David Monnery - Samarkand Hijack

He clambered up on to the bunk above Ogley, wondering if any of them would manage to sleep that night. He felt pretty strung out himself, and guessed that the others, none of whom had his previous experience of life-threatening situations, would spend most of the night listening to their hearts beating wildly inside their ribcages.

‘The last time I was in a place like this,’ Sam Jennings said, his soft drawl floating out of the dark, ‘it was a police station in Mississippi. Back in the Civil Rights days, in the early sixties. We were helping to get black voters registered, which wasn’t very popular with the local authorities. They arrested about twenty of us, though I can’t remember what charges they dreamed up – it was something like walking on the grass with shoes on. Anyway, we were put in a cell a lot like this, except that the police dog pound was right outside, and every so often a dog’s face would appear at the window, growling fit to bust and slavering something awful. We all started singing “We Shall Overcome”, but I tell you, I don’t think any of us felt too confident about it that night. I was scared.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m scared now,’ he added.

‘So am I,’ one of the Zahid boys said, eliciting what sounded like a comforting sentence in Urdu from his father.

‘What do you think, Jamie?’ Copley asked Docherty. ‘You must have seen some hairy situations in the army.’

‘We’re at the mercy of people we know nothing about,’ Docherty said, ‘and that’s always scary. But I don’t think they’re madmen. I don’t think they’ll harm us for fun, or without what they would consider good reason. We mustn’t give them any reason to act in anger – in fact, we should do everything we can to make ourselves human to them. In situations like this people are harder to k…harder to harm if you know them.’

A silence of several moments was broken by Copley. ‘I wonder how the women are getting on.’

‘Probably better than us,’ Docherty said. He knew that women always found it easier to share their feelings, and in adversity that was a useful thing to do. Still, he was worried about Isabel. Though twenty years had passed since her nightmare incarceration in the Naval Mechanical School outside Buenos Aires, being imprisoned once more was bound to give the dreadful memories new life, no matter how different the circumstances might be.

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