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.
But in all his trips along this poor excuse for a road, he’d never run into any English-speaking white Westerners on foot.
What madness.
Mario Bianchi enjoyed an impeccable reputation in the relief agency industry. He’d cultivated this in his forty-year career working all over the African continent. The Italian was known as the man who could get the job done, deftly negotiating not only minefields in the literal sense but also the minefields of street-level diplomacy. No matter who he was working for or where, his convoys got through, his aid camps got built, his clinics got supplied, and his staff got paid. He did this all without discernible trouble from the local heavies. It seemed nothing less than a miracle, considering where he had been and what he had done, but somehow the marauding ADFL rebels of Laurent Kabila passed him by, the RUF maniacs in Sierra Leone did not harass his efforts to evacuate civilians from their territory, even the teenage Liberian gang, the West Side Boys, who essentially slaughtered most anyone they saw just for shits and grins, pretty much let him do his thing in areas where they held control.
He won award after award all over the First World. Hardly a season of any year went by that did not see Mario Bianchi in a tuxedo walking across a floor-lit stage to civilized but energetic applause by the elite, themselves in tuxedos and evening gowns. His successes had piled up over the years before Darfur, and the atrocities of Darfur called to Signor Mario Bianchi the way a flame calls to a moth.