Lie Down With Lions (17 page)

It was the obvious place. No one was allowed to open the bag except Jane, and she never had any reason to.

She undid the clasp and went through the contents, taking them out one by one.

There was no radio.

It was not going to be that easy.

He
must
have one, she thought, and I
must
find it: if I don’t, either Ellis will kill him or he will kill Ellis.

She decided to search the house.

She checked through the medical supplies on the shopkeeper’s shelves, looking in all the boxes and packets whose seals had been broken, hurrying for fear he would come back before she was finished. She found nothing.

She went into the bedroom. She rummaged through his clothes, then in the winter bedding, which was stored in a corner. Nothing. Moving faster, she went into the living room and looked around frantically for possible hiding places. The map chest! She opened it. Only the maps were there. She closed the lid with a bang. Chantal stirred but did not cry, even though it was almost time for her feed. You’re a good baby, thought Jane, thank God! She looked behind the food cupboard and lifted the rug in case there was a concealed hole in the floor.

Nothing.

It had to be here somewhere. She could not imagine that he would take the risk of hiding it
outside
the house, for there would be a terrible danger of its being found by accident.

She went back into the shop. If only she could find his radio everything would be all right—he would have no option but to give in.

His bag was so much the obvious place, for he took it with him wherever he went. She picked it up. It was heavy. She felt around inside it yet again. It had a thick base.

Suddenly she was inspired.

The bag could have a false bottom.

She probed the base with her fingers. It must be here, she thought; it
must.

She pushed her fingers down beside the base and lifted.

The false bottom came up easily.

With her heart in her mouth, she looked inside.

There, in the hidden compartment, was a black plastic box. She took it out.

That’s it, she thought; he calls them on this little radio.

Why does he meet them as well?

Perhaps he cannot tell them secrets over the radio for fear that someone is listening. Perhaps the radio is only for arranging meetings, and for emergencies.

Like when he can’t leave the village.

She heard the back door open. Terrified, she dropped the radio to the floor and spun around, looking into the living room. It was only Fara with a broom. “Oh, Christ,” she said aloud. She turned back, her heart racing.

She had to get rid of the radio before Jean-Pierre returned.

But how? She could not throw it away—it would be found.

She had to smash it.

With what?

She did not have a hammer.

A stone, then.

She hurried through the living room and into the courtyard. The courtyard wall was made of rough stones held together with sandy mortar. She reached up and wiggled one of the top row of stones. It seemed firm. She tried the next, and the next. The fourth stone seemed a little loose. She reached up and tugged at it. It moved a little. “Come on, come on,” she cried. She pulled hard. The rough stone cut into the skin of her hands. She gave a mighty heave and the stone came loose. She jumped back as it fell to the ground. It was about the size of a can of beans: just right. She picked it up in both hands and hurried back into the house.

She went into the front room. She picked up the black plastic radio transmitter from the floor and placed it on the tiled counter. Then she lifted the stone above her head and brought it down with all her might on the radio.

The plastic casing cracked.

She would have to hit it harder.

She lifted the stone and brought it down again. This time the casing broke, revealing the innards of the instrument: she saw a printed circuit, a loudspeaker cone and a pair of batteries with Russian script on them. She took out the batteries and threw them on the floor, then started to smash the mechanism.

She was grabbed from behind suddenly, and Jean-Pierre’s voice shouted: “What are you doing?”

She struggled against his grip, got free for a moment and struck another blow at the little radio.

He grasped her shoulders and hurled her aside. She stumbled and fell to the floor. She landed awkwardly, twisting her wrist.

He stared at the radio. “It’s ruined!” he said. “It’s irreparable!” He grabbed her by the shirt and hauled her to her feet. “You don’t know what you’ve done!” he screamed. There was despair and hot rage in his eyes.

“Let me go!” she shouted at him. He had no right to act like this when it was
he
who had lied to
her.
“How
dare
you manhandle me!”

“How
dare
I?” He let go of her shirt, drew back his arm and punched her hard. The blow landed in the middle of her abdomen. For a split second she was simply paralyzed with shock; then the pain came, deep inside where she was still sore from having had Chantal, and she cried out and bent over with her hands clutching her middle.

Her eyes were shut tight, so she did not see the second blow coming.

His punch landed full on her mouth. She screamed. She could hardly believe he was doing this to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him, terrified that he would hit her again.

“How
dare
I?” he screamed. “How
dare
I?”

She fell to her knees on the dirt floor, and began to sob with shock and pain and misery. Her mouth hurt so much she could hardly speak. “Please don’t hit me,” she managed. “Don’t hit me again.” She held a hand in front of her face defensively.

He knelt down, shoved her hand aside and thrust his face into hers. “How long have you known?” he hissed.

She licked her lips. They were swelling already. She dabbed at them with her sleeve, and it came away bloody. She said: “Since I saw you in the stone hut . . . on the way to Cobak.”

“But you didn’t see anything!”

“He spoke with a Russian accent, and said he had blisters. I figured it out from there.”

There was a pause while that sank in. “Why now?” he said. “Why didn’t you break the radio before?”

“I didn’t dare to.”

“And now?”

“Ellis is here.”

“So?”

Jane summoned up what little courage she had left. “If you don’t stop this . . . spying . . . I’ll tell Ellis, and he will stop you.”

He took her by the throat. “And what if I strangle you, you bitch?”

“If any harm comes to me . . . Ellis will want to know why. He’s still in love with me.”

She stared at him. Hatred burned in his eyes. “Now I’ll never get him!” he said. She wondered who he meant. Ellis? No. Masud? Could it be that Jean-Pierre’s ultimate purpose was to kill Masud? His hands were still around her throat. She felt his grip tighten. She watched his face fearfully.

Then Chantal cried.

Jean-Pierre’s expression changed dramatically. The hostility went from his eyes, and the fixed, taut look of anger crumpled; and finally, to Jane’s amazement, he put his hands over his eyes and began to cry.

She gazed at him with incredulity. She found herself feeling pity for him, and thought: Don’t be a fool—the bastard just beat you up. But despite herself she was touched by his tears. “Don’t cry,” she said quietly. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. She touched his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. My life’s work . . . all for nothing.”

She realized with astonishment and a trace of self-disgust that she was no longer angry with him, despite her swollen lips and the continuing pain in her tummy. She gave in to the sentiment, and put her arms around him, patting his back as if comforting a child.

“Just because of Anatoly’s accent,” he mumbled. “Just because of that.”

“Forget Anatoly,” she said.

“We’ll leave Afghanistan and go back to Europe. We’ll go with the next convoy.” He took his hands from his face and looked at her. “When we get back to Paris . . .”

“Yes?”

“When we’re home . . . I still want us to be together. Can you forgive me? I love you—truly, I always loved you. And we’re married. And there’s Chantal. Please, Jane—please don’t leave me. Please?”

To her surprise she felt no hesitation. He was the man she loved, her husband, the father of her child; and he was in trouble and appealing for help. “I’m not going anywhere,” she replied.

“Promise,” he said. “Promise you won’t leave me.”

She smiled at him with her bleeding mouth. “I love you,” she said. “I promise I won’t leave you.”

CHAPTER NINE

E
llis was frustrated, impatient and angry. He was frustrated because he had been in the Five Lions Valley for seven days and still had not met Masud. He was impatient because it was a daily purgatory for him to see Jane and Jean-Pierre living together and working together and sharing the pleasure of their happy little baby girl. And he was angry because he and nobody else had got himself into this wretched situation.

They had said he would meet Masud today, but the great man had not shown up so far. Ellis had walked all day yesterday to get here. He was at the southwestern end of the Five Lions Valley, in Russian territory. He had left Banda accompanied by three guerrillas—Ali Ghanim, Matullah Khan and Yussuf Gul—but they had accumulated two or three more at each village, and now they were thirty altogether. They sat in a circle, underneath a fig tree near the top of a hill, eating figs and waiting.

At the foot of the hill on which they sat, a flattish plain began and stretched south—all the way to Kabul, in fact, although that was fifty miles away and they could not see it. In the same direction, but much closer, was the Bagram air base, just ten miles away: its buildings were not visible, but they could see the occasional jet rising into the air. The plain was a fertile mosaic of fields and orchards, crisscrossed with streams all feeding into the Five Lions River as it flowed, wider and deeper now but just as fast, toward the capital city. A rough road ran past the foot of the hill and went up the Valley as far as the town of Rokha, which was the northernmost limit of Russian territory here. There was not much traffic on the road: a few peasant carts and an occasional armored car. Where the road crossed the river there was a new Russian-built bridge.

Ellis was going to blow up the bridge.

The lessons in explosives, which he was giving in order to mask for as long as possible his real mission, were hugely popular, and he had been obliged to limit the numbers attending. This was despite his hesitant Dari. He remembered a little Farsi from Tehran, and he had picked up a lot of Dari on his way here with the convoy, so that he could talk about the landscape, food, horses and weapons, but he still could not say such things as
The indentation in the explosive material has the effect of focusing the blast.
Nevertheless the idea of blowing things up appealed so much to the Afghan machismo that he always had an attentive audience. He could not teach them the formulas for calculating the amount of TNT required for a job, or even show them how to use his idiot-proof U.S. Army computing tape, for none of them had done elementary school arithmetic and most of them could not read. Nevertheless he was able to show them how to destroy things more decisively and at the same time use less matériel—which was very important to them, for all ordnance was in short supply. He had also tried to get them to adopt basic safety precautions, but in this he had failed: to them caution was cowardly.

Meanwhile he was tortured by Jane.

He was jealous when he saw her touch Jean-Pierre; he was envious when he saw the two of them in the cave clinic, working together so efficiently and harmoniously; and he was consumed by lust when he caught a glimpse of Jane’s swollen breast as she fed her baby. He would lie awake at night, under his sleeping bag in the house of Ismael Gul, where he was staying, and he would turn constantly, sometimes sweating and sometimes shivering, unable to get comfortable on the floor of packed earth, trying not to hear the muffled sounds of Ismael and his wife making love a few yards away in the next room; and the palms of his hands seemed to itch to touch Jane.

He had nobody to blame but himself for all this. He had volunteered for the mission in the foolish hope that he might win Jane back. It was unprofessional, as well as immature. All he could do was get out of here as quickly as possible.

And he could do nothing until he met Masud.

He stood up and walked around restlessly, careful nonetheless to stay in the shade of the tree so that he would not be visible from the road. A few yards away there was a mass of twisted metal where a helicopter had crashed. He saw a thin piece of steel about the size and shape of a dinner plate, and that gave him an idea. He had been wondering how to demonstrate the effect of shaped charges and now he saw a way.

He took from his kit bag a small, flat piece of TNT and a pocketknife. The guerrillas clustered closer around him. Among them was Ali Ghanim, a small, misshapen man—twisted nose, deformed teeth, and a slightly hunched back—who was said to have fourteen children. Ellis carved the name
Ali
into the TNT in Persian script. He showed it to them. Ali recognized his name. “Ali,” he said, grinning and showing his hideous teeth.

Ellis placed the explosive, carved side down, on the piece of steel. “I hope this works,” he said with a smile, and they all smiled back, although none of them spoke English. He took a coil of blasting fuse from his capacious bag and cut off a four-foot length. He got out his cap box, took a blasting cap and inserted the end of the fuse into the cylindrical cap. He taped the cap to the TNT.

He looked down the hill to the road. He could see no traffic. He carried his little bomb across the hillside and put it down about fifty yards away. He lit the fuse with a match, then walked back to the fig tree.

The fuse was slow-burning. Ellis wondered, while he waited, whether Masud was having him watched and weighed up by the other guerrillas. Was the leader waiting for assurance that Ellis was a serious person whom the guerrillas could respect? Protocol was always important in an army, even a revolutionary one. But Ellis could not pussyfoot around much longer. If Masud did not show today, Ellis would have to drop all this explosives nonsense, confess to being an envoy from the White House, and demand a meeting with the rebel leader immediately.

There was an unimpressive bang and a small cloud of dust. The guerrillas looked disappointed at such a feeble blast. Ellis retrieved the piece of metal, using his scarf to hold it in case it was hot. The name
Ali
was cut through it in ragged-edge letters of Persian script. He showed it to the guerrillas, and they burst into excited chatter. Ellis was pleased: it was a vivid demonstration of the point that the explosive was
more
powerful where it was indented, contrary to what common sense would suggest.

The guerrillas suddenly went quiet. Ellis looked around and saw another group of seven or eight men approaching over the hill. Their rifles and round Chitrali caps marked them as guerrillas. As they came nearer, Ali stiffened, almost as if he were about to salute. Ellis said: “Who is it?”

“Masud,” Ali replied.

“Which one is he?”

“The one in the middle.”

Ellis studied the central figure in the group. Masud looked just like the others at first: a thin man of average height, dressed in khaki clothes and Russian boots. Ellis scrutinized his face. He was light-skinned, with a sparse mustache and the wispy beard of a teenager. He had a long nose with a hooked point. His alert dark eyes were surrounded by heavy lines which made him look at least five years older than his reputed age of twenty-eight. It was not a handsome face, but there was in it an air of lively intelligence and calm authority that distinguished him from the men around him.

He came directly to Ellis with his hand outstretched. “I am Masud.”

“Ellis Thaler.” Ellis shook his hand.

“We’re going to blow up this bridge,” Masud said in French.

“You want to get started?”

“Yes.”

Ellis packed his equipment into his kit bag while Masud went around the group of guerrillas, shaking hands with some, nodding to others, embracing one or two, speaking a few words to each.

When they were ready they went down the hill in a straggle, hoping—Ellis presumed—that if they were seen they would be taken for a group of peasants rather than a unit of the rebel army. When they reached the foot of the hill they were no longer visible from the road, although anyone overhead in a helicopter would have noticed them: Ellis presumed they would take cover if they heard a chopper. They headed for the river, following a footpath through the cultivated fields. They passed several small houses and were seen by the people working in the fields, some of whom ignored them studiously while others waved and called out greetings. The guerrillas reached the river and walked along its bank, gaining what cover they could from the boulders and sparse vegetation at the water’s edge. When they were about three hundred yards from the bridge, a small convoy of army trucks began to cross it, and they all hid while the vehicles rumbled by, heading for Rokha. Ellis lay beneath a willow tree and found Masud beside him. “If we destroy the bridge,” Masud said, “we will cut their supply line to Rokha.”

After the trucks had gone they waited a few minutes, they walked the rest of the way to the bridge and clustered beneath, invisible from the road.

At its midpoint the bridge was twenty feet above the river, which seemed to be about ten feet deep here. Ellis saw that it was a simple stringer bridge—two long steel girders, or stringers, supporting a flat slab of concrete road and stretching from one bank to the other without intermediate support. The concrete was dead load—the girders took the strain. Break them and the bridge was ruined.

Ellis set about his preparations. His TNT was in one-pound yellow blocks. He made a stack of ten blocks and taped them together. Then he made three more identical stacks, using all his explosive. He was using TNT because that was the substance most often found in bombs, shells, mines and hand grenades, and the guerrillas got most of their supplies from unexploded Russian ordnance. Plastic explosive would have been more suitable for their needs, for it could be stuffed into holes, wrapped around girders and generally molded into any shape required—but they had to work with the materials they could find and steal. They could occasionally get a little
plastique
from the Russian engineers by trading it for marijuana grown in the Valley, but the transaction—which involved intermediaries in the Afghan regular army—was risky and supplies were limited. All this Ellis had been told by the CIA’s man in Peshawar, and it had turned out to be right.

The girders above him were I-beams spaced about eight feet apart. Ellis said in Dari: “Somebody find me a stick this long,” indicating the space between the beams. One of the guerrillas walked along the riverbank and uprooted a young tree. “I need another one just the same,” Ellis said.

He put a stack of TNT on the lower lip of one of the I-beams and asked a guerrilla to hold it in place. He put another stack on the other I-beam in a similar position; then he forced the young tree between the two stacks so that it kept them both where they were.

He waded through the river and did exactly the same at the other end of the bridge.

He described everything he was doing in a mixture of Dari, French and English, letting them pick up what they could—the most important thing was for them to see what he was doing, and its results. He fused the charges with Primacord, the high-explosive detonating cord that burned at 21,000 feet per second, and he connected the four stacks so that they would explode simultaneously. He then made a ring main by looping the Primacord back on itself. The effect, he explained to Masud in French, would be that the cord burned down to the TNT from both ends, so that if somehow the cable was severed in one place the bomb would still go off. He recommended this as a routine precaution.

He felt oddly happy as he worked. There was something soothing about mechanical tasks and the dispassionate calculation of poundage of explosive. And now that Masud had shown up at last, he could get on with his mission.

He trailed the Primacord through the water so that it was less visible—it would burn perfectly well underwater—and brought it out onto the riverbank. He attached a blasting cap to the end of the Primacord, then added a four-minute length of ordinary, slow-burning blasting fuse.

“Ready?” he said to Masud.

Masud said: “Yes.”

Ellis lit the fuse.

They all walked away briskly, heading upstream along the riverbank. Ellis felt a certain secret boyish glee about the enormous bang he was about to create. The others seemed excited, too, and he wondered whether he was as bad at concealing his enthusiasm as they were. It was while he was looking at them in this way that their expressions altered dramatically, and they all became alert suddenly, like birds listening for worms in the ground; and then Ellis heard it—the distant rumble of tank tracks.

The road was not visible from where they were, but one of the guerrillas quickly shinnied up a tree. “Two,” he reported.

Masud took Ellis’s arm. “Can you destroy the bridge while the tanks are on it?” he said.

Oh, shit, thought Ellis, this is a test. “Yes,” he said rashly.

Masud nodded, smiling faintly. “Good.”

Ellis scrambled up the tree alongside the guerrilla and looked across the fields. There were two black tanks trundling heavily along the narrow stony road from Kabul. He felt very tense: this was his first sight of the enemy. With their armor plating and their enormous guns they looked invulnerable, especially by contrast with the ragged guerrillas and their rifles; and yet the Valley was littered with the remains of tanks the guerrillas had destroyed with homemade mines, well-placed grenades and stolen rockets.

There were no other vehicles with the tanks. It was not a patrol, then, or a raiding party; the tanks were probably being delivered to Rokha after being repaired at Bagram, or perhaps they had just arrived from the Soviet Union.

He began calculating.

The tanks were going at about ten miles per hour, so they would reach the bridge in a minute and a half. The fuse had been burning for less than a minute: it had at least three minutes to go. At present the tanks would be across the bridge and a safe distance away before the explosion. He had to shorten the fuse.

He dropped from the tree and started to run, thinking: How the hell many years is it since the last time I was in a combat zone?