Lie Down With Lions (23 page)

The Russians took heart then, and most of them—eighty or more men, Ellis estimated—began moving toward the bridge on their bellies, firing constantly. They can’t be as dispirited or undisciplined as the American newspapers say, Ellis thought, unless this is an elite outfit. Then he realized that the soldiers all seemed white-skinned. There were no Afghans in this force. It was just like Vietnam, where the Arvins were always kept out of anything really important.

Suddenly there was a lull. The Russians in the barley field and the guerrillas in the village exchanged fire across the river in a desultory fashion, the Russians shooting more or less at random, the guerrillas using their ammunition sparingly. Ellis looked up. The Hinds in the air were going after Yussuf and Abdur on the cliff. The Russian commander had correctly identified the heavy machine guns as his main target.

As a Hind swooped toward the clifftop gunners, Ellis had a moment of admiration for the pilot, for flying directly at the guns: he knew how much nerve that took. The aircraft veered away: they had missed one another.

Their chances were roughly equal, Ellis thought: it was easier for Yussuf to aim accurately, because he was stationary whereas the aircraft was moving; but by the same token he was the easier target because he was still. Ellis recalled that in the Hind the wing-mounted rockets were fired by the pilot, while the gunner operated the machine gun in the nose. It would be hard for a pilot to aim accurately in such terrifying circumstances, Ellis thought; and since the Dashokas had a greater range than the helicopter’s four-barrel Gatling-type gun, perhaps Yussuf and Abdur had a slight edge.

I hope so, for the sake of all of us, Ellis thought.

Another Hind descended toward the cliff like a hawk falling on a rabbit, but the guns drummed and the helicopter exploded in midair. Ellis felt like cheering—which was ironic, for he knew so well the terror and barely controlled panic of the helicopter crew under fire.

Another Hind swooped. The gunners were a fraction wide this time, but they shot off the helicopter’s tail, and it went out of control and crashed into the face of the cliff, and Ellis thought: Jesus Christ, we may yet get them all! But the note of the guns had changed, and after a moment Ellis realized that only one was firing. The other had been knocked out. Ellis peered through the dust and saw a Chitrali cap moving up there. Yussuf was still alive. Abdur had been hit.

The three remaining Hinds circled and repositioned. One climbed high above the battle: the Russian commander must be in that one, Ellis thought. The other two descended on Yussuf in a pincer movement. That was smart thinking, Ellis thought anxiously, for Yussuf could not shoot at both of them at once. Ellis watched them come down. When Yussuf aimed at one, the other swooped lower. Ellis noticed that the Russians flew with their doors open, just as the Americans had in Vietnam.

The Hinds pounced. One dived at Yussuf and veered away, but he scored a direct hit and it burst into flames; then the second was swooping, rocket pods and guns blazing away, and Ellis thought, Yussuf doesn’t stand a chance! and then the second Hind seemed to hesitate in midair. Had it been hit? It fell suddenly, going twenty or thirty feet straight down—
When your engine cuts out,
the instructor in flight school had said,
your helicopter will glide like a grand piano
—and crashed on the ledge just a few yards from Yussuf; but then its engine seemed to catch again, and to Ellis’s surprise it began to lift. It’s tougher than a goddamn Huey, he thought; helicopters have improved in the last ten years. Its gunner had been blazing away all the time, but now he stopped. Ellis saw why and his heart sank. A Dashoka came tumbling over the edge of the cliff in a welter of camouflage, bushes and branches; and it was followed immediately by a limp mud-colored bundle that was Yussuf. As he fell down the face of the cliff, he bounced off a jagged outcrop halfway, and his round Chitrali cap came off. A moment later he disappeared from Ellis’s view. He had almost won the battle single-handed: there would be no medal for him, but his story would be told beside campfires in the cold Afghan mountains for a hundred years.

The Russians had lost four of their six Hinds, one Hip, and about twenty-five men; but the guerrillas had lost both their heavy guns, and now they had no defense as the two remaining Hinds began to strafe the village. Ellis huddled inside his hut, wishing it were not made of mud. The strafing was a softening-up tactic: after a minute or two, as if at a signal, the Russians in the barley field rose from the ground and rushed the bridge.

This is it, Ellis thought; this is the end, one way or another.

The guerrillas in the village fired on the charging troops, but they were inhibited by the air cover and few Russians fell. Almost all the Russians were on their feet now, eighty or ninety men, firing blindly across the river as they ran. They were yelling enthusiastically, encouraged by the thinness of the defense. The guerrillas’ shooting became a little more accurate as the Russians reached the bridge, and several more fell, but not enough to halt the charge. Seconds later the first of them had crossed the river and were diving for cover among the houses of the village.

There were about sixty men on or near the bridge when Ellis pulled the handle of the firing device.

The ancient stonework of the bridge blew up like a volcano.

Ellis had laid his charges to kill, not for a neat demolition, and the explosion sprayed lethal chunks of masonry like a burst from a giant machine gun, taking out all the men on the bridge and many still in the barley field. Ellis ducked back into his hut as rubble rained on the village. When it stopped he looked out again.

Where the bridge had been, there was just a low pile of stones and bodies in a grisly mélange. Part of the mosque and two village houses had also collapsed. And the Russians were in full retreat.

As he watched, the twenty or thirty men still left alive scrambled into the open doors of the Hips. Ellis did not blame them. If they stayed in the barley field, with no cover, they would be wiped out slowly by the guerrillas in good positions in the village; and if they tried to cross the river they would be picked off in the water like fish in a barrel.

Seconds later, the three surviving Hips took off from the field to join the two Hinds in the air, and then, without a parting shot, the aircraft soared away over the clifftop and disappeared.

As the beat of their rotors faded, he heard another noise. After a moment he realized that it was the sound of men cheering. We won, he thought. Hell, we won. And he started cheering, too.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“
A
nd where have all the guerrillas gone?” Jane asked. “Theyscattered,” Ellis replied. “This is Masud’s technique. He melts away into the hills before the Russians can catch their breath. They may come back with reinforcements—they could even be at Darg now—but they will find nobody to fight. The guerrillas have gone, all but these few.”

There were seven wounded men in Jane’s clinic. None of them would die. Twelve more had been treated for minor wounds and sent on their way. Only two men had died in the battle, but by a heartbreaking stroke of bad luck one of them was Yussuf. Zahara would be in mourning again—and again it was because of Jean-Pierre.

Jane felt depressed, despite Ellis’s euphoria. I must stop brooding, she thought. Jean-Pierre has gone, and he isn’t coming back, and there’s no point in grieving. I should think positively. I should take an interest in other people’s lives.

“What about your conference?” she asked Ellis. “If all the guerrillas have gone away . . .”

“They all agreed,” Ellis said. “They were so euphoric, after the success of the ambush, that they were ready to say yes to anything. In a way the ambush proved what some of them had doubted: that Masud is a brilliant leader and that by uniting under him they can achieve great victories. It also established my macho credentials, which helped.”

“So you’ve succeeded.”

“Yes. I even have a treaty, signed by all the rebel leaders and witnessed by the mullah.”

“You must be proud.” She reached out and squeezed his arm, then withdrew her hand quickly. She was so glad he was here to keep her from being alone that she felt guilty about having been angry with him for such a long time. But she was afraid she might accidentally give him the mistaken impression that she still cared for him in the old way, which would be awkward.

She turned away from him and looked around the cave. The bandages and syringes were in their boxes and the drugs were in her bag. The wounded guerrillas were comfortable on rugs or blankets. They would stay in the cave all night: it was too difficult to move them all down the hill. They had water and a little bread, and two or three of them were well enough to get up and make tea. Mousa, the one-handed son of Mohammed, was squatting in the mouth of the cave, playing a mysterious game in the dust with the knife his father had given him: he would stay with the wounded men, and in the unlikely event that one of them should need medical attention during the night, the boy would run down the hill and fetch Jane.

Everything was in order. She wished them good night, patted Mousa on the head and went outside. Ellis followed. Jane felt a hint of cold in the evening breeze. It was the first sign of the end of summer. She looked up at the distant mountaintops of the Hindu Kush, from where the winter would come. The snowy peaks were pink with the reflection of the setting sun. This was a beautiful country: that was too easy to forget, especially on busy days. I’m glad I’ve seen it, she thought, even though I can’t wait to go home.

She walked down the hill with Ellis at her side. She glanced at him now and again. The sunset made his face appear bronzed and craggy. She realized that he probably had not slept much the night before. “You look tired,” she said.

“It’s a long time since I was in a real war,” he replied. “Peace makes you soft.”

He was very matter-of-fact about it. At least he did not relish the slaughter, as the Afghan men did. He had told her the bare fact that he had blown up the bridge at Darg, but one of the wounded guerrillas had given her the details, explaining how the timing of the explosion had turned the tide of the battle and graphically describing the carnage.

Down in the village of Banda, there was an air of celebration. Men and women stood talking animatedly in groups, instead of retiring to their courtyards. The children were playing noisy war games, ambushing imaginary Russians in imitation of their older brothers. Somewhere a man was singing to the beat of a drum. The thought of spending the evening alone suddenly seemed unbearably dreary to Jane, and on impulse she said to Ellis: “Come and have tea with me—if you don’t mind my feeding Chantal.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

The baby was crying as they entered the house, and as always Jane’s body responded: one of her breasts sprang a sudden leak. She said hurriedly: “Sit down, and Fara will bring you some tea.” Then she darted into the other room before Ellis could see the embarrassing stain on her shirt. She undid her buttons quickly and picked up the baby. There was the usual moment of blind panic as Chantal sought the nipple, then she began to suck, painfully hard at first and then more gently. Jane felt awkward about going back into the other room. Don’t be silly, she told herself; you asked him, and he said it was okay, and in any case you spent practically every night in his bed at one time. . . . All the same, she felt herself flush slightly as she walked through the door.

Ellis was looking at Jean-Pierre’s maps. “This was the cleverest thing,” he said. “He knew all the routes because Mohammed always used his maps.” He looked up at her, saw her expression and said hastily: “But let’s not talk about that. What will you do now?”

She sat on the cushion with her back against the wall, her favorite position for nursing. Ellis did not seem embarrassed by her exposed breast, and she began to feel more comfortable. “I have to wait,” she said. “As soon as the route to Pakistan is open and the convoys begin again, I’ll go home. What about you?”

“The same. My work here is over. The agreement will have to be supervised, of course, but the Agency has people in Pakistan who can do that.”

Fara brought the tea. Jane wondered what Ellis’s next job would be: plotting a coup in Nicaragua, or blackmailing a Soviet diplomat in Washington, or perhaps assassinating an African Communist? She had questioned him, when they were lovers, about going to Vietnam, and he had told her that everybody had expected him to dodge the draft, but he was a contrary son of a bitch and so he did the opposite. She was not sure she believed that, but even if it was true it did not explain why he had remained in this violent line of work even after he got out of the army. “So what will you do when you get home?” she asked. “Go back to devising cute ways of killing Castro?”

“The Agency is not supposed to do assassinations,” he said.

“But it does.”

“There’s a lunatic element that gives us a bad name. Unfortunately, presidents can’t resist the temptation to play secret-agent games, and that encourages the nutcase faction.”

“Why don’t you turn your back on them all and join the human race?”

“Look. America is full of people who believe that other countries as well as their own have a right to be free—but they’re the type of people who turn their backs and join the human race. In consequence, the Agency employs too many psychopaths and too few decent, compassionate citizens. Then, when the Agency brings down a foreign government at the whim of a president, they all ask how this kind of thing can possibly happen. The answer is because they let it. My country is a democracy, so there’s nobody to blame but me when things are wrong; and if things are to be put right, I have to do it, because it’s my responsibility.”

Jane was unconvinced. “Would you say that the way to reform the KGB is to join it?”

“No, because the KGB is not ultimately controlled by the people. The Agency is.”

“Control isn’t that simple,” said Jane. “The CIA tells lies to the people. You can’t control them if you have no way of knowing what they’re doing.”

“But in the end it’s our Agency and our responsibility.”

“You could work to abolish it instead of joining it.”

“But we need a central intelligence agency. We live in a hostile world and we need information about our enemies.”

Jane sighed. “But look what it leads to,” she said. “You’re planning to send more and bigger guns to Masud so that he can kill more people faster. And that’s what you people
always
end up doing.”

“It’s
not
just so that he can kill more people faster,” Ellis protested. “The Afghans are fighting for their freedom—and they’re fighting
against
a bunch of murderers—”

“They’re
all
fighting for their freedom,” Jane interrupted. “The PLO, the Cuban exiles, the Weathermen, the IRA, the white South Africans and the Free Wales Army.”

“Some are right and some aren’t.”

“And the CIA knows the difference?”

“It ought to—”

“But it doesn’t. Whose freedom is Masud fighting for?”

“The freedom of all Afghans.”

“Bullshit,” Jane said fiercely. “He’s a Muslim fundamentalist, and if he ever takes power the first thing he’ll do is clamp down on women. He will never give them the vote—he wants to take away what few rights they have. And how do you think he will treat his opponents, given that his political hero is the Ayatollah Khomeini? Will scientists and teachers have academic freedom? Will gay men and women have sexual freedom? What will happen to the Hindus, the Buddhists, the atheists and the Plymouth Brethren?”

Ellis said: “Do you
seriously
think Masud’s regime would be worse than that of the Russians?”

Jane thought for a moment. “I don’t know. The only thing that’s certain is that Masud’s regime will be an Afghan tyranny instead of a Russian tyranny. And it’s not worth killing people to exchange a local dictator for a foreigner.”

“The Afghans seem to think it is.”

“Most of them have never been asked.”

“I think it’s obvious. However, I don’t normally do this sort of work anyway. Usually I’m more of a detective type.”

This was something about which Jane had been curious for a year. “What exactly was your mission in Paris?”

“When I spied on all our friends?” He smiled thinly. “Didn’t Jean-Pierre tell you?”

“He said he didn’t really know.”

“Perhaps he didn’t. I was hunting terrorists.”

“Among our friends?”

“That’s where they are usually to be found—among dissidents, dropouts and criminals.”

“Was Rahmi Coskun a terrorist?” Jean-Pierre had said that Rahmi got arrested because of Ellis.

“Yes. He was responsible for the Turkish Airlines firebombing in the Avenue Félix Faure.”

“Rahmi? How do you know?”

“He told me. And when I had him arrested he was planning another bombing.”

“He told you that, too?”

“He asked me to help him with the bomb.”

“My God.” Handsome Rahmi, with the smoldering eyes and passionate hatred of his wretched country’s government . . .

Ellis had not finished. “Remember Pepe Gozzi?”

Jane frowned. “Do you mean the funny little Corsican who had a Rolls-Royce?”

“Yes. He supplied guns and explosives to every nutcase in Paris. He’d sell to anyone who could afford his prices, but he specialized in ‘political’ customers.”

Jane was flabbergasted. She had assumed that Pepe was somewhat disreputable, purely on the grounds that he was both rich and Corsican; but she had supposed that at worst he was involved in some everyday crime such as smuggling or dope dealing. To think that he sold guns to murderers! Jane was beginning to feel as if she had been living in a dream, while intrigue and violence went on in the real world all around her. Am I so naïve? she thought.

Ellis plowed on. “I also pulled in a Russian who had financed a lot of assassinations and kidnappings. Then Pepe was interrogated and spilled the beans on half the terrorists in Europe.”

“That’s what you were doing, all the time we were lovers,” Jane said dreamily. She recalled the parties, the rock concerts, the demonstrations, the political arguments in cafés, the endless bottles of
vin rouge ordinaire
in attic studios. . . . Since their breakup she had assumed vaguely that he had been writing little reports on all the radicals, saying who was influential, who was extreme, who had money, who had the largest following among students, who had Communist Party connections, and so on. It was hard now to accept the idea that he had been after real criminals, and that he had actually found some among their friends. “I can’t believe it,” she said in amazement.

“It was a great triumph, if you want to know the truth.”

“You probably shouldn’t be telling me.”

“I shouldn’t. But when I’ve lied to you in the past, I have regretted doing so—to put it mildly.”

Jane felt awkward and did not know what to say. She shifted Chantal to her left breast, then, catching Ellis’s eye, covered her right breast with her shirt. The conversation was becoming uncomfortably personal, but she was intensely curious to know more. She could see now how he justified himself—although she did not agree with his reasoning—but still she wondered about his motivation. If I don’t find out now, she thought, I may never get another chance. She said: “I don’t understand what makes a man decide to spend his life doing this sort of thing.”

He glanced away. “I’m good at it and it’s worth doing and the pay’s terrific.”

“And I expect you liked the pension plan and the canteen menu. It’s all right—you don’t have to explain yourself to me if you don’t want to.”

He gave her a hard look, as if he were trying to read her thoughts. “I do want to tell you,” he said. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“Yes. Please.”

“It’s to do with the war,” he began, and suddenly Jane knew he was about to say something he had never told to anyone else. “One of the terrible things about flying in Vietnam was that it was so hard to differentiate between Vietcong and civilians. Whenever we gave air support to ground troops, say, or mined a jungle trail, or declared a free-fire zone, we knew that we would kill more women and children and old men than guerrillas. We used to say they had been sheltering the enemy, but who knows? And who cares? We killed them.
We were the terrorists then.
And I’m not talking about isolated cases—although I saw atrocities too—I’m talking about our regular everyday tactics. And there was no justification, you see; that was the kicker. We did all those terrible things in a cause that turned out to be all lies and corruption and self-deceit. We were on the wrong side.” His face was drawn, as if he were in pain from some persistent internal injury. In the restless lamplight his skin was shadowed and sallow. “There’s no excuse, you see, no forgiveness.”