Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [125]
By the middle of the afternoon, failure stared them in the face yet again.
They had searched the village of Comar, all the hamlets around it, all the side valleys in the area, and each of the single farmhouses in the almost-barren land to the north of the village. Anatoly was in constant touch with the commanders of the other squads by radio. They had conducted equally thorough searches throughout the entire Valley. They had found arms caches in a few caves and houses; they had fought skirmishes with several groups of men, presumably guerrillas, especially in the hills around Saniz, but the skirmishes had been notable only for greater-than-normal Russian casualties due to the guerrillas’ new expertise with explosives; they had looked at the naked faces of all veiled women and examined the skin color of every tiny baby; and still they had not found Ellis or Jane or Chantal.
Jean-Pierre and Anatoly finished up at a horse station in the hills above Comar. The place had no name: it was a handful of bare stone houses and a dusty meadow where malnourished nags grazed the sparse grass. The only male inhabitant seemed to be the horse dealer, a barefoot old man wearing a long shirt with a voluminous hood to keep off flies. There were also a couple of young women and a huddle of frightened children. Clearly the young men were guerrillas, and were away somewhere with Masud. The hamlet did not take long to search. When they were done, Anatoly sat in the dust with his back to a stone wall, looking thoughtful. Jean-Pierre sat down beside him.
Across the hills they could see the distant white peak of Mesmer, almost twenty thousand feet high, which had attracted climbers from Europe in the old days. Anatoly said: “See if you can get some tea.”
Jean-Pierre looked around and saw the old man in the hood lurking nearby. “Make tea,” he shouted at him in Dari. The man scurried away. A moment later Jean-Pierre heard him shouting at the women. “Tea is coming,” he said to Anatoly in French.
Anatoly’s men, seeing that they were to stay here awhile, killed the engines of their helicopters and sat around in the dust, waiting patiently.
Anatoly stared into the distance. Weariness showed on his flat face. “We are in trouble,” he said.
Jean-Pierre found it ominous that he said we.
Anatoly went on: “In our profession, it is wise to minimize the importance of a mission until one is certain of success, at which point one begins to exaggerate it. In this case I could not follow that pattern. In order to secure the use of five hundred helicopters and a thousand men, I had to persuade my superiors of the overwhelming importance of catching Ellis Thaler. I had to make very clear to them the dangers that face us if he escapes. I succeeded. And their anger at me for not catching him will now be all the greater. Your future, of course, is tied to mine.”
Jean-Pierre had not previously thought of it that way. “What will they do?”
“My career will simply stop. My salary will stay the same but I will lose all privileges. No more Scotch whisky, no more Rive Gauche for my wife, no more family holidays on the Black Sea, no more denim jeans and Rolling Stones records for my children . . . but I could live without those things. What I couldn’t stand would be the sheer boredom of the kind of job given to failures in my profession. They would send me to a small town in the Far East where there is really no security work to do. I know how our men spend their time and justify their existence in such places. You have to ingratiate yourself with mildly discontented people, get them to trust