Janjaweed raiding party. So he did what he could to get next to her. She was close to Bianchi, who was standing below the leader of the Janjas. Court scooted behind the Italian. It wasn’t hard with the Janjas shuffling everyone into this tight knot by the side of the road. They were fifty feet or so from truck three, Court’s quickly fabricated diversionary device. He did his best to lead the SI staff a few feet farther away, but the Janjas just kept herding them back. Everyone was in a tight circle; he could literally smell the apprehension in this constricted gaggle of humanity standing together in the dirt. All eyes were on the Janjaweed commander high up on his camel, and another man on horseback with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped 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.