1001 Nights Cast

I’m lying on my back. The weight on my chest is enormous. My head is wrapped in muslin and I am breathing through a tube held in my mouth. It is dark and I am drifting in and out of memories to keep me going. I have been here for, I would guess, about forty minutes. I have always been good with gauging time. Waiting is a speciality of mine and so time passes at about the same rate as when I am drinking and chatting with friends. I have no way of distinguishing between time flying and time standing still, it just moves at the same rate for me no matter what. My friends envy my stability. I envy them their exciting lives. Women look both intrigued and bored by me as I watch their faces during conversations. It is the lot of a military man I guess, a sort of emotional plateau to be maintained at all times for fear of giving away secrets that should be kept.

It is a secret from my past that I am thinking of now.

Before I was stationed here in Egypt I was in England training lads for intelligence operations. The Captain in charge of the outfit was an Englishman called Waters. He was a striking chap, about six foot four inches with shadowy black hair and golden eyes that sloped slightly downwards giving him a hang-dog type of expression. The girls loved him. At the local village pub, he would drink large numbers of lagers until he could no longer keep his eyes open and all the time women hanging around hoping to be picked by him for amorous favours afterwards. I would often accompany him on our nights off together, and saw a lot of this behaviour. But he never picked any of them.

My first lot of chaps took eight weeks to graduate and it was half way through the second lot that I was to wander in the forest after a training operation one day looking for a German uniform that we used as a prop and had been left in a hole on the training course. Dickinson and I were walking back together to look for it. It was he who saw Captain Waters first.

At first I think he is praying. Kneeling with hands clasped in front and looking upwards. Then Dickinson motions to me to stop and we quickly lie down behind some bracken and logs for fear of being seen before we can identify what is happening.

The birds have stopped singing, a silence is descending on the forest and a hint of trouble is in the air. Dickinson did well to push us down when he did. We hear footsteps approaching Waters from the far side of the forest not more than 300 yards from where we are hiding. Two men approach Waters and Waters stands to greet them. I don’t recognise either of them. They are in plain clothes but they carry guns. We witness a meeting between the three men and an exchange of a package and then all three leave: the two men from where they came and Waters back to base. I instruct Dickinson to continue looking for the German uniform while I follow Waters back to base. Fifteen minutes later Dickinson catches up with me at the edge of the forest and we talk briefly about the package and how we can find out the nature of its contents without alerting Captain Waters. However, as we cross the lawn from the forest we see a commotion of men gathered around a body lying on the ground. It is Waters, he has been shot and there is now no package on him.

Now, in this desert hole, I hear a low rumbling and I am sure the advance of the Italian army is coming. I check my knife in my hand and squeeze my toes and fingers to promote blood flow. I can hear voices and orders being shouted. Our instructions are to wait until the Italians have passed over us and attack from the rear. In three minutes the enemy has passed over and one by one the eleven of us emerge from the sand and slit the throats of the Italians bringing up the rear. After that, under the cover of the night, we move toward a rise on the horizon and disappear as fast as we appeared.

The night’s operation is a success and so I know we will have to do it again. The waiting is easy for me, being buried in the sand is hard on my lungs but doesn’t bother me too much: the killing, whilst necessary, has never been enjoyable for me. It is a part of my training and I can perform it with a certain ease and voracity that places me in demand but it has left me a lonely man. The emotional plateau is maintained at all times and I am rarely moved to excitement or disdain. It is my injury from this war, one I will carry all my life, I am sure.

I rather envy Waters that easy exit. He was a traitor and I had been informed by the bureau head in London that he must be eliminated. Under instruction, I had orchestrated the outing with Dickinson so he could be witness to the two other men in the forest. This gave us a possible killer outside of the training camp. Of course it had been me though. I shot him, that good looking, Englishman—destined for a life of women and drinking—and gave him his easy exit. No long lonely nights wondering about what might have been if he hadn’t been in the army, no possible loss of limbs on the frontline, no discovery of barren loins from shock and trauma over the years, just a quick easy exit, shot in the back, didn’t even see his killer. Gone, finished.

I envy him that.