Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [36]
Among the crucial target areas, the article listed the Panisher Valley.
Ellis remembered Jean-Pierre talking about the Five Lions Valley. The article also mentioned Masud, the rebel leader: Ellis recalled Jean-Pierre speaking of him, too.
He looked out of the window, watching the sun set. There was no doubt, he thought with a pang of dread, that Jane was going to be in grave danger this summer.
But it was none of his business. She was married to someone else now. Anyway, there was nothing Ellis could do about it.
He looked down at his magazine, turned the page, and started reading about El Salvador. The plane roared on toward Washington. In the west the sun went down, and darkness fell.
Allen Winderman took Ellis Thaler to lunch at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Potomac River. Winderman arrived a half hour late. He was a typical Washington operator: dark gray suit, white shirt, striped tie; as smooth as a shark. As the White House was paying, Ellis ordered lobster and a glass of white wine. Winderman asked for Perrier and a salad. Everything about Winderman was too tight: his tie, his shoes, his schedule and his self-control.
Ellis was on his guard. He could not refuse such an invitation from a presidential aide, but he did not like discreet, unofficial lunches, and he did not like Allen Winderman.
Winderman got right down to business. “I want your advice,” he began.
Ellis stopped him. “First of all, I need to know whether you told the Agency about our meeting.” If the White House wanted to plan covert action without telling the CIA, Ellis would have nothing to do with it.
“Of course,” Winderman said. “What do you know about Afghanistan?”
Ellis felt suddenly cold. Sooner or later, this is going to involve Jane, he thought. They know about her, of course: I made no secret of it. I told Bill in Paris I was going to ask her to marry me. I called Bill subsequently to find out whether she really did go to Afghanistan. All that went down on my file. Now this bastard knows about her, and he’s going to use his knowledge. “I know a little about it,” he said cautiously, and then he recalled a verse of Kipling, and recited it:
When you’re wounded an’ left on Afghanistan’s plains,
An’ the women come out to cut up your remains,
Just roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Winderman looked ill at ease for the first time. “After two years of posing as a poet you must know a lot of that stuff.”
“So do the Afghans,” said Ellis. “They’re all poets, the way all Frenchmen are gourmets and all Welshmen are singers.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s because they can’t read or write. Poetry is a spoken art form.” Winderman was getting visibly impatient: his schedule did not allow for poetry. Ellis went on: “The Afghans are wild, ragged, fierce mountain tribesmen, hardly out of the Middle Ages. They’re said to be elaborately polite, brave as lions and pitilessly cruel. Their country is harsh and arid and barren. What do you know about them?”
“There’s no such thing as an Afghan,” Winderman said. “There are six million Pushtuns in the south, three million Tajiks in the west, a million Uzbaks in the north, and another dozen or so nationalities with fewer than a million. Modern borders mean little to them: there are Tajiks in the Soviet Union and Pushtuns in Pakistan. Some of them are divided into tribes. They’re like the Red Indians, who never thought of themselves as American, but Apache or Crow or Sioux. And they would just as soon fight one another as fight the Russians. Our problem is to get the Apache and the Sioux to unite against the palefaces.”
“I see.” Ellis nodded. He was wondering: When does Jane come into all this? He said: “So the main question is: who will be the Big Chief?”
“That’s easy. The most promising of the guerrilla leaders, by far, is Ahmed Shah Masud, in the Panisher Valley.”
The Five Lions Valley. What are you up