Lie Down With Lions (33 page)

His anger was at the boiling point as he stormed into the crude building. Several more of the search party stood in a group in one corner. They looked at Jean-Pierre, then made way for him.

In the corner were two people tied to a bench.

Jean-Pierre stared at them, shocked. His mouth fell open and the blood drained from his face. There was a thin, anemic-looking boy of eighteen or nineteen with long, dirty hair and a droopy mustache; and a large-bosomed blond girl with flowers in her hair. The boy looked at Jean-Pierre with relief and said in English: “Hey, man, will you help us? We are in
deep
shit.”

Jean-Pierre felt as if he would explode. They were just a couple of hippies on the Katmandu trail, a species of tourist which had not quite died out despite the war. What a disappointment! Why did they have to be here just when the whole world was looking for a runaway Western couple?

Jean-Pierre certainly was not going to help a pair of drug-taking degenerates. He turned around and went out.

The pilot was just coming in. He saw the expression on Jean-Pierre’s face and said: “What’s the matter?”

“It’s the wrong couple. Come with me.”

The man hurried after Jean-Pierre. “The wrong people? These are not the Americans?”

“They’re Americans, but they’re not the people we’re looking for.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to speak to Anatoly, and I need you to get him on the radio for me.”

They crossed the field and climbed into the helicopter. Jean-Pierre sat in the gunner’s seat and put on the headphones. He tapped his foot impatiently on the metal floor as the pilot talked interminably over the radio in Russian. At last Anatoly’s voice came on, sounding very distant and punctuated by atmospheric crackling.

“Jean-Pierre, my friend, here is Anatoly. Where are you?”

“I’m at Atati. The two Americans they have captured are not Ellis and Jane. Repeat, they are not Ellis and Jane. They’re just a couple of foolish kids looking for nirvana. Over.”

“This does not surprise me, Jean-Pierre,” Anatoly’s voice came back.

“What?” Jean-Pierre interrupted, forgetting that communication was one-way.

“—have received a series of reports that Ellis and Jane have been seen in the Linar Valley. The search party has not made contact with them but we are hot on their trail. Over.”

Jean-Pierre’s anger about the hippies evaporated and some of his eagerness came back. “The Linar Valley—where is that? Over.”

“Near where you are now. It runs into the Nuristan Valley fifteen or twenty miles south of Atati. Over.”

So close! “Are you sure? Over.”

“The search party got several reports in the villages they passed through. The descriptions fit Ellis and Jane. And they mention a baby. Over.”

Then it
was
them. “Can we figure out where they are now? Over.”

“Not yet. I’m on my way to join the search party. Then I’ll get more details. Over.”

“You mean you’re not at Bagram? What happened to your, uh . . . visitor? Over.”

“He left,” Anatoly said briskly. “I’m in the air now and about to meet the team at a village called Mundol. It’s in the Nuristan Valley, downstream of the point where the Linar joins the Nuristan, and it’s near a big lake which is also called Mundol. Join me there. We’ll spend the night there and then supervise the search in the morning. Over.”

“I’ll be there!” said Jean-Pierre elatedly. He was struck by a thought. “What are we going to do with these hippies? Over.”

“I’ll have them taken to Kabul for interrogation. We have some people there who will remind them of the reality of the material world. Let me speak to your pilot. Over.”

“See you in Mundol. Over.”

Anatoly began speaking in Russian to the copilot, and Jean-Pierre took off his headset. He wondered why Anatoly wanted to waste time interrogating a pair of harmless hippies. They obviously weren’t spies. Then it occurred to him that the only person who really
knew
whether or not these two were Ellis and Jane was Jean-Pierre himself. It was possible—even if wildly unlikely—that Ellis and Jane might have persuaded him to let them go and tell Anatoly this search party had just captured a couple of hippies.

He was a suspicious bastard, that Russian.

Jean-Pierre waited impatiently for him to finish talking to the pilot. It sounded as if the search party down in Mundol was close to its quarry. Tomorrow, perhaps, Ellis and Jane would be caught. Their attempt to escape had always been more or less futile, in reality; but that did not stop Jean-Pierre worrying, and he would be in an agony of suspense until the two of them were bound hand and foot and locked in a Russian cell.

The pilot took off the headset and said: “We will take you to Mundol in this helicopter. The Hip will take the others back to base.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later they were in the air, leaving the others to take their time. It was almost dark, and Jean-Pierre wondered whether it would prove difficult to find the village of Mundol.

Night fell rapidly as they headed downstream. The landscape below disappeared into darkness. The pilot spoke constantly on the radio, and Jean-Pierre imagined that the people on the ground at Mundol were guiding him. After ten or fifteen minutes, powerful lights appeared below. A kilometer or so beyond the lights, the moon glinted off the surface of a large body of water. The helicopter went down.

It landed near another helicopter in a field. A waiting trooper led Jean-Pierre across the grass to a village on a hillside. The silhouettes of the wooden houses were limned with moonlight. Jean-Pierre followed the trooper into one of the houses. There, sitting on a folding chair and wrapped in an enormous coat of wolf fur, was Anatoly.

He was in an ebullient mood. “Jean-Pierre, my French friend, we are close to success!” he said loudly. It was odd to see a man with an Oriental face being hearty and jovial. “Have some coffee—there’s vodka in it.”

Jean-Pierre accepted a paper cup from an Afghan woman who appeared to be waiting on Anatoly. He sat down on a folding chair like Anatoly’s. They looked army, these chairs. If the Russians were carrying this much equipment—folding chairs and coffee and paper cups and vodka—perhaps they would not move faster than Ellis and Jane, after all.

Anatoly read his mind. “I brought a few little luxuries in my helicopter,” he said with a smile. “The KGB has its dignity, you know.”

Jean-Pierre could not read the expression on his face and did not know whether he was joking or not. He changed the subject. “What’s the latest news?”

“Our fugitives definitely passed through the villages of Bosaydur and Linar today. At some point this afternoon the search party lost its guide—he just disappeared. He probably decided to go home.” Anatoly frowned, as if bothered by that little loose end, then resumed his story. “Fortunately, they found another guide almost immediately.”

“Employing your usual highly persuasive recruiting technique, no doubt,” said Jean-Pierre.

“No, oddly enough. This one was a genuine volunteer, they tell me. He’s here in the village somewhere.”

“Of course, they’re more likely to volunteer here in Nuristan,” Jean-Pierre mused. “They’re hardly involved in the war—and in any case they’re said to be totally without scruples.”

“This new man claims actually to have seen the fugitives today, before he joined us. They passed him at the point where the Linar flows into the Nuristan. He saw them turn south, heading this way.”

“Good!”

“Tonight, after the search party arrived here in Mundol, our man questioned some villagers and learned that two foreigners with a baby passed through this afternoon, going south.”

“Then there’s no doubt,” said Jean-Pierre with satisfaction.

“None at all,” Anatoly agreed. “We’ll catch them tomorrow. For sure.”

Jean-Pierre woke up on an inflatable mattress—another KGB luxury—on the dirt floor of the house. The fire had gone out during the night and the air was cold. Anatoly’s bed, across the dim little room, was empty. Jean-Pierre did not know where the owners of the house had spent the night. After they had provided food and served it, Anatoly had sent them away. He treated the whole of Afghanistan as if it were his personal kingdom. Perhaps it was.

Jean-Pierre sat up and rubbed his eyes, then saw Anatoly standing in the doorway, looking at him speculatively. “Good morning,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Have you ever been here before?” Anatoly asked without preamble.

Jean-Pierre’s brain was still foggy with sleep. “Where?”

“Nuristan,” Anatoly replied impatiently.

“No.”

“Strange.”

Jean-Pierre found this enigmatic style of conversation irritating so early in the morning. “Why?” he said tetchily. “Why is it strange?”

“I was talking to the new guide a few minutes ago.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mohammed, Muhammad, Mahomet, Mahmoud—one of those names a million other people have.”

“What language did you use, with a Nuristani?”

“French, Russian, Dari and English—the usual mixture. He asked me who arrived in the second helicopter last night. I said: ‘A Frenchman who can identify the fugitives,’ or words to that effect. He asked your name, so I told him: I wanted to keep him going until I found out why he was so interested. But he didn’t ask any more questions. It was almost as if he knew you.”

“Impossible.”

“I suppose so.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?” It was not like Anatoly to be diffident, Jean-Pierre thought.

“There is no point in asking a man a question until you have established whether he has any reason to lie to you.” With that, Anatoly went out.

Jean-Pierre got up. He had slept in his shirt and underwear. He pulled on his trousers and boots, then draped the greatcoat over his shoulders and stepped outside.

He found himself on a rough wooden veranda overlooking the whole valley. Down below, the river coiled between the fields, broad and sluggish. Some way to the south it entered a long, narrow lake rimmed with mountains. The sun had not yet risen. A mist over the water obscured the far end of the lake. It was a pleasant scene. Of course, Jean-Pierre remembered, this was the most fertile and populous part of Nuristan: most of the rest was wilderness.

The Russians had dug a field latrine, Jean-Pierre noted with approval. The Afghan practice of using the streams from which they took their drinking water was the reason they all had worms. The Russians will really knock this country into shape once they get control of it, he thought.

He walked down to the meadow, used the latrine, washed in the river, and got a cup of coffee from a group of soldiers standing around a cooking fire.

The search party was ready to leave. Anatoly had decided last night that he would direct the search from here, remaining in constant radio contact with the searchers. The helicopters would stay ready to take him and Jean-Pierre to join the searchers as soon as they sighted their quarry.

While Jean-Pierre was sipping his coffee, Anatoly came across the field from the village. “Have you seen that damn guide?” he asked abruptly.

“No.”

“He seems to have disappeared.”

Jean-Pierre raised his eyebrows. “Just like the last one.”

“These people are impossible. I’ll have to ask the villagers. Come and translate.”

“I don’t speak their language.”

“Maybe they’ll understand your Dari.”

Jean-Pierre walked with Anatoly back across the meadow to the village. As they climbed the narrow dirt path between the rickety houses, somebody called to Anatoly in Russian. They stopped and looked to the side. Ten or twelve men, some Nuristanis in white and some Russians in uniform, were crowded together on a veranda looking at something on the ground. They parted to let Anatoly and Jean-Pierre through. The thing on the floor was a dead man.

The villagers were jabbering in outraged tones and pointing to the body. The man’s throat had been cut: the wound gaped horribly and the head hung loose. The blood had dried—he had probably been killed yesterday.

“Is this Mohammed, the guide?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“No,” said Anatoly. He questioned one of the soldiers, then said: “This is the
previous
guide, the one who disappeared.”

Jean-Pierre addressed the villagers slowly in Dari. “What is going on?”

After a pause, a wrinkled old man with a bad occlusion in his right eye replied in the same language. “He has been murdered!” he said accusingly.

Jean-Pierre began to question him and, bit by bit, the story emerged. The dead man was a villager from the Linar Valley who had been conscripted as a guide by the Russians. His body, hastily concealed in a clump of bushes, had been found by a goatherd’s dog. The man’s family thought the Russians had murdered him, and they had brought the body here this morning in a dramatic attempt to find out why.

Jean-Pierre explained to Anatoly. “They’re outraged because they think your men killed him,” he finished.

“Outraged?” said Anatoly. “Don’t they know there’s a war on? People are getting killed every day—that’s the whole idea.”

“Obviously they don’t see much action here.
Did
you kill him?”

“I’ll find out.” Anatoly spoke to the soldiers. Several of them answered together in animated tones. “We didn’t kill him,” Anatoly translated to Jean-Pierre.

“So who did? I wonder. Could the locals be murdering our guides for collaborating with the enemy?”

“No,” said Anatoly. “If they hated collaborators they wouldn’t be making this fuss about one who got killed. Tell them we’re innocent—calm them down.”

Jean-Pierre spoke to the one-eyed man. “The foreigners did not kill this man. They want to know who murdered their guide.”

The one-eyed man translated this, and the villagers reacted with consternation.

Anatoly looked thoughtful. “Perhaps the disappearing Mohammed killed this man in order to get the job of guide.”

“Are you paying much?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“I doubt it.” Anatoly asked a sergeant and translated the answer. “Five hundred afghanis a day.”