Lie Down With Lions (9 page)

“She’ll get over it,” Gill said. “America is full of kids with two daddies.”

“That’s no excuse. I fucked up, and I should face it.”

She surprised him again by patting his knee. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said. “You just weren’t made for this. I knew that within a month of marrying you. You don’t want a house, a job, the suburbs, children. You’re a little weird. That’s why I fell in love with you, and that’s why I let you go so readily. I loved you because you were different, crazy, original, exciting. You would do
anything.
But you’re no family man.”

He sat in silence, thinking about what she had said, while she drove. It was meant kindly, and for that he was warmly grateful; but was it true? He thought not. I don’t want a house in the suburbs, he thought, but I’d like a home: maybe a villa in Morocco or a loft in Greenwich Village or a penthouse in Rome. I don’t want a wife to be my housekeeper, cooking and cleaning and shopping and taking the minutes at the PTA; but I’d like a companion, someone to share books and movies and poetry with, someone to talk to at night. I’d even like to have kids, and raise them to know about something more than Michael Jackson.

He did not say any of this to Gill.

She stopped the car and he realized they were outside the Eastern terminal. He looked at his watch: eight fifty. If he hurried he would get on the nine o’clock shuttle. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“What you need is a woman like you, one of your kind,” Gill said.

Ellis thought of Jane. “I met one, once.”

“What happened?”

“She married a handsome doctor.”

“Is the doctor crazy like you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then it won’t last. When did she get married?”

“About a year ago.”

“Ah.” Gill was probably figuring that that was when Ellis had come back into Petal’s life in a big way; but she had the grace not to say so. “Take my advice,” she said. “Check her out.”

Ellis got out of the car. “Talk to you soon.”

“Bye.”

He slammed the door and she drove off.

Ellis hurried into the building. He made the flight with a minute or two to spare. As the plane took off he found a newsmagazine in the seat pocket in front of him and looked for a report from Afghanistan.

He had been following the war closely since he had heard, from Bill in Paris, that Jane had carried out her intention of going there with Jean-Pierre. The war was no longer front-page news. Often a week or two would go by with no reports about it at all. But now the winter lull was over and there was something in the press at least once a week.

This magazine had an analysis of the Russian situation in Afghanistan. Ellis began it mistrustfully, for he knew that many such articles in news-magazines emanated from the CIA: a reporter would get an exclusive briefing on the CIA’s intelligence appraisal of some situation, but in fact he would be the unconscious channel for a piece of disinformation aimed at another country’s intelligence service, and the report he wrote would have no more relation to the truth than an article in
Pravda.

However, this article seemed straight. There was a buildup of Russian troops and arms going on, it said, in preparation for a major summer offensive. This was seen by Moscow as a make-or-break summer: they
had
to crush the Resistance this year or they would be forced to reach an accommodation of some kind with the rebels. This made sense to Ellis: he would check to see what the CIA’s people in Moscow were saying, but he had a feeling it would tally.

Among the crucial target areas, the article listed the Panisher Valley.

Ellis remembered Jean-Pierre talking about the Five Lions Valley. The article also mentioned Masud, the rebel leader: Ellis recalled Jean-Pierre speaking of him, too.

He looked out of the window, watching the sun set. There was no doubt, he thought with a pang of dread, that Jane was going to be in grave danger this summer.

But it was none of his business. She was married to someone else now. Anyway, there was nothing Ellis could do about it.

He looked down at his magazine, turned the page, and started reading about El Salvador. The plane roared on toward Washington. In the west the sun went down, and darkness fell.

Allen Winderman took Ellis Thaler to lunch at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Potomac River. Winderman arrived a half hour late. He was a typical Washington operator: dark gray suit, white shirt, striped tie; as smooth as a shark. As the White House was paying, Ellis ordered lobster and a glass of white wine. Winderman asked for Perrier and a salad. Everything about Winderman was too tight: his tie, his shoes, his schedule and his self-control.

Ellis was on his guard. He could not refuse such an invitation from a presidential aide, but he did not like discreet, unofficial lunches, and he did not like Allen Winderman.

Winderman got right down to business. “I want your advice,” he began.

Ellis stopped him. “First of all, I need to know whether you told the Agency about our meeting.” If the White House wanted to plan covert action without telling the CIA, Ellis would have nothing to do with it.

“Of course,” Winderman said. “What do you know about Afghanistan?”

Ellis felt suddenly cold. Sooner or later, this is going to involve Jane, he thought. They know about her, of course: I made no secret of it. I told Bill in Paris I was going to ask her to marry me. I called Bill subsequently to find out whether she really did go to Afghanistan. All that went down on my file. Now this bastard knows about her, and he’s going to use his knowledge. “I know a little about it,” he said cautiously, and then he recalled a verse of Kipling, and recited it:

When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,
An’ the women come out to cut up your remains,
Just roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Winderman looked ill at ease for the first time. “After two years of posing as a poet you must know a lot of that stuff.”

“So do the Afghans,” said Ellis. “They’re all poets, the way all Frenchmen are gourmets and all Welshmen are singers.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s because they can’t read or write. Poetry is a spoken art form.” Winderman was getting visibly impatient: his schedule did not allow for poetry. Ellis went on: “The Afghans are wild, ragged, fierce mountain tribesmen, hardly out of the Middle Ages. They’re said to be elaborately polite, brave as lions and pitilessly cruel. Their country is harsh and arid and barren. What do
you
know about them?”

“There’s no such thing as an Afghan,” Winderman said. “There are six million Pushtuns in the south, three million Tajiks in the west, a million Uzbaks in the north, and another dozen or so nationalities with fewer than a million. Modern borders mean little to them: there are Tajiks in the Soviet Union and Pushtuns in Pakistan. Some of them are divided into tribes. They’re like the Red Indians, who never thought of themselves as American, but Apache or Crow or Sioux. And they would just as soon fight one another as fight the Russians. Our problem is to get the Apache and the Sioux to unite against the palefaces.”

“I see.” Ellis nodded. He was wondering: When does Jane come into all this? He said: “So the main question is: who will be the Big Chief?”

“That’s easy. The most promising of the guerrilla leaders, by far, is Ahmed Shah Masud, in the Panisher Valley.”

The Five Lions Valley. What are you up to, you slimy bastard? Ellis studied Winderman’s smooth-shaven face. The man was imperturbable. Ellis asked: “What makes Masud so special?”

“Most of the rebel leaders are content to control their tribes, collect taxes and deny the government access to their territory. Masud does more than that. He comes out of his mountain stronghold and attacks. He’s within striking distance of three strategic targets: the capital city, Kabul; the Salang tunnel, on the only highway from Kabul to the Soviet Union; and Bagram, the principal military air base. He’s in a position to inflict major damage, and he does. He has studied the art of guerrilla warfare. He’s read Mao. He’s easily the best military brain in the country. And he has finance. Emeralds are mined in his valley and sold in Pakistan: Masud takes a ten percent tax on all sales and uses the money to fund his army. He’s twenty-eight years old, and charismatic—the people worship him. Finally, he’s a Tajik. The largest group is the Pushtuns, and all the others hate
them,
so the leader can’t be a Pushtun. Tajiks are the next biggest nation. There’s a chance they might unite under a Tajik.”

“And we want to facilitate this?”

“That’s right. The stronger the rebels are, the more damage they do to the Russians. Furthermore, a triumph for the U.S. intelligence community would be very useful this year.”

It was of no consequence to Winderman and his kind that the Afghans were fighting for their freedom against a brutal invader, Ellis thought. Morality was out of fashion in Washington: the power game was all that mattered. If Winderman had been born in Leningrad instead of Los Angeles, he would have been just as happy, just as successful and just as powerful, and he would have used just the same tactics fighting for the other side. “What do you want from me?” Ellis asked him.

“I want to pick your brain. Is there any way an undercover agent could promote an alliance between the different Afghan tribes?”

“I expect so,” said Ellis. The food came, interrupting him and giving him a few moments to think. When the waiter had gone away, he said: “It should be possible, provided there is something
they
want from
us
—and I imagine that would be weapons.”

“Right.” Winderman started to eat, hesitantly, like a man who has an ulcer. Between small mouthfuls he said: “At the moment they buy their weapons across the border in Pakistan. All they can get there is copies of Victorian British rifles—or, if not copies, the genuine damned article, a hundred years old and still firing. They also steal Kalashnikovs from dead Russian soldiers. But they’re desperate for small artillery—antiaircraft guns and hand-launched ground-to-air missiles—so they can shoot down planes and helicopters.”

“Are we willing to give them these weapons?”

“Yes. Not directly—we would want to conceal our involvement by sending them through intermediaries. But that’s no problem. We could use the Saudis.”

“Okay.” Ellis swallowed some lobster. It was good. “Let me say what I think is the first step. In each guerrilla group you need a nucleus of men who know, understand and trust Masud. That nucleus then becomes the liaison group for communications with Masud. They build their role gradually: exchange of information first, then mutual cooperation, and finally coordinated battle plans.”

“Sounds good,” said Winderman. “How might that be set up?”

“I’d have Masud run a training scheme in the Five Lions Valley. Each rebel group would send a few young men to fight alongside Masud for a while and learn the methods that make him so successful. They would also learn to respect him and trust him, if he is as good a leader as you say.”

Winderman nodded thoughtfully. “That’s the kind of proposal that might be acceptable to tribal leaders who would reject any plan that committed them to take orders from Masud.”

“Is there one rival leader in particular whose cooperation is essential to any alliance?”

“Yes. In fact there are two: Jahan Kamil and Amal Azizi, both Pushtuns.”

“Then I would send in an undercover agent with the objective of getting the two of them around a table with Masud. When he came back with all three signatures on a piece of paper, we would send the first load of rocket launchers. Further consignments would depend on how well the training program was going.”

Winderman put down his fork and lit a cigarette. He definitely has an ulcer, Ellis thought. Winderman said: “This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.” Ellis could see he was already figuring out how to take the credit for the idea. By tomorrow he would be saying
We cooked up a scheme over lunch
and his written report would read
Covert action specialists assessed my scheme as viable.
“What’s the downside risk?”

Ellis considered. “If the Russians caught the agent, they could get considerable propaganda value out of the whole thing. At the moment they have what the White House would call ‘an image problem’ in Afghanistan. Their allies in the Third World don’t enjoy watching them overrun a small primitive country. Their Muslim friends, in particular, tend to sympathize with the rebels. Now, the Russians’ line is that the so-called rebels are just bandits, financed and armed by the CIA. They would just love to be able to prove it by catching a real live CIA spook right there in the country and putting him on trial. In terms of global politics, I imagine that could do us a lot of damage.”

“What are the chances that the Russians would catch our man?”

“Slender. If they can’t catch Masud, why would they be able to catch an undercover agent sent to meet Masud?”

“Good.” Winderman stubbed out his cigarette. “I want you to be that agent.”

Ellis was taken by surprise. He should have seen this coming, he realized, but he had been engrossed in the problem. “I don’t do that stuff anymore,” he said, but his voice sounded thick and he could not help thinking: I would see Jane. I would see Jane!

“I talked to your boss on the phone,” Winderman said. “His opinion was that an assignment in Afghanistan might tempt you back into fieldwork.”

So it was a setup. The White House wanted to achieve something dramatic in Afghanistan, so they asked the CIA to lend them an agent. The CIA wanted Ellis to work in the field again, so they told the White House to offer him this assignment, knowing or suspecting that the prospect of meeting up with Jane again was almost irresistible.

Ellis hated to be manipulated.

But he wanted to go to the Five Lions Valley.

There had been a long silence. Winderman said impatiently: “Will you do it?”