Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [144]
“I’ll be there!” said Jean-Pierre elatedly. He was struck by a thought. “What are we going to do with these hippies? Over.”
“I’ll have them taken to Kabul for interrogation. We have some people there who will remind them of the reality of the material world. Let me speak to your pilot. Over.”
“See you in Mundol. Over.”
Anatoly began speaking in Russian to the copilot, and Jean-Pierre took off his headset. He wondered why Anatoly wanted to waste time interrogating a pair of harmless hippies. They obviously weren’t spies. Then it occurred to him that the only person who really knew whether or not these two were Ellis and Jane was Jean-Pierre himself. It was possible—even if wildly unlikely—that Ellis and Jane might have persuaded him to let them go and tell Anatoly this search party had just captured a couple of hippies.
He was a suspicious bastard, that Russian.
Jean-Pierre waited impatiently for him to finish talking to the pilot. It sounded as if the search party down in Mundol was close to its quarry. Tomorrow, perhaps, Ellis and Jane would be caught. Their attempt to escape had always been more or less futile, in reality; but that did not stop Jean-Pierre worrying, and he would be in an agony of suspense until the two of them were bound hand and foot and locked in a Russian cell.
The pilot took off the headset and said: “We will take you to Mundol in this helicopter. The Hip will take the others back to base.”
“Okay.”
A few minutes later they were in the air, leaving the others to take their time. It was almost dark, and Jean-Pierre wondered whether it would prove difficult to find the village of Mundol.
Night fell rapidly as they headed downstream. The landscape below disappeared into darkness. The pilot spoke constantly on the radio, and Jean-Pierre imagined that the people on the ground at Mundol were guiding him. After ten or fifteen minutes, powerful lights appeared below. A kilometer or so beyond the lights, the moon glinted off the surface of a large body of water. The helicopter went down.
It landed near another helicopter in a field. A waiting trooper led Jean-Pierre across the grass to a village on a hillside. The silhouettes of the wooden houses were limned with moonlight. Jean-Pierre followed the trooper into one of the houses. There, sitting on a folding chair and wrapped in an enormous coat of wolf fur, was Anatoly.
He was in an ebullient mood. “Jean-Pierre, my French friend, we are close to success!” he said loudly. It was odd to see a man with an Oriental face being hearty and jovial. “Have some coffee—there’s vodka in it.”
Jean-Pierre accepted a paper cup from an Afghan woman who appeared to be waiting on Anatoly. He sat down on a folding chair like Anatoly’s. They looked army, these chairs. If the Russians were carrying this much equipment—folding chairs and coffee and paper cups and vodka—perhaps they would not move faster than Ellis and Jane, after all.
Anatoly read his mind. “I brought a few little luxuries in my helicopter,” he said with a smile. “The KGB has its dignity, you know.”
Jean-Pierre could not read the expression on his face and did not know whether he was joking or not. He changed the subject. “What’s the latest news?”
“Our fugitives definitely passed through the villages of Bosaydur and Linar today. At some point this afternoon the search party lost its guide—he just disappeared. He probably decided to go home.” Anatoly frowned, as if bothered by that little loose end, then resumed his story. “Fortunately, they found another guide almost immediately.”
“Employing your usual highly persuasive recruiting technique, no doubt,” said Jean-Pierre.
“No, oddly enough. This one was a genuine volunteer, they tell me. He’s here in the village somewhere.”
“Of course, they’re more likely to volunteer here in Nuristan,” Jean-Pierre mused. “They’re hardly involved in the war—and in any case they’re said to be totally without scruples.”
“This new man claims actually to have seen