Desert Caravan
By Lane Wallace
January 2008
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The tiny desert strip of Julud is receding below the Caravan's wheels, and I'm beginning to breathe a little easier. With its 2,000-foot elevation, a rough and almost indiscernible dirt runway that changes heading more than 10 degrees in its 750-meter length, a tall ridgeline close in to downwind and a mountain less than a half mile off the end of the strip, Julud is a dodgy place to take off and land, even without 95-degree temperatures and thunderstorm cells bearing down on the field.
We—we being myself and Denny Dyvig, the AIM Air pilot I'm flying this Caravan with—had to navigate around those thunderstorms on the way in, and we could see lightning striking the hills to the east as we hurriedly worked to get our cargo and passengers unloaded. In the civilized world of paved runways and malaria-free accommodations, we might even have entertained the more relaxed notion of waiting it out. But if we don't get off before all that rain reaches us here, it'll be days before the airstrip dries out again. And Julud, Sudan, isn't exactly a place one wants to be stuck.
"Okay, once we start, we're not stopping," Denny cautions as he hustles into his seat, latches his door and clears me to start the engine. We run through an abbreviated checklist and I bump the throttle forward as Denny calls out a litany of taxi directions. "Avoid those clumps of grass, those are soft spots," he warns as we begin to move across the soft vertisol. "Green clumps means there's water there … and watch that, there, that's a thorn bush, don't hit that, it could give us a flat tire." I swerve left and right as best I can while keeping the yoke full aft and trying to guess where the sidelines of the runway lie. They didn't train me for this at FlightSafety.
We reach what seems to be the end of the runway with Denny still calling out progressive instructions. "Okay, now high idle, ignition and standby power on, put the throttle up in the turn," he says as I swing the Caravan around toward the darkening eastern skies, switches on and pushing the throttle forward as I turn. "Good, now watch that rut, stay to the right on the dirt here, keep that power coming up. Let's go!"
Seconds later, the Caravan's wheels break ground and I bank away to the right, steering clear of both the mountain and the thunderstorm. I get the flaps up, trim set and am just beginning to breathe easier when the HF radio crackles to life. The connection is not good—not surprising given that the Nairobi base operator is 1,100 miles and a country away from us. But there is urgency in his voice. After several frustrating back-and-forth transmissions to confirm our location, he says, " … we have a … crackle … situation … crackle, crackle … hos … crackle … need you … crackle, crackle … " The voice breaks up in the background static.
Denny looks at me with a concerned frown on his face. "Did he say ‘hostage?' " he asks. I shake my head, unsure. "I thought he said ‘hospital,' " I answer, "but it could have been ‘hostage.' Or ‘hostile.' What do we do?"
"I'll call him on my satellite phone when we land at Kauda," Denny says. "We'll go from there."
"What if the place he's calling us about IS Kauda?" I ask, tension creeping back into my muscles.
"Don't think so," Denny says. "We were just there an hour ago."
"And they shot eight people near there two months ago."
Denny nods. "I'll call ahead before we land, but I think we're okay."
Thirty minutes and one radio security check later, we're on the ground and refueling in the Muslim town of Kauda, in the Nuba mountain region of central Sudan. From up on the refueling ladder, with workers from the local Samaritan's Purse organization turning the hand-pump on the fuel barrel below me, I watch Denny pacing up and down the airstrip as he talks on his satellite phone. I try to discern our future by watching his body language, but all I can see is focused concentration, and he has that attitude anywhere he flies here. Which is part of the reason I'm willing to fly with him.
Denny was one of the pilots I flew with when I was last in Sudan, six years ago. At that time, we were flying into a certified war zone, running risks that included getting shot down or bombed on the ground. Today, Sudan's civil war is officially over. The northern government and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed a comprehensive peace agreement in 2005 (although it didn't cover the western region of Darfur, which is part of the reason for the trouble there). But as I'm quickly discovering, tribal tensions and violent habits formed over 22 years of conflict and civil war don't disappear just because a piece of paper gets signed.
Denny shuts his phone and walks over to where I'm climbing down from the wing. "Well, turns out it was hospital and hostage," he says. "They've had a kind of mutiny/uprising at a hospital in the village of Akot, south of here. The SPLA (Sudan People's Liberation Army, the official military of Southern Sudan) apparently has it subdued, but they want us to go in tomorrow morning to pick up the hostages."
I nod, help him close up the plane, and climb aboard a muddy Land Cruiser for the bumpy, wet and rutted trail ride into town. But as we jolt and slam our way toward rustic accommodations in a place that—like a Mason-Dixon state in 1865—is still struggling to heal bitter wounds and re-integrate returnees from both sides of a war, it occurs to me, once again, that one should be careful what one wishes for. Because I'm here in Sudan, taking on dust, mud, malaria mosquitoes, primitive sanitation, challenging runways and a potentially dicey hostage rescue in the morning … entirely by choice.
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