On target

TWENTY

Horns honked at Gentry, at the accident itself, in annoyance of the delay this would surely cause. Animals brayed at the loud noise of the crash and the ensuing protesting blarings.

The NSS car had stopped in the middle of the intersection, its headlights reflecting off of steam pouring forth from its grill. The rickshaw had bounced away and rolled on its side in the street. Gas flowed from its open tank.

Court arrived at the passenger-side door just as the dazed NSS commander kicked it open. Gentry grabbed the small bespectacled man by his necktie and pulled him free of the wreckage and then let him go, using both hands now to douse the bucket of gasoline over the man's head.

The two soldiers were piling out of the back of the car, and the driver was slowly exiting his side, when Court pulled the road flare from his pants pocket, pulled the lid off the top, and struck the wick on the head. With an explosion of fire and sparks, he held the flare far away from his body with his left hand. With his right he grabbed the NSS commander by his collar and pulled him tight in a headlock.

The soldiers from the back of the car leveled their guns and screamed at him.

The NSS subordinate moved around the car, his pistol high in his hands, and screamed at him.

Three uniformed guards from the Ghost House approaching the wreck lifted their rifles to their shoulders and screamed at him.

Court stood in the middle of the intersection, holding the commander tight by the neck. He spoke softly into his ear in English.

"Reach for your gun, and I burn you."

The man said nothing, but his hands pushed out wide from his body, away from the holster on his hip under his suit coat.

Court whipped the sparkling flare close to the man and then jerked it away quickly. "If they shoot me, I drop this. If I drop this, you die. Understand?"

The man clearly understood. He raised his arms high and began shouting into the chaos around him. Court understood the Sudanese Arabic. "Lower your guns! Put them down! Put them down! Do not shoot!"

No one lowered their guns, but no one fired them either. Court continued to yank the small NSS man to the left and to the right, tried to keep himself a moving target in the hopes that some sniper on the Ghost House roof or some overzealous sentry or passing cop might think twice instead of feeling confident enough to pop a shot off in his direction. While he did this, careful to keep the buzzing and burning road flare near enough to the secret police commander to be dangerous but not so close as to start an inferno, he chanced a look in the back of the black sedan. Ellen Walsh had not moved. She stared at him, her wide stunned eyes obvious under the car's interior light.

"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.