On target

TWENTY-SIX

Men moaned and cried out. Vehicles and debris smoked and burned. The smell of cordite, diesel fuel, and charred paper, rubber, and plastic filled the hot air. Court looked for Ellen Walsh among the heaps of humanity lying in lumps around him. Some of the piles were moving, injured; others were still, dead. He finally saw her through the billowing smoke and hanging dust. She was on her feet, fifty yards away, heading towards the distant body of Mario Bianchi at the foot of a fattrunked baobab tree. She appeared unhurt. Next he looked down at Bishara. His dead body lay in a ball, like a pile of dirty shop rags ready for the washing machine, blood rivulets running in the dry earth around him. He'd been dead under a minute, and already flies swarmed his neck wound, buzzed around him, crazed by the boon of fresh wet blood, a bonanza for them to suck to their filthy hearts' content.

Another SI man was dead, facedown, a few yards away. The remaining six had survived, though a couple of them bled from the ears thanks to Court's truck bomb. They'd have some degree of hearing issues for the rest of their lives, he guessed, but at least they had lives. A couple more had bloody arms or legs, either shrapnel thanks to Gentry or bullet or rifle-butt injuries thanks to the Janjaweed. Horses and the one camel still alive milled about. They'd scattered no more than fifty yards from the trucks; these animals were well accustomed to gunfire and explosions, to mayhem that would make uninitiated creatures run in panic until they dropped from exhaustion or dehydration. Fires still burned all over the road, and truck four was totally engulfed in flames now. Its tank would explode in moments.

What a fucking mess.

Court grabbed the closest man. "Move the first two trucks. Get everyone and all the animals up the road. The gas tank is going to blow in the last truck. It will probably set truck three off as well."

A minute later Court arrived behind Ellen Walsh. She knelt by the body of the Italian relief worker, lying alone in the dirt a hundred meters from the road. His clothes were torn, his face shredded by hard earth and harder stone. The thick rope was still wrapped around his neck.

Walsh cried in shallow sobs.

"You hurt?" Gentry asked. He was not going to be gentle with this woman. If she had followed his instructions, none of this would have happened.

"I'm fine," she said, just noticing the American. "But Mario is dead."

"Fuck him," Court said, looking down at the unnaturally contorted body. "He brought this shit down on himself."

Ellen said nothing, just looked up at him with a mixture of shock and disdain.

After a few seconds standing there, there was an incredibly loud boom. The gas tank of truck four ignited and exploded in a roar. Gentry felt the heat even at one hundred yards. The flame scorched the air; churning black smoke rose into the blue sky like a hot air balloon taking flight. Ellen just watched it alongside Court. After a moment of silence truck three went up in a ball of fire as well, an equally impressive sight.

Ellen gasped. "Where are they going?" The surviving SI men had climbed into the two remaining trucks, ostensibly to pull them forward out of the blast radius. The first vehicle kept on moving up the road, a cloud of dust behind it as it accelerated into the distance. "Where are they going?" she cried out again.

"Most likely to Dirra," Court said. Truck two idled in the road. All the remaining men were inside. They looked like they were waiting for Ellen and Court, but Gentry imagined a heated argument ensuing right now inside that cab about whether or not to leave the kawagas behind to die in the sun. Court was neither surprised nor horrified by the thought of being left behind by the vehicle. He just began walking back to the road. "Calm down; everything is okay," he said to her, but he was nowhere as certain as his strong voice portrayed.

"Dammit," Court knelt down beside Bishara a minute later. The gas explosion had singed his body and burned off most of his clothing. One more unnecessary assault on the young man who had helped him so much. Court hoped that the flies that had been feasting on Bishara's mortal neck wound had been incinerated in the blast.

"What?" asked Ellen.

"He was one hell of a kid."

"You knew him for an hour," she said. She wasn't arguing with him; she truly just didn't understand this sudden emotion for one man out of all who had just died, especially considering the way he had regarded Bianchi minutes before. She counted eight bodies lying in the dirt, not including the one Six knelt beside.

"He saved us both. He was the most dialed-in son of a bitch I've had the honor of working with in a long time."

The one remaining truck lurched into gear and made a wide U-turn off the road, passing the white people in the dust. Ellen began running towards it, waving her arms frantically. It passed her by and raced back to the west.

"No!" she screamed.

Court surmised now that any argument inside the cab had not been whether or not to leave them; they were probably all in favor of that. It was whether they should head east to Dirra or west to Al Fashir. They had obviously decided on the latter.

"What are we going to do?" Ellen cried out to Gentry. He walked up the road a few meters, dropped to his knees, began picking over the body of the dead Janjaweed commander. He pulled a small bladder of water on a chain and looped it over his back. He dug a full mag for a Kalashnikov out of a black canvas chest rig. He lifted up an ornate knife in a scabbard, drew it to inspect the blade, and then pushed it back into its scabbard and dropped it back on the dead man.

"What are we going to do?" she asked again, sobbing this time, as she watched him use his boot to flip the dead SI driver onto his back. He knelt down and pulled sunglasses out of the breast pocket of the man's bloody shirt. He slipped them over his eyes and looked at the animals milling about.

"Can you ride a horse?"

"I… I guess so. But how far?"

He glanced at his watch. There was a GPS on it, but it wasn't working at the moment. Perfect. He guessed. "Twenty-five to thirty miles." Now he pulled a second AK out of the dirt. He folded the wire stock underneath the rifle, significantly shortening its length. "Thirty miles is doable," he declared. He hung the gun off his shoulder and down his back, the muzzle facing down. He poked another Janja fighter with his boot, looking for something useful to scavenge. The man groaned. He was injured but alive. "Unless we run into more of these fuckers."

She just stood there while he worked. "If the radio in one of these trucks is still intact, we can call for help."

"Yeah." Court looked up at her. "That worked so well the last time, why the fuck not do it again?" He softened, but only a little. "How do you think these Janjas knew we were in this convoy? The NSS was listening in. This wasn't random. They sent the Janjaweed out here to kill us. Ordered them to butcher everyone so that it wouldn't look like a government-sanctioned assassination. Trust me, we're better off not broadcasting. With a little luck they'll think we're dead. When those trucks get to civilization, you can be damn sure the SI employees won't admit to knowingly leaving us out here alive. We're dead to the world, and we can use that to our advantage."

Now Gentry kneeled over another wounded Janjaweed horseman. The Arab was flat on his back, breathing shallowly in soft wheezes. Court pulled a water flask from around his neck, a long knife from his belt. He inspected the weapon. This blade passed muster, and he took the belt and the scabbard and the knife and strapped it all to his own body.

"What about them?" Ellen asked as Court returned to his feet.

"What about who?"

"Those two men. They are injured."

"What about them?"

"Can we help them?"

"Are you a doctor?"

"No, but-"

"Me either. Pick one of the horses. We need to get moving."

She looked at the bearded American for several seconds. "But these men. What if no one comes by before nightfall? There are wild animals out here. These are human beings, Six. You can't just leave them behind to die."

"Watch me. Get on a horse. I'd like to take the camel, he won't need water like a horse will, but if we encounter another Janjaweed gang out in the desert, we're gonna want the speed of horses to get away from them." He pulled two turbans from the heads of two of the dead horsemen and tucked them into the belt he'd just scavenged.

Ellen shouted angrily, "We take these two men with us, or I don't go, Six. That is absolutely final!"

Gentry ignored her, kept speaking, more to himself than to the woman. "Camels are actually very fast, but if you don't know how to handle one, and I don't, it's easy to lose-"

"Listen to me! They need a hospital!"

Court stopped talking and looked over the wounded men. "More like a morgue."

"They are alive! And I am not going anywhere without them!"

Now his eyes turned to the shouting woman. He sighed. "Seriously?"

"Seriously. We can't just leave two living men out here in the desert." One of the wounded groaned softly.

Court's jaw fixed, jutted forward a bit as he stared at the Canadian lawyer. He nodded, lifted the rifle hanging from his neck, causing the woman to flinch in fear. With no hesitation at all, he turned and shot the two wounded men, once each in the chest. Their torsos jerked violently with the impacts, dark blood rooster-tailed a foot into the air above them, and both men stilled instantly.

After the report from the second round died off in the desert, Gentry let his rifle hang by its sling in front of him. "Problem solved. Let's go."

Ellen Walsh's face whitened with horror, then seconds later it reddened with rage. She charged the American. He walked away from her, heading for one of the horses, but she grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt, literally spinning him around. He did not make eye contact with her; instead, he continued marching forward alongside the burning truck.

"You bastard! You are no better than them!" she berated as she ran alongside, trying to get in front of him.

"They're dead; I'm alive. I'd say I am doin' a lot better." He said it mirthlessly, continuing forward. But she finally made it in front of him, put her hand on his chest. Her small sunburned fingers clenched his sweat-drenched brown T-shirt. With his free left hand Gentry snatched her hand, spun it backwards into a wristlock, and pushed her back, away from him. He angrily raised the butt of the AK towards her with his free hand as if he were going to slam it into her face.

Ellen was unafraid; her rage had pushed her past concern for her own personal well-being. "Ah, you beat women, too, do you? You fucking animal! Executing wounded men! Picking over dead bodies like a vulture! Blowing up-"

"How the fuck were we going to haul them across thirty miles of desert? They would have bled out anyway, and we would have died trying."

"We could have carried them on the horses!"

"And moved at half speed! You want to be out here at nightfall?"

"Don't make excuses! Just admit it, you wanted to kill them!"

He lowered the gun and let go of her hand. "I'll admit this. I don't give a fuck about those two guys, about the bodies lying around here. Other than Bishara, I could not care less."

She looked over the bodies, back up to him. "What? What are you?"

"I'm whatever you want me to be. The son of a bitch who shoots the wounded, or the guy who's pulled your ass out of the fire more times in the past eighteen hours than I'd like to remember," he said, climbing into the saddle of a large gray Arabian mare. "I can get you out of this alive, but you have to let me do my job."

"Your job is to shoot injured men?"

"Not if I can help it, but we needed to go, and wasting those two shitheads was a means to that end. I could have waited thirty minutes for them to die on their own, but I didn't want to wait. I could have left them behind, knowing that if the Janjas came back and one of them had enough strength to point which direction we took off in, it could get us killed, but I didn't want to do that either. Do you even know what these fuckers do? They rape and slaughter defenseless women, they burn children alive in fire pits in front of their parents for shits and grins. Four hundred thousand dead. Is that just a fucking number to you? You can cry for the Janjaweed if that makes you feel self-righteous, but I won't bat an eye after shooting the killers of women and children."

She stared at him a long time. Tears streamed down a face still wild with fury and hatred. Clean lines in the caked dust on her cheeks. She said, "Okay, they are killers of women and children; I understand that. But what does this make you?"

Court slid the AK into a strap on the rear of the saddle, then tightened his grip on the big mare's reins. He looked down at Ellen Walsh and kicked the animal's haunches. The horse was already galloping towards the east when he answered her.

"I am a killer of men."