and seeing that he was thrown in some cage somewhere, Court couldn’t say that he did not want to see her again.
He shook his head. Shit man, snap out of it.
The Antonov leveled out quickly, causing Court’s stomach to lurch in the other direction. With a metallic motorized cranking sound, the rear loading hatch opened behind him. Cold night sky appeared out past the red cabin lighting. The whoosh of air was audible, painfully loud even, but barely felt, as the aerodynamics of the craft kept the wind outside the cabin.
Yes, he’d once been a well-oiled machine.
Court stood, fumbled with all the equipment strapped to his body, and began lumbering towards the night.
He was still a machine, he told himself, and he believed it. He knew it. He was just a machine that needed a bit more oil than in the old days.
The Gray Man gave a quick test pull to the gear on his chest, between his knees, and on his back, walked slowly down the ramp, and tumbled out into the black sky.
The night air was cool here near the east coast of the Sudan; gentle breezes pulled in from the ocean saw to that. This area of the Red Sea Hills, the topographical anomaly to the west of Port Sudan and to the northwest of Suakin, rose one thousand feet out of the Sahel, a rocky brown disfigurement to the otherwise flat landscape.
At half past midnight, no light shone on the hillside save for a sliver of moon, not a single electrical source for a dozen miles in any direction, but these hills were not uninhabited. The Bejas and the Rashaidas lived out here. They tended goats or small farms on the plateaus, traded at the souks in Port Sudan or Suakin, subsistence-farmed where they could, lived off the hard earth, and did their best to stay out of the way of the Arabs, the tribes that had the power and led the government of Sudan.
There was once gold in these hills. Since pharaonic times gold ore had been sought out and mined and transported overland to Alexandria and Cairo. The mining of precious metals in the area had all but dried up, but gypsum and iron ore and limestone were still scratched out of the rock and sent away to places that actually had a need for the raw materials used in constructing cities and buildings.
It certainly wasn’t needed here.
There’d been a war a few years back. Like the war in southern Sudan and the war in Darfur, the eastern minority tribes once tried to throw off the yoke of oppression. They were poorly organized, all but unfunded, and slapped into submission in what had become little more than a footnote after the bigger, badder civil conflicts at the other ends of the large nation.
Now, on a cool, dark, quiet hillside on the eastern edge of a plateau that overlooked the flat coastal plain that ran twenty miles to Port Sudan and then to the waterline itself, there was nothing but rail-thin goats, left unattended during the night by Beja tribesmen. Many of the animals slept standing, a few chewed lazily at tufts of green grass.
A gray Sahelian goat bleated loudly. Another followed, and then another. Soon a chorus of goats called out together, and then the tiny herd parted, ran out from the center, leaving an opening on the grassy hillside.
A large brown backpack crashed into the vacated space, bounced, and rolled down the hill, whipping a twenty-five-foot cord behind it.
And two seconds later a man in dark clothing landed on both boots, seemed to find his balance after a short skid, but the parachute above his head deformed and then re-formed in front of him, sucked in the draft down the hill towards the flatlands, and it pulled him off balance. He lost his footing on the hill, pitched forward, yanking and pulling on the leads to the canopy as he tumbled.
Twenty meters down the hill he came to rest. The canopy deflated and was hauled in, the bleating of the goats subsided, and their community re-formed again as if this odd insult had never occurred.
Gentry sat on his butt, hugged the fluttering canopy to his chest, and looked around in the dark.
“Shit,” he said softly to no one, and then he doubled over, leaned on his left elbow, and vomited onto the dry grass.
Once he collected himself, swigged water from a bladder in his pack, spat it out to perfunctorily clean out his