Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [139]
“I don’t want anyone killed for my sake,” she said quickly.
“It’s not for you,” Ellis said harshly. “It’s for me—I refused to go on alone.”
Jane shut up.
Ellis was thinking about practicalities. He said to Mohammed: “You’re not dressed like a Nuristani.”
“I will change clothes with Halam.”
“You don’t speak the local language well.”
“There are many languages in Nuristan. I will pretend to come from a district where they use a different tongue. The Russians speak none of these languages anyway, so they will never know.”
“What will you do with your gun?”
Mohammed thought for a moment. “Will you give me your bag?”
“It’s too small.”
“My Kalashnikov is the type that has a folding butt.”
“Sure,” said Ellis. “You can have the bag.”
Jane wondered whether it would attract suspicion, but decided not: Afghans’ bags were as strange and varied as their clothes. All the same, Mohammed would surely arouse suspicion sooner or later. She said: “What will happen when they finally realize they are on the wrong trail?”
“Before that happens I will run away in the night, leaving them in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s terribly dangerous,” said Jane.
Mohammed tried to look heroically unconcerned. Like most of the guerrillas, he was genuinely brave but also ludicrously vain.
Ellis said: “If you time this wrong, and they suspect you before you’ve decided to leave them, they will torture you to find out which way we went.”
“They will never take me alive,” said Mohammed.
Jane believed him.
Ellis said: “But we will have no guide.”
“I shall find you another one.” Mohammed turned to Halam and began a rapid multilingual conversation. Jane gathered that Mohammed was proposing to hire Halam as a guide. She did not like Halam much—he was too good a salesman to be entirely trustworthy—but he was obviously a traveling man, so he was a natural choice. Most of the local people had probably never ventured outside their own valley.
“He says he knows the way,” said Mohammed, reverting to French. Jane suffered a twinge of anxiety about the words He says. Mohammed went on: “He will take you to Kantiwar, and there he will find another guide to take you across the next pass, and in this way you will proceed to Pakistan. He will charge five thousand afghanis.”
Ellis said: “It sounds like a fair price, but how many more guides will we have to hire at that rate before we reach Chitral?”
“Maybe five or six,” said Mohammed.
Ellis shook his head. “We don’t have thirty thousand afghanis. And we have to buy food.”
“You will have to get food by holding clinics,” Mohammed said. “And the way becomes easier once you are in Pakistan. Perhaps you will not need guides at the end.”
Ellis looked dubious. “What do you think?” he asked Jane.
“There’s an alternative,” she said. “You could go on without me.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not an alternative. We’ll go on together.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
All the first day, the search parties found no trace of Ellis and Jane. Jean-Pierre and Anatoly sat on hard wooden chairs in a spartan, windowless office at the Bagram air base, monitoring the reports as they came in over the radio network. The search parties had left before dawn—again. There were six of them at the start: one for each of the five main side valleys leading east from the Five Lions, and one to follow the Five Lions River north to its source and beyond. Each of the parties included at least one Dari-speaking officer from the Afghan regular army. They landed their helicopters at six different villages in the Valley, and half an hour later all six parties had reported that they had found local guides.
“That was quick,” said Jean-Pierre after the sixth reported in. “How did they do it?”
“Simple,” said Anatoly. “They ask someone to be a guide. He says no. They shoot him. They ask someone else. It doesn’t take long to find a volunteer.”
One of the search parties tried to follow its assigned trail from the air, but the experiment was a failure. The trails were rather difficult to follow from