Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [123]
“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
They 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