Gnashing my teeth to build my nerve, I could taste the swirling dirt deep in my mouth. In my four years at North-western as a journalism major, not once did I take a class called Tuck and Roll. Wish I had. Would have been much more useful than some of the things I learned about grammar and ethics.
Geronimo!
I jumped into the darkness, then slammed into the soil. Only it didn’t feel like soil. It felt like concrete, the pain shooting through my body like an exploding bomb.
I wanted to scream. Don’t scream, Nick! They’ll hear you!
So much for my tucking skills. As for the rolling, I immediately had that down pat – as in, down and down and down the embankment. When I finally stopped, dizzy to the point of vomiting, I turned and looked up.
Continuing in hot pursuit of our Jeep was another Jeep of trigger-happy Janjaweed, surely thinking that they were closer than ever to killing a couple of troublemaking Americans. They’d catch on soon enough – maybe another mile or two – but by then Alan and I would be like two needles in a haystack in the dead of night. They’d never find us. At least I hoped that was the case.
“You okay?” came Alan’s voice. He was maybe ten feet away from me.
“Yeah,” I said. “You?” “Never better, man.”
I saw a familiar glow coming from Alan’s hand. It was an iridium satellite phone. I had the same one somewhere on me.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Domino’s Pizza,” he joked. “You like pepperoni?”
I laughed. Never did a laugh feel so good.
“No, I’m calling for backup,” he said. “It’s time you and I got the hell out of Dodge. A dead surgeon and reporter won’t do much for world peace and all that good stuff we care so much about, huh, Nick?”
BRUISED, BATTERED, BANGED UP – but most important, alive – Alan and I were airlifted at daybreak by a UN World Food Programme plane to Khartoum. The good doctor decided he’d stay a few more days there in the Sudanese capital to help out at another hospital. What a guy – and I sincerely mean that.