riding to Dirra with them. They will still take you along, as a personal favor to me, if and only if you give Signor Bianchi the pistol.”
“What’s he going to do with it?”
Mario Bianchi spoke for himself. He was still rubbing the back of his neck. He wondered aloud if there was a physical therapist or a chiropractor at his Dirra clinic doing volunteer work today. Then said, “I will throw the gun out in the desert. What were you going to do with a gun?”
Court rolled his eyes. “I might have come up with something.”
“We don’t need guns in our convoy. We aren’t looking for trouble.”
Court eyed the older Italian for a long time. Finally he said, “That’s the funny thing about trouble. Sometimes it comes looking for you.”
Bianchi’s stare was every bit as intense as Gentry’s; it conveyed the same measure of loathing for the man in front of him. “You do not get in one of my trucks with that gun.”
This was a dangerous waste of time, and Court knew it. No other car had passed in the ten minutes they had been in the road with the Speranza Internazionale convoy. If he wanted to get out of here before either brigands, the GOS Army, or the secret police happened by, he was going to have to play along. With an exasperated sigh he drew his weapon. Bianchi reached out for it, but Gentry turned away from him, back towards a shallow dry streambed on the south side of the road. He dropped the magazine from the pistol and thumbed the bullets out onto the ground, kicked them down the indentation. Some fell into the cracks of the dry earth, some remained visible. Then he ejected the round from the chamber and disassembled the weapon, pulling off the slide, popping out the slide spring, the barrel. He threw these items as far as he could in the distance.
Ellen stepped up to him. Her voice was softer; she wanted to put the matter behind them. “Now then. Was that so hard?”
Court looked out at the vast landscape and scratched a fresh sand flea bite on his left wrist.
“I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.”
Ten minutes later Court was in the center seat of the third truck of four in the convoy. He could see little out the windshield ahead save for the dust of the two vehicles in front of them. Ellen was with Mario in the lead vehicle. The Italian had segregated the two, probably, thought Court, so that the geezer could hit on the dust-covered but still attractive Canadian. In the cab with Gentry was Rasid, the white-haired driver, and Bishara, a young loader for SI. Bishara spoke surprisingly good English, even if his geography wasn’t quite as practiced. He asked Court if he was from the same town as David Beckham. Court said no, ignored him mostly, and kept his eyes peeled out the windows. He knew they weren’t free of the NSS just yet. It would be another couple of hours to Dirra, Mario had told them. They should arrive just about midday. Once there, he would get Ellen to safety in the Speranza Internazionale camp for internally displaced people. She would have access to communications there and could arrange some way out of here either via air with a helicopter or overland with an escort of UNAMID troops. Court, on the other hand, planned to hire a car and driver to take him right back to Al Fashir. In the city he would find someone who could sell him a black market mobile phone, and he would call Sid, put as much blame for his missing the Ilyushin flight on the Russian flight crew, the pilot’s canoodling with the girl from the ICC, and he would get Sid to find him some other way out of Al Fashir. If he could do all this in a day and a half, he would still just be able to make it to Suakin in time for the operation there.
He’d be cutting it close as it was, and he just hoped there were no more snags along the way.
Court sipped a bottle of tepid water that Bishara had passed him. He’d checked it carefully before opening it to make sure it was not a refilled container. The two SI Darfuris were listening to awful music on a poorly tuned transistor radio that hung right behind Gentry’s head on the latch to the sliding access