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“Good enough,” he said. Then he flipped on the Jeep’s headlights. “Now hold the wheel steady for me, all right? Very steady, Nick!”
    I climbed back into the shotgun seat, reaching over for the steering wheel as Alan lifted his left foot and yanked off his running shoe. I could just make out the swoosh of the Nike label.
    “I’ll be right back,” he said.
    Right back? Where the hell are you going, doc?
    What are you doing now?
    Don’t leave me, buddy .

Chapter 3
    ALAN DOVE BENEATH the steering wheel, the lug wrench held like a baton in one hand, his running shoe in the other.
    I tried to see what he was doing. Of course, what I should’ve been doing was paying attention to what he asked me to do — hold the wheel steady.
    Oh, shit! Look out! Look out!
    The Jeep suddenly swerved, the two left tires leaping a foot off the ground and nearly flipping us over. I could hear Alan’s head slam against the driver’s-side door as I struggled to straighten the wheel. Ouch!
    “Sorry, Alan!” I shouted. “You okay?”
    “Yeah, but throw me some light down here. I dropped the damn wrench.”
    “Sorry, man.”
    “No, you’re doing fine. Just hold that steering wheel steady!”
    I flipped the flashlight back on for him. The wrench had fallen behind the brake pedal. With his right foot still on the gas, Alan scooped up the tool and shoved it into his shoe. I still had no idea what he was doing.
    Then it hit me.
    Alan was weighing down the gas pedal, wasn’t he?
    Sure enough, as I traded glances between him and the road, I saw Alan replace his foot with his weighted-down shoe. Using the laces like stitches, he looped them around the pedal, quickly tying them tight as he could under the circumstances.
    Just as fast he came back up and yanked the belt from his pants, securing the steering wheel to a steel rod beneath his seat.
    We were officially on cruise control.
    Now what?
    Only I didn’t really need to ask that question and get an answer. I just didn’t want to believe what was happening.
    “Are you ready?” Alan asked. “You better be. We’re out of here!”
    “You’re kidding me!”
    “No, I’m dead serious. You see that boulder up ahead on the right? There’s an embankment right after it,” he said.
    “How do you know that?”
    “I was a Boy Scout, Nick. Always prepared. All we have to do is tuck and roll and they’ll never see us! Trust me.”
    I aimed the flashlight at the speedometer. We were pushing the needle at eighty miles an hour. What’s that, doc? Tuck and roll?
    But there was no time to discuss or argue; that boulderand the embankment were a few seconds away. With another bullet whizzing by us, I took a deep breath and told Alan all he needed to hear.
    “Fuckin’ A, let’s do it!”
    I grabbed my knapsack and turned to grab the roll bar. Ping! went another bullet. And another: Ping! And then dozens of pop s and ping s.
    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