Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [69]
He had nobody to blame but himself for all this. He had volunteered for the mission in the foolish hope that he might win Jane back. It was unprofessional, as well as immature. All he could do was get out of here as quickly as possible.
And he could do nothing until he met Masud.
He stood up and walked around restlessly, careful nonetheless to stay in the shade of the tree so that he would not be visible from the road. A few yards away there was a mass of twisted metal where a helicopter had crashed. He saw a thin piece of steel about the size and shape of a dinner plate, and that gave him an idea. He had been wondering how to demonstrate the effect of shaped charges and now he saw a way.
He took from his kit bag a small, flat piece of TNT and a pocketknife. The guerrillas clustered closer around him. Among them was Ali Ghanim, a small, misshapen man—twisted nose, deformed teeth, and a slightly hunched back—who was said to have fourteen children. Ellis carved the name Ali into the TNT in Persian script. He showed it to them. Ali recognized his name. “Ali,” he said, grinning and showing his hideous teeth.
Ellis placed the explosive, carved side down, on the piece of steel. “I hope this works,” he said with a smile, and they all smiled back, although none of them spoke English. He took a coil of blasting fuse from his capacious bag and cut off a four-foot length. He got out his cap box, took a blasting cap and inserted the end of the fuse into the cylindrical cap. He taped the cap to the TNT.
He looked down the hill to the road. He could see no traffic. He carried his little bomb across the hillside and put it down about fifty yards away. He lit the fuse with a match, then walked back to the fig tree.
The fuse was slow-burning. Ellis wondered, while he waited, whether Masud was having him watched and weighed up by the other guerrillas. Was the leader waiting for assurance that Ellis was a serious person whom the guerrillas could respect? Protocol was always important in an army, even a revolutionary one. But Ellis could not pussyfoot around much longer. If Masud did not show today, Ellis would have to drop all this explosives nonsense, confess to being an envoy from the White House, and demand a meeting with the rebel leader immediately.
There was an unimpressive bang and a small cloud of dust. The guerrillas looked disappointed at such a feeble blast. Ellis retrieved the piece of metal, using his scarf to hold it in case it was hot. The name Ali was cut through it in ragged-edge letters of Persian script. He showed it to the guerrillas, and they burst into excited chatter. Ellis was pleased: it was a vivid demonstration of the point that the explosive was more powerful where it was indented, contrary to what common sense would suggest.
The guerrillas suddenly went quiet. Ellis looked around and saw another group of seven or eight men approaching over the hill. Their rifles and round Chitrali caps marked them as guerrillas. As they came nearer, Ali stiffened, almost as if he were about to salute. Ellis said: “Who is it?”
“Masud,” Ali replied.
“Which one is he?”
“The one in the middle.”
Ellis studied the central figure in the group. Masud looked just like the others at first: a thin man of average height, dressed in khaki clothes and Russian boots. Ellis scrutinized his face. He was light-skinned, with a sparse mustache and the wispy beard of a teenager. He had a long nose with a hooked point. His alert dark eyes were surrounded by heavy lines which made him look at least five years older than his reputed age of twenty-eight. It was not a handsome face, but