Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [86]
She went to Jean-Pierre’s chest and took out his American maps of Afghanistan. They were rolled into a cylinder and fastened with an elastic band. Impatiently, she snapped the band and dropped the maps on the floor. Somewhere in the back of her mind a voice said: That may have been the only rubber band within a hundred-mile radius.
Calm down, she told herself.
She knelt on the floor and began to shuffle through the maps. They were on a very large scale, so she had to put several of them together to show all of the territory between the Valley and the Khyber Pass. Ellis looked over her shoulder. “These are good maps!” he said. “Where did you get them?”
“Jean-Pierre brought them from Paris.”
“They’re better than what Masud has.”
“I know. Mohammed always uses these to plan the convoys. Right. Show me how far the Russians have advanced.”
Ellis knelt on the rug beside her and traced a line across the map with his finger.
Jane felt a surge of hope. “It doesn’t look to me as if the Khyber Pass is cut off,” she said. “Why can’t we go this way?” She drew an imaginary line across the map a little to the north of the Russian front.
“I don’t know whether that’s a route,” Ellis said. “It may be impassable—you’d have to ask the guerrillas. But the other thing is that Masud’s information is at least a day or two old, and the Russians are still advancing. A valley or pass might be open one day and closed the next.”
“Damn!” She was not going to be defeated. She leaned over the map and peered closely at the border zone. “Look, the Khyber Pass isn’t the only way across.”
“A river valley runs all along the border, with mountains on the Afghan side. It may be that you can only reach those other passes from the south—which means from Russian-occupied territory.”
“There’s no point in speculating,” Jane said. She put the maps together and rolled them up. “Someone must know.”
“I guess so.”
She stood up. “There’s got to be more than one way out of this bloody country,” she said. She tucked the maps under her arm and went out, leaving Ellis kneeling on the rug.
The women and children had returned from the caves and the village had come to life. The smoke of cooking fires drifted over courtyard walls. In front of the mosque, five children were sitting in a circle playing a game called (for no apparent reason) Melon. It was a storytelling game, in which the teller stopped before the end and the next child had to carry on. Jane spotted Mousa, the son of Mohammed, sitting in the circle, wearing at his belt the rather wicked-looking knife his father had given him after the accident with the mine. Mousa was telling the story. Jane heard: “. . . and the bear tried to bite the boy’s hand off, but the boy drew his knife . . .”
She headed for Mohammed’s house. Mohammed himself might not be there—she had not seen him for a long time—but he lived with his brothers, in the usual Afghan extended family, and they, too, were guerrillas—all the fit young men were—so if they were there they might be able to give her some information.
She hesitated outside the house. By custom she should stop in the courtyard and speak to the women, who would be there preparing the evening meal; and then, after an exchange of courtesies, the most senior woman might go into the house to inquire whether the menfolk would condescend to speak to Jane. She heard her mother’s voice say: “Don’t make an exhibition of yourself!” Jane said aloud: “Go to hell, Mother.” She walked in, ignoring the women in the courtyard, and marched straight into the front room of the house—the men’s parlor.
There were three men there: Mohammed’s eighteen-year-old brother, Kahmir Khan, with a handsome face and a wispy beard; his brother-in-law, Matullah; and