The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [76]
Q. Let’s talk about Sunday night.
A. Yes. Well, it had been a serene day. We camped somewhere near El Obeid. Kalash had led us off the main road. He wanted to show Nigel the place where the army of the Mahdi had wiped out the English and the Egyptians seventy-five years ago. Kashgil was the name of the place where the battle took place. Kalash told us where the armies had been and described the massacre in great detail. He knew exactly how many rifles and cannon had been captured, how many foreigners had been killed. He was amusing. “On this spot an English officer, a rather fat one with an angry red face, Nigel, charged into a group of native horsemen, waving his sword and shouting insults. He was killed more quickly than the others because we rather admired his bravery.” Nigel was not amused. These English don’t much like the memory of defeat, especially when they lost to natives. Paul stood by smiling; he always found Kalash delightful.
We camped not far away, between some hills. There was a big moon; for the whole trip we had wonderful moonlight. There was no reason to expect what happened. We went to bed as usual about nine o’clock. Ilona always stripped completely before going to sleep, and hung her clothes on the rope of the tent. We perspired a great deal during the day, of course, and the night air took away some of the odor. I wore an American T-shirt Paul had given me as a nightgown. But Ilona slept naked. She was a restless sleeper, turning and muttering all night. Since we had left civilization, Kalash had made us sleep with the guns. He and Tadeusz and Paul had the sub-machine guns, Nigel a pistol. Ilona and I had a pistol, too, hanging on a hook from the ridgepole of the tent.
I was asleep when the noise started. I was not confused at all. As soon as I woke, even before I opened my eyes, I knew that shooting was going on. I thought: bandits. Kalash had said all along that there might be bandits. The first shots were not very loud. Then there was a tremendous amount of firing. The flap of our tent was open and I looked out. All up and down the hillside were muzzle flashes, flickering in the darkpink and blue, like the flame of a gas stove. Also yellow, all mixed together. Kalash was running in his white robes with a gun in his hands. He fell full length and I thought he was killed. But then he began to shoot again. Nigel and Tadeusz came out of their tent on their hands and knees, also shooting. Beside me, Ilona kicked away her sleeping bag and reached up for the pistol. “We have to get out of the tent,” she said. “They’ll shoot into the tents.” She was a quick thinker— she stopped me from crawling out the front of the tent. She ripped open the back and we crawled out that way. She was naked and I might as well have been, in my T-shirt. It was terribly frightening for a woman to lie there with her body exposed. We huddled on the ground together, in a little depression in the dirt. Ilona held the pistol in both hands.
Up to now I had not seen Paul. I wondered if he had been shot. Bullets were flying all through the camp. Sparks flew off the cars as the bullets hit. It seemed quite impossible that any of us would live through all this. Nigel and Kalash were under the Land Rover, firing. Now Tadeusz had vanished as well. I was filled with a peculiar feeling—I don’t know how to describe it. That my brother should have gone through all he had gone through in order to be murdered in the middle of nowhere by a bunch of illiterate tribesmen. Oddly enough, I thought of that English officer Kalash told us about, the fat one. I understood his rage. How dared these savages kill us, who were so intelligent, so cultured, so civilized?
Kalash and Nigel kept shooting. All of a sudden, there was much more firing on the hill, machine guns. The bandits began to yell to each other, Kalash and Nigel got on their feet and ran out toward the hill. They fell down side by side and shot again.
Then the firing stopped. It was very sudden. The sound persisted. There