by Mark Greaney
It took a minute and a half to siphon the fuel and complete the transaction, and by the time Gentry returned to his tiny taxi scooter, he was certain he was the most hated man in all of Al Fashir. Horns honked in chorus behind him. He handed the keys back to the driver, who continued to berate him while he restarted the little putt-putting motor of the vehicle. Court crammed the metal bucket on the floor between his feet. Then he grabbed a fistful of money out of his wallet and, reaching up, waved it next to the complaining Darfuri tribesman. The man shut up and reached for it, but Gentry pulled it back to him, patted the man on the back instead as if to say, “Soon, my friend.”
The driver pressed on. As he did so, Court opened the cooler of bottled water next to him on the bench. Even in poor lighting from the buildings as they passed them and the headlights of the other cars on the street, he could see black sediment in the liquid. Drinking it would have probably given him dysentery, but he was not going to drink it. Instead he doused himself with it, completely covering his face, his arms, and his clothing. He pulled out a second bottle and did it again, drenching himself in water.
The driver looked back over his shoulder at this odd fare, but Court motioned for him to keep his eyes pointed forward.
Court opened a third bottle and then a fourth, pouring water all over his clothing and hair and face.
The Darfuri man soon pulled over next to a large but aged soccer stadium. He pointed at the busy intersection ahead and then gestured with his hands that it was just to the left. He turned fully around in his seat with his hand out for his money now, and Court reached deep into his wallet. The American pulled out a wad of bills of a different color than the Sudanese man expected, but the Darfuri knew euros when he saw them. He nodded slowly, then became more serious when he saw how much he was being handed. Four hundred euros was enough to buy a brand-new rickshaw, the driver realized, and he could not help himself from swallowing hard.
It took a few seconds more for the turbaned driver to realize that that was exactly what the kawaga was asking him to do. After the driver took the money, the waterlogged white man with the tin bucket of gasoline stepped out of the back, unzipped his jumpsuit, stripped to his soaking wet shorts and T-shirt, and handed the jumpsuit over to the driver. It did not take the Sudanese man long to realize he was being asked—no, forced—to change clothes with the white man. He climbed out of his vehicle grudgingly but quickly and took off his clothes right there on the side of the street. Passersby stopped and stared. The kawaga pulled the long tunic and the brown pants on, pocketed the screwdriver and the flare, cinched the pants tight with a leather belt, and reached up and took the turban off the Darfuri’s head and used it to wrap his own face and head in a white mask. Without a word or a nod, the white man removed the cap from the gas tank of the covered scooter and tossed it in the road. Then he hurriedly climbed behind the handlebars and positioned the bucket tightly between his knees. He opened one more bottle of water and doused his new clothing with it, and then he jammed the throttle forward, and the rusty red machine leapt forward and back out into traffic.
The Darfuri driver stood in the dirt under a street-lamp next to the soccer stadium, no shirt on his back, scratching his head as a crowd converged on him with unbridled curiousity.
Court hoped he was not too late. Once Ellen Walsh was taken through the front gates of the Ghost House, it would be suicide to even attempt trying to get to her, and it would do nothing to help her chances. He just had to do something before the NSS car made it in.
Just up ahead at the last intersection he saw another traffic jam of crap cars, beasts of burden pulling wood and rusted carts, and NGO vehicles. He jacked the handlebars to the left and bumped up on a little curb, drove straight through men walking home from work or out for dinner or an evening stroll. White-turbaned men leapt to the side as if for dear life, though the rickshaw was probably not big or powerful enough to do much more than cause bruises or a few broken bones to a pedestrian.
He tried to picture the scene ahead because he had no real idea what he was going to find around the corner. But he’d seen his share, more than his share, of secret police HQs in third-world, ex-colonial outposts. There would be a squat building with a fortified wall around it, a front gate with a guard shack and some sort of movable barrier. Often there would be a sandbagged machine gun emplacement or two, or even an armored personnel carrier at the front.
This damn Canadian investigator better appreciate this, he thought to himself. Then he remembered that if not for him, she would be nowhere near the predicament from which he was now trying to extract her.
He was at the left turn now, leaving more screaming and shouting and horn honking behind him. He pulled too hard for the turn, and the little two-stroke machine rocked high, its left rear wheel off the ground for a few seconds before banging back to the dusty pavement, causing the cab of the vehicle to bottom out with an ear-piercing scrape. Gasoline sloshed on his pants leg, but he’d managed to save eighty percent of the contents of the bucket by lifting his opposite knee to compensate for the tilting in his seat.
And then there it was, right ahead of him and on the right. The wall was lower than he had expected, and the building was taller and a bit more ornate than he had envisioned. There was an access gate with a guardhouse on the near side of the road, and some sort of tin-shack bunker on the far side.
And there was the NSS car, about to make a right turn at the intersection ahead, just beyond the entrance to the Ghost House.
Shit, thought Court. Not going to make it.
But he floored the little rickshaw and leaned forward, hoped against hope something would slow down the sedan’s advance on the entrance.
A donkey pulling a cart overladen with plastic watering cans entered the intersection in front of the NSS sedan, causing it to slow and honk. It was twenty-five yards tops to the entry drive of the Ghost House, and Court knew this was his chance, he would get to the sedan in time, though his odds for success at any part of his plan after that were still pretty lousy. He grabbed the bucket of gas by its rickety handle, held the rickshaw straight by its throttle, and barreled in on the stationary car. Just as the donkey cart began rolling out of the way and the sedan started to drift forward again, Gentry let go of the handlebar, spun out of his seat, and leapt out of the rickshaw. Though he stumbled forward and splashed another twenty-five percent of the gasoline from the bucket, he remained on his feet, running into screeching and honking traffic.
The rickshaw slammed into the front passenger-side door of the NSS car at twenty miles an hour, jolting and denting the car with a crunching crash and knocking it into the wooden cart in front of it.
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 wre
ck 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 s
itting 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.”