to the Janjaweed commander, Mario Bianchi caught the American sneaking a quick glance at his watch. Bizarre at a time like this, the Italian thought, as he once again began deferentially explaining his working relationship with the Janjaweed to the obviously poorly informed man on the camel.

“This is not going to be good,” Court muttered under his breath. He wasn’t talking about the marauders on horseback; he was talking about the project he’d been working on for thirty-five minutes. His life and the lives of everyone in the convoy were in peril, and not just from the hotheads with the smelly horses and flea-bitten camels. Bishara stepped up to Court on the road and put his hand on his back.

“Is it going to work?” he asked softly.

Court turned back to him. “I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it sure as hell is going to explode.” Court put a tone on it and a look in his eyes that endeavored to convey the danger they were all in.

It was obvious to the Gray Man that young Bishara understood completely.

“Good luck, man.”

Court nodded. “You, too, kid.”

He wanted to talk to Ellen, to warn her about what was to come, but at that moment she was farther up the road, being led along with the rest of the SI personnel, all of them into one single group. When he did get close enough to her he could not speak. The common languages that he could have used, English or rudimentary Arabic, were likely understood by someone in the Janjaweed raiding party. So he did what he could to get next to her. She was close to Bianchi, who was standing below the leader of the Janjas. Court scooted behind the Italian. It wasn’t hard with the Janjas shuffling everyone into this tight knot by the side of the road. They were fifty feet or so from truck three, Court’s quickly fabricated diversionary device. He did his best to lead the SI staff a few feet farther away, but the Janjas just kept herding them back. Everyone was in a tight circle; he could literally smell the apprehension in this constricted gaggle of humanity standing together in the dirt. All eyes were on the Janjaweed commander high up on his camel, and another man on horseback with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped to his saddle. Both used their angry beasts to compress the convoy personnel. Ellen shouldered up to Court, the man she knew as Six.

“Are they here because I told Bianchi who I was?” she asked breathlessly. She was on the verge of tears, as if she already knew the answer.

“I told you not to do that,” Court said flatly. He had something else bothering him at the moment and had no energy to focus on the Canadian woman’s feelings or fears at present.

“I . . . I thought it would get UNAMID forces out here.”

“Uh-huh,” Gentry said, looking down to his watch again. Nervously he glanced at the Janjaweed. They were standing around or sitting high in their saddles, as if waiting for something.

Court was waiting for something, too. But he did not know what would come first. Or which of the two events would prove to be the most calamitous.

For the first time he tuned into what Mario Bianchi was saying to the Arab commander. The old Italian hadn’t shut up since he’d gotten out of his truck. He’d been speaking Arabic, but now the one-sided conversation was in French.

“As I say, you can use my phone to contact Commander Ibrahim. He will tell you that I am a friend.”

“You’re friends with these fucks?” Court asked in English.

Bianchi looked around at the American, who was now right behind him on the side of the road. He nodded and said, “I have an arrangement with the Janjaweed in this area.”

“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”

Bianchi ignored the American and turned back to the commander. “So, would you like my phone?”

The Janjaweed commander, impossibly high up on his huge mount, said, “No. I have a phone.”

Bianchi nodded. “Can you please contact Commander Ibra—”

“Commander Ibrahim contacted
me
.”

Bianchi’s head cocked. “He did? So he told you we could pass,
si
?”

The commander on the camel simply shook his head, one time, very slowly.

Bianchi’s next words were softer, uncharacteristically unsure.

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to do this.” The commander barked a brief order in Arabic. Quickly a horseman shrouded with a purple turban on a large sorrel gelding moved around and behind the herded scrum of convoy personnel. Court lost sight of him for a moment behind some stationary horsemen, but when the purple-turbaned man reappeared there was a noosed rope in his hand. Deftly he tossed it out underhanded. It dropped heavily over the neck of Mario Bianchi, who was just now turning to the sound of galloping hooves behind him. The horseman looped the other end of the rope around the horn of his saddle, and he cruelly kicked his heels into the sides of his steed. The animal bolted forward, away from the road and towards the rocky desert to the north.

With a shout of surprise, Mario Bianchi was launched forward by the taut rope, yanked to the ground by his neck, and dragged forward. He crashed awkwardly into three or four of his staff, sending men spinning out of the way or knocked like tenpins in a bowling alley. Ellen Walsh screamed as the Italian was dragged off. The horse hooves and the slamming of his thick body against unyielding hard earth crust and jagged stones and dry roots as hard as hickory sticks made violent sounds that only diminished as the man was pulled ten, then twenty, then fifty, then one hundred yards away, to where finally all that could be seen of him in the distance was a dust cloud that hung in the still air.

Court looked down at his watch. He began quickly pushing the crowd around him farther off the road, first with nudges and then with shoves.

The Janjaweed commander then shouted something to his dismounted men. It was Sudanese Arabic, but close enough to the Gulf Arabic that Gentry understood.

“Beat them all to death.”

Rifles were raised and turned upside down. The weapons’ butts were then used to viciously slam into the crowd from all directions. A half dozen men hammered into the bodies of nine men and one woman; they went about their cruel business amid shouts and screams and begging pleas from the victims. At the same time those Janjas on horses and camels began shoving the group tighter and tighter together, using the thick animals’ massive bodies to literally crush the pathetic group of defenseless civilians.

Court took a glancing rifle butt in the right shoulder while he was looking in the other direction. It propelled him sideways and knocked him into the haunches of the camel upon which the commander sat. The Janjaweed leader looked down at him with his coal black eyes showing through the folds of his turban. Court winced in pain but again looked down to his watch.

Then he turned to Ellen. She tripped backwards over a felled man and then rolled onto her stomach at Court’s feet. She started to get back up as if to run, but there was nowhere to run to. They were completely encircled by the Arab thugs.

And only Court Gentry knew that the safest place in the world for her right now was right where she was, facedown in the dirt.

He dove onto her, used his body to slam her down and his arms to cover her ears.

Here we go,
he thought to himself as he tightened his body.

From the third truck, the vehicle in which Court and Bishara had ridden, there came a muted pop, like a car backfiring through its muffler. It was audible, even above the shouts and the cracking of rifle stocks on thin arms and legs, but it wasn’t one-tenth the volume Court had expected it to be.

Huh?
He lifted his head, looked back, had no idea what he’d done wrong. Underperformance had been the absolute
least
of his worries.

The beatings stopped momentarily as the Janjaweed looked to the vehicle. Even the Speranza Internazionale staff, lying prostrate or fetal on the ground all around Gentry and Walsh, looked around in confusion.

Smoke billowed out of cab windows and through the slits of the sliding lift door at the back of the cargo space. But the roof did not blow off, there was no cacophonic concussion blast, and certainly no shrapnel.

Orders were barked in Arabic, and a pair of men on horses dismounted, passed their reins off to others standing around, and ran over to the truck. Court knew these men had planned on looting cargo. They needed to see why the cargo in one of the trucks was now smoldering.

The Janjaweed leader shouted another command to the rest of his men, and again Court understood.