by Ward Larsen
Davis zipped up his bag. Mobilization complete.
CHAPTER FOUR
Six thousand five hundred and fifty miles. That was the direct distance between Washington, D.C., and Khartoum. Davis had covered a lot more.
He noticed the pitch of the engine change as the Qatar Airways A-320 began its final descent into Khartoum International Airport. It was the final leg of an odyssey that would have given Homer pause. Altogether, four flights and two airport lounges, thirty-nine hours since leaving Larry Green’s office. Adding the time zones, two calendar days. But Davis hadn’t wasted the time. Much he’d dedicated to sleep, which was something he had a talent for. In his military days, Davis had spent two weeks in the desert sleeping under a poncho strung between a pair of cacti. He’d snoozed soundly in the crotch of a gumbo-limbo tree during jungle survival training. So a thirty-four-inch pitch seat in coach didn’t bother him one bit, even if it was three inches shy of his own personal pitch.
He looked out the window and saw the city of Khartoum. Every shade of brown ever coined was there—taupe, tan, beige, coffee—all blended and fused, brewed into an angular urban landscape. In these last few minutes above the fray, Davis prepared himself. He mentally reviewed the information Larry Green had presented two mornings ago. It didn’t take long. There had been almost nothing on Imam Rafiq Khoury, enigmatic cleric and head of FBN Aviation. Davis had seen one grainy photo of a slight man with an angular build, his limbs jutting out at awkward angles like he’d been snapped together using some kind of child’s building set. The rest of him had been hidden behind a white turban, bird’s nest beard, and dark glasses. Khoury’s background held an even poorer resolution. He had appeared on the scene less than a year ago—nobody knew from where—to build FBN Aviation from scratch. That was all. Khoury and his company were like a holograph, something that changed its appearance depending on the angle from which it was viewed. Davis was not pleased. He liked to go into an investigation with knowledge, because knowledge begat clout. Ten minutes from now, and five thousand feet down, he was going to have precious little of either.
On final approach, the airplane rocked as it was buffeted by thermal turbulence, the same bumps you got anywhere in the world where the temperature changed by fifty degrees from day to night. The pilot handled it well, though, and brought the jet in to a nice touchdown. Davis appreciated a smooth landing. A gust of wind, turbulence from a departing heavy jet—it didn’t take much to screw one up.
As the airplane taxied to the terminal, it struck Davis that there wasn’t going to be anyone here to meet him. Nobody waving from a balcony or parked in a cell phone waiting lot. He didn’t have a single friend in Khartoum, or for that matter, in all of North Africa. Possibly five hundred miles north, in a command post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Davis might know somebody there, an old Academy classmate or a buddy from flight school. That was the best he could hope for. That was how alone he was.
Jammer Davis got off the airplane five minutes later. It felt like he was stepping into hell.
From the cool cabin of the A-320, the stairs delivered him to a blazing hot tarmac. It was a desert heat, languid air stirred by a choppy breeze. The sun was at its apex, pounding down from the dead center of a faultless blue sky.
Davis fell in with a crowd that was moving slowly toward the terminal, probably dazed by the heat. He was limping slightly from the weekend’s rugby match. He had tried to ignore the injury, but it was undeniable, written in black and blue all over his ankle. The terminal was new, glistening concrete and polished metal shimmering in the sun. Attached to it were two new jetways sagging flaccidly to the ground, clearly broken. That was what happened in places like this. The Transportation Ministry had probably purchased the newest equipment, only to later discover that the airport authority didn’t know how to operate jetways with laser sensors. So the jet bridges were abandoned, left there like a pair of dinosaurs with hangovers, and a fifty-year-old set of rusted stairs was wheeled up to every arriving flight. It served as a reminder to Davis of the world he was entering, a sovereign moshpit of corrupt bureaucrats and tribal strongmen and baseline incompetence.
When he entered the terminal, it felt like he’d stepped into a walk-in cooler. It was the kind of massive carbon footprint only a net exporter of oil could love. He saw too much space, saw too few passengers. The brand-new marble floors were already dirty and scuffed, and stacks of unclaimed luggage sat behind empty check-in counters. Airports were showcase facilities, commissioned by governments, so when this terminal had been designed, the efficient transport of passengers was likely a secondary concern to visual impressiveness. It was only here to upstage whatever was in Addis Ababa or Damascus. Bigger and better.
Davis made his way through customs and took a hard stare from a pair of guards at the exit. He was traveling on his real passport. Larry Green had forwarded an offer from the CIA to provide something else, but that had only struck Davis as a get-into-jail-free card. He retrieved his bag from a conveyor belt that worked, then went outside to find a cab. Davis spotted a sign that said taxi at the far end of the terminal. He started walking.
“Hey mister!”
Davis turned.
“You need taxi?”
Davis saw a smiling man who had probably never seen a dentist in his life. He was pointing to a cab parked on the curb behind him. The car looked a lot like the guy’s teeth, chipped and dinged. The front right fender reminded Davis of a crumpled beer can. But he saw a dozen other cabs coming and going, parked on other curbs, and they all looked the same.
Davis said, “Sure.”
He climbed in and threw his suitcase on the seat beside him. The cab had no meter, and since they were only going to the far side of the airfield, Davis negotiated his price in advance. The driver didn’t haggle, which seemed strange. In Davis’ previous forays to the Middle East, the art of negotiating prices for things like cab rides was a veritable art form.
They got under way, and the driver kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the horn as he weaved through a sea of cars, scooters, donkey carts, and darting pedestrians, all the while keeping up a commentary in choppy English. A tiny fan on the front dash oscillated back and forth, taking the place of an air conditioner. The windows were the old-fashioned kind with crank handles, and all were half open, allowing hot air to wash the interior in thick waves.
“You like our new airport?” the driver asked.
Davis had never seen the old one. He said, “It’s great.”
“You are U.N.? Relief agencies?”
“Yeah, that’s me. I’m the U.N.”
“If you want, I will take you into town while you are here. Our lovely city was designed one century ago by the British Lord Kitchener. The streets, they are very good, very wide. And if you look from above, they make the shape of the Union Jack.”
Davis thought, I can’t imagine why they don’t like Westerners. He said, “How interesting.”
The airport was surrounded by a ring road, and as they swung east to the far side, the bustle of the passenger terminal disappeared. Here Davis saw nothing but desert, although not desert in its purest form, not the massive sand swales of Saudi Arabia or southern Egypt. The earth was dry and cracked, baked into hard layers by a relentless sun. Stunted bushes grasped the rocky soil, their brown and green shades muted as if the pigment had been seared right out of them. The driver turned off the perimeter road and onto a side street. He had gone quiet, which was fine with Davis. The only sounds now came from the car, the low hum of the engine, groans from the undercarriage, and the little fan in front banging back and forth.
But something felt wrong.
Davis had always been blessed with a kind of internal compass. It was a thing he’d never really understood. Maybe it had to do with the way he sensed the sun and the stars, or how he saw the terrain. Maybe he was like a migratory bird or sea turtle, some deep part of his brain registering the earth’s magnetic field. Whatever it was, it was working rig
ht now. They were heading east, away from the airport. Larry Green had shown him satellite photos that covered the whole complex, so Davis knew exactly where FBN Aviation was situated. It wasn’t down this road.
Davis ran through possible explanations. The driver wasn’t running up the meter because there was no meter. He wasn’t padding time or mileage. He wasn’t avoiding rush hour traffic because it was the wrong time of day and the wrong part of the planet. And he wasn’t giving a trial version of his tour. There was nothing to see here. Only sand and dust and waves of heat.
“Is this the right way?” he asked.
The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “There is much construction on the main road. This is only way to get where you are going. We will be there in two, perhaps three minutes.”
Davis hadn’t seen any construction. When the pace of the car slowed, more ideas came and went. The road wasn’t in great shape, a marginal stretch of graded earth and crushed stone. Still, Davis had taken a lot of cabs, in cities all over the world, and they all had one thing in common—the drivers were always in a hurry. Eager to drop off their fare so they could get back to the queue. The car slowed further, no more than ten miles an hour. No faster than Larry Green could run one of his races. The only sound was the soft crush of sand and gravel under rubber, the mechanical gyration of the little fan in front. Back and forth.
Something was definitely wrong.
Davis studied the front dash. In any cab in the states there would have been a license or registration with a picture of the driver. He saw a spot where there had been something, a hardened blob of dried glue on the glove compartment, but whatever had been there was gone. The driver was completely silent now, eyeing him steadily in the rearview mirror. Davis looked outside, scanning ahead. The desert was taking over, thick scrub lining the margins of the road. He sensed the driver’s foot easing further off the accelerator. A hundred feet ahead on the right, Davis spotted a dull black tube extending from behind a large bush. A gun barrel.
There wasn’t time to think. Davis vaulted the seat.
The startled driver yelled something in Arabic, but it was cut off when Davis wheeled an elbow hard into the guy’s head. Davis slid sideways until he was behind the wheel, actually sitting on the driver, his feet planted on the floorboard and pressing like he would on a squat rack in the gym. The stunned driver tried to move but was completely immobilized, frozen by Davis’ weight and the power of his legs. With the steering wheel now in hand, Davis looked for his primary threat—the gun barrel. He saw it fifty feet ahead, attached now to a man wearing a long robe. Another guy appeared on the opposite side of the road with a machete in his hand. That made three.
The driver was crushed beneath him. The man with the machete was holding it out like a pirate ready for a sabre duel. The gunman was craning his neck, trying to see what was going on inside the car. That was Davis’ tactical situation.
The taxi was barely moving now because the dazed driver’s foot could no longer reach the accelerator. Davis changed that. He stomped on the gas and whipped the steering wheel hard right. The car lunged ahead, its spinning wheels spewing dirt and rock. The man holding the gun was suddenly faced with the most important decision of his life. Try to shoot? Or jump aside? He did both, which was like doing neither. He was half a step to his right, with the gun barrel rising through forty-five degrees, when the car hit him. The gun exploded a round into the front grill, and the gunman went sprawling across the hood, hit the windshield with a thump, and rolled off. The gun stayed on the hood.
Davis hit the brakes, glanced left just in time to see the machete coming through the half-open window. He rolled toward the passenger seat, pulling the driver with him as the blade came scything inside. With a thump, it lodged in the driver’s-side headrest and stuck there. An arm was still connected to the handle, struggling to pull the blade free. Davis grabbed it. Once he got a solid arm bar, he reached outside with his free hand, grabbed blindly, and was rewarded with a fistful of hair and part of a turban. He yanked it all in through the half-open window. With his head inside the car and his body outside, the man tried to push away. But he couldn’t, not without losing half his scalp. He released the machete, and when he did, Davis let go of his arm. But not his hair. Davis reached down and cranked the window up, kept going until the guy’s neck was pinned tight with his head inside the cab. Davis gave a vicious twist to break off the window handle and tossed it into the backseat.
He yanked the machete out of the headrest and paused to check the big picture. Three men. Gargling and choking noises on his left from the guy who’d lost his machete and now had his head trapped in a window. To Davis’ right, the driver was still immobilized, stunned. Outside, the man who’d had the rifle was rolling in agony on the dirt shoulder. Davis grabbed the driver by the collar and shoved his head out the passenger-side window, cranked it up and broke off another handle, giving a mirror image of the other side—body in the cab but head jammed outside. He locked the passenger door, brought the machete down to sever the locking knob at its base, then gave the same treatment to the driver’s side. Two down, one to go.
The car was still rolling, so Davis put it in park. He climbed into the backseat, grabbed his bag and, with the machete still in hand, got out. He took a good look at the surrounding desert, but didn’t see anybody aside from the man who was already down. The one who had just shot a taxicab. Davis did see three looted suitcases in the brush, and some clothing and paper scattered in the nearby desert. Which meant that he wasn’t their first victim. He was dealing with bandits, common thieves. The cab was almost certainly stolen. The suitcases in the brush looked like they’d been there a while, so Davis wasn’t going to inquire about the owners. They had either made their police reports or were rotting in the desert. Nothing he could do either way. But it was a vivid welcome. Like the abandoned jetways, another reminder of what he was getting into.
Davis went to the car’s hood and retrieved the gun, which turned out to be a baseline AK. Three minutes later, he had the third man standing outside the cab with his head secured in a rear window. Two outside, one in.
He put the car in gear, and watched as it began to idle ahead down the road. All three men were struggling to get free. The driver with the bad teeth, the one who was mostly inside, was trying to steer with his foot. The pair outside were walking fast to keep the pressure off their bruised windpipes. Trying not to fall and break their necks. The combination of rolling wheels and stumbling feet kicked up a hell of a cloud of dust. The picture reminded Davis of a clown car at the circus. He gave them five minutes like that. Sooner or later, somebody would realize that there was only one way to get out of the predicament—break a window. They’d have to use a fist or an elbow, not an easy thing to do against tempered safety glass on a hot day. The winner of that cranial challenge would rescue the others. Of course, everything would go faster if the guy steering changed direction, if he realized that the thick brush would bring them to a stop. But right now Davis wasn’t seeing thoughtfulness and teamwork. He heard shouting and saw arms flailing—a lot of flailing—so he amended his original estimate. Ten minutes.
Davis studied the gun and wondered what to do with it. It had a carrying strap, so he could sling it over his shoulder. That would be one way to walk into the headquarters of FBN Aviation and start his investigation. He still had the machete too, which would fit nicely under his belt. In the end, Davis decided against it. Now wasn’t the time for that trajectory. Not yet. He ejected the magazine from the gun, cleared the round in the chamber, and tossed everything into the bushes. Far and in different directions. He took a firm grip on the machete, pulled his arm back, and heaved the big blade fifty yards through the air, watched it twirl and spin like some kind of misguided javelin.
Davis then picked up his suitcase, turned toward the airfield, and began to walk.
CHAPTER FIVE
The helicopter, a Russian-made Mi-24 Hind-D, disappeared in a swirl of dust as it s
ettled onto the uneven surface, a patchwork amalgam of broken concrete and sand. The wheels flexed as weight was transferred from rotor blades to earth, and the whine of the engines fell in both frequency and pitch, more and more until everything came still. There was nothing for a time, nothing except the faint crackle of cooling engines and a curtain of dust drifting on the indifferent breeze. The craft was emblazoned with the markings of the Sudanese Air Force, and a small flag bearing five stars was affixed to one cockpit window. Finally, the helicopter’s side door opened, and two men clambered down to the broken earth.
They were an odd pair, the general and the imam. On physical appearance alone, as different as two men could be. The general was a strapping specimen, even if the straps had gone a bit loose—the circumference of his barrel chest was more than matched by that of his gut. He moved with a soldier’s bravura, yet took five strides to reach full swagger. His stiffly pressed uniform was pinned with rows of shining brass, and the breast of his jacket was a veritable billboard of ribbons. The general’s features were typically Nubian, the dark eyes wide-set and humorless. Any remains of his bristly hair had long ago been shaved away, and the ring of ebony skin at the base of his wheel hat gleamed in the midday sun. His shoulders carried the weight of five stars—he had once considered six, but not even Idi Amin Dada had taken things that far—and the general walked in front, as generals tended to do, with the firm purpose of a man in control.
The imam was the general’s somatic counterpoint. He did not so much walk as drift, a long white robe floating on the breeze. His black beard, long and unkempt in the most pious tradition, fell to the top of his chest, and his eyes were obscured by wide wraparound sunglasses. He was small of stature and slightly built, a circumstance aggravated by the general’s bulk. This contrast, a matter of mere chance at the outset of their association, had served both men well in the careful cultivation of their respective images. One commanding, one humble.
