On Target

by Mark Greaney

  “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 sitting 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.”

  “I don’t have the credentials to get into the UN camps,” she protested.

  “You didn’t have the credentials to arrest a crew of Russian gunrunners either, and you tried that.”

  She shook her head. “What the hell was I thinking?”

  “Not a clue, lady,” the man said. “I just have to ask. Did you have a plan, other than to threaten them with international indictment and then ask to please use the telephone so that you could turn them in?”

  “That was about it,” Ellen admitted, shaking her head again at her actions. “I’m a lawyer by training. I’ve only been with the ICC for a few months. I had the UN documents forged myself; I got tired of sitting in my office and not doing anything. I just wanted to come out here and see Darfur for myself. Nobody from my office knows where I am, what I’m doing.”

  “Well, you’ve got guts. I’ll give you that.” The man’s words trailed off at the end, and she got the idea that he did not want to talk anymore.

  TWENTY-ONE

  They headed north for another ten minutes. Her attempts to engage the quiet man in conversation were either deftly deflected or outright ignored. On the open road, outside of the city, they picked up speed. The man finally directed her to pull over and to run the car down a gentle draw by the side of the road. She asked about wild animals, and he admitted he had no idea, but he promised she’d be safe. It wasn’t that she trusted him—she still didn’t know exactly which side this man was on—but she knew she didn’t have any other options at the moment. She would do what he said.

  The low draw led them to a gully that ran towards a rocky, dry streambed. During the rainy season, in another couple of months, it would be suicide to hide in this ditch. The rills cutting into the scrubland all around would send hundreds of thousands of gallons of runoff down here just minutes after a concentrated rain shower. But right now it seemed safe enough. Thatched brush rose several feet high on either side of the dusty gully. The tops of some of the bushes had interwoven, creating a tight canopy above. It was only six feet high or so, but Court directed her to push the car into the brush and turn off the engine.

  The hot metal clicked and clanged when she did so.

  “Check the glove box. Any water?” He asked. She opened it and found only a plastic bag of lemon candies. Court climbed out, dug through the bushes, and checked the trunk but found nothing there either.

  “We’ll be okay tonight. We’ll get some water in the morning.”

  “What do we do now?” She looked back towards the man; he was invisible in the dark now. She heard him reposition himself, lift his legs up onto the little backseat.

  “Try to get some sleep.”

  “What do I call you?”

  “I’m the only other person here. If you are talking, I will pretty much assume you are talking to me.”

  “Touché,” she said, though she did not like smart-asses. She did her best to make herself comfortable in the front seat. She swung her body around so that her back was to the passenger door. It had been smashed on the outside by the rickshaw, but the inner frame was intact. She did this to try to get face-to-face with the man in the back who was prone with his back on the driver’s side.

  “I’m Ellen, if you had forgotten.”

  “Yep.”

  A long pause. “You’re not going to talk to me?”

  “We both need to rest. We’re not going to drive out of here tomorrow. Too dangerous. We’ll go up to the road on foot and try to flag down a friendly vehicle.”

  “How do we know if it’s friendly before we flag it down?”

  She heard more than saw him shrug his shoulders. “No idea, to tell you the truth,” he said, and again, she could tell he was trying to end the conversation.

  “Are you really a crewman for Rosoboronexport?”

  No answer.

  “Some sort of mercenary?”

  No answer.

  “A spy?”

  “Go to sleep, Ellen.”

  She let out a frustrated sigh. “Just give me a name. Make it up if you want to, but give me something I can call you.”

  “Call me Six,” he said after several seconds.

  “Dear Lord,” she replied. “Does that mean there are five more out there just like you?”

  “Go to sleep, Ellen,” he said again, and this time she endeavored to leave him alone.

  One minute later she realized she could not sleep. After what had happened in the past hour, who could sleep? Plus it was miserable in the smelly car.

  “Six, can we open some windows?”

  “Negative.”

  “Negative? Why don’t you just say ‘no’?”

  “No.”

  She sat up in the seat, leaned a little closer to the man in the dark. “No, we can’t open the windows?”

  “We can’t open the windows.”

  “Why not? It’s so hot in here. There’s no way I can sleep in this heat.”

  Six responded matter-of-factly, “Scorpions, camel spiders, pythons, poison—”

  “Okay, okay! We’ll keep the windows up.”

  Six said nothing.

  “Why did you come back for me?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Yes, you do. You can talk to me.” Then she said, “Please talk to me. I’m scared, my heart is still racing, there is no way I can sleep like this. I just need to talk a few minutes. You don’t have to tell me anything top secret or whatever, but please help me out here.”

  The man remained silent. She could barely see his silhouette in the darkness, and his silhouette did not move a muscle. Of the expression on his face,
even whether or not his eyes were closed, Ellen had not a clue.

  She was so certain the man had turned to a statue she was startled when he finally did respond.

  “I came back for you because it’s my fault you are here.”

  “Your fault? How? Why?”

  “I came here to do a job. An important job. A good job, actually, one you would approve of.”

  He said nothing else. He seemed to have chosen those few words he did say extremely carefully, laboring over every phrase. She encouraged him, “And?”

  “And then you got in the way. I tried to get you out of the way the easiest way I could think of. It didn’t work.”

  “Or it worked too well.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s it. Didn’t know you were ICC. I thought you were just some annoying busybody.”

  She was grateful for the conversation, for feeling like she’d pried open a corner of the tough shell of this mysterious American to get a tiny glimpse of what was inside. She said, “That’s actually not a bad description for my job with the ICC.”

  Ellen saw the silhouette change, movement in the whiskers of the beard on the side of his face, and she imagined him smiling. It was difficult to do.

  “Anyway, I just wanted you on ice till we took off. Then the NSS got involved. They were going to kill you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know men like that. They’d be worried about their own necks more than anything. They’d realize how bad they’d messed up letting you get that close, and they’d do the one thing they knew how to do to make it better.”

  With the stranger’s calm proclamation that she had narrowly avoided death, the weight of everything that had happened in the past three hours seemed to crush in on her all at once. Ellen put her head in her hands, felt her fingers tingle and shake. Her entire body went slack, tired, achy. She looked back up to the man in the dark.

  “I . . . I just . . .” Ellen Walsh hesitated, but then she hurriedly spun around in the front seat, fought madly for the door handle of the sedan, wrapped her fingers around it and pulled it open while frantically pushing at the wrecked door with her other hand. She launched her upper torso out into the dark, thick brush, spewing vomit along the way as she did so. After several seconds the wave of nausea subsided, and she hacked and coughed and spat out into the flora of the streambed. A second wave of sickness attacked her, and she succumbed, vomiting again until she retched loudly into the night, her body continuing its convulsions though it had nothing left to expel. She spat again to clear her mouth, began crying openly, her head still hanging out of the car.

  And behind her the stranger had not moved.

  “I . . . I’m so sorry,” was all she could say. Her embarrassment only made her feel foolish.

  “Don’t worry,” came a surprisingly soft voice from behind her.

  She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse.

  Six said, “It happens to me all the time.”

  It took her a full minute to get her body back inside the vehicle, to get the door closed, herself twisted into a reclining position on the front seat. Her tears and sobs had begun to subside. She wiped her face several more times, cognizant of the gaze of the quiet man in the dark, though she had no way of knowing for sure if his eyes were even open.

  Finally, when she had recovered completely except for a few wet sniffs, she asked, “You think we’re going to get out of this okay?”

  “Yeah, you’ll be safe and sound by this time tomorrow.”

  He sounded certain, and this helped her greatly. But she asked, “What about you?”

  He shrugged. “I take it day by day.”

  She let that go, did not know what it meant but sensed not to press. While she wiped her eyes she asked, “Are you married?”

  “Yeah.”

  Slowly she lowered her arm from her face, looked towards the silhouette in the backseat. “No, you’re not. You just lied to me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know, but you are not married.”

  He nodded; this she saw clearly. “You’re right. Impressive.”

  She sat up straighter, leaned a little closer. Her eyes brightened as if she were playing a game. “Kids?”

  “No comment.” He had loosened up a little; he was using humor, but he was still very much on guard.

  “I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t think so.”

  He said nothing.

  “Mom, dad?”

  “Dad.” He answered back quickly, too quickly for her not to believe him.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Michigan, Detroit.”

  “Really? Me, too! Originally, I mean, before my family immigrated to Canada. Where did you go to school?”

  A long pause. An admission. “Okay, I’m not from Michigan.”

  Ellen laughed, surprised herself by the loud noise she made in the tight, hot car, “Sucker! Neither am I.”

  She saw him smile again as he shrugged. “You are pretty good.”

  With a long sniff and a wider smile she said, “You have no idea.”

  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 l
ied 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.