by Mark Greaney
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.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Court sat in his tiny hotel room in Al Fashir. Outside the open window above his tattered and soiled mattress on the floor, the morning bustle of the city rattled and whistled and bleated and shouted, as men and animals and vehicles passed by.
He was filthy and wanted a shower, but there was no shower here. Just a hole cut into a closet floor down the hall for a toilet. He’d spent the evening scratching bloody flea bites and had not gotten much sleep but, he asked himself, what did he expect for nothing?
It had taken a day and a half and most of the rest of his Sudanese pounds to get a car and a driver to transport him back to the capital of North Darfur. Court bought a satellite phone with the rest of his cash, using his watch and the two AKs to make up the difference. The man who’d driven him from Dirra had a cousin who owned a filthy boardinghouse in Al Fashir for Darfuris there to work construction on whatever project the NGOs were paying them to build, and the driver and the cousin had spoken and offered Court a room free of charge. The two men even took Court shopping for some local items and paid for them out of their own pockets. Many Sudanese, Court had noticed in his day on the road and in the town, possessed an intense kindness and willingness to give of themselves and their meager property for a complete stranger.
Court had little to offer in return but his gratitude, a few Arabic words of thanks, and an understanding of the body language of the culture. He held his hand to his heart and nodded deeply so many times in the past day he almost felt as if he could pass for a Darfuri, if not for the pigmentation of his skin.
Court had worked in dozens of different places in his career, either as a CIA singleton operator, as a CIA Paramilitary Operations officer, or as a private sector assassin, and many of those places, for want of a better term, sucked. But from time to time he found himself somewhere remote, both geographically and culturally, and completely taken in by the scenery or the people or the way of life in ways that stayed with him after he’d done his job and left the place behind.
He felt this way about Darfur. He wasn’t supposed to be here. There was much to hate. It was hot as hell and thick with bugs and controlled by a despot and murdering bands of marauders, but Court felt something about this place, the people, the stubbornness and discipline needed to face a miserable day armed with nothing but one’s own devices. He could not help but respect the people for scratching out what existences they had, and he appreciated their kindness to him.
He would love to repay the kindness by removing the man from power who was systematically killing them.
He reached across the mattress, picked up his phone, and called a number in Saint Petersburg.
Gregor Ivanovic Sidorenko had not slept. His man had disappeared into the depths of Darfur, the opposite side of the country from where he needed to be, and he had not heard from him in almost seventy-two hours. Furthermore, the international news channels were broadcasting reports from Darfur, reports of an attack on an aid convoy not ninety minutes’ driving time from where Gentry was last seen. Details were sketchy, but things did not look good.
Sid sat at his breakfast table in the cold, bit into a hard-boiled egg, and stared at his phone. He’d hardly taken his beady eyes from it in three days.
But for once it rang, and it startled him.
The Russian mobster tipped a mimosa in a fluted crystal glass while lurching forward to grab the receiver, fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice, Cuvée du Centenaire Grand Marnier, and Krug Grande Cuvée Champagne drenching his thick, gold-lined fleece robe. He ignored the expensive mess and answered the phone.
“Slushayu vas.” I am listening.
“It’s Gray. You receiving me okay?”
“Mr. Gray, where are you?”
“I’m back in Al Fashir. I’m safe at the moment, but I can’t stay here for long.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing to worry about. I got sidetracked.”
“Side . . . ? Mr. Gray, that is not acceptable! You have jeopardized everything! The FSB is very upset.”
“It couldn’t be helped.”
“My people spoke to the pilot. You left the airport to save a woman. A woman!”
“Your pilot shouldn’t have left me behind.”
“A woman!”
“It’s more complicated—”
“This is a very serious damage to our timetable.”
“It’s no problem.”
“How can you say that it is no problem? We do not have another flight to Khartoum scheduled until after Abboud’s trip to the Red Sea! How are you going—”
“Can you get a plane back here to Al Fashir?”
“Yes, I have arranged a flight. It will depart today from Belarus. But we can only get you out of the country with that flight. It will not be landing again in the Sudan.”
“It doesn’t have to land.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Get a pen and paper. I’m going to need the aircraft to bring in some gear I’ll require if I’m going to continue on with the operation. Get the FSB to help you put it together. Just relax. This little hiccup along the way will be forgotten.”
“If they don’t land, how will you—”
“They will need a flight path out of the country that takes them over the Red Sea. They can arrange that. Now, write all this down.”
There was a scramble on the other end of the line. “Wait . . . okay. I am ready.”
Court dictated a list to the Russian mob boss, who scribbled like a frantic secretary. When he was finished, Sidorenko blew out a long breath. “You can do this?”
“Sure.”
“The pilot . . . he can do it?”
“You will talk to him when we are in the air. Encourage him to follow my instructions to the letter.”
“Da, of course.” Gregor Sidorenko was no longer angry. There was a high-pitched tone of excitement in his voice. “This will be . . . dangerous for you.”
“You are worried about my well-being?”
“Of course. I . . . I just want to do what I can to help.”
�
�Anything else?”
“I had a man who was going to take you by car from Khartoum to Suakin. If you proceed as you suggest, you will have to cross territory all alone and on foot. You don’t look like a Sudanese tribesman.”
“There is a tribe of lighter-skinned Arabs in the area. The Rashaidas. I won’t be able to pull it off up close, but with a head wrap and local clothing, someone seeing me driving by in a car or walking across a field is going to peg me for a Rashaida before he pegs me for a white boy.”
“You are willing to bet your life on that?”
The assassin answered nonchalantly, “This is what I do.”
Sidorenko replied breathlessly, “You are amazing.”
There was a long pause on the line. Sid thought the American was going to respond to his comment, but instead he said, “The plan remains in effect. After I’m on the ground, no contact until the job is done.”
“Da. But the man who was going to take you to Suakin. He is a police officer there in the city of Suakin. He is an occasional informant for the FSB. He may be able to provide you with intelligence that will be helpful. I can arrange a meeting.”
Court thought it over. As far as Sid’s op was concerned, he didn’t really need a police informant. But for Zack’s job? Nocturne Sapphire could absolutely stand for one more source of intel about the layout of forces in the area.
“Agreed.”
Sid said, “Mr. Gray, please remember. I have women here for you. Many beautiful women. Leave the ones you find in the desert in the desert; when you come back, you will never go wanting for women again!”
Court sighed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Court leaned his head back against the plywood wall of his room. He knew he needed to call Zack; he’d put it off as long as possible. He knew he’d get a tongue-lashing of the highest order. He was right.
After three rings, Zack answered the phone with a marked absence of the customary pleasantries. “What the fuck, dude?”
“I got delayed.”
“You got delayed? Really? Delayed? Good. I’m glad that’s all it was, because for a minute there, I was worried that maybe my watch was running two motherfucking days fast!”