by Mark Greaney
But more than anything, this smelled like an operation that, though it might well come off just as planned, was thought up by a department desperate to remain viable under an administration for whom covert, paramilitary-style operations had been all but ruled out.
On Court’s third night on his own, he called a number given to him by Sidorenko’s henchmen. Sid’s secretary answered, and Court told him he’d suffered a slight injury while training for the mission. He would require, Court declared, a small bottle of mild painkillers to get him through his recovery. Court went to a dark hallway in Vitebsk Metro Station, where he met one of Sid’s young skinhead goons. A paper bag was exchanged without a word.
Court downed two of the Darvocet while still on the platform waiting for his metro ride back to his hotel on Zagorodny Prospect. He had convinced himself, sort of, that he was in pain. The stomach wound he’d received four months earlier did seem somewhat aggravated by his abdominal exercises—the knot of scar tissue pulled at the muscles and caused them to stiffen in protest—but truly it was not pain he would have batted an eyelash at had he not developed his penchant for narcotics.
Court knew this, and he wondered if—despite all the big, bad men in this world who wanted him dead—in fact, that friendly old doctor in Nice who’d hooked him up with the morphine would end up being the man who would ultimately bring him down.
FOURTEEN
The Russian transport, an Ilyushin Il-76, was massive, with a tip-to-tail length of more than 150 feet, and a similar width from wingtip to wingtip. Court stood in front of the plane before dawn and inspected it through the faint illumination of frigid moonshine. Next to him stood Gregor Sidorenko. He’d flown with Gentry from Saint Petersburg to Grodno, Belarus, in the Hawker and landed at the main airport there just thirty minutes earlier. There was, unequivocally, no operational reason for Sid to be there; it was anathema to every relevant procedure and tactic that Court had learned in his sixteen years as an operative. But his Russian handler had wanted to go along for this part of the ride. Even though it was below freezing out here on the tarmac, Sid looked ridiculous bundled as he was in wool and cotton and leather and fur, his thin nose and his pointed chin jutting out from the mound of fabric and dead animal that blanketed him.
Court was perplexed by his handler’s bizarre excitement over the operation. It was night-and-day different than the cool distance kept by his former employer, the English ex-spymaster Sir Donald Fitzroy. Sir Donald would no more fly along to stand around at the departure point of one of Court’s wet operations than he would execute the op himself. But Sid was a fan—a freak, in Court’s eyes—of this sort of thing.
Sid’s Russian accent broke the still. “Everything is prepared. Takeoff at ten a.m.”
“I know.”
“Seven hours fifteen minutes to Khartoum.”
Court just nodded.
“They say your pilot is very good.”
Court said nothing.
“Takeoff will be to the south. That’s Poland back there behind us, so he will probably fly south until he reaches the border with—”
“Sid. I really don’t care which way we fly.”
The Russian was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I do not know how you can be so calm. Everything that must be running through your mind. Everything that you must do in the next days. The danger, the intrigue, the physical peril. And you just stand there bored, like you are waiting for a train to take you in to your office.”
Court’s eyes remained on the aircraft ahead. Sid did not know the half of it, of course. Sid’s op was relatively— and relatively was the key word—easy, compared to what he really had to do. Shooting a man at five hundred yards and then hiding out in the hills for a week or so until he could just walk through airport gates and board a flight out of the country seemed so much simpler than pretending to prepare for an assassination but instead executing a split-second kidnapping and a perilous rendezvous in enemy territory to transfer a prisoner.
Court so wished he could just shoot that murderous fucker Bakri Abboud in the head and be done with it.
“How can you possibly remain so relaxed?” Sid asked Court.
The Gray Man turned to the Russian mafioso, the first time he’d made eye contact with his handler all morning.
“This is what I do.”
Gregor Sidorenko’s narrow mouth formed a surprisingly toothy smile. Even in the predawn light it glowed. “Fantastic.”
The aircraft was a behemoth, and it exhibited function over form. Called the Candid by NATO forces, the Ilyushin Il-76 had huge, high wings that sagged slightly when at rest. The plane looked big and fat and slumbering there in the dark. Court wanted to walk over and kick it awake, but he knew soon the Russian crew would handle that, and the aircraft would effectively transport him and whatever war goods it carried to Khartoum. It was not a military flight in the strict sense. The plane and the crew were property of Rosoboronexport, the Russian state-owned military export entity. Rosoboronexport flew cargo aircraft all over the globe, to the Sudan, to Venezuela, to Libya, to India, transporting exported Russian arms to some sixty countries in all, fanning and fueling the flames in trouble spots all over the earth.
With only idle curiosity, Gentry asked Sid, “What is the cargo?”
“Other than you? Crates of heavy Kord machine guns, ammunition, and support equipment.”
“And they are allowed in by the UN? What about the sanctions?”
Sid snorted in the cold morning air. “The sanctions are obtuse. Russia is allowed to sell military equipment to the Sudan, as long as the equipment is not to be used in the Darfur region of the country.”
“If Russia is shipping machine guns to Sudan, they can be damn sure they are being used in Darfur. That’s where the war is.”
“Exactly, my friend,” Sid smiled, not picking up on Court’s derision of the arrangement. “Moscow takes President Abboud’s word for it. That seems to satisfy the UN.”
“Unbelievable,” said Court, almost to himself.
Sidorenko patted him on the back. “Yes. Very good, isn’t it?” The Russian turned and headed back to the warmth of the terminal.
Court lay on his back across four of the Ilyushin’s red plastic seats. Next to him in the tight floor space between his resting place along the wall of the fuselage and the huge crates of cargo in the center of the aircraft was positioned a single MultiCam backpack. Gentry was a master at packing light. Inside the fifty-pound ruck was a disassembled Blaser R 93, a German sniper rifle, caliber .300 Winchester Magnum, and twenty rounds of ammunition. Also binoculars, two fragmentation grenades, two smoke grenades, and a small supply of dried food, water, and oral rehydration salts. A medical blow-out kit for major trauma was included, but for cuts and bruises he’d packed nothing. On his belt and in his cargo pants he wore a Glock nine-millimeter pistol, a combat knife, a multi-tool, and a flashlight.
He was covered in a long white thobe, a robe customary in the Sudan.
The flight crew had left him alone. Their higher-ups at Rosoboronexport had ordered them to ferry a man to Khartoum, but that was all they knew.
Gentry had told the crew chief in Russian before takeoff that he was not to be disturbed except for emergencies, so when a member of the five-man cabin crew appeared above him and shouted over the shrill engines, he knew it was time to either be mad or be worried. The man summoned him to the cockpit, and Gentry followed him up the narrow channel alongside the gray wooden cargo crates, which hung from rollers attached to rails on the ceiling that ran down the length of the craft. There were no windows in the cabin; instead, quilted padding and netting and fastened equipment hung from the walls of the fuselage. It reminded the American of another cargo plane he’d been in, four months earlier, over northern Iraq. That flight did not end well for Gentry; his thigh throbbed where the bullet had torn through the muscle, but it ended even less well for the five other men who’d been with him in the cargo hold.
The cockpit of the Il
yushin was expansive; four men fit themselves in the upper-level crew area, and the navigator sat below in the nose among a sea of dials and buttons and computer monitors. The pilot, a redheaded Russian in his forties named Genady, who wore aviator glasses too large for his face and appeared, to Gentry, to be unhealthily thin, beckoned him forward. A young and heavyset flight engineer passed the American a radio headset so he and the pilot could communicate comfortably with each other.
“What is it?” Court asked in Russian.
“Sudanese air traffic control has contacted us. There is a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“We have been diverted. We are no longer going to Khartoum.”
“Where are we going?”
“Al Fashir.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I think perhaps the Sudanese Army must need the guns there in a hurry.”
Court pulled a laminated map off the flight engineer’s table. The man looked up at him but did not protest. “Where the hell is Al Fashir?” asked Gentry as he unfolded the map.
The Russian pilot turned and looked back over his shoulder and answered the question with one word, delivered in a grave tone. “Darfur.” He put his gloved finger on the far edge, completely across the country from where Court’s operation was planned.
Court looked up from the map. “Fuck.”
“It is a problem for you, da?”
“My job is not in Darfur.”
Genady said, “Nothing I can do. I have to divert; I don’t have clearance to land in Khartoum.”
“Shit!” said Gentry now. He tossed the headset back on the console and turned to leave the cockpit, yanking the map out with him.
Five minutes later he was on his Hughes Thuraya satellite phone, talking with Sidorenko. He’d spent the time waiting for the connection to be established looking over the map. “This is not acceptable! How am I supposed to get out of the airport at Al Fashir, cross a hundred miles of bandit-covered desert, plus another three hundred miles of Sudanese territory? I’ve got the fucking Nile River now between myself and my objective.”
“Yes, Gray, I understand. It is a problem. You must let me think.”
“I don’t have time for you to think! I need you to get this flight back on track!”
“But that is not possible. My influence is with Moscow, not Khartoum. You will have to land where the Sudanese instruct you to land.”
“If you can’t fix this, then this operation is dead, you got that?” In fact, Court was concerned about Zack’s op, Nocturne Sapphire, and not Sid’s contract, but he did not mention this.
“I will do my best.” Sid hung up, and Court continued pacing the narrow alley between the wall of the fuselage and the crates of guns.
This snafu was of the “shit happens” variety. It was no one’s fault, but Court knew from much experience that no blame need be assigned to an operation for it to fail completely and miserably.
To Sidorenko’s credit, he called back much quicker than Gentry had anticipated.
“Mr. Gray, we have a solution. You must fly out again with the plane after it off-loads in Al Fashir. Return to the air base in Belarus. There will be another flight to Khartoum in three days’ time. It will be helicopter repair equipment, goods that are not likely to be diverted to Al Fashir. Everything will be fine.” Sid seemed satisfied with the new arrangements.
“Three days from now?”
“Correct.”
“One day before Abboud goes to Suakin? That’s not enough time to get there and prepare.” It would have been, thought Court, if Sidordenko’s operation was the actual plan he intended on carrying out. It was not enough time, in Gentry’s estimation, to adequately recon the area to increase the chances for success in Zack’s operation. Again, he could not very well explain this to the man on the far end of the satellite connection.
Sid shouted back across the line, his stress getting the best of him. “I can’t help it! I had no way to foresee this. The Russian government did not foresee this. Just stay with the flight crew and come back. We will try again in three days.”
Court hung up the phone and continued pacing the narrow corridor of the aircraft next to the weapons. “Son of a bitch.”
He next used his phone to call Zack. Hightower took the call on the first ring. He was clearly surprised to hear from Gentry. “You’re about twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, Six.”
“I’m about to fall behind schedule.” Court told Sierra One what was going on. When he was finished he asked, “You know anything about this airport? Any way I can get out of here and over to Suakin?”
“You might as well be on the dark side of the moon. It’s a war zone all around Al Fashir. The Red Cross, private NGO relief agencies, and African Union troops working for UNAMID, the United Nations Mission in Darfur, are about the only foreigners in the area. You might be able to buy a ride to the east from some local ballsy enough to brave the Janjaweed militia and the government of Sudan troops patrolling the badlands, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Stick with Sid’s change to the op orders, retrograde out of the Sudan with the aircrew, and reinsert in three days. It’s the best we can do at this point. We’ll just have to rush things when you get there. I’ll let Carmichael know what’s up.”
“Roger that, Six out.”
“Wait one,” Zack said, “Just a piece of advice. Don’t know what your turnaround time is in Al Fashir, but stay the hell inside the airport grounds. If you get popped by the authorities over there, they’ll take you to the Ghost House.”
“That sounds charming,” Court said over the whine of the Ilyushin’s engines changing pitch. They had just begun a turn to the south and a slight descent.
“It’s anything but charming. It’s the name the locals give to the government’s secret prisons across the country, but the one in Al Fashir is extra special. You go in the Al Fashir Ghost House, you don’t come out, and you don’t die quick. It is legendarily miserable.”
“Understood. I’ll avoid the local tour, then. Six out.”
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 hu
rried 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.