A light transporter plane came moaning through the haze that afternoon, putting up what little dust was yielded from the rock-ground as it landed away from us. As it idled back towards the cabins, I saw sacks held in netting through its open side-doors, their blue roundels confirming that they were from the same source as ours. We had long unloaded, but I glanced over in the direction of the vehicle compound, where our truck would have been. I knew that this could be the start of a narrative of consequences for stealing a supply truck.
But the UN gofer who clambered out showed no interest in the bureaucracy of supply chains. Adrian stood in the sun, convincingly playing an old hand at Rumbek, and debriefed the pilot. This was one of three tiny planeloads that made it out of Lokichogio and had been allowed to continue from Juba. The Sudanese were closing the airstrips again, the latest step in its programme of controlled starvation clearly completed. The rest of the shipments we’d last seen at the Ugandan border would be laboriously distributed by road through south-western Sudan. They were further away than ever now.
As I heard the story and watched the sanguine acceptance of it on the part of the station staff, inured to chaotic disappointments and to whom one small shipment was just what it was, a kind of manna from heaven, I could picture Jimmy with the officials of Loki airbase, hands on hips, mirrored aviators reflecting his resignation to the business of famine administration.
And I knew that we, Adrian and I, were affirmed and vindicated in our piracy. I was glad, of course, for some bodies had been fed that would otherwise have disappeared. Some bags of food had already started their slow, determined journeys back to villages. I knew the horrors of under-supply: too little and we were only delaying, not interrupting, the processes of starvation. Some say the cruelty of that is ugly, but I don’t buy that. Perhaps a very few would live who would have died but for our truck. Maybe our one load had made a difference. We could never know for sure.
But, God help me, I was glad for another reason that had nothing to do with famine. I’d proved that little jerk Jimmy wrong – a truck convoy had been the way to go. I wanted to seek him out and spit in his face. We’d only got one stolen truck through, a grandiose, token gesture that probably achieved nothing in the overall scheme of things, but I knew Jimmy’s wrong call had let people die. And I realised I was pleased that we’d brought our truck here and he’d taken his to Lokichogio. It felt good, almost as good as arriving with a full convoy.
I went to find Miriam, whom I knew would be signing off paperwork for the plane in the office cabin, where Adrian and I had arrived the previous day. It seemed longer ago. I wanted to ask her what best we could do for her back in London, more for moral support than practicality.
She was alone when I got there, leaning back against the desk and rubbing the heels of her hands up her pale cheeks, pushing the crinkled skin around her lower lashes up and over her green eyes. When her hands reached her forehead and flattened back over her hair, I saw she’d been crying and her top teeth emerged to bite her bottom lip hard.
I made no move towards her, but didn’t look away.
“I’m sorry. It doesn’t often happen,” she said. “I’m just so bloody tired.”
“I know,” I said and just stood there for a moment, a small act of solidarity, I suppose. “I’m sorry too.”
I tried to think of something else to say.
“Thanks for not grassing us up,” I said eventually.
She smiled briefly and I left the room.
We hitched a lift on the plane. It was returning to Juba to refuel, then north to Khartoum, where some of the distribution of aircraft was being centralised, depending on which strips were being opened and closed. The whole pretence was about “security”, but really it was just about further government control of supplies.
Before we left, Adrian disabled the truck, on a pretext of servicing it. He just disconnected the fuel lead or something. It would be easily fixed by anyone reclaiming the truck, but meanwhile would prevent any of the more able-bodied, or ambitious militia, using it to get out to remote villages. We couldn’t take the risk of what might be done with a lorry that must have been reported as stolen. Besides, rogue transport is dangerous in a famine – Sudanese tribes have a touching but self-destructive culture of sharing all they have. Some of the food that had been walked back might last a month, but less than a week if a truckload of extra people turned up.
Back in Khartoum, I felt weird, like I was watching myself in a performance. I felt like I occupied a bubble, like no one else could see me. Adrian and I evidently looked like a proper item, as they say. We scrubbed up at a foreign correspondents’ club, trying not to show our passes, though no one seemed to know anything of stolen trucks, and we were fed vegetable pie and potatoes. We got some cash at the embassy and went out into the cooling evening air. Sharia still held its grip on Khartoum, so there was little for Westerners with a post-zone thirst to do in the dusk, but we walked around the top of the airport, watching the lights of planes coming in from the north against a salmon sky and headed towards a cafe near the British Council,
