Lie Down With Lions (22 page)

“Yes.”

“That’s a good reason.”

“Thank you. And thanks for these.” He waved the maps at her, then went out.

Chantal had gone to sleep with Jane’s nipple in her mouth. Jane disengaged her gently and lifted her to shoulder level. She burped without waking. The child could sleep through anything.

Jane wished Jean-Pierre had come back. She was sure he could do no harm, but all the same she would have felt easier if he had been under her eye. He could not contact the Russians because she had smashed his radio. There was no other means of communication between Banda and Russian territory. Masud could send messengers by runner, of course; but Jean-Pierre had no runners, and anyway if he sent someone the whole village would know about it. The only thing he could possibly do was to walk all the way to Rokha, and he had not had time for that.

As well as being anxious, she hated to sleep alone. In Europe she had not minded, but here she was frightened of the brutal, unpredictable tribesmen who thought it as normal for a man to beat his wife as for a mother to smack her child. And Jane was no ordinary woman in their eyes: with her liberated views and her direct gaze and her says-who attitude she was a symbol of forbidden sexual delights. She had not followed the conventions of sexual behavior, and the only other women they knew like that were whores.

When Jean-Pierre was there she always reached out to touch him just before falling asleep. He always slept curled up, facing away from her, and although he moved a lot in his sleep he never reached out for her. The only other man she had shared a bed with for a long period was Ellis, and he had been just the opposite: all night long he was touching her, hugging her and kissing her, sometimes while half-awake and sometimes when fast asleep. Twice or three times he had tried to make love to her, roughly, in his sleep: she would giggle and try to accommodate him, but after a few seconds he would roll off and start snoring, and in the morning he had no recollection of what he had done. How different he was from Jean-Pierre. Ellis touched her with clumsy affection, like a child playing with a beloved pet; Jean-Pierre touched her the way a violinist might handle a Stradivarius. They had loved her differently, but they had betrayed her the same way.

Chantal gurgled. She was awake. Jane laid her in her lap, supporting her head so that they could look directly at one another, and began to talk to her, partly in nonsense syllables and partly in real words. Chantal liked this. After a while Jane ran out of small talk and began to sing. She was in the middle of “Daddy’s Gone to London in a Puffer Train” when she was interrupted by a voice from outside. “Come in,” she called. She said to Chantal: “We have visitors all the time, don’t we? It’s like living in the National Gallery, isn’t it?” She pulled the front of her shirt together to hide her cleavage.

Mohammed walked in and said in Dari: “Where is Jean-Pierre?”

“Gone to Skabun. Anything I can do?”

“When will he be back?”

“In the morning, I expect. Do you want to tell me what the problem is, or do you plan to continue talking like a Kabul policeman?”

He grinned at her. When she spoke disrespectfully to him he found her sexy, which was not the effect she intended. He said: “Alishan has arrived with Masud. He wants more pills.”

“Ah, yes.” Alishan Karim was the brother of the mullah, and he suffered from angina. Of course, he would not give up his guerrilla activities, so Jean-Pierre gave him trinitrin to take immediately before battle or other exertion. “I’ll give you some pills,” she said. She stood up and handed Chantal to Mohammed.

Mohammed took the baby automatically and then looked embarrassed.

Jane grinned at him and went into the front room. She found the tablets on a shelf beneath the shopkeeper’s counter. She poured about a hundred into a container and returned to the living room. Chantal was staring, fascinated, at Mohammed. Jane took the baby and handed over the pills. “Tell Alishan to rest more,” she said.

Mohammed shook his head. “He’s not frightened of me,” he said. “You tell him.”

Jane laughed. Coming from an Afghan, that joke was almost feminist.

Mohammed said: “Why did Jean-Pierre go to Skabun?”

“There was a bombing there this morning.”

“No, there wasn’t.”

“Of course there wa—” Jane stopped suddenly.

Mohammed shrugged. “I was there all day with Masud. You must be mistaken.”

She tried to keep her face composed. “Yes. I must have misheard.”

“Thank you for the pills.” He went out.

Jane sat down heavily on a stool. There had been no bombing at Skabun. Jean-Pierre had gone to meet his contact. She did not see quite how he had arranged it, but she had no doubt whatsoever.

What was she to do?

If Jean-Pierre knew about the gathering tomorrow, and could tell the Russians about it, then the Russians would be able to attack—

They could wipe out the entire leadership of the Afghan Resistance in a single day.

She had to see Ellis.

She wrapped a shawl around Chantal—the air would be a little cooler now—and left the house, heading for the mosque. Ellis was in the courtyard with the rest of the men, poring over Jean-Pierre’s maps with Masud and Mohammed and the man with the eye patch. Some guerrillas were passing around a hookah; others were eating. They stared in surprise as she walked in with her baby on her hip. “Ellis,” she said. He looked up. “I need to talk to you. Would you come outside?”

He got up, and they went out through the arch and stood in front of the mosque.

“What is it?” he said.

“Does Jean-Pierre know about this gathering you have arranged, of all the Resistance leaders?”

“Yes—when Masud and I first talked about it, he was right there, taking the slug out of my ass. Why?”

Jane’s heart sank. Her last hope had been that Jean-Pierre might not know. Now she had no choice. She looked around. There was no one else within earshot, and anyway they were speaking English. “I have something to tell you,” she said, “but I want your promise that no harm will come to him.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Oh,
shit
,” he said fervently. “Oh fuck, oh shit. He works for them. Of course! Why didn’t I guess? In Paris he must have led those motherfuckers to my apartment! He’s been telling them about the convoys—that’s why they’ve been losing so many! The
bastard
—” He stopped suddenly, and spoke more gently. “It must have been terrible for you.”

“Yes,” she said. Irresistibly her face crumpled, tears rushed to her eyes and she began to sob. She felt weak and foolish and ashamed of herself for crying, but she also felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her.

Ellis put his arms around her and Chantal. “You poor thing,” he said.

“Yes,” she sobbed. “It was awful.”

“How long have you known?”

“A few weeks.”

“You didn’t know when you married him.”

“No.”

“Both of us,” he said. “We both did it to you.”

“Yes.”

“You mixed with the wrong crowd.”

“Yes.”

She buried her face in his shirt and cried without restraint, for all the lies and betrayals and spent time and wasted love. Chantal cried, too. Ellis held Jane close and stroked her hair until eventually she stopped shaking, began to calm down and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I broke his radio, you see,” she said, “and then I thought he had no way of getting in touch with them; but today he was called to Skabun to see to the bomb-wounded, but there was no bombing at Skabun today. . . .”

Mohammed came out of the mosque. Ellis let go of Jane and looked embarrassed. “What’s happening?” he said to Mohammed in French.

“They’re arguing,” he said. “Some say this is a good plan and it will help us defeat the Russians. Others ask why Masud is considered the only good commander, and who is Ellis Thaler that he should judge Afghan leaders? You must come back and talk to them some more.”

“Wait,” Ellis said. “There’s been a new development.”

Jane thought: Oh, God, Mohammed will kill somebody when he hears this—

“There has been a leak.”

“What do you mean?” Mohammed said dangerously.

Ellis hesitated, as if reluctant to spill the beans; and then he seemed to decide that he had no alternative. “The Russians may know about the conference—”

“Who?” Mohammed demanded. “Who is the traitor?”

“Possibly the doctor, but—”

Mohammed rounded on Jane. “How long have you known this?”

“You’ll speak to me politely or not at all,” she snapped back.

“Hold it,” said Ellis.

Jane was not going to let Mohammed get away with his accusatory tone of voice. “I warned you, didn’t I?” she said. “I told you to change the route of the convoy. I saved your damn life, so don’t point your finger at
me
.”

Mohammed’s anger evaporated, and he looked a little sheepish.

Ellis said: “So that’s why the route was changed.” He looked at Jane with something like admiration.

Mohammed said: “Where is he now?”

“We’re not sure,” Ellis replied.

“When he comes back he must be killed.”

“No!” said Jane.

Ellis put a restraining hand on her shoulder and said to Mohammed: “Would you kill a man who has saved the lives of so many of your comrades?”

“He must face justice,” Mohammed insisted.

Mohammed had talked about
if
he comes back, and Jane realized she had been assuming that he would return. Surely he would not abandon her and their baby?

Ellis was saying: “If he is a traitor, and if he has succeeded in contacting the Russians, then he has told them about tomorrow’s meeting. They will surely attack and try to take Masud.”

“This is very bad,” said Mohammed. “Masud must leave immediately. The conference will have to be called off—”

“Not necessarily,” Ellis said. “Think. We could turn this to advantage.”

“How?”

Ellis said: “In fact the more I think about it, the more I like it. This may turn out to have been the best thing that could possibly happen. . . .”

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
hey evacuated the village of Darg at dawn. Masud’s men went from house to house, gently waking the occupants and telling them that their village was to be attacked by the Russians today and they must go up the Valley to Banda, taking with them their more precious possessions. By sunrise a ragged line of women, children, old people and livestock was wending its way out of the village along the dirt road that ran beside the river.

Darg was different in shape from Banda. At Banda the houses were clustered at the eastern end of the plain, where the Valley narrowed and the ground was rocky. In Darg all the houses were crammed together on a thin shelf between the foot of the cliff and the bank of the river. There was a bridge just in front of the mosque, and the fields were on the other side of the river.

It was a good place for an ambush.

Masud had devised his plan during the night, and now Mohammed and Alishan made the dispositions. They moved around with quiet efficiency, Mohammed tall and handsome and gracious, Alishan short and mean-looking, both of them giving instructions in soft voices, imitating their leader’s low-key style.

Ellis wondered, as he laid his charges, whether the Russians would come. Jean-Pierre had not reappeared, so it seemed certain that he had succeeded in contacting his masters; and it was almost inconceivable that they should resist the temptation to capture or kill Masud. But that was all circumstantial. And if they did not come, Ellis would look foolish, having caused Masud to set an elaborate trap for a no-show victim. The guerrillas would not make a pact with a fool. But if the Russians do come, Ellis thought, and if the ambush works, the boost to my prestige and Masud’s might be enough to clinch the whole deal.

He was trying not to think about Jane. When he had put his arms around her and her baby, and she had wet his shirt with her tears, his passion for her had flared up anew. It was like throwing gasoline on a bonfire. He had wanted to stand there forever, with her narrow shoulders shaking under his arm and her head against his chest. Poor Jane. She was so honest, and her men were so treacherous.

He trailed his detonating cord in the river and brought its end out at his position, which was in a tiny one-room house on the riverbank a couple of hundred yards upstream of the mosque. He used his crimper to attach a blasting cap to the cord, then finished the assembly with a simple army-issue pull-ring firing device.

He approved of Masud’s plan. Ellis had taught ambush and counterambush at Fort Bragg for a year between his two tours in Asia, and he would have given Masud’s setup nine out of ten. The lost point was due to Masud’s failure to provide an exit route for his troops in case the fight should go against them. Of course Masud might not consider that a mistake.

By nine o’clock everything was ready, and the guerrillas made breakfast. Even that was part of the ambush: they could all get into position in minutes, if not seconds, and then the village seen from the air would look more natural, as if the villagers had all rushed to hide from the helicopters, leaving behind their bowls and rugs and cooking fires; so that the commander of the Russian force would have no reason to suspect a trap.

Ellis ate some bread and drank several cups of green tea, then settled down to wait as the sun rose high over the Valley. There was always a lot of waiting. He remembered it in Asia. In those days he had often been high, on marijuana or speed or cocaine, and then the waiting hardly seemed to matter because he enjoyed it. It was funny, he thought, how he had lost interest in drugs after the war.

Ellis expected the attack either this afternoon or at dawn tomorrow. If he were the Russian commander he would reason that the rebel leaders had assembled yesterday and would leave tomorrow, and he would want to attack late enough to catch any latecomers, but not so late that some of them might have left already.

At around midmorning the heavy weapons arrived, a pair of Dashokas, 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns, each pulled along the road on its two-wheeled mounting by a guerrilla. A donkey followed, loaded down with cases of 5-0 Chinese armor-piercing bullets.

Masud announced that one of the guns would be manned by Yussuf, the singer, who, according to village rumor, was likely to marry Jane’s friend Zahara; the other by a guerrilla from the Pich Valley, one Abdur, whom Ellis did not know. Yussuf had already shot down three helicopters with his Kalashnikov, it was said. Ellis was skeptical about this: he had flown helicopters in Asia and he knew it was close to impossible to shoot one down with a rifle. However, Yussuf explained with a grin that the trick was to get above the target and fire down at it from a mountainside, a tactic that was not possible in Vietnam because the landscape was different.

Although Yussuf had a much bigger weapon today, he was going to use the same technique. The guns were dismounted, then taken, each carried by two men, up the steep steps cut into the cliffside that towered over the village. The mounts and the ammunition followed.

Ellis watched from below as they reassembled the guns. At the top of the cliff was a shelf ten or fifteen feet wide; then the mountainside continued up at a gentler slope. The guerrillas set up the guns about ten yards apart on the shelf and camouflaged them. The helicopter pilots would soon find out where the guns were, of course, but they would find it very difficult to knock them out where they were.

When that was done, Ellis went back to his position in the little one-room house by the riverside. His mind kept returning to the sixties. He had begun the decade as a schoolboy and ended a soldier. He had gone to Berkeley in 1967, confident that he knew what the future held for him: he wanted to be a producer of television documentaries, and since he was bright and creative, and this was California, where anybody could be anything if he worked hard, there had been no reason he could see why he should not achieve his ambition. Then he had been overtaken by peace and flower power, antiwar marches and love-ins, the Doors and bell-bottom jeans and LSD; and once again he had thought he knew what the future held: he was going to change the world. That dream had also been short-lived, and soon he was overtaken once again, this time by the mindless brutality of the army and the drugged horror of Vietnam. Whenever he looked back like this, he could see that it was the times when he felt confident and settled that life would hit him with the really big changes.

Midday passed without lunch. That would be because the guerrillas did not have any food. Ellis found it hard to get used to the essentially rather simple idea that when there was no food then nobody could have lunch. It occurred to him that this might be why nearly all the guerrillas were heavy smokers: tobacco deadened the appetite.

It was hot even in the shade. He sat in the doorway of the little house, trying to catch what breeze there was. He could see the fields, the river with its arched rubble-and-mortar bridge, the village with its mosque, and the overhanging cliff. Most of the guerrillas were in their positions, which provided them with shelter from the sun as well as cover. The majority of them were in houses close to the cliff, where it would be difficult for helicopters to strafe them; but inevitably some were in the more vulnerable forward positions, nearer the river. The rough stone façade of the mosque was pierced by three arched doorways, and one guerrilla sat cross-legged under each arch. They made Ellis think of guardsmen in sentry boxes. Ellis knew all three of them: there was Mohammed in the farthest arch; his brother Kahmir, with the wispy beard, in the middle; and in the nearest arch Ali Ghanim, the ugly man with the twisted spine and the family of fourteen children, the man who had been wounded with Ellis down on the plain. Each of the three had a Kalashnikov across his knees and a cigarette between his lips. Ellis wondered which of them would be alive tomorrow.

The first essay he had written in college had been about the wait before battle as handled by Shakespeare. He had contrasted two precombat speeches: the inspirational one in
Henry V
in which the King says: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead”; and Falstaff’s cynical soliloquy on honor in
1 Henry IV:
“Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. . . . Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. . . . Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” The nineteen-year-old Ellis had got an A for that—his first, and his last, for afterward he was too busy arguing that Shakespeare and indeed the entire English course were “irrelevant.”

His reverie was interrupted by a series of shouts. He did not understand the Dari words used, but he had no need to: he knew, from the urgency of tone, that the sentries on the surrounding hillsides had spotted distant helicopters, and had signaled to Yussuf on the clifftop, who had spread the word. There was a flurry of movement throughout the sun-baked village as guerrillas manned their posts, retreated farther into their cover, checked their weapons and lit fresh cigarettes. The three men in the archways of the mosque melted into its shadowy interior. Now the village seen from the air would appear deserted, as it normally would during the hottest part of the day, when most people rested.

Ellis listened hard and heard the menacing throb of approaching helicopter rotors. His bowels felt watery: nerves. This is how the slants felt, he thought, hiding in the dripping jungle, when they heard my helicopter gun-ship coming toward them through the rain clouds. You reap what you sow, baby.

He loosened the safety pins in the firing device.

The helicopters roared closer, but still he could not see them. He wondered how many there were: he could not tell from the noise. He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see a guerrilla dive into the river from the far bank and begin swimming across toward him. When the figure emerged near Ellis he could see that it was scarred old Shahazai Gul, the brother of the midwife. Shahazai’s specialty was mines. He dashed past Ellis and took cover in a house.

For a few moments the village was still and there was nothing but the heart-stopping throb of rotor blades, and Ellis was thinking, Jesus, how the hell many of them have they sent? And then the first one flashed into view over the cliff, going
fast,
and wheeled down toward the village. It hesitated over the bridge like a giant hummingbird.

It was an Mi-24, known in the West as a Hind (the Russians called them Hunchbacks because of the bulky twin turboshaft engines mounted on top of the passenger cabin). The gunner sat low in the nose with the pilot behind and above him, like children playing piggyback; and the windows all around the flight deck looked like the multifaceted eye of a monstrous insect. The helicopter had a three-wheeled undercarriage and short, stubby wings with underslung rocket pods.

How the hell could a few ragged tribesmen fight against machinery like that?

Five more Hinds followed in rapid succession. They overflew the village and the ground all around it, scouting, Ellis presumed, for enemy positions. This was a routine precaution—the Russians had no reason to expect heavy resistance, for they believed their attack would be a surprise.

A second type of helicopter began to appear, and Ellis recognized the Mi-8, known as the Hip. Larger than the Hind but less fearsome, it could carry twenty or thirty men, and its purpose was troop transport rather than assault. The first one hesitated over the village, then dropped suddenly sideways and came down in the barley field. It was followed by five more. A hundred and fifty men, Ellis thought. As the Hips landed, the troops jumped out and lay flat, pointing their guns toward the village but not shooting.

To take the village they had to cross the river, and to cross the river they had to take the bridge. But they did not know that. They were just being cautious: they expected the element of surprise to enable them to prevail easily.

Ellis worried that the village might appear
too
deserted. By now, a couple of minutes after the first helicopter appeared, there would normally be a few people visible, running away. He strained his hearing for the first shot. He was no longer scared. He was concentrating too hard on too many things to feel fear. From the back of his mind came the thought: It’s always like this once it starts.

Shahazai had laid mines in the barley field, Ellis recalled. Why had none of them exploded yet? A moment later he had the answer. One of the soldiers stood up—an officer presumably—and shouted an order. Twenty or thirty men scrambled to their feet and ran toward the bridge. Suddenly there was a deafening bang, loud even over the whirlwind of helicopter noise, then another and another as the ground seemed to explode under the soldiers’ running feet—Ellis thought, Shahazai pepped up his mines with extra TNT—and clouds of brown earth and golden barley obscured them, all but one man who was thrown high in the air and fell slowly, turning over and over like an acrobat until he hit the ground and crumpled in a heap. As the echoes died there was another sound, a deep, stomach-thudding drumbeat that came from the clifftop as Yussuf and Abdur opened fire. The Russians retreated in disarray as the guerrillas in the village started firing their Kalashnikovs across the river.

Surprise had given the guerrillas a tremendous initial advantage, but it would not last forever: the Russian commander would rally his troops. But before he could achieve anything he had to clear the approach to the bridge.

One of the Hips in the barley field blew apart, and Ellis realized that Yussuf and Abdur must have hit it. He was impressed: although the Dashoka had a range of a mile, and the helicopters were less than half a mile away, it took good shooting to destroy one at this distance.

The Hinds—the humpbacked gunships—were still in the air, circling above the village. Now the Russian commander brought them into action. One of them swooped low over the river and shelled Shahazai’s minefield. Yussuf and Abdur fired at it but missed. Shahazai’s mines exploded harmlessly, one after another. Ellis thought anxiously: I wish the mines had knocked out more of the enemy—twenty or so men out of a hundred and fifty isn’t much. The Hind rose again, driven off by Yussuf; but another one descended and strafed the minefield again. Yussuf and Abdur poured a constant stream of fire at it. Suddenly it lurched, part of a wing fell off and it nose-dived into the river; and Ellis thought: Nice shooting, Yussuf! But the approach to the bridge was clear, and the Russians still had more than a hundred men and ten helicopters, and Ellis realized with a chill of fear that the guerrillas could lose this battle.