Lie Down With Lions (29 page)

“You have made the right decision,” Masud was saying. “You must get out of Afghanistan, with our treaty in your pocket. If the Russians catch you, all is lost.”

Ellis nodded agreement. Jane thought: I’ve never seen Ellis like this before—he treats Masud with deference.

Masud went on: “However, it is a journey of extraordinary difficulty. Much of the trail is above the ice line. Sometimes the path is hard to find in the snow, and if you get lost there, you die.”

Jane wondered where all this was leading. It seemed to her ominous that Masud was carefully addressing Ellis, not her.

“I can help you,” Masud went on. “But, like you, I want to make a deal.”

“Go on,” said Ellis.

“I will give you Mohammed as a guide, to take you through Nuristan and into Pakistan.”

Jane’s heart leaped. Mohammed as a guide! It would make a world of difference to the journey.

“What is my part of the bargain?” Ellis asked.

“You go alone. The doctor’s wife and the child stay here.”

It was heartbreakingly clear to Jane that she must agree to this. It was foolhardy for the two of them to try to make it alone—they would probably both die. This way she could at least save Ellis’s life. “You
must
say yes,” she told him.

Ellis smiled at her and looked at Masud. “It’s out of the question,” he said.

Masud stood up, visibly offended, and walked back to the circle of guerrillas.

Jane said: “Oh, Ellis, was that wise?”

“No,” he said. He held her hand. “But I’m not going to let you go that easily.”

She squeezed his hand. “I . . . I’ve made you no promises.”

“I know,” he said. “When we get back to civilization, you’re free to do whatever you like—live with Jean-Pierre, if that’s what you want, and if you can find him. I’ll settle for the next two weeks, if that’s all I can get. Anyway, we may not live that long.”

That was true. Why agonize over the future, she thought, when we probably don’t have a future?

Masud came back, smiling again. “I’m not a good negotiator,” he said. “I’ll give you Mohammed anyway.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
hey took off half an hour before dawn. One by one, the helicopters lifted from the concrete apron and disappeared into the night sky beyond the range of the floodlights. In turn, the Hind Jean-Pierre and Anatoly were in struggled into the air like an ungainly bird and joined the convoy. Soon the lights of the air base were lost from view, and once again Jean-Pierre and Anatoly were flying over the mountaintops toward the Five Lions Valley.

Anatoly had worked a miracle. In less than twenty-four hours he had mounted what was probably the largest operation in the history of the Afghan war—and he was in command of it.

He had spent most of yesterday on the phone to Moscow. He had had to galvanize the slumbering bureaucracy of the Soviet Army by explaining, first to his superiors in the KGB and then to a series of military bigwigs, just how important it was to catch Ellis Thaler. Jean-Pierre had listened, not understanding the words but admiring the precise combination of authority, calm and urgency in Anatoly’s tone of voice.

Formal permission was given late in the afternoon, and then Anatoly had faced the challenge of putting it into practice. To get the number of helicopters he wanted he had begged favors, called in old debts, and scattered threats and promises from Jalalabad to Moscow. When a general in Kabul had refused to release his machines without a written order, Anatoly had called the KGB in Moscow and persuaded an old friend to sneak a look at the general’s private file, then called the general and threatened to cut off his supply of child pornography from Germany.

The Soviets had six hundred helicopters in Afghanistan: by three a.m. five hundred of them were on the tarmac at Bagram, under Anatoly’s command.

Jean-Pierre and Anatoly had spent the last hour bent over maps, deciding where each helicopter should go and giving the appropriate orders to a stream of officers. The deployments were precise, thanks to Anatoly’s compulsive attention to detail and Jean-Pierre’s intimate knowledge of the terrain.

Although Ellis and Jane had not been in the village yesterday when Jean-Pierre and Anatoly went to find them, it was almost certain they had heard about the raid and had now gone into hiding. They would not be in Banda. They might be living in a mosque in another village—short-term visitors normally slept in the mosques—or, if they felt the villages were unsafe, they might move into one of the little one-room stone huts for travelers which dotted the countryside. They could be anywhere in the Valley, or they could be in one of the many little side valleys.

Anatoly had covered all these possibilities.

Helicopters would land at every village in the Valley and at every hamlet in every side valley. The pilots would overfly all the trails and footpaths. The troops—more than a thousand men—were instructed to search every building and look under large trees and inside caves. Anatoly was determined not to fail again. Today they would
find
Ellis.

And Jane.

The interior of the Hind was cramped and bare. There was nothing in the passenger cabin but a bench fixed to the fuselage opposite the door. Jean-Pierre shared it with Anatoly. They could see the flight deck. The pilot’s seat was raised two or three feet off the floor, with a step beside it for access. All the money had been spent on the armament, speed and maneuverability of the aircraft and none on comfort.

As they flew north, Jean-Pierre brooded. Ellis had pretended to be his friend while working all the time for the Americans. Using that friendship, he had ruined Jean-Pierre’s scheme for catching Masud, thereby destroying a year’s painstaking work. And finally, Jean-Pierre thought, he seduced my wife.

His mind went in circles, always returning to that seduction. He stared out into the darkness, watching the lights of the other helicopters, and imagined the two lovers as they must have been the night before, lying on a blanket under the stars in some field, playing with one another’s bodies and whispering endearments. He wondered whether Ellis was good in bed. He had asked Jane which of them was the better lover, but she said neither was better—they were just different. Was that what she said to Ellis? Or did she murmur
You’re the best, baby, the very best?
Jean-Pierre was beginning to hate her as well. How
could
she go back to a man who was nine years older than she, a crass American and a CIA spook?

Jean-Pierre looked at Anatoly. The Russian sat still and blank-faced, like a stone statue of a Chinese mandarin. He had got very little sleep during the previous forty-eight hours, but he did not look tired, just dogged. Jean-Pierre was seeing a new side to the man. In their meetings over the past year Anatoly had been relaxed and affable, but now he was taut, unemotional and tireless, driving himself and his colleagues relentlessly. He was calmly obsessed.

When dawn broke they could see the other helicopters. It was an awe-some sight: they were like a vast cloud of giant bees swarming over the mountains. The noise of their buzzing must have been deafening on the ground.

As they approached the Valley, they began to divide into smaller groups. Jean-Pierre and Anatoly were with the flight going to Comar, the northernmost village of the Valley. For the last stretch of the journey they followed the river. The rapidly brightening morning light revealed tidy ranks of sheaves in the wheatfields: the bombing had not completely disrupted farming here in the upper Valley.

The sun was in their eyes as they descended to Comar. The village was a cluster of houses peeping over a heavy wall on the hillside. It reminded Jean-Pierre of perched hill villages in the south of France, and he felt a pang of homesickness. Wouldn’t it be good to go home, and hear French spoken properly, and eat fresh bread and tasty food, or get into a taxi and go to a cinema!

He shifted his weight in the hard seat. Right now it would be good just to get out of the helicopter. He had been in pain more or less constantly since the beating. But worse than the pain was the memory of the humiliation, the way he had screamed and wept and begged for mercy: each time he thought of that, he flinched physically and wished he could hide. He wanted revenge for that. He felt he would never sleep peacefully until he had evened the score. And there was only one way that would satisfy him. He wanted to see Ellis beaten, in the same way, by the same brute soldiers, until he sobbed and screamed and pleaded for mercy, but with one extra refinement: Jane would be watching.

By the middle of the afternoon, failure stared them in the face yet again.

They had searched the village of Comar, all the hamlets around it, all the side valleys in the area, and each of the single farmhouses in the almost-barren land to the north of the village. Anatoly was in constant touch with the commanders of the other squads by radio. They had conducted equally thorough searches throughout the entire Valley. They had found arms caches in a few caves and houses; they had fought skirmishes with several groups of men, presumably guerrillas, especially in the hills around Saniz, but the skirmishes had been notable only for greater-than-normal Russian casualties due to the guerrillas’ new expertise with explosives; they had looked at the naked faces of all veiled women and examined the skin color of every tiny baby; and still they had not found Ellis or Jane or Chantal.

Jean-Pierre and Anatoly finished up at a horse station in the hills above Comar. The place had no name: it was a handful of bare stone houses and a dusty meadow where malnourished nags grazed the sparse grass. The only male inhabitant seemed to be the horse dealer, a barefoot old man wearing a long shirt with a voluminous hood to keep off flies. There were also a couple of young women and a huddle of frightened children. Clearly the young men were guerrillas, and were away somewhere with Masud. The hamlet did not take long to search. When they were done, Anatoly sat in the dust with his back to a stone wall, looking thoughtful. Jean-Pierre sat down beside him.

Across the hills they could see the distant white peak of Mesmer, almost twenty thousand feet high, which had attracted climbers from Europe in the old days. Anatoly said: “See if you can get some tea.”

Jean-Pierre looked around and saw the old man in the hood lurking nearby. “Make tea,” he shouted at him in Dari. The man scurried away. A moment later Jean-Pierre heard him shouting at the women. “Tea is coming,” he said to Anatoly in French.

Anatoly’s men, seeing that they were to stay here awhile, killed the engines of their helicopters and sat around in the dust, waiting patiently.

Anatoly stared into the distance. Weariness showed on his flat face. “We are in trouble,” he said.

Jean-Pierre found it ominous that he said
we.

Anatoly went on: “In our profession, it is wise to minimize the importance of a mission until one is certain of success, at which point one begins to exaggerate it. In this case I could not follow that pattern. In order to secure the use of five hundred helicopters and a thousand men, I had to persuade my superiors of the overwhelming importance of catching Ellis Thaler. I had to make very clear to them the dangers that face us if he escapes. I succeeded. And their anger at me for
not
catching him will now be all the greater. Your future, of course, is tied to mine.”

Jean-Pierre had not previously thought of it that way. “What will they do?”

“My career will simply stop. My salary will stay the same but I will lose all privileges. No more Scotch whisky, no more Rive Gauche for my wife, no more family holidays on the Black Sea, no more denim jeans and Rolling Stones records for my children . . . but I could live without those things. What I couldn’t stand would be the sheer boredom of the kind of job given to failures in my profession. They would send me to a small town in the Far East where there is really no security work to do. I know how our men spend their time and justify their existence in such places. You have to ingratiate yourself with mildly discontented people, get them to trust you and talk to you, encourage them to make remarks critical of the government and the Party, then arrest them for subversion. It’s such a waste of time. . . .” He seemed to realize he was rambling, and tailed off.

“And me?” said Jean-Pierre. “What will happen to me?”

“You’ll become a nobody,” said Anatoly. “You won’t work for us anymore. They might let you stay in Moscow, but most likely they would send you back.”

“If Ellis gets away, I can never go back to France—they would kill me.”

“You have committed no crime in France.”

“Nor had my father, but they killed him.”

“Maybe you could go to some neutral country—Nicaragua, say, or Egypt.”

“Shit.”

“But let us not give up hope,” Anatoly said a little more brightly. “People cannot vanish into thin air. Our fugitives are
somewhere
.”

“If we can’t find them with a thousand men, I don’t suppose we can find them with ten thousand,” said Jean-Pierre gloomily.

“We shan’t have a thousand, let alone ten thousand,” said Anatoly. “From now on we have to use our brains, and minimal resources. All our credit is spent. Let’s try a different approach. Think: somebody must have helped them hide. That means that somebody knows where they are.”

Jean-Pierre considered. “If they had help it was probably from the guerrillas—the people least likely to tell.”

“Others may
know
about it.”

“Perhaps. But will they tell?”

“Our fugitives must have
some
enemies,” Anatoly persisted.

Jean-Pierre shook his head. “Ellis hasn’t been here long enough to make enemies, and Jane is a heroine—they treat her like Joan of Arc. Nobody dislikes her—oh!” Even as he was speaking, he realized it was not true.

“Well?”

“The mullah.”

“Aaah.”

“Somehow she irritated him beyond reason. It was partly that her cures were more effective than his, but not only that, for mine were, too, but he never disliked me particularly.”

“He probably called her a Western whore.”

“How did you guess?”

“They always do. Where does this mullah live?”

“Abdullah lives in Banda, in a house about half a kilometer outside the village.”

“Will he talk?”

“He probably hates Jane enough to give her away to us,” said Jean-Pierre reflectively. “But he couldn’t be
seen
to do it. We can’t just land in the village and pick him up—everyone would know what had happened and he would clam up. I’d have to meet him in secret somehow. . . .” Jean-Pierre wondered what kind of danger he might put himself in if he continued thinking along this line. Then he thought of the humiliation he had suffered: revenge was worth any risk. “If you drop me near the village I can make my way to the path between the village and his house and hide there until he comes along.”

“What if he doesn’t ‘come along’ all day?”

“Yes . . .”

“We’ll just have to make sure he does.” Anatoly frowned. “We’ll round up all the villagers in the mosque, as we did before—then just let them go. Abdullah will almost certainly go back to his house.”

“But will he be alone?”

“Hmmm. Suppose we let the women go first, and order them to return to their homes. Then, when the men are released they will all want to check on their wives. Does anyone else live near Abdullah?”

“No.”

“Then he
should
hurry along that footpath all alone. You step out from behind a bush—”

“And he slits my throat from ear to ear.”

“He carries a knife?”

“Did you ever meet an Afghan who didn’t?”

Anatoly shrugged. “You can take my pistol.”

Jean-Pierre was pleased, and a little surprised, to be trusted that much, even though he did not know how to use a gun. “I suppose it may serve as a threat,” he said anxiously. “I’ll need some native clothes, just in case I’m seen by someone other than Abdullah. What if I meet someone who knows me? I’ll have to cover my face with a scarf or something. . . .”