Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [94]
He trailed his detonating cord in the river and brought its end out at his position, which was in a tiny one-room house on the riverbank a couple of hundred yards upstream of the mosque. He used his crimper to attach a blasting cap to the cord, then finished the assembly with a simple army-issue pull-ring firing device.
He approved of Masud’s plan. Ellis had taught ambush and counterambush at Fort Bragg for a year between his two tours in Asia, and he would have given Masud’s setup nine out of ten. The lost point was due to Masud’s failure to provide an exit route for his troops in case the fight should go against them. Of course Masud might not consider that a mistake.
By nine o’clock everything was ready, and the guerrillas made breakfast. Even that was part of the ambush: they could all get into position in minutes, if not seconds, and then the village seen from the air would look more natural, as if the villagers had all rushed to hide from the helicopters, leaving behind their bowls and rugs and cooking fires; so that the commander of the Russian force would have no reason to suspect a trap.
Ellis ate some bread and drank several cups of green tea, then settled down to wait as the sun rose high over the Valley. There was always a lot of waiting. He remembered it in Asia. In those days he had often been high, on marijuana or speed or cocaine, and then the waiting hardly seemed to matter because he enjoyed it. It was funny, he thought, how he had lost interest in drugs after the war.
Ellis expected the attack either this afternoon or at dawn tomorrow. If he were the Russian commander he would reason that the rebel leaders had assembled yesterday and would leave tomorrow, and he would want to attack late enough to catch any latecomers, but not so late that some of them might have left already.
At around midmorning the heavy weapons arrived, a pair of Dashokas, 12.7mm antiaircraft machine guns, each pulled along the road on its two-wheeled mounting by a guerrilla. A donkey followed, loaded down with cases of 5-0 Chinese armor-piercing bullets.
Masud announced that one of the guns would be manned by Yussuf, the singer, who, according to village rumor, was likely to marry Jane’s friend Zahara; the other by a guerrilla from the Pich Valley, one Abdur, whom Ellis did not know. Yussuf had already shot down three helicopters with his Kalashnikov, it was said. Ellis was skeptical about this: he had flown helicopters in Asia and he knew it was close to impossible to shoot one down with a rifle. However, Yussuf explained with a grin that the trick was to get above the target and fire down at it from a mountainside, a tactic that was not possible in Vietnam because the landscape was different.
Although Yussuf had a much bigger weapon today, he was going to use the same technique. The guns were dismounted, then taken, each carried by two men, up the steep steps cut into the cliffside that towered over the village. The mounts and the ammunition followed.
Ellis watched from below as they reassembled the guns. At the top of the cliff was a shelf ten or fifteen feet wide; then the mountainside continued up at a gentler slope. The guerrillas set up the guns about ten yards apart on the shelf and camouflaged them. The helicopter pilots would soon find out where the guns were, of course, but they would find it very difficult to knock them out where they were.
When that was done, Ellis went back to his position in the little one-room house by the riverside. His mind kept returning to the sixties. He had begun the decade as a schoolboy and ended a soldier. He had gone to Berkeley in 1967, confident that he knew what the future held for him: he wanted to be a producer of television documentaries, and since he was bright and creative, and this was California, where anybody could be anything if he worked hard, there had been no reason he could see why he should not achieve his ambition. Then he had been overtaken by peace and flower