On Target (19 page)

“You okay?” He asked. He moved around quickly to the other side of the car, still trying to preclude any hot shots from feeling lucky. “You okay?” he asked from the left of the vehicle now. She nodded blankly, and he worried she may have been in shock. “Pay attention! Get in the driver’s seat! Hurry! Now! Get it together!” He moved forward and back a few feet. Ducked down, nearly pulling the secret policeman to the pavement. The blaring horns of the cars and trucks and bleating animals of the carts crowding the intersection continued unabated. Court knew the road flare would not last another minute. In sixty seconds he’d have to either be gone from the scene or be prepared to torch the scene.

He strongly preferred the former.

Ellen finally scooted out of the backseat. She seemed confused more than terrified. He yelled at her mercilessly, a profanity-laced tirade designed to focus her and bring her back into the here and now, to convince her that all the danger around her was real, and her own actions were the only thing that would save her from it.

“That’s right,” his tone softened as she sat behind the wheel. “You’re doing good. See if the engine will start.” The deputy NSS man from the airport backed away from the car slowly, moving to Court’s left. Gentry worried the man was thinking about taking a shot, planning first to get away from the fireball that was sure to follow. His boss would die, no doubt, but for all Gentry knew, this clown was next in line for a promotion and saw an opportunity to create the vacancy he needed to make that happen.

Behind this man nearly a dozen African Union peacekeepers arrived, jumping out of the back of an APC. They began waving their rifles around at the scene demonstratively but warily, not sure what the hell was going on but damn sure they weren’t going to let anyone in the crowd target them without blowing the entire fucking crowd apart in a fusillade of bullets.

Perfect. There were now easily twenty-five guns pointing at Gentry, and he had no doubt that the vast majority of people pointing these guns didn’t really give a damn if this shitty little hostage of his burned alive.

Time to go!

Ellen got the car started, and Court pulled his NSS captive up the north-south portion of the intersection a few feet, told Ellen to drive alongside him. She backed the sedan away from the donkey cart, and the rear bumper scooted the demolished rickshaw a few feet before she put it in drive. Court let go of the secret policeman’s neck but continued to wave the flare over him as he reached across the man’s body and pulled the pistol from his hostage’s hip holster. He racked the slide one-handed by hooking the rear sights on his belt and slamming the gun down and forward. Court now pointed this gun at the other NSS man, who seemed to have thought better of his plan to open fire. Gentry imagined this insane intersection full of weapons would only need the pop of a single gunshot to send every last goddamn rifle opening up full auto on the scene. Maybe the other NSS man figured the peacekeepers behind him would obliterate every breathing creature in front of them if he fired a round from his pistol at the white man.

As Ellen drove forward and alongside the Gray Man, he instructed her to continue slowly. He walked backwards, alongside the open left rear door, leaving the NSS commander in the intersection near the broken rickshaw and the smashed donkey cart and the other vehicles stuck in traffic behind the wreckage on three sides. Court pointed the pistol with his right hand, held the last of the burning road flare with his left, but then quickly flung the flare overhanded past the secret policeman and toward the rickshaw. In a swift single motion, while the sputtering flame arced nearer to the scooter with its leaking gas tank, Court Gentry dropped to a low squat, fired two rounds from the pistol, one into the chest of each of the National Security Service operatives. Then he spun low and dove into the backseat of the sedan. “Go! Go! Go! Go!” he screamed.

The rickshaw and the dusty street intersection burst into flames. The whoosh of the ignition of the fuel was audible through the open car door.

Ellen Walsh’s foot stomped down on the gas pedal.

The sedan shot forward towards the north.

No one fired a shot at it before it turned to the left forty meters on, disappearing down a side street into the dark, a fireball rising into the sky behind it.

“Where are we going?”

The crewman from the Russian military transport plane, who was obviously no Russian himself, sat in the backseat of the car as Ellen plowed through narrow, congested streets, past gray tin ramshackle buildings and mud-colored single-story walls running on both sides, seemingly in all directions, seemingly for miles. Through intersection after intersection she drove, sometimes getting the four-door up to forty kilometers or so, but often slowing down to a near crawl as she used the front grill to nudge her way through the evening congestion or to push groups of cows or sheep out of the way.

“Where do you want me to go?” she yelled it this time; the man behind her didn’t seem to be paying attention.

Finally he answered, his voice softer than back in the intersection. “Just keep going. You’re doing great.”

Yeah, she allowed herself to realize. I
am
doing great. She’d never in her life experienced shock, and she retained the presence of mind now to wonder if that was this strange sense of calm she was beginning to feel.

“You didn’t kill anyone back there, did you?” Ellen asked. Her voice was shaky, confused, she did her best to swallow the flood of emotions that threatened to pour forth at any second.

“Of course not. Just a couple of warning shots. I had to slow them down so we could get clear.”

She believed him. He certainly did not sound or act like a man who had just killed another human.

“Where are we going?”

“No place specific. Just keep heading this way.”

“Who are you?”

“Not now,” was all he would say.

“You aren’t Russian,” she said, looking at him through the rearview.

“Figured that out? You
are
a special investigator,” he replied, sarcastic in a vague way so that Ellen could not discern if he was trying to be playful or cruel.

“American?” She knew that he was from his accent.

But he just repeated, “Not now.”

They continued north for a half hour; they spoke little. The American muttered something about needing to change out the vehicle they were in, but he just told her to keep going, as if he could not bring himself to pull over in this town even for a few minutes to find another mode of transportation. He stayed in the backseat. At first she thought he remained back there to keep an eye out the rear window for anyone following, but later she ventured a few glances in her rearview and saw him sitting back there in the dark, just looking out the side windows, as if he were lost as to where to go. He’d seemed resolute enough back with the flare and the pistol and the shouted commands and the little man in the headlock. But now she worried that he had somehow worn himself out, either physically or emotionally, and now she would have to make the decisions.

She said, “I need to get to a phone. Call some people who can help.”

“Negative,” he replied flatly. “Just keep driving.” His voice was unexpectedly strong now.

“We’re going to be in the desert soon.”

“Not desert. The Sahel.”

She looked up in the rearview. “The what?”

“It’s scrubland. Between the savannah to the south and the desert to the north. Sparsely populated, hot as a desert, but not the same. The desert starts another hundred miles north of here.”

“Okay, whatever the geography is, do we really need to go out there?”

“Yes.”

“There won’t be phones out there.”

“No,” he agreed. “There won’t. We just need to get off the X for now. We’ll find our way back to a safe place later. The National Security Service will be looking hard for us. They’ll be listening in on phone lines; they’ll have choppers in the air; they’ll have the streets and markets and alleys and hotels in Al Fashir covered with informants. We need to just get out into the clear. Hunker down tonight, and then make our way to one of the UN-RUN IDP camps in the morning.”

“I don’t have the credentials to get into the UN camps,” she protested.

“You didn’t have the credentials to arrest a crew of Russian gunrunners either, and you tried that.”

She shook her head. “What the hell was I thinking?”

“Not a clue, lady,” the man said. “I just have to ask. Did you have a plan, other than to threaten them with international indictment and then ask to please use the telephone so that you could turn them in?”

“That was about it,” Ellen admitted, shaking her head again at her actions. “I’m a lawyer by training. I’ve only been with the ICC for a few months. I had the UN documents forged myself; I got tired of sitting in my office and not doing anything. I just wanted to come out here and see Darfur for myself. Nobody from my office knows where I am, what I’m doing.”

“Well, you’ve got guts. I’ll give you that.” The man’s words trailed off at the end, and she got the idea that he did not want to talk anymore.

They headed north for another ten minutes. Her attempts to engage the quiet man in conversation were either deftly deflected or outright ignored. On the open road, outside of the city, they picked up speed. The man finally directed her to pull over and to run the car down a gentle draw by the side of the road. She asked about wild animals, and he admitted he had no idea, but he promised she’d be safe. It wasn’t that she trusted him—she still didn’t know exactly which side this man was on—but she knew she didn’t have any other options at the moment. She would do what he said.

The low draw led them to a gully that ran towards a rocky, dry streambed. During the rainy season, in another couple of months, it would be suicide to hide in this ditch. The rills cutting into the scrubland all around would send hundreds of thousands of gallons of runoff down here just minutes after a concentrated rain shower. But right now it seemed safe enough. Thatched brush rose several feet high on either side of the dusty gully. The tops of some of the bushes had interwoven, creating a tight canopy above. It was only six feet high or so, but Court directed her to push the car into the brush and turn off the engine.

The hot metal clicked and clanged when she did so.

“Check the glove box. Any water?” He asked. She opened it and found only a plastic bag of lemon candies. Court climbed out, dug through the bushes, and checked the trunk but found nothing there either.

“We’ll be okay tonight. We’ll get some water in the morning.”

“What do we do now?” She looked back towards the man; he was invisible in the dark now. She heard him reposition himself, lift his legs up onto the little backseat.

“Try to get some sleep.”

“What do I call you?”

“I’m the only other person here. If you are talking, I will pretty much assume you are talking to me.”

“Touché,” she said, though she did not like smart-asses. She did her best to make herself comfortable in the front seat. She swung her body around so that her back was to the passenger door. It had been smashed on the outside by the rickshaw, but the inner frame was intact. She did this to try to get face-to-face with the man in the back who was prone with his back on the driver’s side.

“I’m Ellen, if you had forgotten.”

“Yep.”

A long pause. “You’re not going to talk to me?”

“We both need to rest. We’re not going to drive out of here tomorrow. Too dangerous. We’ll go up to the road on foot and try to flag down a friendly vehicle.”

“How do we know if it’s friendly before we flag it down?”

She heard more than saw him shrug his shoulders. “No idea, to tell you the truth,” he said, and again, she could tell he was trying to end the conversation.

“Are you really a crewman for Rosoboronexport?”

No answer.

“Some sort of mercenary?”

No answer.

“A spy?”

“Go to sleep, Ellen.”

She let out a frustrated sigh. “Just give me a name. Make it up if you want to, but give me
something
I can call you.”

“Call me Six,” he said after several seconds.

“Dear Lord,” she replied. “Does that mean there are five more out there just like you?”

“Go to sleep, Ellen,” he said again, and this time she endeavored to leave him alone.