but for cuts and bruises he’d packed nothing. On his belt and in his cargo pants he wore a Glock nine-millimeter pistol, a combat knife, a multi-tool, and a flashlight.
He was covered in a long white thobe, a robe customary in the Sudan.
The flight crew had left him alone. Their higher-ups at Rosoboronexport had ordered them to ferry a man to Khartoum, but that was all they knew.
Gentry had told the crew chief in Russian before takeoff that he was not to be disturbed except for emergencies, so when a member of the five-man cabin crew appeared above him and shouted over the shrill engines, he knew it was time to either be mad or be worried. The man summoned him to the cockpit, and Gentry followed him up the narrow channel alongside the gray wooden cargo crates, which hung from rollers attached to rails on the ceiling that ran down the length of the craft. There were no windows in the cabin; instead, quilted padding and netting and fastened equipment hung from the walls of the fuselage. It reminded the American of another cargo plane he’d been in, four months earlier, over northern Iraq. That flight did not end well for Gentry; his thigh throbbed where the bullet had torn through the muscle, but it ended even less well for the five other men who’d been with him in the cargo hold.
The cockpit of the Ilyushin was expansive; four men fit themselves in the upper-level crew area, and the navigator sat below in the nose among a sea of dials and buttons and computer monitors. The pilot, a redheaded Russian in his forties named Genady, who wore aviator glasses too large for his face and appeared, to Gentry, to be unhealthily thin, beckoned him forward. A young and heavyset flight engineer passed the American a radio headset so he and the pilot could communicate comfortably with each other.
“What is it?” Court asked in Russian.
“Sudanese air traffic control has contacted us. There is a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“We have been diverted. We are no longer going to Khartoum.”
“Where are we going?”
“Al Fashir.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I think perhaps the Sudanese Army must need the guns there in a hurry.”
Court pulled a laminated map off the flight engineer’s table. The man looked up at him but did not protest. “Where the hell is Al Fashir?” asked Gentry as he unfolded the map.
The Russian pilot turned and looked back over his shoulder and answered the question with one word, delivered in a grave tone. “Darfur.” He put his gloved finger on the far edge, completely across the country from where Court’s operation was planned.
Court looked up from the map. “Fuck.”
“It is a problem for you, da?”
“My job is not in Darfur.”
Genady said, “Nothing I can do. I have to divert; I don’t have clearance to land in Khartoum.”
“Shit!” said Gentry now. He tossed the headset back on the console and turned to leave the cockpit, yanking the map out with him.
Five minutes later he was on his Hughes Thuraya satellite phone, talking with Sidorenko. He’d spent the time waiting for the connection to be established looking over the map. “This is not acceptable! How am I supposed to get out of the airport at Al Fashir, cross a hundred miles of bandit-covered desert, plus another three hundred miles of Sudanese territory? I’ve got the fucking Nile River now between myself and my objective.”
“Yes, Gray, I understand. It is a problem. You must let me think.”
“I don’t have time for you to think! I need you to get this flight back on track!”
“But that is not possible. My influence is with Moscow, not Khartoum. You will have to land where the Sudanese instruct you to land.”
“If you can’t fix this, then this operation is dead, you got that?” In fact, Court was concerned about Zack’s op, Nocturne Sapphire, and not Sid’s contract, but he did not mention this.
“I will do my best.” Sid hung up, and Court continued pacing the narrow alley between the wall of the fuselage and the crates of guns.
This snafu was of the “shit happens” variety. It was no one’s fault, but Court knew from much experience that no blame need be assigned to an operation for it to fail completely and miserably.
To Sidorenko’s credit, he called back much quicker than Gentry had anticipated.
“Mr. Gray, we have a solution. You must fly out again with the plane after it off-loads in Al Fashir. Return to the air base in Belarus. There