On target

TWENTY-SEVEN

Thirty minutes later Ellen Walsh and Court Gentry were a mile north of the desert track to Dirra, heading east through a narrow canyon that ran parallel to the distant road. Walsh's chestnut mare had nearly bucked her twice; it was accustomed to a heavier hand controlling the bridle. Gentry deftly led his horse, and he led the way without speaking.

He felt the fury of the woman behind him, sensed the hating eyes burrowing into his back like the scorching heat of the sun's rays. Off and on she would speak, continuing to berate him. "You are a war criminal now. You realize that, don't you? And the fact that you executed two wounded prisoners right in front of an ICC investigator leads me to wonder what you do when no one is around to hold you accountable for your crimes."

Court looked deep into the afternoon haze, searching for any stationary or slowly moving dust clouds ahead, telltale signs of approaching horses. He did see dust clouds here and there, but they moved quickly across the landscape, indicating they were caused by the wind and not hooves or feet or tires.

"I came to the Sudan to help bring a wanted man to justice. But you know what? I ran into someone else, someone who maybe isn't as dangerous, scale-wise, as President Abboud, but someone with just as little regard for human life. That's you, Six. I'm going to make sure you are brought to justice for what happened today."

He turned his horse a little towards the north now. The path he was on led back closer to what passed for a road out here, and he wanted to stay out of sight of any passing traffic. "Do you ever take a break?" Court mumbled it to himself. The way forward, out of the canyon and back into the scrubland of the Sahel, looked clear, for now. He spoke louder. "You know what killed them? You killed them. You not doing what I told you to do. Out here, if you want to live, you do what I say. If I'm on trial in Winnipeg or wherever the fuck, I will listen to you, but out here, in enemy territory? You listen to me."

Apparently his remark caught her off guard, so accustomed she had become to his ignoring her.

It took her a while to respond, and even then, her words seemed ineffectual. "I am not a trial lawyer. And I'm from Vancouver."

Court did not reply, just looked ahead, scanning for threats.

"How can you do it? How can you kill like that?"

"Training."

"Military training?"

He did not answer.

"I need to know who you are," she said. He could hear the wheels turning in her head. He was now the subject of her investigation.

"No, you don't."

"Do you really work for the Russians?"

"I did once, but that didn't work out."

"Because of me?"

"Yep."

"But… you are American. Are you CIA?"

"Negative."

"Then what?"

"I'm currently unemployed."

"Right." She didn't believe him. "So all this isn't business? It's just pleasure?"

"More fun than a barrel of Janjaweed," said Court as he swigged from the canteen he took from one of the men he killed.

"I'm serious, Six. I have every intention of writing a report on what happened back there."

"Knock yourself out."

"You don't believe me?"

"I don't care."

"You aren't afraid of the ICC?"

He laughed cruelly. "Terrified, but I'll get over it."

"You are a dangerous man who must be stopped."

He did not slow his mount, but he pulled the reins to the left so that he could make eye contact with the woman. "But I'm not so dangerous that you won't accept my help. And I'm not so dangerous that you aren't afraid to be alone with me in the desert while I'm carrying two firearms, and I'm not so dangerous that you aren't afraid to tell me that you are going to do all you can to have me thrown in prison. What does that tell you, Walsh? It should tell you that you see me as more savior than demon."

She thought about it a moment. "The justice I want to administer to you is not the same as what you administered to those people back there. I respect the rule of law."

"Well, you didn't respect it enough to get all those bastards to stop bashing heads and sit down at a little makeshift courtroom in the dirt to be judged properly. Respect the rule of law all you want, but out here, the rule of law is not going to save your ass like this rusty AK and a fistful of dirty bullets will."

"I'm not a fool, I-"

"That's exactly what you are! All of you international law people are fools. Naive, foolish sheep who think the way to get the government of Sudan to put down their weapons and stop a genocide is to draft indictments in the Netherlands and send do-gooding lawyers down here to wander the desert and write fucking reports. You can feel good all you want, but you won't change a goddamned thing."

She had locked onto something he said. "And what you're here to do, it will change things?"

Court wanted to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn't. "You're damn right, it will."

"So you smuggle in weapons with the Russians and shoot the wounded. Is that all part of your plan to make the world a better place?"

"No, it's not. All this is just a distraction."

"Then what is your mission?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because you are just another obstacle in my way."

"Maybe we can work together."

"Surely I don't look that stupid, do I?" Court said. "Until we get to Dirra, we are on the same side. After that, you go your way, I'll go mine, and we'll just leave it at that." There was a finality in his comment that Walsh recognized, and she left him alone.

They covered three hours more of hard ground with no words between them.

Just after five in the afternoon, Gentry looked back over his shoulder to check on the woman. She was sunburned and exhausted but still upright on her mount. He pulled his horse to a stop, slid off the side, and untied a bladder from the saddle. He gave the gray Arabian warm water, which the animal drank eagerly. After thirty seconds he repeated the process with Ellen's horse. As he did this, Ellen looked around, as if she'd been sleeping upright and was only now recognizing her surroundings.

After a moment Court looked up to her, noticed an odd look on her face.

"What the hell is that?" she asked, her voice more curiosity than worry.

Gentry followed her gaze into the distance, back the way they had come.

"A haboob," Gentry replied gravely. "A dust storm."

Ellen stared in awe at the sight. It was as if a huge mountain had risen out of the flat ground they had just crossed. And the mountain grew and moved towards them.

"That looks bad."

"It's not good." Court replied.

"Is it going to catch us?"

Court hurriedly retied the three-fourths-empty bladder on the back of his horse's saddle. Then he lifted a foot back into the stirrup and climbed back up. "Get off your horse. Get on with me. Hurry!"

"No," she said. But then asked, "Why?"

"We'll get separated if we're on two horses, and we cannot afford to get separated out here. Climb on with me, now!"

Ellen hesitated but soon slid off her chestnut mare, grabbed the water bladder off its back, and went to Court. He pulled her up behind him, and she held her arms tight around his waist. He handed back one of the brown turbans he had taken from a dead Janjaweed horseman. "Cover your face," he said. "Even your eyes."

"What about you? How will you see?"

Court threw a similar wrap over his own face. "I won't see. I'll try to keep us going in the right direction. But the most important thing is we stay on the horse. There is nowhere out here to hunker down and wait this out. We just have to barrel right on through it."

Ideally Gentry would have dismounted and waited out the storm, but commonsense action was a luxury he could ill afford. He'd seen haboobs in Iraq that lasted three days, knew every minute they were out here in the badlands was another minute the NSS had to send more men out to hunt them. The last thing he wanted was to have his horse blindly stumble down a gulley or wander smack into a camp of Janjaweed fighters, but attempting to continue on, to run these risks, seemed preferable to just hanging out in the open with little water and no protection.

A cooler breeze hit them a minute later, and the sand and dust were on them shortly after that. Suddenly it went from daylight to night; the sun's rays were blotted out above them in an instant, and then they were surrounded, enveloped. A sense of claustrophobia overtook Ellen, but all she could do was tuck her face tighter into the turban and then press her face into the sweaty T-shirt of the man in front of her. The man who had kept her alive but who considered himself the arbiter of the life of others.

Court held his watch up to his eyes, under the head wrap like a little tent. He could barely see, and hot grit dusted his corneas in seconds. The GPS function on the watch still seemed to be screwed up, but at least the compass worked. He headed east-northeast. Dirra was in this direction, but he had no idea how fast they were going in the haboob, so his main worry was passing right by the town in the dust or even in night. Surely there would be lights from the village, even if electrical power was virtually nonexistent, but there were low hills and sagging dry streambeds and wall-like rock formations that could easily obscure any distant light source, even if the dust storm did die down.

Court could feel dehydration affecting his performance. He felt dizzy, tired, even a little drunk. He needed to take in some more liquid quickly. Though he could not see an inch in front of his face, he pulled the canteen off the horse's saddle, opened it, and held it to his mouth. The grit and dirt and sand in the air and on his mouth immediately mixed with the hot, rank water, creating a mouthful of soupy mud. He gulped it down nonetheless, understanding how important hydration was for him right now, even if he didn't enjoy sucking down this hot sludge.

He reached back and put it in Ellen's hand. It took her a minute to realize what it was and what he was asking her to do. She took a swig herself, then immediately began hacking.

"It's full of dirt."

"Your face is full of dirt. Drink it. You need it."

"I'm okay," she said and tried to give it back to him.

"Drink. You have to stay hydrated out here in these temperatures."

"But it's full of dirt."

"You'll shit it out," Court said coldly.

"That's disgusting. I don't want to shit it out."

"Do you want to die of heatstroke? Drink the fucking water!" he shouted at her.

Reluctantly, angrily, she gulped down several more swallows. The grit and the mud made her cough several more times, but the liquid stayed down. When the bladder was empty, she dropped it in the dirt and the horse kept moving.

The haboob lasted until well past nightfall, and Court somehow managed to keep the animal moving in the correct direction. When the dust cloud moved on, he and Ellen dismounted and continued on foot, while Gentry led the big horse by its reins. The animal had proven incredibly reliable, and he wanted to give it a break by relieving it of the weight of two riders for an hour or two.

Their bodies were completely covered in grime. They could have been black Africans or Asians or space aliens under the coating of brown, and no one would know. Court realized this unintended consequence just might work in their favor as long as no one came too close. He was wrong, though. Their white skin may not have shown through, but their Western appearance was impossible to mask.

They had stayed away from the one desert track between Al Fashir and Dirra, had covered nothing but wide-open and desolate ground for hours, but as they neared their objective, they began passing through tiny villages and across dirt roads, and the traffic around them picked up. Donkey carts and small pickup trucks passed them, Darfuri villagers stared at them unabashedly, two filthy kawagas leading a Janjaweed horse, the man with two Kalashnikovs strapped to him and the woman wearing a turban like a man. Hardly an everyday occurrence out here in this wild land.

Court worried about the locals. He knew there existed a phenomenon in places like this, referred to as the bush telegraph, where somehow, inexplicably, news travels from community to community as certainly and as swiftly as a satellite phone. Gentry knew that at any moment he could meet up with Janjaweed or NSS or GOS soldiers and find himself outnumbered in a gun battle out here in the dark. Or he could find himself overrun by UNAMID soldiers from the African Union, who would arrest him and put an end to his operation.

But there was nothing for him to do but continue on; he had to get the woman to safety. He did his best to avoid settlements, gave the dung-fueled cooking fires a wide berth, waited for vehicles to pass instead of crossing in front of their headlights.

Ellen was dead tired. The heat and the stress and the long day and the lack of food and water all added up to put her in a temporary trance, which she occasionally snapped out of to try to engage Court in conversation. Just like the evening before, Gentry found himself talking to her more than he would anyone else. Even though she was 100 percent against him now, an adversary after he wasted those two worthless pieces of shit back with the convoy, he still kept talking to her, and it pissed him off. But it did not piss him off enough to stop.

The air finally cooled around eleven, and Ellen seemed to be reinvigorated by this. Court gave her the remainder of the water and, like a thirsty brown plant in the corner, the hydration seemed to cause her to spring back to life before his eyes.

"How much farther?"

"Not long. Another half hour or so."

"Can we get back on the horse?"

"Negative. We need her rested in case we get into trouble and have to escape."

"Okay," she said. "That makes sense." They walked shoulder to shoulder through low grass and beneath acacia trees so large they blocked out the stars. She looked over at him a few times. He could tell she was thinking about something. He ignored her, hoping her thought would pass, but it did not.

"Six, I think a lot of very bad people started out as good people, don't you?"

"I don't know."

"Be careful you don't become that which you hate."

"I have no idea what you are talking about."

"Yes, you do. I believe you. I believe that you believe you are here for the right reasons. Maybe in your head you are. But this place needs people who are saving lives, not taking lives."

Court stopped her from stumbling over an anthill in the dark. He led her around it by the arm, and then immediately let go. "Saving a life and taking a life are not opposites. Sometimes they are two sides of the same coin. I may take lives from time to time, but I wouldn't do it unless I felt I was saving some, too."

"Sounds like you're trying to justify it to yourself."

"I have to justify it to myself. But I don't have to justify anything to you. People like you will never understand. Waste of time to try to convince you."

"You will be indicted for war crimes for what happened today."

There was a tone to her voice that Gentry picked up on. She seemed to be disappointed in him for what happened but conflicted in her feelings.

"I believe you mentioned that."

"We will catch you."

"Right. You've been trying to catch Abboud for three years, and you have his goddamned address."

That sank in a moment. "We are trying. The ICC will get Abboud, sooner or later."

"Not if the ICC is sending Canadian women into Darfur alone. You people are going to need a lot of help to bring him down."

He could tell this comment made her curious. "Are you going to help us? Is that your plan?"

Court had said too much, and he knew it. "If I was here for Abboud, do you think I'd be in Darfur? No, I'd be in Khartoum, where Abboud is." He hoped he'd sold that to her.

She shrugged. "Abboud isn't my job, anyway," Ellen said. "I am working on illegal weapons proliferation. Armament imports are the symptom. Abboud is the disease."

"You think he's single-handedly responsible for the genocide here?"

She thought it over. "Responsible? Not entirely. But he can stop it. I believe that. He has the power."

"Somebody should just shoot him in the head; that would stop it." For the first time today, Court was interested in the conversation. He wanted to see how she'd respond to the comment.

"Your gun is the answer to every question, isn't it?"

"Not my gun. Like I said, I'm not in Khartoum."

"Fine, not your gun, but you really think killing him will fix things?"

"Don't you?"

"No, I don't. His followers could continue the war for years, decades even. If he died, all the gains the NGOs had made, just by being allowed in here, would probably be lost. Whoever takes over won't want the prying eyes of the west in Darfur, especially if the campaign of brutality continues."

"So Abboud is a good guy?" He was baiting her to get more intel on the political landscape.

"Of course not! He is as evil as the day is long. I'm just saying his death could bring about some unintended consequences."

Court knew about an intended consequence the Russians had in mind. They wanted Abboud out of the way so the Chinese would lose access to Tract 12A.

But at what cost to the region?

He pressed her a bit, trying to pull a bit more info from her. She knew more about the Sudan than he did, and he respected her knowledge, even if he assumed her conclusions to be naive at best and stupid at worst. "What about other actors in the region? The Russians, the Chinese, the U.S., the African Union."

"What about them?"

"Do you think any of them have an interest in what happens here?"

She turned to him, though they were still walking, regarding his question with a thoughtful sigh. The Arabian behind them snorted. "The Chinese have mineral rights in north Darfur. So far they haven't found much, but if they did find something, then all bets are off as to how that would change the political landscape."

"What do you mean?"

"The Chinese have a fragile alliance with Abboud. The Russians have a fragile alliance with-"

Court tried to finish the sentence, "The vice president, who would succeed Abboud if he were taken out of the picture."

"No. The vice president is as weak willed as they come. I was going to say the Russians have a fragile alliance with the government in Chad. If Abboud were killed, some people think a power struggle would ensue, and the civil war would spread to the entire nation. Chad would use that opportunity to invade Darfur with Russian help. It would start a firestorm, with two nuclear superpowers involved in the outcome. Personally, I don't believe that, as long as no major oil deposits are found in Darfur. This big conspiracy just sounds too big for Russia to fool with unless it turns out there is something really significant out here under the dirt."

She sounded like she knew what she was talking about, which gave Court the sinking feeling Gregor Sidorenko had lied to him. The Russians wanted Abboud dead not because his death would give them Tract 12A but because his death would cause chaos, into which Chad could invade and take Tract 12A for the Russians via a shooting war.

Son of a bitch.

Court had a thought. "But you guys want to arrest Abboud? Wouldn't that have the same effect as killing him? He'd be out of power and could not stop a civil war."

"The thinking at the ICC is that if we could give Abboud a reason to use his influence and power to our benefit, then his followers would not fall into the trap of being used as pawns by the Chinese and the Russians."

Interesting, thought Court, but he saw no possible way Abboud would have a reason to comply with the ICC.

They crested a gentle rise, palm trees at the apex. On the other side they saw the massive IDP camp splayed out in the valley below them over several square miles. It was flat and dark in the night, thousands of single-room tents. There were lights around the perimeter, and a few UNAMID vehicles in view. Camel-dung fires burned like a hundred fireflies in the distance, tiny pinpricks of amber across the wide valley floor.

"It's incredible," said Ellen, her hands on her hips.

"You see the gate?" asked Court, pointing towards an entrance in the fencing, protected on either side by white armored personnel carriers.

"Yeah." She looked up at him. "You're not coming with me, are you?"

Court mounted the Janjaweed horse.

"Nope."

"Because of what I said about having you prosecuted? Look, you are safer in there than you are out here. You won't be taken into custody here in Dirra, I promise you. We follow the law. You haven't even been indicted yet."

"I'm not going in there because I have a job to do out here. And I'm going to do it."

"So you just ride off into the sunset?"

"It's half-past midnight."

Walsh shook her head, batted buzzing insects away from her eyes. "I bet you think you are a cowboy. But you're not. You're an outlaw. You are-"

"I need three days, Ellen. Three days from now you can do whatever it is you have to do. Make your report, send teams out looking for me."

"Why don't you tell me your mission? What happens in three days? Who you are working for? If our goals do intersect, I promise I will try to help you."

"No offense, Miss Walsh, but I don't need any help your organization can provide."

She looked to the rifle on his chest and waved an exhausted hand at it. "Again, that's all the help you need?"

"I'm not here to kill people. The last twenty-four hours I have been off mission. Like I said, you would one hundred percent approve of what I'm doing. I just need three days to do it. Your wait will be rewarded."

Walsh did not reply. Court could imagine her giving him three days, just out of curiosity. He could also imagine her running to the front gate of the SI camp and yelling at the UNAMID soldiers to get themselves into their jeeps to chase the white horseman through the night. Ellen Walsh, like all women, was a complete mystery to Court Gentry.

"Three days. Please." He pulled the reins on the horse hard, spun the big animal around, and then galloped off into the dark.