Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [124]
Although Ellis and Jane had not been in the village yesterday when Jean-Pierre and Anatoly went to find them, it was almost certain they had heard about the raid and had now gone into hiding. They would not be in Banda. They might be living in a mosque in another village—short-term visitors normally slept in the mosques—or, if they felt the villages were unsafe, they might move into one of the little one-room stone huts for travelers which dotted the countryside. They could be anywhere in the Valley, or they could be in one of the many little side valleys.
Anatoly had covered all these possibilities.
Helicopters would land at every village in the Valley and at every hamlet in every side valley. The pilots would overfly all the trails and footpaths. The troops—more than a thousand men—were instructed to search every building and look under large trees and inside caves. Anatoly was determined not to fail again. Today they would find Ellis.
And Jane.
The interior of the Hind was cramped and bare. There was nothing in the passenger cabin but a bench fixed to the fuselage opposite the door. Jean-Pierre shared it with Anatoly. They could see the flight deck. The pilot’s seat was raised two or three feet off the floor, with a step beside it for access. All the money had been spent on the armament, speed and maneuverability of the aircraft and none on comfort.
As they flew north, Jean-Pierre brooded. Ellis had pretended to be his friend while working all the time for the Americans. Using that friendship, he had ruined Jean-Pierre’s scheme for catching Masud, thereby destroying a year’s painstaking work. And finally, Jean-Pierre thought, he seduced my wife.
His mind went in circles, always returning to that seduction. He stared out into the darkness, watching the lights of the other helicopters, and imagined the two lovers as they must have been the night before, lying on a blanket under the stars in some field, playing with one another’s bodies and whispering endearments. He wondered whether Ellis was good in bed. He had asked Jane which of them was the better lover, but she said neither was better—they were just different. Was that what she said to Ellis? Or did she murmur You’re the best, baby, the very best? Jean-Pierre was beginning to hate her as well. How could she go back to a man who was nine years older than she, a crass American and a CIA spook?
Jean-Pierre looked at Anatoly. The Russian sat still and blank-faced, like a stone statue of a Chinese mandarin. He had got very little sleep during the previous forty-eight hours, but he did not look tired, just dogged. Jean-Pierre was seeing a new side to the man. In their meetings over the past year Anatoly had been relaxed and affable, but now he was taut, unemotional and tireless, driving himself and his colleagues relentlessly. He was calmly obsessed.
When dawn broke they could see the other helicopters. It was an awe-some sight: they were like a vast cloud of giant bees swarming over the mountains. The noise of their buzzing must have been deafening on the ground.
As they approached the Valley, they began to divide into smaller groups. Jean-Pierre and Anatoly were with the flight going to Comar, the northernmost village of the Valley. For the last stretch of the journey they followed the river. The rapidly brightening morning light revealed tidy ranks of sheaves in the wheatfields: the bombing had not completely disrupted farming here in the upper Valley.
The sun was in their eyes as they descended to Comar. The village was a cluster of houses peeping over a heavy wall on the hillside. It reminded Jean-Pierre of perched hill villages in the south of France, and he felt a pang of homesickness. Wouldn’t it be good to go home, and hear French spoken properly, and eat fresh bread and tasty food, or get into a taxi and go to a cinema!
He shifted his weight in the hard seat. Right now it would be good just to get out of the helicopter. He had been in pain more or less constantly since the beating. But worse than the pain was the memory of