Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

However, Qemal kept the rendezvous. He apparently had concealed himself some time earlier in the small trees that grow nearby. The troops did not discover him until he walked out of the trees and presented himself to Prince Kalash. Qemal’s unsuspicious behaviour had something to do with the fact that Prince Kalash had left Miernik approximately one mile to the south, at the site of some stone ruins. Because the troops had no orders to watch Miernik-his presence had not been anticipated and therefore was not dealt with in their instructions-they kept no watch on him. (I digress to remark that this blind stupidity is typical military behaviour.)

Qemal agreed to assemble the personnel of the ALF shortly after dawn on 17th July at their headquarters. He gave Prince Kalash the precise location of this place. The main ALF camp was located between the east and middle forks of the Wadi Magrur, fifty miles west of Malha. Prince Kalash provided me with no details of his remarks to Qemal, except to say that he had greeted him as a brother. The lieutenant in charge of the troops reports that Prince Kalash, on meeting Qemal, embraced him.

After their conversation was concluded, Qemal disappeared on foot into the bush. Prince Kalash turned his Land Rover around and returned to the ruins where he had left Miernik. Miernik was not there. Prince Kalash was observed calling Miernik’s name, and he and his bodyguards conducted a search of the area that lasted for the better part of an hour.

The troops did not interfere. They had earlier observed a second Land Rover, which had been concealed in the bush, proceeding in a southeasterly direction through open country. It contained four men but the distance was too great to permit identification.

Prince Kalash afterwards reported that he and his men found Land Rover tracks beginning at a point about two hundred yards from the stone ruins. The tracks led in a southeasterly direction.

Only after intensive questioning did Prince Kalash tell me that he had taken Miernik into the desert, and there abandoned him, on the Amir’s orders. It was a bitter task for the prince. He felt that he had deceived, and perhaps killed, his companion. “Qemal got a look of madness in his eyes when I told him I’d brought Miernik along,” Kalash said. “He went off snarling about the Russians. I tried to beat him back to the ruins. I wanted to get Miernik away from there. But he was gone. Prince Kalash was by now convinced that a mistake had been made. He wanted to pursue Qemal and Miernik in my helicopter, but I could not permit that. The Amir forbade Prince Kalash to involve himself in any kind of a rescue attempt. ‘Kalash says this Pole is a harmless fool,” said the Amir. “Aly states that he is a Communist spy, Qemal thinks he is a Russian. Let Qemal decide what to do with him.”

No one had any idea that Tadeusz and Kalash were going into the mountains together. They simply went. Ilona saw them from the window as they were getting into the Land Rover. As she told it later, she ran out to talk to them. Tadeusz told her they were going to look at some ruins-a morning excursion. Ilona thought so little of the incident that she didn’t even mention it to me. I can understand why. It didn’t seem important, much less dangerous. Living in that palace, which is really a fortress, surrounded at all times by the Amir’s power, one readily forgets danger. What happened on the trip only a few days before seemed far away in time. It was inconceivable that anything could happen to any of us so long as we were guests of the Amir.

Kalash had been back for some time before I was given the news. I expect he had to talk the situation over with his father before telling Nigel and Paul. I was the last to know, and it was Paul who told me. He could easily have deceived me-made the situation seem less serious than it was. I would have been ready to believe that Tadeusz had just wandered away and lost his bearings. That would have been serious enough, but after all there seemed to be hundreds of people about the palace, so a search party would have been easy to organize. Almost anyone else would have thought it merciful to lie to me. But Paul told me the truth, and told it at once. We met in a small courtyard; it was a hanging garden, really, with vines and shrubs growing up the walls and over the top. There was a fountain-a fountain in that desert! It had some sort of an American device that circulated the same few liters of water forever. The American ambassador had given several of these pumps to the Amir, who quite adored them. It was a cool place. I went there every day, to read and exercise. We never saw the boys, you realize. It was a strict Muslim household where the sexes came together only for breeding purposes.

So I was a little surprised to see Paul, but very glad. I felt close to him. He is a sympathetic type, you know, and strictly speaking he saved my life at least twice in the space of a couple of weeks. As you seem to be interested in such things I may as well tell you that I was madly signaling to him that he was welcome to climb in the window whenever he wanted. I realize that I am not coming to the point very quickly. You must forgive me. I have a tendency to cry when I tell this story. I want to give you the facts as coldly as possible.

Very well. Paul comes into the garden. It must have been very early afternoon. The sun was overhead and strong. The floor of the courtyard was dappled with shadow. Shafts of sunlight, perpendicular columns of white sunlight. Paul walked through these, out of the shadow, into the light. It was a very theatrical effect. He sits down beside me. With no preliminaries-not even speaking my name in a tone of voice that might have warned me-Paul told me. Tadeusz was missing in the desert. Kalash thought he might have been abducted. No trace had yet been found of him. There had been talk about organizing a search party. The Amir had forbidden it. If Tadeusz had been kidnapped, we would hear from the bandits when they demanded a ransom. To approach the kidnappers now, with the threat of force, would create the risk that Tadeusz might be killed.

I just stared at him. What was he telling me? Paul’s face was serious but not worried. He was watching my reaction very closely. I thought, Ah ha! He expects me to get hysterical. I said, “What do you think of his chances?” Paul said, “I don’t know. Kalash says there’s no possibility that your brother is merely lost. He’s sure someone grabbed him. If he was taken by friends of the people we shot a few days ago, obviously his chances are almost nonexistent. But maybe not. I would think that men wanting revenge would simply have killed him where they found him. The other possibility is kidnap and ransom. Kalash tells me the local kidnappers are pretty honorable-if you pay, they give back the victim unharmed. It’s a matter of business ethics. So we can wait and pay if the second possibility is the one we believe in.

I asked him how much the ransom was likely to be. Looking back, it seems insane, this conversation between Paul and me. For all we knew my brother lay dead out there somewhere-perhaps having been tortured-and we sat in a garden by a splashing fountain and discussed price. The fountain smelled of chlorine, by the way. The chemical smell of it made me angry: these damned Arabs with their American fountains, their Cadillacs, their pet lions, their harem filled with children. You know what it was. Subconsciously I was blaming Kalash for everything that happened. He was so supremely indifferent to other people, to life itself. Now he had done this to Tadeusz. To Paul I said, “How much do you think they’ll want?”

“The Amir says that they usually demand only a modest sum. What he considers a modest sum I don’t really know. Kalash guesses it would be a thousand pounds.”