Fly by Night

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Davis looked up and down the road to Khartoum. He could see for miles in either direction, and there wasn’t another set of headlights in sight. The road was probably never busy. A surge of traffic now and again, an hour before and thirty minutes after any of the ten or twelve daily flights was processed. But at this hour on a Friday evening, he was completely alone. As were the men he was watching.

Davis had parked next to a guard station, a shack with twin railroad-type crossing gates that were both pointed straight up. The gates looked like they hadn’t moved in years. The barriers were here, Davis supposed, so the military could govern access to the airport in the event of a crisis. But today the control point was unmanned because there was no crisis. Hadn’t been one yesterday. Doubtful there would be one tomorrow. Which led to the larger problem — a contingent of armed men with nothing to do. In a disciplined fighting force, not an issue. Here it was trouble.

Their modest compound was two hundred yards off the main road, central on a patch of desert where the scrub had been bulldozed away to leave a bare scar on the earth. The main structure was well lit, an office no bigger than a double-wide trailer. This was fronted by a heavy canvas awning that formed a makeshift patio, thirty feet of shade for lounging and recreating — where the soldiers were now. Next to this headquarters complex was a rectangular building with corrugated metal sides and a flat roof. A warehouse, apparently, because parked in front was a mid-size truck, the same vehicle he’d seen drive away from the airport two days ago with a load of Regina Antonelli’s supplies. Presently, the cargo bed was covered by a tarp, and underneath a load jutted up at points along the length like so many lumps in a python.

Davis counted one last time, got the same answer. Still five men under the awning. He looked close, but saw no evidence of soldiers in any of the other buildings. At this time of night, any more than five would be overkill for a remote outpost like this. One man was leaning against a pole that held up the awning. The other four soldiers — if you could call them that — sat playing cards. Having served in the military, Davis knew all about guard duty. He knew that playing cards was a good way to cut the boredom. Just like personal phone calls or watching a game on TV. All soldiers did that. But never the entire detail at the same time. That was dumb, even dangerous. It told Davis that this unit wasn’t expecting enemy action any time soon. Told him there was no chance of a snap inspection from headquarters.

He watched the loner stab a needle into his arm and shoot up — something. The man went limp, to the point that Davis thought somebody ought to lash him to the pole. His buddies didn’t seem to notice. They were the other extreme, raucous and lively.

He hadn’t drawn their attention yet, so Davis kept studying. The men at the table were sitting on plastic chairs, white and cheap, the kind you bought at Wal-Mart for $4.99 and could stack in a nest on your porch when you weren’t using them. He spotted four guns, probably AKs, all leaning on one another, barrels up and butts in the sand. They made a neat little tree, all right there in one place. If there were any other weapons, Davis didn’t see them. Everything else under the tarp fell in the category of junk. A jerry can marked PETROL, a bicycle leaning on a crate, its front wheel removed and lying on the ground. To one side, some construction equipment — a shovel, a few bags of cement, a small pneumatic jackhammer. A bath towel and a Sudanese flag were strung side by side on a support wire, flapping in the breeze with equal indifference.

There was a moment of truth at the table. A smiling winner raked in the pot while the investors sulked and wrist-flicked their cards spinning to the middle of the table. From where he was, Davis couldn’t see anybody’s rank. It didn’t matter. If you watched a group of soldiers long enough — even a feral group like this — you could figure out who was in charge. Dominant mannerisms, command presence. And Davis didn’t even need that, because he noticed the way one man held his head at an angle. Scarface. The long pole in a flimsy organizational tent.

From the highway checkpoint, a dirt path led to the little outpost. Davis put the truck into gear and crawled forward at idle. They still hadn’t noticed him, so he flicked on his high beams. Like anybody would to navigate a raw desert trail at night. He’d covered half the ground when one of the soldiers pointed and said something. Scarface turned and stared.

The old truck’s twin white beams jarred up and down, strobing everything in their path. Vapor belched from under the hood, a steady white cloud spewing into the hot evening air. The engine was running rough, coughing and sputtering, and Davis thought, Good. The men rose from their chairs but didn’t look alarmed. Curious was more like it.

Davis estimated the tree of rifles to be twelve, maybe fifteen steps from the card table. He remembered that Scarface had carried a sidearm, a Heckler & Koch 9-mm, if he wasn’t mistaken. He searched and found it, a belted holster hanging on a hook near the gun stack. So there was a good chance that all the firepower was right there in one place. Three or four seconds from anybody’s hands. Six or seven seconds from being used. That was a lot of time when you counted it out, which was exactly what Davis rehearsed in his mind. One … strike. Two, three … strike. All the way to seven. He worked everything out, a nice tight blueprint in his head. Of course, plans like that had a way of going wrong — seven seconds left a lot of room for error — but you had to start somewhere. Davis figured he was solid until about three. After that, he’d go with the flow — or against it, actually.

With fifty feet to go, Davis spotted a bottle of whiskey on the table, along with three tiny glasses. Three glasses, four men. So one of them might be sober, maybe a devout Muslim. Or perhaps they were playing by frat-house rules, losers having to drink after each hand. Whatever. He was dealing with five men, most of whom had been drinking. And with his target set full, Jammer Davis began to sort.

In air-to-air combat, before merging with an opposing force, you always perform a radar sort with your wingman. This short-term tactical plan dictates which of the bad guys you will each take out — right shoots right, lead shoots high, a preplanned sequence of death that is as cold and clinical as it is optimistic. Right now, Davis didn’t have a wingman or Sidewinders on his rails. But going in he at least wanted a plan.

He decided that the man on the left, a small guy with a beret, would be first. He was closest to the weapons. The addict leaning on the pole was last — no doubt about that — which meant that his gray area involved the three in the middle. Scarface was the boss, so he was high on the list. A tall, rangy man looked like a pushover. The one Davis didn’t like was in the middle. He was short and burly, with a flattened nose on a squashed face. There was a toughness about him. On looks alone the guy could get work tossing steamer trunks on a wharf. Yet what bothered Davis most about the man was right there in front of him on the table. The largest chip stack.

Davis pulled the truck to an easy stop twenty feet from the awning. Steam swirled from under the hood and spread in a mist of white. He got out of the truck slowly and muttered a few expletives, like anybody would after blowing a radiator on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

By virtue of physical size, Davis was not a man easily forgotten, so he was sure that some of these soldiers — the ones who’d been at the airport two days ago — would recognize him. Scarface certainly. Davis gave a subtle wave, as if he recognized them too.

“Hi,” he said, adding in his best helpless-foreigner shrug.

Scarface gave an almost imperceptible nod. Not one of the men under the tent looked worried. Their initial curiosity had graduated to amusement. They were completely confident, an outlook derived by some equation involving their superior numbers and the whiskey on the table.

Davis went to the hood, opened it very, very slowly, and then stood with his hands on his hips. He turned to the soldiers, and said, “You guys got any water?”

It was the man on the right, the rangy one, who came forward. Not Davis’ first pick, but at times like this you didn’t get to choose. The guy covered most of the twenty-foot gap in six lanky strides, stopping a couple of paces shy to peer hesitantly into the steaming engine compartment. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything, probably because he didn’t speak any English. Or maybe because the mechanical issue involved was obvious enough — a cracked hose near the top of the radiator spewed superheated water like a miniature volcano. Davis could smell alcohol on the man’s breath, something cheap and harsh. Even in a fundamentalist Muslim country, soldiers found their rotgut.

The rangy soldier was roughly four feet away from the open hood, a reasonably safe distance. About where Davis would have stopped. He figured that soldiers in Sudan knew all about overheated engines. There was probably a whole course on it in basic training. Davis took one last look at the others. He saw Scarface glance away momentarily at his drug-addled fifth.

Right then, Davis began to count.

The windmill is an underrated strike.

Davis rotated his right arm up and then arced down, his fist falling like a wrecking ball. The blow struck between the man’s neck and collarbone, and his head snapped forward. Before his knees could even buckle, Davis grabbed him by the collar and drove the soldier head-first into the engine compartment, slamming his face squarely onto the steaming radiator hose. His screams were cut short when Davis slammed the hood down on the back of his head. The long, rangy limbs went soft like slack rope.

One down. His internal clock was running.

Three …

After a stunned moment, the others at the poker table started shouting. Davis didn’t understand a word, but he didn’t need to. The cadence was enough, explosive and breathless. A plan of action, maybe some profanity mixed in. Let’s kick his ass, Hussein! Something like that.

The man with the beret lunged in from the left, and took a wild swing with the whiskey bottle in his hand. He was the smallest of the lot, a full foot shorter than Davis, built out of matchsticks. His impulse to grab the bottle wasn’t bad. His execution was. Davis raised an arm to deflect the blow, rotated his opposite elbow to the guy’s jaw. The strike didn’t put him down, but stunned him to immobility. Davis’ next swing was big and full, a roundhouse that caught the man squarely in the solar plexus, a good target because it has nerve bundles and vital arterial junctions. Even more importantly, the solar plexus lies very close to an opponent’s center of gravity. If the guy had been any smaller, the blow would have sent him into orbit. As it was, he went airborne in the direction of Davis’ follow-through, sailed five feet through the air, and hit the dirt like a sack of wet gravel. Two down.

Six …

The odds were improving, but the first two had taken three blows, six seconds. Davis was over budget. And so, just like he’d figured, things started to go to hell. The squashed-faced guy was moving for the guns, which was what he should have done. Scarface was going the other way, which was what he should have done.

There was no choice. Davis lunged for the gun stack, got there just as the squat soldier was swinging a Kalashnikov in his direction. Flying through the air, Davis hit the man shoulder first and everything went flying — the soldier, his rifle, the whole tree of rifles. The squat guy was quick to his feet, and the fighter’s nature Davis had expected took over. He started swinging, a storm of short, compact punches that caught Davis in the body and face as he was rising. Davis, however, became a bigger storm, a category five maelstrom of fists and elbows, blocking and striking, backed by over two hundred pounds of follow-through. In close quarters combat, you hit hard and often, overwhelm your opponent. That’s what Davis did. The squat guy doubled over after a knee to the gut, then crumpled like his bones had disconnected after a hammer fist to the back of the neck. Three down.

Davis turned to find Scarface, but didn’t see him right away.

Ten? Twelve? He had no idea. His clock was pointless.

Davis spotted him, ten paces away and half hidden behind the hanging beach towel. He had a knife in his hand, a combat blade. The ten-inch Rambo special would look pretty impressive in a bar or at a poker game. Even useful in a fight if you knew how to use it. Scarface didn’t. He was holding the thing all wrong, jabbing and pointing like it was a fencing foil. Right then, Davis realized that this commander had not been promoted for his fighting skill. Davis walked straight at him, remembering the cut on the kid who’d been with Antonelli.

Scarface started swinging wildly, scything the blade in big defensive arcs. Davis grabbed what was at hand — the loose bicycle wheel. He wound up backhanded, and threw it like a ten-pound Frisbee. It hit Scarface in the head and knocked him back two steps. Davis grabbed an overturned plastic chair and kept going, no hesitation in his advance. The commander recovered and started swinging the knife again. Davis held out the chair and fended him off like a lion tamer, didn’t stop until he’d backed him up against the wall of the building. Davis ripped the Sudanese flag off the support line. With Scarface cornered, he used the chair to keep separation, then the flag to snag the knife on its last pass. He locked down on the man’s wrist, wrestled the knife away and tossed it far into the brush. Scarface should have stopped right there. Instead, his tactical disaster was made complete when he threw what could charitably be described as a punch.

A village somewhere had lost its idiot.

With a vision of Antonelli’s bruised face in his head, Davis pulled back his right hand and unloaded. It was just one blow, a compact delivery, but he rotated all his weight behind the strike, augmented with more than a little anger. The palm heel to the base of the nose, properly delivered, is among the most incapacitating of blows. The force of the strike lifted Scarface off his feet and slammed his head back into the corrugated aluminum wall. In that instant, his head stopped its rearward movement. Davis’ hand did not. Something had to give, and predictably it was the target’s nasal cartilage and vasculature. Maybe to a lesser degree the wall, where a round indentation came pressed into the aluminum.

Scarface collapsed to the dirt. He didn’t move.

Davis took the intermission to check on the others. He saw three men right where he’d left them, barely moving. No threat. The addict was still leaning on the pole in glassy-eyed oblivion. Definitely no threat. Scarface moaned and his eyes flickered. A hand went instinctively to his shattered face. He blinked repeatedly, an involuntary act to wash the blood out of his eyes. When he finally focused, it was on Davis. Six feet up.

“Who … who are you?” he croaked in English.

“I’m with the United Nations — Enforcement Division.”

Scarface spit out a mouthful of blood and asked a slow, gurgling question, “What do you want?”

Davis walked over to the pile of construction equipment, grabbed the dusty jackhammer and hauled it over. He poised it over Scarface’s chest, watched his eyes go wide.

Davis said, “I want you to stop pilfering.” He pointed to the other men strewn about under the awning. “I don’t care about any of them. You are the commander, and from this point forward your unit mission has changed. You will no longer raid. Instead, you are assigned to protect every aid shipment that comes into this territory. If any load of cargo to any aid organization is interrupted, by your people or anybody else, I will come back for the one person in the Sudanese Army who is responsible.” Davis lowered the blade of the jackhammer. “I will find you and use this, and I don’t mean on a sidewalk. I will bend you over and use it on you. Get the picture?”

Scarface nodded to suggest he did.

“Good.” Davis tossed the jackhammer aside, and it crushed the rickety card table in a colorful spray of chips and playing cards.

He walked to his pickup truck. Steam was still coming from under the hood, but less now. There was a chance it might still run for another mile or two, until vital parts of the engine melted and seized. Davis decided it was time for a trade-in, and there was only one other vehicle on this dealer’s lot. He reached into the pickup and took the keys from the ignition, threw them far into the desert. From behind the front seat he grabbed a handful of a mechanic’s most useful tools — plastic zip ties. They were long and thick gauge, probably used for keeping cargo bay panels in place or tying down instruments with broken mounts. A thousand uses really, which was why mechanics loved them. Cops loved them too, but had a different name. They called them flex cuffs.

Ignoring the addict, who had passed out right where he’d been standing, Davis dragged the rest of the squad together in pairs. Moaning and bloody, nobody resisted. Davis sat them down, one by one, and bound their wrists behind their backs, looping the ties through their belt loops. Then he connected them in pairs, bound their wrists so that it looked like they were playing patty-cake back-to-back. He doubted they could drive like that, even if they had a vehicle. He was sure they couldn’t ride a one-wheeled bicycle. But they could probably walk, so Davis considered making it a three-legged race, only to find he was running short on zip ties. Also on time.

He went to the three-ton truck parked in front of the storage building. The keys were in the ignition — that was how it worked in any army. Davis cranked the big diesel, shifted with a grinding of gears, and rumbled off toward the main road. Asphalt was soon humming under the truck’s knobby tires, a steady reverberation that brought Davis down from his adrenaline high. The headlights cast an easy white glow, and Davis took deep breaths. He began to feel the edge from his scrum — a badly scraped knee, a sore shoulder, nerve pain in one wrist. There would be more when he woke up tomorrow morning. Davis then felt something sharp stabbing his upper right thigh. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the source — half of a tiny circuit board. He reached deeper into his pocket and pulled out the rest of his phone. A crushed plastic shell and shattered display.

That was when it hit Davis. He had screwed up. And he was now truly on his own.