where Gennady had slapped her, and her rust-colored blouse was torn at the shoulder from the soldiers’ rough treatment.
He spoke to her softly, quickly, so the NSS would not pick up all of it. “Listen carefully. Don’t fight with them, but be firm. Demand to speak to someone from UNAMID. Don’t say anything else. You are not in the ICC. You saw nothing. You know nothing.” Gentry looked down at the floor. Not up at her eyes. “You’ll be okay.” He turned away and headed back out the door slowly. “You’ll be fine.”
“Who are you?” she called out to him.
He slowed but did not turn back and look at her. “Nobody.”
Gentry and the rest of the Ilyushin’s crew walked together across the darkened tarmac towards the huge aircraft.
Court was mad and worried, and he felt like shit about the Canadian woman. His shoulders sagged as he walked in the rear of the group, his head slumped down. He tried to tell himself that her outburst condemned her, and that was her fault, not his, and he could not do anything about it.
He’d told her she’d be fine, but from pretty much everything he could see and guess about the situation, he was certain she would be killed. It would be just too easy to make her disappear right here and now, and too damaging to let her walk away to reveal what she knew. Court also knew that if he could come to this conclusion, it made absolutely no sense for the NSS or the GOS to come to any other conclusion.
Miss Ellen Walsh was dead.
“Your fault, Gentry.” He said it aloud, softly, as he walked through the night with the flight crew.
They were still a couple hundred yards from the aircraft. Court began to slow. He looked up and saw the others were ahead of him by several yards now. He slowed some more. Then his slumped shoulders raised and stiffened. He looked up from his sulk and said, “Gennady. Don’t leave me.”
The pilot turned, continued walking backwards. “What? Leave you where?”
“Just wait for me. I have to—”
“We are going now. Fifteen minutes for preflight, and then we are in the air. I don’t know what you are talking about, but I’m not waiting for you. Come on.”
Court stood firm in the dark; insects chirped and buzzed and trilled and clicked in the scrub around him. He looked back over his shoulder towards the dark terminal. A black four-door sedan pulled up to the employee access door.
“Dammit!” he shouted into the night.
“Let’s go!” barked Gennady, angrier this time.
Court looked ahead at the aircraft still two hundred yards ahead. He thought about his fifty pounds of gear. He wished he had some of it with him now.
Gennady asked, “What is the matter with—”
Court interrupted him. He pointed a threatening finger in his face. “Don’t leave me! I’ll be right back. Do not take off until I get back!” He knew if he invoked the name of Gregor Sidorenko this pilot would do exactly as he said, but he was not about to violate operational security to that level just yet. Instead he just threw out a “Please!” He did not wait for a response. Instead, he turned on his heel and began running back to the terminal. “Dammit!”
NINETEEN
The Gray Man had sprinted one hundred yards through the warm night, with no real plan other than to find the woman and to figure out some way he might help her. He wasn’t going to pick a fight with an airport full of secret police and soldiers, so he didn’t have any real idea where he was going with this impetuous charge, but he’d been around long enough to put some confidence in his powers of improvisation. Ahead he saw the bright shaft of artificial light from the opening of the terminal’s employee access door. The two NSS men appeared in the beam, and behind them, two armed GOS army sergeants pushed Ellen Walsh forward and into the back of the four-door sedan. The soldiers climbed in on either side of her, and the NSS men got in the front. The vehicle pulled away, in the opposite direction of Gentry’s run, just as he arrived at the terminal’s side entrance. He knew they were heading to the exit of the airport, taking the woman away.
And he knew where they were going.
The NSS detention facility in Al Fashir.
The Ghost House.
“Dammit!” he shouted again as he stopped running. Two airport guards eyed him from