Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [146]
The villagers were jabbering in outraged tones and pointing to the body. The man’s throat had been cut: the wound gaped horribly and the head hung loose. The blood had dried—he had probably been killed yesterday.
“Is this Mohammed, the guide?” Jean-Pierre asked.
“No,” said Anatoly. He questioned one of the soldiers, then said: “This is the previous guide, the one who disappeared.”
Jean-Pierre addressed the villagers slowly in Dari. “What is going on?”
After a pause, a wrinkled old man with a bad occlusion in his right eye replied in the same language. “He has been murdered!” he said accusingly.
Jean-Pierre began to question him and, bit by bit, the story emerged. The dead man was a villager from the Linar Valley who had been conscripted as a guide by the Russians. His body, hastily concealed in a clump of bushes, had been found by a goatherd’s dog. The man’s family thought the Russians had murdered him, and they had brought the body here this morning in a dramatic attempt to find out why.
Jean-Pierre explained to Anatoly. “They’re outraged because they think your men killed him,” he finished.
“Outraged?” said Anatoly. “Don’t they know there’s a war on? People are getting killed every day—that’s the whole idea.”
“Obviously they don’t see much action here. Did you kill him?”
“I’ll find out.” Anatoly spoke to the soldiers. Several of them answered together in animated tones. “We didn’t kill him,” Anatoly translated to Jean-Pierre.
“So who did? I wonder. Could the locals be murdering our guides for collaborating with the enemy?”
“No,” said Anatoly. “If they hated collaborators they wouldn’t be making this fuss about one who got killed. Tell them we’re innocent—calm them down.”
Jean-Pierre spoke to the one-eyed man. “The foreigners did not kill this man. They want to know who murdered their guide.”
The one-eyed man translated this, and the villagers reacted with consternation.
Anatoly looked thoughtful. “Perhaps the disappearing Mohammed killed this man in order to get the job of guide.”
“Are you paying much?” Jean-Pierre asked.
“I doubt it.” Anatoly asked a sergeant and translated the answer. “Five hundred afghanis a day.”
“It’s a good wage, to an Afghan, but hardly worth killing for—although they do say a Nuristani will murder you for your sandals if they’re new.”
“Ask them if they know where Mohammed is.”
Jean-Pierre asked. There was some discussion. Most of the villagers were shaking their heads, but one man raised his voice above the others and pointed insistently to the north. Eventually the one-eyed man said to Jean-Pierre: “He left the village early this morning. Abdul saw him go north.”
“Did he leave before or after this body was brought here?”
“Before.”
Jean-Pierre told Anatoly, and added: “I wonder why he went away, then?”
“He’s acting like a man guilty of something.”
“He must have left immediately after he spoke to you this morning. It’s almost as if he went because I had arrived.”
Anatoly nodded thoughtfully. “Whatever the explanation is, I think he knows something we don’t. We’d better go after him. If we lose a little time, too bad—we can afford it anyway.”
“How long ago was it that you spoke to him?”
Anatoly looked at his watch. “A little over an hour.”
“Then he can’t have got far.”
“Right.” Anatoly turned away and gave a rapid series of orders. The soldiers were suddenly galvanized. Two of them got hold of the one-eyed man and marched him down toward the field. Another ran to the helicopters. Anatoly took Jean-Pierre’s arm and they walked briskly after the soldiers. “We will take the one-eyed man, in case we need an interpreter,” Anatoly said.
By the time they reached the field the two helicopters were cranking. Anatoly and Jean-Pierre boarded