Excerpt
As the three of us approached the car, we were stopped by a small squad of Congolese police, led by a short officer with pinpointpresumably druggedpupils to his eyes and a highly agitated manner. What, I was asked, were we doing strolling through the front lines of the Congolese Army? I explained that I and my passengers wished to move my car out of the Congolese Army's way.
The captain of the Congolese army company had joined us. "You have penetrated the front lines of the Congolese Army without permission!" he shouted. "You are obviously communist spies! You are in a state of arrest!" . . .
Enter the minister of the interior, a recent university graduate of about twentysix, whose portfolio of course included the police. I knew he had just returned from a U.S. taxpayer-paid junket to the United States, so his arrival seemed a hopeful sign. The minister seemed embarrassed by our arrest but unsure how to overrule his police officer.
I asked him if he thought we were really communist spies. . . . Lee Griggs, who stammered, and stammered more when under stress and speaking French, said: "D-d-don't you knnnnnow that t-Time Magazine is the mmmmmost rrrrreactionary p-p-publication in the world?" . . .
The minister huddled with the police officer and a young army lieutenant. . . . When the discussion was completed, the police officer with the drugged eyes walked over and informed us that we had been sentenced to death as communist spies and would be shot. We were ordered to squat on the ground. Each of us was given his own private executionerin both senses of the word "private", except that all Congolese privates were now corporals. Each executioner squatted beside his prey and worked the bolt action of his rifle, pointed at the side of his victim's head. Then, the drugged police officer politely explained in French that the order to fire would be "when they hear the sound of firing".
Not so crazy, I thought: We had become, in effect, hostages, to prevent the U.N. Tunisians from firing on the Congolese army. But not so intelligent, either: there was absolutely no reason to believe that the Tunisian captain across the street had any knowledge whatsoever of the straw tribunal's decision. So why would the Tunisians hold their fire? . . .
A Volkswagen "beetle" wormed its way slowly into the apartment house compound; an African Roman Catholicpriest in a whitetropical cassock hurried out and into the building's open stairway.
"Anyone for Extreme Unction?" I asked my comrades.
"Silence!" squeaked the little police captain. "One more word from any of you andpoh!"
I began to accept the fact that I was almost certainly going to be shot within the next few minutes. . . . This was the time to test whether I really was a Buddhist, not a closet Christian who would want to pray.
The squatting position, sitting on ones heels, conformed exactly to the Japanese squatting position that I had always used to meditate in zazen. Turning my palms up in the position of supplication probably looked like just that, to my guards. . . .
I was totally engrossed in zazen when Art Higbee shook me by the shoulder.
"We're being released," he said.
"Released from what?" I apparently asked.
It transpired that Tally Palmer, the diminutive vice-consul who had almost rescued Frank Carlucci, had been the embassy duty officer that Sunday afternoon. It was this little midshipman diplomat who had received the call from one of our colleagues. Faced with the realistic prospect that a woman would have little influence on the Congolese soldiery or policeand a foreign woman about five feet tall even lessshe had called the new Canadian defense attach, a colonel whom she had met at a cocktail party the night before. Would he accompany her? After all, one of the three American correspondentsmyselfwas a Commonwealth subject, and a fellow-Scot.
The colonel had said: "Just give me a few minutes to go into uniform. A Congolese soldier wouldn't believe I was a colonel, otherwise."
While we were waiting in the compound to be shot, Tally's "beetle" stopped off a block short of the besieged Ghanaian ambassadorial residence; the tiny American woman and the six-feet-two Scottish Canadian officer, wearing his kilt and sporran and his battlefield dirk (dagger) in the left, knee-length Argyle sock, plus a highlander-regiment fore-and-aft cap, stepped out and made their way into the first residence they could find. There a Belgian couple had been crouched under a table in expectation of a machinegun duel next door. They agreed to give the odd foreign couple (fellow whites in need of sanctuary) the telephone.
The Canadian colonel had the direct number of Mobutu, the chief of staff. Astonishingly, he got Mobutu at once. He explained the situation briefly and passed the telephone to Mademoiselle le vice-consul des Etats-Unis, who could speak better French. Mobutu asked Tally to bring one of the Congolese army officers to the phone.
She scampered out, flanked by her lanky Canadian escort, and brought back a young lieutenant who, as soon as he heard Colonel Mobutu's voice, sprang to attention and saluted the telephone receiver. Mobutu barked orders. The Army should release the American correspondents at once, and the lieutenant should tell the police to "stay out of politicsthat is the Army's business!" (He later went on, of course, to make it clear that he wasn't joking about that.)
The Congolese lieutenant, the Scots-Canadian colonel and Tally Palmer raced back to the compound and secured our release. It had been the second time that Mobutu had intervened to save my life within a matter of weeks. Tally, a future Episcopalian priest, always saw our trio's redemption from the firing squad as a "miracle".
"Do you need a lift?" the colonel asked. I said we had a car. Tally and her Canadian drove off, and then I discovered that my car was no longer in No-Man's-Land. The police captain, I remembered, had taken my ignition keys, but I had a duplicate set; I could only assume that he had decided to be the first Congolese policeman with a Studebaker. (I collected the insurance in local francs, and received permission from the Post to pay my bills for a while in "Mickey Mouse moulah" and charge the Post in dollars.)
As Tally and the colonel departed, our colleagues fled in their wake. The Tunisians were ensconced in their Ghanaian embassy garden foxholes, the Congolese were behind the hedges with their rifles. With war imminent, we could only walk off, down a street at right angles that led to the Cours Albert, where we could hope to find a taxi. We did so. But we were six hours ahead of Washington and New York, so we stopped the driver at the Royale and sat down at the terrace of the Greek caf. We ordered uzo, the Greek name for raki or arak, the eastern Mediterranean equivalent of pastis. As the waiter arrived with our glasses, the sun finally dived behind the purple horizon.
We raised our glasses, to drink to our rescue. Then we heard a shot from the west, from the riverside, followed by a whole rafale of shots, then a wild explosion of automatic and rifle fire. It was the signal that Art and Lee and I had been waiting for and that I had banished from my mind with zazen.
"To our executions!" I said. And we drank the whole glasses down, at one go, like Russians.
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