The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [68]
The Cadillac is not designed for this kind of travel. It overheated several times and twice got stuck in the sand when the wheels slid off the harder surface of the dirt road. It is obvious that we are going to have to have a second vehicle, a Land Rover or a Jeep, if we are going to make it to El Fasher. Kalash agrees and tells us that we’ll have no trouble buying what we need in Port Sudan. If we live, we’ll arrive there tomorrow morning. I’ve no doubt that Kalash can accomplish anything in Sudan. When we arrived at the frontier, he stopped the car, spoke one sentence in Arabic, received a smart salute from the guard, and drove right on through. “Now, Miernik, you can stop worrying about clerks and passports,” Kalash said. “In Sudan, my name is your passport.”
We camped last night by the sea on a cliff a few miles above the town of Dunqunab. Kalash chose the spot carefully. It is, he says, exactly opposite Mecca across the Red Sea. He prayed for quite a long time at sunset and sunrise, facing in the holy direction, while the rest of us shuffled around in embarrassment. There is something incongruous about Kalash, of all people, prostrating himself and banging his head on the ground. But his religiousness is obviously genuine, while it lasts. As soon as he says his final “amen” and slaps the dirt off his robes he is the Kalash we have always known and loved: bitter tongue, sardonic eye, stiff pecker. “I have gone forty-eight full hours without a woman,” he told me tonight as he turned away from Mecca; “we really must do something about this monastic arrangement of tents.” Kalash has only one tone of voice: distinct. His words were clearly audible to the girls; Ilona flashed a joyful smile at Zofia. It was not returned.
While the girls made supper, Kalash and Collins opened the secret compartment of the Cadillac and extracted an armload of weapons: three Sten guns and a couple of German automatics. The two of them bought these firearms in Cairo. Kalash thinks we may need them when we get into bandit country. While Kalash and Collins sat at the camp table, loading clips from a pile of cartridges, Miernik pulled me aside. “Paul, you must protest! We must get rid of these guns. We were not consulted about this at all. It’s dangerous merely to carry these things! Suppose we are stopped by the police?” I told him I didn’t think the Sudanese police would present much of a problem to Kalash. Moreover, if there were bandits along the route, we’d need something to scare them off with. “Bandits? Bandits? Nigel spoke of bandits, but I thought it was a joke,” said Miernik. “I cannot take Zofia where there are bandits.” He was in a state of great agitation, and even now, when I have all but concluded that he is straight from the KGB, I feel a little sorry for him. Even if he’s acting all the time, letting his emotions crawl all over the surface of his skin must be bad for his nerves. Dealing with him is certainly bad for mine.
Finally he consented to shoot at a target with the rest of us. Collins turned out to be competent with the submachine gun and the pistol: he shoots fast, without sighting, a pretty certain sign that he’s had training. Kalash is not too bad for an amateur. I shot as awkwardly as I could, still building cover. (Collins grinned at me, absolutely sure that I was faking it.) Collins had been goading Miernik all through the shooting, apologizing for the noise, telling him to stand well back, warning