A metallic crackling commenced. There were two episodes and then a continuing, spaced-out manifestation. It was the first gunfire. It was faint and sporadic but there was no question what it was. It was originating at a good distance, from the north, in the direction of the pan. It occurred to Ray that the ridge constituting the high side of the pan would provide a logical parapet for an attacking force to make use of. The elevation would be favorable and they would have superior fire zones.
Morel heard it and fell silent. He had been talking, lecturing really, mainly to himself. Ray resented having been told that he was the one who never seemed to shut up. Morel had been droning on about a writing project he had put off completing, which he now regretted, because, as Ray understood it, he had been planning to popularize a term for religious belief, immaterialism, that he had come up with and liked. Before that there had been a muttered discourse about how various false narratives, most of them religious in nature, had been to blame for the confluence of events, however he had put it, that had led to their being in the present fix. He’s a bigger pedant than I am, Ray thought. Iris was going to be in for some surprises. Ray had pretended to be an interested hearer out of pity for the man. It was necessary for Morel to be doing something. He had a low tolerance for inaction, obviously. It had sent Morel into the monologue that was just mercifully coming to an end. They had to be quiet now. They had to concentrate, to follow, to scry out as much as they could of what was happening outside, because sooner or later it was going to come inside and get them. It was that simple.
Ray was thinking ahead. He said, “Do you know where they put my boots?”
“How would I know that?”
“Just asking in case you noticed anything about them when you were out.”
“I have no idea where they put them. I didn’t see them.”
“I have to get them.”
“I completely understand.”
“I have another couple of pair in the Land Cruiser. Did you see where they parked my Land Cruiser, blue Land Cruiser?”
“I didn’t. I was looking for my Land Rover and didn’t see that anywhere. But I think they have all the vehicles on the far side of the main building. That’s my guess. That’s gunfire we hear.”
“Small-arms fire, yes.”
“You know what a gunshot sounds like to me? Like what a bar of metal
“Well, that’s suggestive. Of course different guns make different sounds.”
“Can you tell things like the caliber of the weapons being fired, that kind of thing?”
“In a limited way. I’m not a weapons expert.” A subtle shift was taking place. Morel was showing an unsolicited deference to Ray, based no doubt on his perception of him as an expert in peculiar matters like the present one, bloodshed. He wanted to tell him how misplaced his notion was. But he couldn’t. What was the point in scaring him? Ray had gone out of his way to have nothing but the most minimal contact with weapons instruction. He had gotten the initial introduction and then he had evaded the subject, except for two mandated refresher courses there had been no way to avoid. The agency was organized guile, not organized gunplay, in his parsing of it, his own individual parsing of it. His practice in the agency had been founded on outsmarting, outthinking, on intellection. He had been so fastidious, so wonderfully fastidious. A bolt of ennui struck him. He was weary of himself.
“We have to get out there,” Morel said.
Oh, just step out into bloody confusion and then get shot, Ray thought. He said, “We need to think about that. We have a couple of ways we can go. We can get poised to jump on whoever comes to the door and overpower him. We might want to attract attention by yelling when the fighting gets closer, if it does.”
Morel was enthusiastic about that. “I like the idea of shouting. We could take turns. We could shout Kea tsala, I mean ditsala…”
Ray said, “No, that means we’re each
“Oh, you’re right. No it would be Kea lona ditsala.”
“That’s it. That might be good to shout. A good thing about it is that it wouldn’t offend anybody, whichever side heard it.” He had to come up with some semblance of a plan of action, even if it was for the sole purpose of calming Morel down while events unfolded into some more readable shape.
“But let’s consider the opposite possibility. Stop walking around so much. We need to conserve our energy. And here’s the opposite possibility.
“We have no idea who’s going to win this thing. So the opposite strategy would be to keep our mouths absolutely shut. In other words, we sit tight and silent and then make a move when it’s all over, when we think it is. For example, maybe we can go back to figuring out how we can rip our way through the roof up there, the thatch, once we think it’s safe to appear in public. We could take turns being each other’s footstools so we could get up high enough to claw away up there. You could be the footstool first.”
What he was doing was wrong. He was yielding to the impulse to tease Morel, a little. But in fact he was just doing his best to suggest calming options, and the teasing was incidental. He did think that with some currently unimaginable exertions they might get through the chicken wire and the other impedimenta and then finally through the thatch, their fingers bloody shreds at the end of the procedure.
Ray said, “So there are different ways to go. It would help if we could get some room service. I’m starving.”
“Let me give you some advice,” Morel said, suddenly authoritative.
“Go on.”
“Try not to think about food. Don’t articulate what you’re thinking, is what I mean. This sounds stupid but it isn’t. Here is the thing. Don’t name the thing you want or need to yourself.”
“Funny, that’s exactly what I was doing, not speaking of it. Then I lost it.”
“Where do you think the fighting is?”
“You mean the firing. I don’t know if there’s any fighting going on yet.”
“You mean you don’t know who’s firing or do you mean you can’t tell if the guys down here are firing back?”
“Take it easy. I don’t know anything for sure. What I think is that there’s shooting coming from the west rim of the pan, the high rim. That’s the only high ground in the vicinity. It overlooks everything. I’m sure it’s the Kerekang people up there. I don’t hear anything that sounds like local return fire, so far.
“I don’t know what anybody’s doing. But the pan rim is a good defensive position for Kerekang in case koevoet wants to go after them. Koevoet has some truck-mounted machine guns, heavy caliber, would be my guess. But they can’t put vehicles into the pan, so they can’t get close to him. I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to send Bushmen down to blow darts at these bastards. I’m just making that up. I’m doing my best here, with nothing to go on.”
There was a crescendo in the firing.
“I hate war,” Morel said.
“Who doesn’t?” Ray said. Here we go, he thought.
The firing sank away.
Morel said, “War is unnecessary. All the monstrous stuff, weaponry, huge standing armies, all that… There’s a way out of it and the way would be for all the countries of the world to decide to drop the load of competitive armaments by agreeing that there would be one body, the United Nations, and what it would do would be to operate a powerful force that would enforce agreed-on boundaries. That is, everyone’s boundaries would be agreed, imperfect or not, frozen, accepted as final. So nations would go down to what they needed to police themselves inside secure boundaries… so if no country is threatened with any kind of incursion, then that means no need for overseas bases, no arms races, because the justification for those is defense of the realm. I’m not saying you could ever get to the point where this would suddenly blaze up as a good idea to all hands on deck. It’s a thought
