The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [78]
The next morning, when we went away in the cars, we left the dead men where they were, lying in the sun. Kalash walked from one body to the other just before he got in the car. He spat on the face of each corpse. For just a moment, while he did that, one could see that his people had not always been gentlemen from Oxford.
71. REPORT BY CHRISTOPHER.
I was still awake when I heard Kalash speaking to me through the wall of the tent. He said, in his ordinary penetrating tone of voice, that he had spotted a half-dozen men moving toward the camp from the hill that lay to the west of us. “Silly fellows are crawling along on their stomachs in the moonlight and dashing from shadow to shadow,” he said. “They have guns.”
I pulled on my boots and picked up the Sten gun and the extra magazines. The camp could not have been in a worse defensive position. The tents were pitched in a shallow canyon, with four low hills lying all around it and only a narrow track of firm ground leading out. There was no cover, except for the vehicles. It was obvious that somebody would have to get around behind the attackers, and I told Kalash that I’d try it. The moon was full, but fairly low on the horizon, so that there was a strip of shadow behind my tent. I cut the canvas and crawled out. Kalash stuck his head around the end of the tent and gave me what I believe is called a wolfish grin. He seemed to be looking forward to whatever was coming.
I heard him waking Miernik and Nigel as I crawled off to the right as fast as possible. The ground was flinty and I was sorry I hadn’t taken time to put on my clothes. I could feel the skin peeling off my knees and elbows and the blood oozing. It was about twenty yards to the shoulder of the hill, which was really just a hillock. Fair-sized boulders, the color of sand in daylight but now as white as eggshell in the moonlight, were scattered over the face of the hill. Each rock threw a puddle of shadow big enough to conceal a man. As soon as I got under cover of the hill I stood up and ran along its base until I thought I was due north of the attackers and a little behind them. Then, crawling again, I went up the hill.
When I got to the top I found a rock to hide behind and looked around. There was no sign of movement in the camp. Kalash lay on his back in full view in front of the tents. About ten yards below me, lying behind rocks, were the bandits, six of them abreast. The light was very good and I could see them plainly. They were wearing white robes with U.S. Army rifle ammunition belts around their waists. Five had M-l rifles and the other, probably the leader, had a submachine gun slung across his back. They were about fifty yards from the edge of the camp. I thought they’d try to get closer before attacking.
I decided to move off to the right and downhill a little, so as to be out of the line of fire from the camp, and also to get into an enfilading position. I backed away from my rock, stood up in a crouching position—and fell over a walkie-talkie radio. When I went down I smashed my nose with my own Sten gun. By some miracle, the fellows down below didn’t hear anything. I got around on their flank with no trouble, except that blood was running off my chin. I pinched my nostrils but I couldn’t get the blood to clot. My vision was slightly blurred, though it cleared in a minute or two.
The bandits were exactly where they had been before. The leader got up on his knees, unslung his machine pistol, and gave a hand signal. His troops unlocked their M-1’s: I heard the safety catches clicking. The bolt on a Sten gun is very noisy. I figured if I pulled mine to put a round in the chamber I’d have five M-1’s shooting at me from a range of ten yards in about four seconds. In less time than that, they opened fire on the camp. At the first shot, Kalash stood up in the moonlight in the middle of the open ground and began firing at the hillside with his Sten gun. He certainly was a lovely target.