Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [157]
“This is what you have to do,” he began. “Walk down the gorge, paying out the cable. Try to conceal it. It doesn’t matter if you lay it in the stream—this stuff burns under water. When you reach the limit of the wire, pull out the safety pins like this.” He showed her two split pins which pierced the barrel of the syringe. He pulled them out and put them back in. “Then keep your eye on me. Wait for me to wave my arms above my head like this.” He showed her what he meant. “Then pull the ring. If we time this just right, we can kill them all. Go!”
Jane followed orders like a robot, without thinking. She walked down the gorge, paying out the cable. At first she concealed it behind a line of low bushes; then she laid it in the bed of the stream. Chantal slept on in the sling, swaying gently as Jane walked, leaving both of Jane’s arms free.
After a minute she looked back. Ellis was wedging the TNT into a fissure in the rock. Jane had always believed that explosives would go off spontaneously if you handled them roughly: obviously that was a misconception.
She walked on until the cable became taut in her hand; then she turned around again. Ellis was now scaling the canyon wall, presumably searching for the best position from which to observe the Russians as they stepped into the trap.
She sat down beside the stream. Chantal’s tiny body rested in her lap. The sling went slack, taking the weight off Jane’s back. Ellis’s words kept repeating in her mind: If we time this just right, we can kill them all. Could it work? she wondered. Would they all be killed?
What would the other Russians do then? Jane’s head began to clear, and she considered the likely sequence of events. In an hour or two someone would notice that this little party had not called in for a while, and would attempt to raise them on the radio. Finding that impossible, they would assume that the party was in a deep gorge, or that its radio was on the blink. After a couple more hours without contact, they would send a helicopter to look for the party, assuming that the officer in charge would have had the sense to light a fire or do something else to make his location easily visible from the air. When that failed, the people at headquarters would start to worry. At some point they would have to send out a search party to look for the missing search party. The new party would have to cover the same ground as the old one. They certainly would not complete that trip today, and it would be impossible to search properly at night. By the time they found the bodies, Ellis and Jane would be at least a day and a half ahead, possibly more. It might be enough, Jane thought; by then she and Ellis would have gone past so many forks and side valleys and alternative routes that they could be untraceable. I wonder, she thought wearily. I wonder if this could be the end. I wish the soldiers would hurry. I can’t bear the waiting, I’m so afraid.
She could see Ellis clearly, crawling along the clifftop on his hands and knees. She could see the search party, too, as they marched down the valley. Even at this distance they appeared dirty, and their slumped shoulders and dragging feet showed them to be tired and dispirited. They had not seen her yet; she blended into the landscape.
Ellis crouched behind a bluff and peered around its edge at the approaching soldiers. He was visible to Jane but hidden from the Russians, and he had a clear view of the place where he had planted the explosives.
The soldiers reached the head of the gorge and began to descend. One of them was riding, and had a mustache: presumably he was the officer. Another wore a Chitrali cap. That’s Halam, Jane thought, the traitor. After what Jean-Pierre had done, treachery seemed to her an unforgivable crime. There were five others, and they all had short hair and uniform caps and youthful, clean-shaven faces. Two men and five boys, she thought.
She watched Ellis. He would give the sign at any minute. Her neck began to ache from the strain of looking