Court kept his eye on the properly functioning GPS computer on his new wristwatch while sitting on the bench in the back of the Antonov. It gave him his position over the land below him, and he had to monitor it constantly to be sure the pilot was doing what he was told.
The plane was an AN-26, a much smaller transport than the one he’d ridden into the Sudan three days earlier. He wondered how many people were on board. He hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone in the cockpit since climbing onto the flight nearly two hours earlier. He’d been waiting at the end of the runway at Al Fashir airport, had spent four hours swatting flies and kicking away little scorpions and dinner-plate-sized camel spiders, lying in a hide provided by one of the broken wings of one of the broken planes that lay like slaughtered birds alongside the runway. He’d planned on waiting inside the cabin of the discarded wreckage but found the interior too hot and stuffy to bear, and he had no doubt there’d be snakes to contend with as well. He was down to his last bottle of water when he climbed the fence to get into the airport that afternoon, had drunk the last sip from it an hour before the Russian plane landed, which turned out to be nearly three hours before the plane took off again.
He’d climbed through the hatch that they’d left open on his orders, relayed through Sid, through the FSB, and then on to the Rosoboronexport crew. When he made his way inside the dim cargo cabin, he found all the gear he’d requested cinched to a mesh bench. It was the same pack he’d had with him on his earlier flight, with a few new items, equipment crucial to the change in his operation necessitated by his three-day visit to Darfur. The crew of the Antonov had not bothered to even come out of the cockpit to check and make sure he’d made it in, that he had everything he needed.
These Russians didn’t give a shit about him or his job. They were probably annoyed about the unusual flight plan they were ordered to fly, were certainly pissed about the unusual maneuver they’d have to execute, and they would no doubt blame him for the FSB heavies getting in their business and telling them how to do their job.
As far as the man in the back of their plane right now, they made it 100 percent clear with the open hatch left unattended and the lack of a welcoming party when he boarded. They didn’t want to know him.
And that worked for a guy like the Gray Man.
He’d spent the first hour of the flight obsessively checking and rechecking all the equipment. He didn’t trust these Russians with his life, so he didn’t trust them to properly check the devices he’d need to keep himself alive and fulfill his objectives of the next forty-eight hours. Once he was satisfied everything was in working order, he sat back down on the bench and tried to relax.
Court’s brain soon drifted off mission. He wanted a pain pill, but he was in no pain. His adrenaline was up, it stayed high when he was about to do this sort of thing, but still, he thought, he worried, he fretted now more than earlier in his career.
He’d once been a well-oiled machine, back with the SAD and before.
Somehow the Canadian woman had gotten inside him. He’d known better than to engage her in conversation, to try to justify himself to her, but there was something about her that got under his skin in ways both positive and negative. He would never admit to respecting her—her line of work and sanctimony he absolutely did not agree with—but he did not meet many real people out here in the black, on the dark side. And even though she was likely some tree-hugging, do-gooding, we-are-the-world-singing, flipper-fucking fool, she was, at least, a fool who went toe to toe with the real dangers of the world.
The aircraft began a steep descent, sending his stomach up into his chest, and Court unlatched the buckle on his seat belt.
Ellen Walsh pushed some of Gentry’s buttons during their day together, and even though this woman was likely right now preparing an indictment and opening an investigation and putting all of her energies into tracking him down