Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [44]
“Still, I wish you hadn’t made an enemy of that man.”
“He hit me with a stick!” Jane shouted furiously. Chantal began to cry. Jane forced herself to be calm. She rocked Chantal for a moment, then began to feed her. Why couldn’t Jean-Pierre see how cowardly his attitude was? How could he be intimidated by the threat of expulsion from this godforsaken country? Jane sighed. Chantal turned her face away from Jane’s breast and made discontented noises. Before the argument could continue they heard distant shouting.
Jean-Pierre frowned, listening, then got up. A man’s voice came from their courtyard. Jean-Pierre picked up a shawl and draped it over Jane’s shoulders. She pulled it together in the front. This was a compromise: it was not really sufficient covering, by Afghan standards, but she refused point-blank to scuttle out of the room like a second-class citizen if a man walked into her house while she was feeding her baby; and anyone who objected, she had announced, had better not come to see the doctor.
Jean-Pierre called out in Dari: “Come in.”
It was Mohammed Khan. Jane was in a mood to tell him just what she thought of him and the rest of the village men, but she hesitated when she saw the strain on his handsome face. For once he hardly looked at her. “The convoy was ambushed,” he said without preamble. “We lost twenty-seven men—and all the supplies.”
Jane closed her eyes in pain. She had traveled with such a convoy when she first came to the Five Lions Valley, and she could not help but picture the ambush: the moonlit line of brown-skinned men and scrawny horses stretched out unevenly along a stony trail through a narrow, shadowy valley; the beat of the rotor blades in a sudden crescendo; the flares, the grenades, the machine-gun fire; the panic as the men tried to take cover on the bare hillside; the hopeless shots fired at the invulnerable helicopters; and then at last the shouts of the wounded and the screams of the dying.
She thought suddenly of Zahara: her husband had been with the convoy. “What—what about Ahmed Gul?”
“He came back.”
“Oh, thank God,” Jane breathed.
“But he’s wounded.”
“Who from this village died?”
“None. Banda was lucky. My brother, Matullah, is all right, and so is Alishan Karim, the brother of the mullah. There are three other survivors—two of them wounded.”
Jean-Pierre said: “I’ll come right away.” He stepped into the front room of the house, the room that had once been the shop, and then the clinic, and was now the medical storeroom.
Jane put Chantal down in her makeshift cradle in the corner and hastily tidied herself up. Jean-Pierre would probably need her help, and if he did not, then Zahara could use some sympathy.
Mohammed said: “We have almost no ammunition.”
Jane felt little regret about that. She was revolted by the war, and she would shed no tears if the rebels were obliged for a while to stop killing poor miserable homesick seventeen-year-old Russian soldier boys.
Mohammed went on: “We have lost four convoys in a year. Only three got through.”
“How are the Russians able to find them?” asked Jane.
Jean-Pierre, who was listening in the next room, spoke through the open doorway. “They must have intensified their surveillance of the passes by low-flying helicopters—or perhaps even by satellite photography.”
Mohammed shook his head. “The Pushtuns betray us.”
Jane thought this was possible. In the villages through which they passed, the convoys were sometimes seen as a magnet for Russian raids, and it was conceivable that some villagers might buy their safety by telling the Russians where the convoys were—although it was not clear to Jane just how they would pass the information to the Russians.
She thought of what she had been hoping for from the ambushed convoy. She had asked for more antibiotics, some hypodermic needles and a lot of sterile dressings. Jean-Pierre had written out a long list of drugs. The organization Médecins pour la Liberté had a liaison