On target

FIFTEEN

Ellen Walsh's low spirits rose instantly when she saw a ray of the late afternoon sun glint off metal in the distant sky. It was an airplane, big and lumbering, turning onto its final approach, a thousand meters above the brown highland plain of north Darfur. An aircraft landing here at Al Fashir airport meant a potential way out of this miserable place.

Ellen had been stuck here since arriving on a UN transport plane ferrying in aid workers. There had been a problem with Walsh's documents; her UNAMID travel authorization was missing the requisite stamp that would have allowed her entry into the UN camp for internally displaced people in Zam Zam. This oversight meant she was not allowed to leave the airport, unless it was on a plane out of Al Fashir.

So for three days she'd waited for a flight that would take her back to her office. UN aircraft had arrived, but they remained parked on the hot tarmac awaiting a resupply of UN jet fuel from a UN tanker. Chinese state-owned oil company planes had come and gone, but they'd returned to Beijing and not Khartoum, and they'd made it clear she could not go with them. Sudanese military flights had arrived and departed, as well, but they weren't providing taxi service for some white woman.

But this new aircraft, this mysterious arrival floating in the hazy mirage to the north and lining up on the runway, could be her ticket out of here. It wasn't military, it wasn't painted in UN white, and it did not have the same shape as the Chinese planes she'd seen. Ellen knew aircraft, and normally she could ID a cargo plane in a second, but this craft in the distance was now banking across the late afternoon sun and was therefore impossible for her to identify. But she did not care. Whatever type of plane it was, whoever was flying it, and wherever it was headed next, she determined to do everything in her power to see that she was on it when it left.

Ellen was neither vain nor any sort of slave to fashion, but even before the lumbering aircraft touched down at the far end of the runway, she hurried back into the terminal to the restroom. She passed a pair of local Darfuri tribeswomen on their way out, dressed head to toe in colorful orange drapings, ushering three small children on ahead of them. The ladies' head wrappings were high and wide and, Ellen Walsh now realized, served as an effective foil for all the dust in the air. As she stepped up to the mirror for a look at herself, she nearly recoiled in horror. Her auburn hair looked ashen from the gray dust floating about, the faint creases around her eyes on her thirty-five-year-old face were exaggerated by the dust and grime and salt from the sweat that had dried there.

Quickly she untied the white T-shirt from the outside of her backpack and drenched it in the dingy water flowing from the tap. She wiped her face with the makeshift washcloth. She had used the same shirt for the same task so many times in the past seventy-two hours that it was streaked and dulled from the filth scratched off her skin. She turned away from the tap, dipped her head forward towards the begrimed floor of the bathroom, and used her fingers to comb through her hair as she leaned over, pulling a dust cloud out of her shoulder-length locks. She rose, blew the bangs out of her eyes, and replaced her hair band.

One more look in the mirror didn't fill her with relief, but it was an improvement. She retied the wet T-shirt to her backpack and hoisted it over a shoulder, then left the bathroom to return to the tarmac.

She heard the huge engines long before she saw the aircraft. It taxied to a parking spot on the other side of the ramp from the four UN planes, some four hundred meters from the door Ellen stepped through. In the dusty afternoon distance she could not identify the four-engine plane, but she did see there were no airline markings or country designation. Still, from its shape she could tell it was a cargo ship. She was momentarily caught up in the bevy of traffic as she began walking towards it. Several customs men and airport ground crewmen passed her on foot, as did two dozen soldiers hanging off the sides of a pickup and two dilapidated flatbed trucks. She thought about letting all the activity approaching the new arrival die down before making her approach, but she decided to keep going. She had no idea how long this flight would be on the ground. Days were doubtful; everyone who'd landed heretofore had gotten out of Al Fashir as soon as possible if they had the fuel to do so. Hours would be likely if they were going to be offloading cargo. Minutes only if they were just here to take on fuel.

She was not going to miss her chance.

As Ellen walked towards the aircraft at the distant end of the ramp, it was partially obscured in the haze of a heat mirage pouring up from the cracked tarmac, the late afternoon air dimming just slightly but not yet cooling. The air above the plane's hulking form quivered as vapors poured from the idling engines.

After a moment, the pilot shut his engines down. The whine of the four big turbojets was replaced by the voices of the soldiers in the distance and the ceaseless sound of insects in the sandy scrub brush that ran along either side of the taxiway.

The entourage of local army and airport workers was between her and the plane, moving purposefully across the hot taxiway, and they commanded her attention for the majority of her walk. She hesitated more than once, weighing the pros and cons of waiting for them to do their business and leave the aircraft versus pushing right on through the gaggle of black men, some uniformed, some in business suits, and some in flowing white tobes, to speak immediately to the flight crew. Neither option looked particularly promising, but she quickly arrived at the conclusion that the latter choice seemed preferable to sitting back and waiting for a plane that might well just take off again into the sky without her.

So she decided to walk right up the lowering rear hatch and take her chances. This decision caused her to look past the men fifty yards in front of her and turn her focus fully to the aircraft another twenty meters beyond them, and only then did her certain gait slow a bit. After a few yards she slowed even more.

And then she stopped dead in her tracks on the blistering tarmac.

With her eyes steady on the plane, she unslung her backpack and put it at her feet, unzipped it quickly, let a couple of sweat-stained blouses fall to the pavement as she pulled out a small black three-ring binder. She knelt on her backpack as she quickly leafed through it; her knees would have blistered had she placed them directly on the ground. Three quick glances back up to the cargo plane, and a few licks of her bone-dry fingertips helped her find the page she was looking for.

Another look down at the page. Another look up at the plane in front of her.

Yes. She muttered an exclamation that was not completely drowned out by the locusts and crickets around her. "Oh my God."

It was an Ilyushin Il-76, and from the look of its sagging disposition on its ten-wheel undercarriage, it was full of cargo. The Il-76 was an extremely common Russian-built transport aircraft, in service with aid agencies and transport services and militaries throughout the hemisphere. But unless Ellen's eyes were deceiving her, this was an Il-76MF, an upgraded version with a longer fuselage.

Slowly she looked away from the plane as she collected her belongings off the tarmac. Slower still she turned and began walking back to the terminal.

Her excitement grew and grew as she sauntered nonchalantly in the afternoon heat, retracing her steps of moments ago. This excitement was tempered by the knowledge that she would not be able to make a phone call inside the building, as there wasn't a single public phone, and she'd been told the administrative line had been down for the past seventy-two hours. The airport administrators were lying, she had no doubt, but the effect was the same. She could not call her office.

The excitement, tempered as it was, helped her think quickly as her mind raced to formulate a hasty plan. The scale of the opportunity before her could not be exaggerated, and she determined to control her emotions and focus on the opportunity at hand.

Certainly in her professional career, and almost certainly in her entire life, Ellen Walsh, special investigator for the International Criminal Court, had never felt so determined.

Nor so alone.