On target

TWENTY-TWO

An early April morning on the Sahel begins hot and sunny, gets hotter and sunnier by the hour, with the screech of birds and insects prevalent and energetic in the dry season. In the sweltering sedan, under the thick brown and green brush of the gully, Gentry flicked a centipede from the tip of his nose, tried to fall back asleep, but could not.

He rubbed his eyes, wiped away dried sweat that had formed on his eyelashes and on his forehead during the night. He cracked his window. Instantly fresh air entered the interior, and he inhaled deeply. He'd actually managed a couple hours' sleep, not consecutively, but his body was tuned by half a lifetime of catnapping to get maximum benefit from minimum rest.

In the low light of the morning under the canopy of brush enveloping the car, he tried to plot out his day. He did not have his sat phone, so he couldn't report to Sierra One what had happened. Not that he would have been looking forward to that call. The landing in Darfur was a snafu that was really no one's fault and could have been worked around with relative ease. But everything that had happened since? All the threats to the operation since touchdown in Al Fashir? Court knew good and well that it was all on him. A string of fuckups on his part had put him here, now, and had put the CIA's Operation Nocturne Sapphire, of which he was a crucial part, in mortal jeopardy.

So now what, Gentry? He looked over at the woman. He had not been this close to a female in a long time, with the exception of a venerable nurse or two in France and a veterinary assistant whose amateur needlework had unquestionably saved his life and the lives of those he went on to save the previous December.

This was different. She slept a few feet from him, calm and quiet now, and as near as he could tell from his limited experience with women, content. He'd heard her toss and turn for hours last night. A few times she'd called out in fright, waking Court in the process, but he had done nothing to help her.

He had no idea what to do. He'd had no training in providing comfort.

She was pretty. His age, with short, reddish-brown hair that lay strewn all over her face as she slept. He respected her being here, in a war zone, even if he did not hold attorneys or international organizations in particularly high regard. The ICC specifically seemed, to a man like Court, to be nothing but a banquet hall full of overeducated and underexperienced bitchers and whiners who had no real enforcement arm or mandate to do what they promised to do. To a man like Court, a one-man judge, jury, and executioner, the ICC seemed incredibly irrelevant out here in the real world.

But he couldn't help but respect the woman. The way she had puffed her little chest out and declared herself an ICC investigator like that was fucking stupid, but it was undeniably ballsy. The girl was tough, even if she didn't have the sense to restrain herself from talking too much.

He'd lied to her about killing the two NSS men, but he felt he did that for her own good. He could tell by her questioning him about it that she would not have been able to handle that piece of information at that moment, and he needed her to drive and to keep her wits about her. He had to kill them, he knew, because even with the turban wrapped around his face and the change of clothes, they would easily have been able to identify him as the crewman of the Ilyushin who spoke English and French and yelled at the woman. It was lucky for him Ellen Walsh hadn't seen his shooting of them, and he saw no reason to burden her with this knowledge.

She began to stir a bit, licked her lips and rubbed her nose. For an instant he wanted to reach out and brush the hair away from her face. It was a powerful feeling. It reminded him of the feeling he got when he looked across the room at his bottle of pain tablets back in his room in Nice. He knew he shouldn't reach out, but damn if he didn't want to.

Unlike those days in Nice, and some of the days since Nice, he did not reach out for Ellen Walsh.

He'd talked too much last night. He remembered this suddenly, and it pissed him off. The conversation went on for an hour, easily. She'd managed to get more info about him, more true info about him, that is, than anyone else he'd been in contact with in a very long time. Ninety percent of the conversation was about her, her family, friends, experiences with the ICC in Holland, but the 10 percent of the time he was talking, or at least the 5 percent of the time that he was both talking and telling the truth, he'd said too much. He hadn't given out one shred of operational intelligence, of this he was sure. But he'd admitted to having parents who divorced when he was young, and a brother who had died a few years back, and why he'd told her this he had no idea. He imagined she made one hell of a good investigator, drawing the truth out of those she interviewed, instilling in them a confidence that the two of them were just chatting while she was, in fact, sucking in each and every word, evaluating them, tossing out those that didn't fit, and building with those remaining words an impression, a picture of the people she was talking to, an understanding of who they were.

And what they were trying to hide.

He had this uncomfortable and unshakable sense that this woman sleeping three feet from him in the hot car, separated only by the backrests of the front seats, had somehow peered deep inside of him and knew his history, his past, his demons that he'd even managed to hide from himself.

It was a sickening feeling, a feeling of exposure, of vulnerability. And yet, at the same time, it gave him an affinity for this woman, made him feel close to her somehow, gave him a sensation to which he was wholly unaccustomed.

Court looked at her a long time. He watched her chest move up and down with the slow breaths of slumber.

Then he turned away from her suddenly and sat up straight in the backseat.

Unfuck yourself, Court! Unfuck yourself this instant! He screamed it at himself internally. You are shit deep in Indian country. Get your damn head in the game! Instantly he disliked this woman; she was a threat to him now, a weakness that could kill him.

He could flip a switch in his brain like that. It kept him alone, no question, but it also kept him alive.

Court climbed out of the car, no attempt to do it quietly so that Ellen would not wake. Her beauty rest was not his goddamned problem. He crawled out of the brush hiding the sedan, stood in the gully, then he ripped off the local tunic that he'd taken from the rickshaw driver the evening before, revealing his brown undershirt.

He pulled the gun he'd taken from the NSS commander the evening before, looked it over carefully in the morning light. It was a Bul Cherokee. He found it somewhat ironic that an Arabic-speaking secret policemen should be carrying an Israeli pistol, maybe more ironic that the gun had been used to kill him. It wasn't in Court's top-ten pistol choices, but it sure as shit had done the job on the two NSS goons last night.

He scrambled out of the gully, looked out to the road a quarter mile distant, past dry scrubland, windblown and sand-strewn. He saw no cars on the road. It ran flat and straight to the west, but to the east, back towards Al Fashir, the highway turned into a winding track and disappeared down a gentle slope.

The landscape wasn't barren in the strictest sense. This wasn't a Sahara-like desert of sand dunes; there were sporadic tufts of trees, acacia and baobab, and on-again, off-again grasses and shrubs as far as the eye could see atop the brown earthen crust, a surface that looked as hard as stone and somehow even less inviting.

He heard her climb out of the car below and behind him. It took her a minute to get her bearings and find him there on the crest of the gulley. Wordlessly she appeared next to him, closer than he would have liked, and followed his gaze out on the vast expanse to the east.

"Don't suppose you spy a Waffle House that I'm missing out there in the distance."

Court shook his head.

"Did you get some rest?"

"A little."

"I had some hellacious dreams. But I feel okay. Thanks for talking to me last night."

Court said nothing.

"I got the impression you don't do a lot of that. That you were chatting to help me relax."

Still nothing.

"Anyway… I appreciate it."

Court just kept looking out at the vast expanse of land in front of him, willing her to take a couple of steps back.

He was scanning the road, searching for vehicles in the hazy distance.

"Did someone get up on the wrong side of the stolen car this morning?"

He realized he was being an ass, was turning his anger at his openness last night into poor manners today. He felt even more childish now than when he woke up. He softened, turned towards her, but did not make eye contact. "I'm fine. Just thinking about today."

"Where are we, exactly? Do we even know?"

"We're about twenty-five klicks from the outskirts of Al Fashir. That's really all I can tell you."

"Where are we going?"

Court looked past Ellen's shoulder and saw it in the distance. A hazy, smoky apparition on the false horizon a few miles to the west. It rose from the desert track, what passed for a road out here in the Darfuri landscape, and from the size of the dust cloud he knew it was some sort of a convoy of large trucks. It took a while to be sure, but after a time he recognized the white paint on the vehicles. They were not government of Sudan; they were not private cargo transports. No, they belonged to some sort of nongovernmental relief organization.

He pointed to the dust rising in the distance. "We're going where they are going."

Ellen and Court moved quickly together down towards the road. The Canadian woman began running her fingers through her hair, trying to fix herself up a bit. Gentry looked at her with confusion.

"It never hurts to make a good first impression." She said it with a smile, continuing to do what she could to knock dust off her clothes now. "I'd ask you if you had a mirror, but I imagine I'd have better luck finding that Waffle House."

Court was fascinated by the odd behavior of womanhood.

"Listen," Ellen said to him. He could tell before she spoke again that she was a little uncomfortable. "Would it be okay if you stood back, maybe behind one of those little trees or something, while I get them to stop for us? I don't want to scare off what might be our one chance."

Court didn't mind at all. He was a scruffy-looking white man, out here, with a big pistol poorly tucked into his pants. He assumed the convoy would have a contingent of UNAMID soldiers, African Union troops loaned to the United Nations, and he had no doubt they would stop the convoy for a pretty white woman by the side of the road. Court would be perceived as a threat, and from what he'd learned about the UNAMID's reticence to fight anybody around here, he didn't want to run the risk of scaring them off. "Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Don't fuck it up, though. Lie down in the road in front of those trucks if you have to, but make sure they stop. And don't tell them you're with the ICC and were involved in the fracas with the secret police. These NGOs aren't looking to get involved in that kind of trouble. Tell them-"

"How 'bout I tell them I'm a reporter and you're my photographer? We got lost in Al Fashir looking for our hotel and then got robbed, taken out here, and dumped alongside the road."

Court was ready to nix her idea for one of his own, but he stopped himself, thought about it, and realized her story was actually pretty good.

Doing his best to mask how impressed he was, he said, "That might work. Let's go with that."

Gentry moved off the road, down a small draw and into some scrub brush. Ellen Walsh walked up the road fifty meters to create some more distance.

Ten minutes later, sixty-one-year-old Mario Bianchi followed the Canadian woman along the sandy dirt road, back down the row of trucks towards her colleague, an American photographer, or so she had just informed him. Fat flies half the size of one euro coins dive-bombed his face. He pulled off his safari hat and shooed them away, but it was a losing battle he soon gave up. It was going to be a hot one today, already at nine a.m. it was nearing thirty-seven degrees. He'd wanted to get his convoy up to Dirra by noon; they'd been running late, even before this surprising event he'd just stumbled onto.

Mario had thought he'd seen everything on the road from Al Fashir to Dirra. Hell, he'd made this 125-kilometer trip well over a hundred times in the past eight years working for, and then running, the Rome-based aid agency Speranza Internazionale. Bianchi shuttled personnel and supplies from all over Europe to the SI-run camps just this side of Dirra, and he had become well accustomed to the heat, the smell, the bugs, the animals, and the dangers of this route.

He'd encountered drunken rebels, highway robbers, government of Sudan military patrols, African Union "peacekeepers," and, of course, the dreaded Janjaweed militia.

But in all his trips along this poor excuse for a road, he'd never run into any English-speaking white Westerners on foot.

What madness.

Mario Bianchi enjoyed an impeccable reputation in the relief agency industry. He'd cultivated this in his forty-year career working all over the African continent. The Italian was known as the man who could get the job done, deftly negotiating not only minefields in the literal sense but also the minefields of street-level diplomacy. No matter who he was working for or where, his convoys got through, his aid camps got built, his clinics got supplied, and his staff got paid. He did this all without discernible trouble from the local heavies. It seemed nothing less than a miracle, considering where he had been and what he had done, but somehow the marauding ADFL rebels of Laurent Kabila passed him by, the RUF maniacs in Sierra Leone did not harass his efforts to evacuate civilians from their territory, even the teenage Liberian gang, the West Side Boys, who essentially slaughtered most anyone they saw just for shits and grins, pretty much let him do his thing in areas where they held control.

He won award after award all over the First World. Hardly a season of any year went by that did not see Mario Bianchi in a tuxedo walking across a floor-lit stage to civilized but energetic applause by the elite, themselves in tuxedos and evening gowns. His successes had piled up over the years before Darfur, and the atrocities of Darfur called to Signor Mario Bianchi the way a flame calls to a moth.

Here in Darfur his reputation had reached near mythical proportions. Somehow, when the UN wouldn't dare run convoys without escorts, when private relief concerns were hunkered down in Khartoum, too bloodied and battered by the indiscriminate slaughter of Darfur to actually go to Darfur to work, Speranza Internazionale convoys continued in the region; their IDP camps and clinics and warehouses and water stations remained in operation. Of course, there were sporadic raids by the Janjaweed and even the local rebels, but they were a small fraction of what any other group had experienced in the region when they dared open up shop in the Land of the Fur.

It was thought Bianchi's successes were a result of his powerful personality, that he had somehow been able to cajole the devils of Africa for decades to permit his organization's coexistence.

But that was not it at all. Bianchi was, behind the false veneer of do-gooder naivete, in truth, a deeply cynical man. A half century in Africa would do that to anyone, but the manifestation of his cynicism was a cold, brutal, realpolitik that, most would agree, had no place in the world of relief organizations.

The truth of Mario Bianchi's success stemmed from one simple, common act.

Mario paid bribes.

Big bribes.

To everyone.

The West Side Boys in Liberia did not hassle his local operation because he paid them tens of thousands of dollars to let him work. Surely if the well-intentioned Americans and Europeans who donated money to his organization knew that a major portion of their tax-deductible donations was immediately converted into baksheesh that fourteen-year-old Liberian gunmen used to buy ganja, bullets, and porno tapes, the spigot of privately donated aid would be shut off instantly. If these same donors had a clue that after the Congolese death squads took payments for access from Speranza Internazionale, they immediately demanded payment from all NGOs working in their area of influence, and when the principled among them refused to contribute, they were targeted and butchered, thereby leaving SI as virtually the only relief agency in eastern Congo, well, they could be forgiven for feeling somewhat sullied by their well-intentioned funding of butchery.

And here in Darfur, it continued. American film stars created advertisements at the SI camps, money poured in, and the money went, in no small part, to the Janjaweed killers who roamed north Darfur and raped and killed and burned, did so on the backs of the best camels from Chad, with the best AK-47s from Egypt, communicated with the best satellite phones from Japan, all paid for with American and European money.

Bianchi justified it easily. He was here, and he was working. He did what he had to do, and who the hell were you to judge him from your armchair while he was swatting flies out of his nose in forty-degree Celsius heat on a dirt road in the center of hell?

And now his cynicism applied to his present situation. Two American journalists alone, out here in the Sahel? If he were honest with himself, he would admit that he now wished he'd ordered his drivers to continue on, to leave the white woman by the side of the road. Freelance reporters operating without GOS minders in Darfur were serous troublemakers, as far as Bianchi's operation was concerned. He had to work with the leaders of the Sudan-rat bastards one and all-not against them. Even picking up this woman, taking her to Dirra, was dangerous to his organization. If the GOS somehow found out what he had done, he'd little doubt there would be repercussions from Khartoum that could hurt the flow of aid to his camps. Sure, he could bribe his way out of it, but the economic downturn in the First World had affected donations, and there was only so much in bribes that he could dole out in this economy.

Bianchi saw the white man ahead.

"Where is his camera? You said he was a photographer."

"He is. Like I said, robbers stole our car last night. Everything was in it. We've been out here for hours waiting for the right people to come along."

"You are twenty-five kilometers outside Al Fashir," he told her.

"Hey, don't look at me, I wasn't driving."

Mario did not doubt the woman. Highway bandits worked the road between Al Fashir and Dirra. In the rainy season, when the roads were slow and breakdowns were common, SI tried to travel with an UNAMID armed escort whenever possible, since it was impossible to bribe every Darfuri farmer or herder with an AK. But this time of year they could, more or less, race on by most any small group of men bent on doing them harm.

Except for the Janjaweed, whom he paid well so that they would leave his convoys alone.

The Italian was just a few steps from the American man now, the lone white talking to some of SI's African drivers and freight loaders who'd left their vehicles to smoke by the side of the road. The American did not have any equipment with him, not even a pack on his back. He wore a sweat-stained brown T-shirt and some sort of local black pants. His T-shirt rode up on his back when he turned.

The man was bearded and tan, and grime from the Sahel covered the parts of his face that the beard did not. He spoke in French to the locals. French was not uncommon here, as it was a common language in Chad, and Chad was just one hundred miles to the west.

The American was facing the opposite direction. When he reached to shake the hand of another of his employees, a young Darfuri loader, Mario saw the butt of a pistol on his right hip.

The Italian relief coordinator's mouth dropped wide. He could not believe this man dared to carry a gun. An American cowboy! And he expected to just jump on one of the Speranza Internazionale trucks and get a ride out of here to safety? He would bring nothing but danger with that instrument of evil tucked so cavalierly in his drawstring pants.

Without a word to the American, Mario Bianchi angrily walked up behind him and reached out to disarm him.

And that, as it turned out, proved to be an extremely bad idea.