On Target (29 page)

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!”

“I got caught up with the NSS. And the Janjaweed.”

“The NSS
and
the Janjas? You left the airport.”

“Yeah.”

“This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with some Canadian skank working for the ICC, would it?”

“She spread the word, huh?”

“She didn’t spread the word; mushroom clouds over NGO convoys spread the word! You must have charmed the socks off of her; she is saying she doesn’t even remember what you look like, but the Darfuris are saying some lily-white fuckwad blew up two of their trucks and killed a shitload of Janjaweed. What the hell were you doing?”

“She needed my help.”

“Yeah? Outstanding. But you know what? I need your help, too. I need you to do your goddamned job! Chasin’ tail across the desert when you are supposed to be over here getting ready for the most important SAD/ SOG operation in the past decade is not going to get the shoot on sight rescinded, Six.”

“I wasn’t chasing tail. They were going to kill her.”

“Cry me a fucking river! As a matter of fact, cry me the fucking
Nile
River, because me and the boys almost had to fucking swim the Nile to get over there to pull your ass out of Darfur.”

Court knew the possibility that the CIA would send Whiskey Sierra into Darfur to save Sierra Six had never been on the table. It was a ludicrous assertion. Still, he also knew when it was best to just let Sierra One have his little rant unopposed. Like a forest fire that burns the mountain so thoroughly that no tinder remains to fuel it, Zack’s tirade would extinguish itself in a minute if Court didn’t fight back.

“Look,” said Court, already tired of talking to Zack. “Everything is okay. Sid is sending a plane here to Al Fashir tonight. I’ll be in Suakin by tomorrow evening. I’ll be back on target in time for the op Sunday morning at six thirty. Everything goes ahead as planned.”

“You’d better see that it does, dude. You better get back on target posthaste. There is a hell of a lot riding on this.”

“Yeah, understood. Six out.”

Court kept his eye on the properly functioning GPS computer on his new wristwatch while sitting on the bench in the back of the Antonov. It gave him his position over the land below him, and he had to monitor it constantly to be sure the pilot was doing what he was told.

The plane was an AN-26, a much smaller transport than the one he’d ridden into the Sudan three days earlier. He wondered how many people were on board. He hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone in the cockpit since climbing onto the flight nearly two hours earlier. He’d been waiting at the end of the runway at Al Fashir airport, had spent four hours swatting flies and kicking away little scorpions and dinner-plate-sized camel spiders, lying in a hide provided by one of the broken wings of one of the broken planes that lay like slaughtered birds alongside the runway. He’d planned on waiting inside the cabin of the discarded wreckage but found the interior too hot and stuffy to bear, and he had no doubt there’d be snakes to contend with as well. He was down to his last bottle of water when he climbed the fence to get into the airport that afternoon, had drunk the last sip from it an hour before the Russian plane landed, which turned out to be nearly three hours before the plane took off again.

He’d climbed through the hatch that they’d left open on his orders, relayed through Sid, through the FSB, and then on to the Rosoboronexport crew. When he made his way inside the dim cargo cabin, he found all the gear he’d requested cinched to a mesh bench. It was the same pack he’d had with him on his earlier flight, with a few new items, equipment crucial to the change in his operation necessitated by his three-day visit to Darfur. The crew of the Antonov had not bothered to even come out of the cockpit to check and make sure he’d made it in, that he had everything he needed.

These Russians didn’t give a shit about him or his job. They were probably annoyed about the unusual flight plan they were ordered to fly, were certainly pissed about the unusual maneuver they’d have to execute, and they would no doubt blame him for the FSB heavies getting in their business and telling them how to do their job.

As far as the man in the back of their plane right now, they made it 100 percent clear with the open hatch left unattended and the lack of a welcoming party when he boarded. They didn’t want to know him.

And that worked for a guy like the Gray Man.

He’d spent the first hour of the flight obsessively checking and rechecking all the equipment. He didn’t trust these Russians with his life, so he didn’t trust them to properly check the devices he’d need to keep himself alive and fulfill his objectives of the next forty-eight hours. Once he was satisfied everything was in working order, he sat back down on the bench and tried to relax.

Court’s brain soon drifted off mission. He wanted a pain pill, but he was in no pain. His adrenaline was up, it stayed high when he was about to do this sort of thing, but still, he thought, he worried, he fretted now more than earlier in his career.

He’d once been a well-oiled machine, back with the SAD and before.

Somehow the Canadian woman had gotten inside him. He’d known better than to engage her in conversation, to try to justify himself to her, but there was something about her that got under his skin in ways both positive and negative. He would never admit to respecting her—her line of work and sanctimony he absolutely did not agree with—but he did not meet many real people out here in the black, on the dark side. And even though she was likely some tree-hugging, do-gooding, we-are-the-world-singing, flipper-fucking fool, she was, at least, a fool who went toe to toe with the real dangers of the world.

The aircraft began a steep descent, sending his stomach up into his chest, and Court unlatched the buckle on his seat belt.

Ellen Walsh pushed some of Gentry’s buttons during their day together, and even though this woman was likely right now preparing an indictment and opening an investigation and putting all of her energies into tracking him down and seeing that he was thrown in some cage somewhere, Court couldn’t say that he did not want to see her again.

He shook his head.
Shit man, snap out of it.

The Antonov leveled out quickly, causing Court’s stomach to lurch in the other direction. With a metallic motorized cranking sound, the rear loading hatch opened behind him. Cold night sky appeared out past the red cabin lighting. The whoosh of air was audible, painfully loud even, but barely felt, as the aerodynamics of the craft kept the wind outside the cabin.

Yes, he’d once been a well-oiled machine.

Court stood, fumbled with all the equipment strapped to his body, and began lumbering towards the night.

He was
still
a machine, he told himself, and he believed it. He
knew
it. He was just a machine that needed a bit more oil than in the old days.

The Gray Man gave a quick test pull to the gear on his chest, between his knees, and on his back, walked slowly down the ramp, and tumbled out into the black sky.

The night air was cool here near the east coast of the Sudan; gentle breezes pulled in from the ocean saw to that. This area of the Red Sea Hills, the topographical anomaly to the west of Port Sudan and to the northwest of Suakin, rose one thousand feet out of the Sahel, a rocky brown disfigurement to the otherwise flat landscape.

At half past midnight, no light shone on the hillside save for a sliver of moon, not a single electrical source for a dozen miles in any direction, but these hills were not uninhabited. The Bejas and the Rashaidas lived out here. They tended goats or small farms on the plateaus, traded at the souks in Port Sudan or Suakin, subsistence-farmed where they could, lived off the hard earth, and did their best to stay out of the way of the Arabs, the tribes that had the power and led the government of Sudan.

There was once gold in these hills. Since pharaonic times gold ore had been sought out and mined and transported overland to Alexandria and Cairo. The mining of precious metals in the area had all but dried up, but gypsum and iron ore and limestone were still scratched out of the rock and sent away to places that actually had a need for the raw materials used in constructing cities and buildings.

It certainly wasn’t needed here.

There’d been a war a few years back. Like the war in southern Sudan and the war in Darfur, the eastern minority tribes once tried to throw off the yoke of oppression. They were poorly organized, all but unfunded, and slapped into submission in what had become little more than a footnote after the bigger, badder civil conflicts at the other ends of the large nation.

Now, on a cool, dark, quiet hillside on the eastern edge of a plateau that overlooked the flat coastal plain that ran twenty miles to Port Sudan and then to the waterline itself, there was nothing but rail-thin goats, left unattended during the night by Beja tribesmen. Many of the animals slept standing, a few chewed lazily at tufts of green grass.