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.”
“Touche,” 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
“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, “
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.
