The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [77]
Paul’s face was covered with blood. The lower half of his face. They were calling our names. Ilona and I stood up, and although Paul and my brother were only a few feet away from us, we both waved. Ilona and I stood up on our tiptoes, as if we were standing in a crowd on a train platform, and waved. Remember, she was completely naked and I was wearing only that shirt that came down to my hips. Paul stopped in his tracks and laughed. He roared with laughter. Of course, it was a funny sight—Ilona with that big pistol in her hand and me beside her, waving. Paul just thought it was awfully funny. It was the tension, and the relief.
All I could see was Paul’s blood. I thought he’d been shot, naturally. So—this will seem strange, perhaps, but at the time it seemed so obvious—I pulled off the T-shirt and pressed it against his face, to try to stop the bleeding. He let me do it. All he had was a nosebleed—he fell or something and hit his nose and it gushed blood all over him.
So when Kalash and Nigel came back with the Land Rover they found us like that—two nude girls and their friends standing by with hot machine guns. They hardly glanced at us. Kalash had gathered up the bodies of the bandits they had killed. They had thrown three of them into the back of the Land Rover. A fourth was only wounded, but very badly. All were dressed in white robes, with great stains of blood on them. Kalash tried to question the wounded one. He was not gentle about it. He pulled the man into a sitting position and shouted at him in Arabic. The man’s head kept rolling onto his shoulder. Kalash gripped his chin and held the head upright. The man was breathing very loudly and blood was pumping out of his body. Spurting. Nigel wanted to put a tourniquet on him, but Kalash kept shouting at the dying man. He was very young. I don’t think he heard what Kalash was saying to him. Certainly he never answered. His eyes rolled back in his head and he died. I suppose you know that the bowels and the bladder empty at that moment. I didn’t. What I remember is the sudden, rotten stink. Kalash stood up and held his hands in front of him, fingers rigid and spread out wide, in a gesture of disgust.
While this was going on, my brother crawled into one of the tents and came back with two blankets for Ilona and me. We wrapped up in them and Ilona—this will show what people will do under stress—lit the camp stove and made tea. We stood about drinking tea with sugar and tinned milk in it with four dead bodies on the ground at our feet. Kalash and Paul searched the bodies. They found something that interested them, but I don’t know what it was. They didn’t discuss it with the rest of us.
It was a miracle none of us was even hurt, except for Paul’s bloody nose. The bandits had attacked too soon. Kalash couldn’t understand why the bandits had been so stupid. He seemed offended that they had opened fire from such a distance instead of sneaking into the camp and executing us in our sleep. Paul said the bandits probably did not realize we had firearms. Perhaps they thought we would surrender, or run into the desert. Maybe all they wanted was to steal the cars and the equipment.
There were five or six bullet holes in the Cadillac, and one of the windows was smashed. I don’t think the Land Rover was damaged at all. Both cars ran all right. When I went back to the tent to get my clothes I saw that there were several holes in the canvas. Ilona was right about that, and so it’s true that she saved my life, just as Nigel said to me later on.
We didn’t sleep anymore that night. The men went out into the desert a little way and waited with their guns