Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [46]
Ahmed died a few minutes after midnight, and Jean-Pierre felt like crying—not with sadness, for he hardly knew Ahmed, but with sheer frustration, for he knew he could have saved the man’s life, if only he had had an anesthetist and electricity and an operating theater.
He covered the dead man’s face, then looked at the wife, who had been standing motionless, watching, for hours. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. She nodded. He was glad she was calm. Sometimes they accused him of not trying everything: they seemed to think he knew so much that there was nothing he couldn’t cure, and he wanted to scream I am not God at them; but this one seemed to understand.
He turned away from the corpse. He was weary to his bones. He had been working on mangled bodies all day, but this was the first patient he had lost. The people who had been watching him, mostly relatives of the dead man, came forward now to deal with the body. The widow began to wail, and Jane led her away.
Jean-Pierre felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Mohammed, the guerrilla who organized the convoys. He felt a stab of guilt.
Mohammed said: “It’s the will of Allah.”
Jean-Pierre nodded. Mohammed took out a pack of Pakistani cigarettes and lit one. Jean-Pierre began to gather up his instruments and put them into his bag. Without looking at Mohammed he said: “What will you do now?”
“Send another convoy immediately,” Mohammed said. “We must have ammunition.”
Jean-Pierre was suddenly alert, despite his fatigue. “Do you want to look at the maps?”
“Yes.”
Jean-Pierre closed his bag, and the two men walked away from the mosque. The stars illuminated their way through the village to the shopkeeper’s house. In the living room, Fara was asleep on a rug beside Chantal’s cradle. She awoke instantly and stood up. “You can go home now,” Jean-Pierre told her. She left without speaking.
Jean-Pierre put his bag down on the floor, then picked up the cradle gently and carried it into the bedroom. Chantal stayed asleep until he put the cradle down; then she began to cry. “Now what is it?” he murmured to her. He looked at his wristwatch and realized she probably wanted feeding. “Mama’s coming soon,” he told her. This had no effect. He lifted her out of the cradle and began to rock her. She became quiet. He carried her back into the living room.
Mohammed was standing, waiting. Jean-Pierre said: “You know where they are.”
Mohammed nodded and opened a painted wooden chest. He took out a thick bundle of folded maps, selected several and spread them on the floor.
Jean-Pierre rocked Chantal and looked over Mohammed’s shoulder. “Where was the ambush?” he asked.
Mohammed pointed to a spot near the city of Jalalabad.
The trails followed by Mohammed’s convoys were not shown on these or any other maps. However, Jean-Pierre’s maps showed some of the valleys, plateaus and seasonal streams where there might be trails. Sometimes Mohammed knew from memory what was there. Sometimes he had to guess, and he would discuss with Jean-Pierre the precise interpretation of contour lines or the more obscure terrain features such as moraines.
Jean-Pierre suggested: “You could swing more to the north around Jalalabad.” Above the plain in which the city stood, there was a maze of valleys like a cobweb stretched between the Konar and Nuristan rivers.
Mohammed lit another cigarette—like most of the guerrillas, he was a heavy smoker—and shook his head dubiously as he exhaled. “There have been too many ambushes in that area,” he said. “If they are not betraying us already they soon will. No, the next convoy will swing south of Jalalabad.”
Jean-Pierre frowned. “I don’t see how that’s possible. To the south, there’s nothing but open country all the way from the Khyber Pass. You’d be spotted.”
“We won’t use the Khyber Pass,” said Mohammed. He put his finger on the map, then traced the Afghanistan-Pakistan border southward. “We will cross the border at Teremengal.” His finger reached the town he had named, then traced a route from there to the Five Lions Valley.
Jean-Pierre