Mark Greaney - On target

And what they were trying to hide.

He had this uncomfortable and unshakable sense that this woman sleeping three feet from him in the hot car, separated only by the backrests of the front seats, had somehow peered deep inside of him and knew his history, his past, his demons that he'd even managed to hide from himself.

It was a sickening feeling, a feeling of exposure, of vulnerability. And yet, at the same time, it gave him an affinity for this woman, made him feel close to her somehow, gave him a sensation to which he was wholly unaccustomed.

Court looked at her a long time. He watched her chest move up and down with the slow breaths of slumber.

Then he turned away from her suddenly and sat up straight in the backseat.

Unfuck yourself, Court! Unfuck yourself this instant! He screamed it at himself internally. You are shit deep in Indian country. Get your damn head in the game! Instantly he disliked this woman; she was a threat to him now, a weakness that could kill him.

He could flip a switch in his brain like that. It kept him alone, no question, but it also kept him alive.

Court climbed out of the car, no attempt to do it quietly so that Ellen would not wake. Her beauty rest was not his goddamned problem. He crawled out of the brush hiding the sedan, stood in the gully, then he ripped off the local tunic that he'd taken from the rickshaw driver the evening before, revealing his brown undershirt.

He pulled the gun he'd taken from the NSS commander the evening before, looked it over carefully in the morning light. It was a Bul Cherokee. He found it somewhat ironic that an Arabic-speaking secret policemen should be carrying an Israeli pistol, maybe more ironic that the gun had been used to kill him. It wasn't in Court's top-ten pistol choices, but it sure as shit had done the job on the two NSS goons last night.

He scrambled out of the gully, looked out to the road a quarter mile distant, past dry scrubland, windblown and sand-strewn. He saw no cars on the road. It ran flat and straight to the west, but to the east, back towards Al Fashir, the highway turned into a winding track and disappeared down a gentle slope.

The landscape wasn't barren in the strictest sense. This wasn't a Sahara-like desert of sand dunes; there were sporadic tufts of trees, acacia and baobab, and on-again, off-again grasses and shrubs as far as the eye could see atop the brown earthen crust, a surface that looked as hard as stone and somehow even less inviting.

He heard her climb out of the car below and behind him. It took her a minute to get her bearings and find him there on the crest of the gulley. Wordlessly she appeared next to him, closer than he would have liked, and followed his gaze out on the vast expanse to the east.

"Don't suppose you spy a Waffle House that I'm missing out there in the distance."

Court shook his head.

"Did you get some rest?"

"A little."

"I had some hellacious dreams. But I feel okay. Thanks for talking to me last night."

Court said nothing.

"I got the impression you don't do a lot of that. That you were chatting to help me relax."

Still nothing.

"Anyway… I appreciate it."

Court just kept looking out at the vast expanse of land in front of him, willing her to take a couple of steps back.

He was scanning the road, searching for vehicles in the hazy distance.

"Did someone get up on the wrong side of the stolen car this morning?"

He realized he was being an ass, was turning his anger at his openness last night into poor manners today. He felt even more childish now than when he woke up. He softened, turned towards her, but did not make eye contact. "I'm fine. Just thinking about today."

"Where are we, exactly? Do we even know?"

"We're about twenty-five klicks from the outskirts of Al Fashir. That's really all I can tell you."

"Where are we going?"

Court looked past Ellen's shoulder and saw it in the distance. A hazy, smoky apparition on the false horizon a few miles to the west. It rose from the desert track, what passed for a road out here in the Darfuri landscape, and from the size of the dust cloud he knew it was some sort of a convoy of large trucks. It took a while to be sure, but after a time he recognized the white paint on the vehicles. They were not government of Sudan; they were not private cargo transports. No, they belonged to some sort of nongovernmental relief organization.

He pointed to the dust rising in the distance. "We're going where they are going."

Ellen and Court moved quickly together down towards the road. The Canadian woman began running her fingers through her hair, trying to fix herself up a bit. Gentry looked at her with confusion.

"It never hurts to make a good first impression." She said it with a smile, continuing to do what she could to knock dust off her clothes now. "I'd ask you if you had a mirror, but I imagine I'd have better luck finding that Waffle House."

Court was fascinated by the odd behavior of womanhood.

"Listen," Ellen said to him. He could tell before she spoke again that she was a little uncomfortable. "Would it be okay if you stood back, maybe behind one of those little trees or something, while I get them to stop for us? I don't want to scare off what might be our one chance."

Court didn't mind at all. He was a scruffy-looking white man, out here, with a big pistol poorly tucked into his pants. He assumed the convoy would have a contingent of UNAMID soldiers, African Union troops loaned to the United Nations, and he had no doubt they would stop the convoy for a pretty white woman by the side of the road. Court would be perceived as a threat, and from what he'd learned about the UNAMID's reticence to fight anybody around here, he didn't want to run the risk of scaring them off. "Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Don't fuck it up, though. Lie down in the road in front of those trucks if you have to, but make sure they stop. And don't tell them you're with the ICC and were involved in the fracas with the secret police. These NGOs aren't looking to get involved in that kind of trouble. Tell them-"

"How 'bout I tell them I'm a reporter and you're my photographer? We got lost in Al Fashir looking for our hotel and then got robbed, taken out here, and dumped alongside the road."

Court was ready to nix her idea for one of his own, but he stopped himself, thought about it, and realized her story was actually pretty good.

Doing his best to mask how impressed he was, he said, "That might work. Let's go with that."

Gentry moved off the road, down a small draw and into some scrub brush. Ellen Walsh walked up the road fifty meters to create some more distance.

Ten minutes later, sixty-one-year-old Mario Bianchi followed the Canadian woman along the sandy dirt road, back down the row of trucks towards her colleague, an American photographer, or so she had just informed him. Fat flies half the size of one euro coins dive-bombed his face. He pulled off his safari hat and shooed them away, but it was a losing battle he soon gave up. It was going to be a hot one today, already at nine a.m. it was nearing thirty-seven degrees. He'd wanted to get his convoy up to Dirra by noon; they'd been running late, even before this surprising event he'd just stumbled onto.

Mario had thought he'd seen everything on the road from Al Fashir to Dirra. Hell, he'd made this 125-kilometer trip well over a hundred times in the past eight years working for, and then running, the Rome-based aid agency Speranza Internazionale. Bianchi shuttled personnel and supplies from all over Europe to the SI-run camps just this side of Dirra, and he had become well accustomed to the heat, the smell, the bugs, the animals, and the dangers of this route.

He'd encountered drunken rebels, highway robbers, government of Sudan military patrols, African Union "peacekeepers," and, of course, the dreaded Janjaweed militia.