Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [158]
Jane looked back at the soldiers. One of them reached out and took the bridle of the horse, to help it over the uneven ground. Jane had the syringe device in her left hand and the forefinger of her right hand was crooked inside the pull ring. One jerk would light the fuse and detonate the TNT and bring the cliff tumbling down on her pursuers. Five boys, she thought. Joined the army because they were poor or foolish or both, or because they were conscripted. Posted to a cold, inhospitable country where the people hate them. Marched through a mountainous, icy wilderness. Buried under a landslide, heads smashed and lungs choked with earth and backs broken and chests crushed, screaming and suffocating and bleeding to death in agony and terror. Five letters to be written to proud fathers and anxious mothers at home: regret to inform, died in action, historic struggle against the forces of reaction, act of heroism, posthumous medal, deepest sympathy. Deepest sympathy. The mother’s contempt for these fine words as she recalled how she had given birth in pain and fear, fed the boy in hard times and easy, taught him to walk straight and wash his hands and spell his name, sent him to school; how she had watched him grow and grow until he was almost as tall as she, then even taller, until he was ready to earn a living and marry a healthy girl and start a family of his own and give her grandchildren. The mother’s grief when she realized that all that, everything she had done, the pain and the work and the worry, had been for nothing: this miracle, her man-child, had been destroyed by braggardly men in a stupid, vain war. The sense of loss. The sense of loss.
Jane heard Ellis shout. She looked up. He was on his feet, not caring now whether he was seen, waving at her and yelling: “Do it now! Do it now!”
Carefully, she put the pull-ring device down on the ground beside the rushing stream.
The soldiers had seen both of them now. Two men began climbing up the side of the gorge toward where Ellis stood. The others surrounded Jane, pointing their rifles at her and her baby, looking embarrassed and foolish. She ignored them and watched Ellis. He climbed down the side of the gorge. The men who had been scrambling up toward him stopped and waited to see what he was going to do.
He reached the level ground and walked slowly up to Jane. He stood in front of her. “Why?” he said. “Why didn’t you do it?”
Because they are so young, she thought, because they are young, and innocent, and they don’t want to kill me. Because it would have been murder. But most of all . . .
“Because they have mothers,” she said.
Jean-Pierre opened his eyes. The bulky figure of Anatoly was crouching beside the camp bed. Behind Anatoly, bright sunlight streamed through the open flap of the tent. Jean-Pierre suffered a moment of panic, not knowing why he had slept so late or what he had missed; then, all in a flash, he recalled the events of the night.
He and Anatoly were encamped in the approach to the Kantiwar Pass. They had been awakened at around two thirty a.m. by the captain commanding the search party, who in turn had been roused by the soldier on watch. A young Afghan called Halam had stumbled into the encampment, said the captain. Using a mixture of Pashto, English and Russian, Halam said that he had been guide to the fleeing Americans, but they had insulted him so he had abandoned them. On being asked where the “Americans” were now, he had offered to lead the Russians to the stone hut where, even now, the fugitives lay in unsuspecting sleep.
Jean-Pierre had been all for jumping into the helicopter and rushing off right away.
Anatoly had been more circumspect. “In Mongolia we have a saying: Don’t get a hard-on until the whore opens her legs,” he said. “Halam may be lying. If he is telling the truth, still he may not be able to find