Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

‘Someone meeting you?’ the escort asked.

‘I think so.’

She wondered for the hundredth time if the absence of organisation was normal for the Medical Action Group, or if it was a reflection of the disorder in her own life. The first choice for the mission, someone who had made a name for himself when he rescued members of a vulnerable ethnic group from a hospital in Nouakchott at the height of the Senegal-Mauritania conflict, had withdrawn because of a debilitating toothache. He’d kept quiet about the problem as he was determined to come, but two days before the flight he’d acknowledged that he wasn’t fit to travel. When the Medical Action Group put out a last-minute call for a volunteer Terry had agreed to come. Her lack of preparation preoccupied her now. She had no idea where her lift was coming from.

‘Go to Movement Control.’ The escort pointed to a door behind a long line of sandbags. Then he saluted and began walking back to the Transall. The plane would unload and turn around inside fifteen minutes.

Terry had imagined the bond of flying through dangerous skies might endure beyond the short walk to the terminal, but found herself alone.

‘What do you want?’ a blue-helmeted soldier asked when she entered the Movement Control Office. The man stood behind a low table looking through a sheaf of photocopied forms.

‘I’m going into the city.’

‘Yes?’

‘Someone is to meet me here.’

He looked up slowly, his expression unfriendly. She saw from his epaulettes that he was from Argentina.

‘You can wait half an hour. If no one comes to collect you we’ll ship you back. Wait outside please. This office is for UN personnel.’

Terry experienced a moment of panic. She had anticipated difficulty and danger, but not the possibility of being thrown out of the country before she’d even made it into the city.

He looked at his notes again. ‘Is there a telephone I can use?’ she asked.

‘The phones are down.’ He concentrated on his forms.

‘Your transport not here?’ said a man standing nearby. He had an intelligent face and a crewcut that made him look like a soldier or a monk.

‘I’m not sure. Where would they wait for me?’

‘Here, I guess. You made arrangements?’ His accent was American.

‘Sort of.’

‘We’re going into town,’ he said. ‘If you want a ride, you can come with us. We’re leaving now.’

Someone might be on their way to pick her up. What if they came and she’d already gone?

On the other hand she didn’t want to be sent back on the next plane.

‘Suit yourself,’ the man said, and he began to move away.

‘OK, I’ll come.’ She spoke to the back of his closely shaven head. He didn’t look round as he walked out. Terry glanced at the Argentinian, but he was pretending she wasn’t there.

Outside she hurried past the sandbags.

‘The truck’s round here,’ he said, taking a sharp right when they left the Movement Control Office. ‘You got any luggage?’

She showed him her holdall.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘We have to run.’

As they left the shelter of the terminal he began to sprint across a muddy piece of ground towards a sandbagged position fifty yards away. He didn’t stop running until he’d reached the emplacement. Terry kept as close behind him as she could. In the distance she heard the sound of machinery. She didn’t know which direction she should expect bullets to come from. Her chest tightened – from the exertion of running or from a sudden overwhelming adrenalin spike she couldn’t tell. Her holdall swung clumsily in the cold air.

They passed the sandbags, built into a small hut with blue-helmeted soldiers peering at them from inside through slits that served as windows. Then Terry’s companion began to run again. She could see a blue Land Rover twenty yards away. It stood by itself behind a long, low warehouse.

‘This is it,’ he said affably when they reached the van.

The door opened from the inside.

A girl looked down at Terry. ‘Jump in,’ she said.

Terry squeezed onto the edge of the high seat, swung the heavy door closed and introduced herself.

‘I’m Anna,’ the girl said. Her face, framed by an effusion of black ringlets, was preoccupied.

Three people were crushed into a driving cabin designed for two. Terry clutched her holdall in front of her against the dashboard as Anna wriggled beside her to find a more comfortable position.

‘I’m Brad,’ the driver added absently. He switched the key in the ignition.

‘Have you got your card?’ Brad asked Terry.

‘My card?’

‘Your press accreditation.’

‘I’m not a reporter. I’m a doctor.’

‘Shit,’ he said. He switched off the engine. ‘Do you have a UN card?’

With difficulty she fished her wallet out from the holdall. Inside was a collection of identity cards. She took out the one from the Medical Action Group, with her smiling photo emblazoned across the laminated top.

‘How did you get on a plane?’ Anna asked.

‘I had this.’ Terry showed them a letter from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva authorising her to take a UN flight.

Brad started the engine again. ‘Let’s hope they’re not being thorough this morning,’ he muttered.

The Land Rover moved onto a track leading to a tarmac road. A white armoured personnel carrier blocked the entrance to the road.

‘Hold it up,’ Brad told Terry, nodding towards her card. ‘They might not notice that it isn’t from the UN.’ She followed their example and raised her card in front of the windscreen. She could make out the head and shoulders of a soldier inside the APC leaning forward to see them better.

‘If he comes out, I hope you can speak French,’ Brad told Terry.

‘He won’t come out,’ Anna said. ‘There’s been shooting today. They never come out when there’s been shooting.’

She was right. No one emerged to inspect their credentials. The APC slid back and let them pass.

The Land Rover climbed onto the road, Brad crouching over the wheel.

‘When we reach the bridge we enter government territory,’ Anna said. ‘There won’t be any shooting till the second checkpoint.’ She glanced at Terry.

Ahead, Terry saw another white APC across the road. ‘French,’ Anna explained nodding towards the APC. ‘Foreign Legion.’

Terry started getting to grips with her fear, and her thoughts, careering wildly, reverted to her boorish behaviour with the logistics officers.

‘Is it far to the centre of town?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

‘If we get to Sniper Alley with no problems it’s fifteen minutes to the Holiday Inn,’ Brad said. He glanced at Terry. ‘That’s our base. It’s in the middle of town.’

‘Why are you here?’ Anna asked.

‘I’ve come to evacuate a little boy. He needs urgent treatment in London.’

The Land Rover stopped in front of the French APC and they waved their cards at the window again. The APC reversed, leaving just enough room for them to pass.

A kingdom of laminated cards.

‘This is the scary bit,’ Anna said. ‘There may be small-arms fire from the other side of the airstrip.’

Terry kept her eyes fixed forward. Ahead there was a fork in the road. Brad drove the Land Rover round a flimsy plywood barricade and onto the left fork. They moved out of the cover of some trees past a disabled tank stuck in a ditch, its cannon pointing towards the sky, and began to move between burned, roofless buildings. There was a small cemetery on one side, gravestones higgledy-piggledy. As they passed the cemetery, approaching a flyover, two bullets hit the side of the Land Rover. A pair of loud cracks.