The Miernik Dossier - Charles McCarry [99]
I remembered Miernik, kneeling in the moonlight at Kashgil with the Sten gun at his shoulder, and the tape recording of his session on the floor with Ilona, and the way he boxed me into going to Czechoslovakia, and a good deal besides. Zofia’s explanation of the book code didn’t much move me. To me Miernik didn’t seem quite the passive bungler Zofia made him out to be. Or any more in need of love than the monk she imagined he should have been. Miernik had found his monastery, all right. It was one of the last ones left, I thought sardonically, and the abbot was Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria and his spiritual successors. This was my last sardonic thought about Miernik.
Zofia still couldn’t sleep. I really could not listen to any more analysis of her brother. The girl and I lay in the oasis, talking about the stars. To keep her from telling me more about Miernik, I named all the constellations I could remember: Gemini, Orion, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Cygnus, Serpens. We calculated the distance to Alpha Centauri in miles and kilometers. Had Miernik been there he could have traced the connection between the prechristian myths after which the stars are named and the religious anxieties of the nuclear age. But he was down the road somewhere.
16 July. We started north again at sunrise. I was lightheaded and a little raw from lack of sleep. Both Zofia and I had painful sunburns. As we traveled north, the country became rougher and what little vegetation there had been ran out; we were only a hundred miles or so from the edge of the Libyan desert, and the air was hot to the touch, like the bottom of a cooking pot. The Land Rover, running in low gear and four-wheel drive most of the time, overheated. I kept on adding water from the jerry cans I’d filled at the oasis, straining out the green slime and the sand through a T-shirt.
I navigated as best I could with a compass and the relief map Kalash had given me. The map was an old British job and not always accurate; I thought often that I was lost when hills appeared before me that were not marked on the map, but finally I concluded that many features of the country simply had not been noted. I expected to find the ALF on the other side of every hill. The Land Rover, its motor roaring and its load rattling, seemed louder by the moment. Any terrorist within two miles could have heard us coming.
We had been moving north for about four hours when I faced the fact that we had lost Miernik’s trail. I had seen no tire tracks, and no other sign of his Land Rover, for a couple of hours. There seemed to be no other route than the one we had taken (I’d turned off into five or six blind canyons before settling on the route we now followed through a maze of dun-colored hills). At ten-thirty I stopped the car, got out the walkie-talkie, and climbed to the top of the highest ground in the neighborhood. All I got on the radio when I tried to contact Kalash was static, so I concluded that we were out of range for daytime transmission. There must have been enough solar radiation in that scorched sky to block a fifty-thousand-watt station.
I was trembling from the strain of climbing a five-hundred-foot hill with a walkie-talkie in one hand and a Sten gun in the other. Therefore I had difficulty holding the binoculars steady, and on my first sweep of the country ahead I missed the object on the next hilltop. I caught it