On Target (26 page)

Ellen gasped. “Where are they going?” The surviving SI men had climbed into the two remaining trucks, ostensibly to pull them forward out of the blast radius. The first vehicle kept on moving up the road, a cloud of dust behind it as it accelerated into the distance. “Where are they going?” she cried out again.

“Most likely to Dirra,” Court said. Truck two idled in the road. All the remaining men were inside. They looked like they were waiting for Ellen and Court, but Gentry imagined a heated argument ensuing right now inside that cab about whether or not to leave the
kawagas
behind to die in the sun. Court was neither surprised nor horrified by the thought of being left behind by the vehicle. He just began walking back to the road. “Calm down; everything is okay,” he said to her, but he was nowhere as certain as his strong voice portrayed.

“Dammit,” Court knelt down beside Bishara a minute later. The gas explosion had singed his body and burned off most of his clothing. One more unnecessary assault on the young man who had helped him so much. Court hoped that the flies that had been feasting on Bishara’s mortal neck wound had been incinerated in the blast.

“What?” asked Ellen.

“He was one hell of a kid.”

“You knew him for an hour,” she said. She wasn’t arguing with him; she truly just didn’t understand this sudden emotion for one man out of all who had just died, especially considering the way he had regarded Bianchi minutes before. She counted eight bodies lying in the dirt, not including the one Six knelt beside.

“He saved us both. He was the most dialed-in son of a bitch I’ve had the honor of working with in a long time.”

The one remaining truck lurched into gear and made a wide U-turn off the road, passing the white people in the dust. Ellen began running towards it, waving her arms frantically. It passed her by and raced back to the west.

“No!” she screamed.

Court surmised now that any argument inside the cab had not been whether or not to leave them; they were probably all in favor of that. It was whether they should head east to Dirra or west to Al Fashir. They had obviously decided on the latter.

“What are we going to do?” Ellen cried out to Gentry. He walked up the road a few meters, dropped to his knees, began picking over the body of the dead Janjaweed commander. He pulled a small bladder of water on a chain and looped it over his back. He dug a full mag for a Kalashnikov out of a black canvas chest rig. He lifted up an ornate knife in a scabbard, drew it to inspect the blade, and then pushed it back into its scabbard and dropped it back on the dead man.

“What are we going to do?” she asked again, sobbing this time, as she watched him use his boot to flip the dead SI driver onto his back. He knelt down and pulled sunglasses out of the breast pocket of the man’s bloody shirt. He slipped them over his eyes and looked at the animals milling about.

“Can you ride a horse?”

“I . . . I guess so. But how far?”

He glanced at his watch. There was a GPS on it, but it wasn’t working at the moment.
Perfect.
He guessed. “Twenty-five to thirty miles.” Now he pulled a second AK out of the dirt. He folded the wire stock underneath the rifle, significantly shortening its length. “Thirty miles is doable,” he declared. He hung the gun off his shoulder and down his back, the muzzle facing down. He poked another Janja fighter with his boot, looking for something useful to scavenge. The man groaned. He was injured but alive. “Unless we run into more of these fuckers.”

She just stood there while he worked. “If the radio in one of these trucks is still intact, we can call for help.”

“Yeah.” Court looked up at her. “That worked so well the last time, why the fuck not do it again?” He softened, but only a little. “How do you think these Janjas knew we were in this convoy? The NSS was listening in. This wasn’t random. They
sent
the Janjaweed out here to kill us. Ordered them to butcher everyone so that it wouldn’t look like a government-sanctioned assassination. Trust me, we’re better off not broadcasting. With a little luck they’ll think we’re dead. When those trucks get to civilization, you can be damn sure the SI employees won’t admit to knowingly leaving us out here alive. We’re dead to the world, and we can use that to our advantage.”

Now Gentry kneeled over another wounded Janjaweed horseman. The Arab was flat on his back, breathing shallowly in soft wheezes. Court pulled a water flask from around his neck, a long knife from his belt. He inspected the weapon. This blade passed muster, and he took the belt and the scabbard and the knife and strapped it all to his own body.

“What about them?” Ellen asked as Court returned to his feet.

“What about who?”

“Those two men. They are injured.”

“What about them?”

“Can we help them?”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No, but—”

“Me either. Pick one of the horses. We need to get moving.”

She looked at the bearded American for several seconds. “But these men. What if no one comes by before nightfall? There are wild animals out here. These are human beings, Six. You can’t just leave them behind to die.”

“Watch me. Get on a horse. I’d like to take the camel, he won’t need water like a horse will, but if we encounter another Janjaweed gang out in the desert, we’re gonna want the speed of horses to get away from them.” He pulled two turbans from the heads of two of the dead horsemen and tucked them into the belt he’d just scavenged.

Ellen shouted angrily, “We take these two men with us, or I don’t go, Six. That is absolutely final!”

Gentry ignored her, kept speaking, more to himself than to the woman. “Camels are actually very fast, but if you don’t know how to handle one, and I don’t, it’s easy to lose—”

“Listen to me! They need a hospital!”

Court stopped talking and looked over the wounded men. “More like a morgue.”

“They are alive! And I am not going anywhere without them!”

Now his eyes turned to the shouting woman. He sighed. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. We
can’t
just leave two living men out here in the desert.” One of the wounded groaned softly.

Court’s jaw fixed, jutted forward a bit as he stared at the Canadian lawyer. He nodded, lifted the rifle hanging from his neck, causing the woman to flinch in fear. With no hesitation at all, he turned and shot the two wounded men, once each in the chest. Their torsos jerked violently with the impacts, dark blood rooster-tailed a foot into the air above them, and both men stilled instantly.

After the report from the second round died off in the desert, Gentry let his rifle hang by its sling in front of him. “Problem solved. Let’s go.”

Ellen Walsh’s face whitened with horror, then seconds later it reddened with rage. She charged the American. He walked away from her, heading for one of the horses, but she grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt, literally spinning him around. He did not make eye contact with her; instead, he continued marching forward alongside the burning truck.

“You bastard! You are no better than them!” she berated as she ran alongside, trying to get in front of him.

“They’re dead; I’m alive. I’d say I
am
doin’ a lot better.” He said it mirthlessly, continuing forward. But she finally made it in front of him, put her hand on his chest. Her small sunburned fingers clenched his sweat-drenched brown T-shirt. With his free left hand Gentry snatched her hand, spun it backwards into a wristlock, and pushed her back, away from him. He angrily raised the butt of the AK towards her with his free hand as if he were going to slam it into her face.

Ellen was unafraid; her rage had pushed her past concern for her own personal well-being. “Ah, you beat women, too, do you? You fucking animal! Executing wounded men! Picking over dead bodies like a vulture! Blowing up—”

“How the fuck were we going to haul them across thirty miles of desert? They would have bled out anyway, and we would have died trying.”

“We could have carried them on the horses!”

“And moved at half speed! You want to be out here at nightfall?”

“Don’t make excuses! Just admit it, you
wanted
to kill them!”

He lowered the gun and let go of her hand. “I’ll admit this. I don’t give a fuck about those two guys, about the bodies lying around here. Other than Bishara, I could not care less.”

She looked over the bodies, back up to him. “What? What
are
you?”

“I’m whatever you want me to be. The son of a bitch who shoots the wounded, or the guy who’s pulled your ass out of the fire more times in the past eighteen hours than I’d like to remember,” he said, climbing into the saddle of a large gray Arabian mare. “I can get you out of this alive, but you have to let me do my job.”

“Your job is to shoot injured men?”

“Not if I can help it, but we needed to go, and wasting those two shitheads was a means to that end. I could have waited thirty minutes for them to die on their own, but I didn’t want to wait. I could have left them behind, knowing that if the Janjas came back and one of them had enough strength to point which direction we took off in, it could get us killed, but I didn’t want to do that either. Do you even know what these fuckers do? They rape and slaughter defenseless women, they burn children alive in fire pits in front of their parents for shits and grins. Four hundred thousand dead. Is that just a fucking number to you? You can cry for the Janjaweed if that makes you feel self-righteous, but I won’t bat an eye after shooting the killers of women and children.”

She stared at him a long time. Tears streamed down a face still wild with fury and hatred. Clean lines in the caked dust on her cheeks. She said, “Okay, they are killers of women and children; I understand that. But what does this make you?”

Court slid the AK into a strap on the rear of the saddle, then tightened his grip on the big mare’s reins. He looked down at Ellen Walsh and kicked the animal’s haunches. The horse was already galloping towards the east when he answered her.

“I am a killer of men.”

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.”