On Target

to his saddle. Both used their angry beasts to compress the convoy personnel. Ellen shouldered up to Court, the man she knew as Six.

“Are they here because I told Bianchi who I was?” she asked breathlessly. She was on the verge of tears, as if she already knew the answer.

“I told you not to do that,” Court said flatly. He had something else bothering him at the moment and had no energy to focus on the Canadian woman’s feelings or fears at present.

“I . . . I thought it would get UNAMID forces out here.”

“Uh-huh,” Gentry said, looking down to his watch again. Nervously he glanced at the Janjaweed. They were standing around or sitting high in their saddles, as if waiting for something.

Court was waiting for something, too. But he did not know what would come first. Or which of the two events would prove to be the most calamitous.

Shit.

For the first time he tuned into what Mario Bianchi was saying to the Arab commander. The old Italian hadn’t shut up since he’d gotten out of his truck. He’d been speaking Arabic, but now the one-sided conversation was in French.

“As I say, you can use my phone to contact Commander Ibrahim. He will tell you that I am a friend.”

“You’re friends with these fucks?” Court asked in English.

Bianchi looked around at the American, who was now right behind him on the side of the road. He nodded and said, “I have an arrangement with the Janjaweed in this area.”

“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”

Bianchi ignored the American and turned back to the commander. “So, would you like my phone?”

The Janjaweed commander, impossibly high up on his huge mount, said, “No. I have a phone.”

Bianchi nodded. “Can you please contact Commander Ibra—”

“Commander Ibrahim contacted me.”

Bianchi’s head cocked. “He did? So he told you we could pass, si?”

The commander on the camel simply shook his head, one time, very slowly.

Bianchi’s next words were softer, uncharacteristically unsure.

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to do this.” The commander barked a brief order in Arabic. Quickly a horseman shrouded with a purple turban on a large sorrel gelding moved around and behind the herded scrum of convoy personnel. Court lost sight of him for a moment behind some stationary horsemen, but when the purple-turbaned man reappeared there was a noosed rope in his hand. Deftly he tossed it out underhanded. It dropped heavily over the neck of Mario Bianchi, who was just now turning to the sound of galloping hooves behind him. The horseman looped the other end of the rope around the horn of his saddle, and he cruelly kicked his heels into the sides of his steed. The animal bolted forward, away from the road and towards the rocky desert to the north.

With a shout of surprise, Mario Bianchi was launched forward by the taut rope, yanked to the ground by his neck, and dragged forward. He crashed awkwardly into three or four of his staff, sending men spinning out of the way or knocked like tenpins in a bowling alley. Ellen Walsh screamed as the Italian was dragged off. The horse hooves and the slamming of his thick body against unyielding hard earth crust and jagged stones and dry roots as hard as hickory sticks made violent sounds that only diminished as the man was pulled ten, then twenty, then fifty, then one hundred yards away, to where finally all that could be seen of him in the distance was a dust cloud that hung in the still air.

TWENTY-FIVE

Court looked down at his watch. He began quickly pushing the crowd around him farther off the road, first with nudges and then with shoves.

The Janjaweed commander then shouted something to his dismounted men. It was Sudanese Arabic, but close enough to the Gulf Arabic that Gentry understood.

“Beat them all to death.”

Rifles were raised and turned upside down. The weapons’ butts were then used to viciously slam into the crowd from all directions. A half dozen men hammered into the bodies of nine men and one woman; they went about their cruel business amid shouts and screams and begging pleas from the victims. At the same time those Janjas on horses and camels began shoving the group tighter and tighter together, using the thick animals’ massive bodies to literally crush the pathetic group of defenseless civilians.

Court took a glancing rifle butt in the right shoulder while he was looking in the other direction. It propelled him sideways and knocked him into the haunches of the camel upon which the commander sat. The Janjaweed leader looked down at him with his coal black eyes showing through the folds of his turban. Court winced in pain but again looked down to his watch.

Then he turned to Ellen. She tripped backwards over a felled man and then rolled onto her stomach at Court’s feet. She started to get back up as if to run, but there was nowhere to run to. They were completely encircled by the Arab thugs.

And only Court Gentry knew that the safest place in the world for her right now was right where she was, facedown in the dirt.

He dove onto her, used his body to slam her down and his arms to cover her ears.

Here we go, he thought to himself as he tightened his body.

From the third truck, the vehicle in which Court and Bishara had ridden, there came a muted pop, like a car backfiring through its muffler. It was audible, even above the shouts and the cracking of rifle stocks on thin arms and legs, but it wasn’t one-tenth the volume Court had expected it to be.

Huh? He lifted his head, looked back, had no idea what he’d done wrong. Underperformance had been the absolute least of his worries.

The beatings stopped momentarily as the Janjaweed looked to the vehicle. Even the Speranza Internazionale staff, lying prostrate or fetal on the ground all around Gentry and Walsh, looked around in confusion.

Smoke billowed out of cab windows and through the slits of the sliding lift door at the back of the cargo space. But the roof did not blow off, there was no cacophonic concussion blast, and certainly no shrapnel.

Orders were barked in Arabic, and a pair of men on horses dismounted, passed their reins off to others standing around, and ran over to the truck. Court knew these men had planned on looting cargo. They needed to see why the cargo in one of the trucks was now smoldering.

The Janjaweed leader shouted another command to the rest of his men, and again Court understood.

“Shoot them all.”

The men moved, formed in a single ragged line facing their prostrate victims.

Kalashnikovs were raised, and safety levers were clicked down to the fully automatic setting.

Court stood quickly. One man against dozen, he reached behind his back and under his shirt to grab something hidden there.

And then it happened. For whatever reason, stage one of Gentry’s diversion had been all but a dud.

But stage two?

Stage two was a goddamned masterpiece.

As the men neared the rear of the vehicle there was another loud bang, then the demonic high-pitched scream of a missile launch. The acetylene tank rocketed out of the back, a jet of fire behind it. Almost faster than the eye could pick up its image it smashed in a downward angle through the windshield of truck four and buried itself into the cargo space of the rear vehicle.

The big four-ton truck shuddered on its chassis.

Court spun back towards Walsh, tackled her to the ground once again.

The truck exploded in a flash of fire, eardrums were assaulted with a deafening thunder, brains were slammed around inside skulls with a concussion like a brickbat to the temple. Court felt the flame envelop his body and then dissipate in an instant. The quick burn sucked the oxygen from the air and starved his lungs. He gasped and grunted, inhaled nothing until new air moved in and he could catch a fresh breath.

He fought the pain in his chest and the daze in his head, looked up to see that the concussive battering had