I looked at the bomb craters and their shrapnel blast patterns. Dozens of metres away, rocks and tree trunks were spattered and split from daisy level upwards. I gulped. ‘Say we hear a Sukhoi jet. How many seconds do we have?’ ‘Little time,’ said our rebel guide. ‘Maybe you see them before you hear them.’ ‘So what do we do?’ ‘Take cover in a river bed or a foxhole,’ the rebel said, pointing at the utterly flat, exposed land around us. ‘Tuck your arms beneath your body to protect your limbs,’ said my producer Daniel. ‘No,’ said Ken the fixer. ‘Wrap your arms round your head to protect it.’ My instinct would be ‘run’. I didn’t get to reach 46 as a hack in Africa without being a coward. But the only thing we all agreed on was, ‘Hit the ground.’
After two weeks in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, almost completely surrounded by Khartoum’s military forces, we were racing down the last track held by Sudan People’s Liberation Army guerrilla forces to the outside world. If Khartoum cut the road, and that’s why its planes were bombing it, the rebels said we could walk out. Government forces supposedly wouldn’t stray into the bush. But it would take days. There would be landmines and ambushes. And it would be hot.
We had almost got used to Khartoum’s Antonovs. These circle Nuba’s skies daily like sharks, their propeller-drone the signature tune of this war. Our car was camouflaged with mud. We were forever stopping under trees, when the low throb became audible above the granite hills. When one circled our camp and bombed villages around us, we ducked into foxholes. We all knew they had the accuracy of doodlebugs but each one of us still pictured a 250lb bomb aimed right for our heads.
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