Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [95]
Midday passed without lunch. That would be because the guerrillas did not have any food. Ellis found it hard to get used to the essentially rather simple idea that when there was no food then nobody could have lunch. It occurred to him that this might be why nearly all the guerrillas were heavy smokers: tobacco deadened the appetite.
It was hot even in the shade. He sat in the doorway of the little house, trying to catch what breeze there was. He could see the fields, the river with its arched rubble-and-mortar bridge, the village with its mosque, and the overhanging cliff. Most of the guerrillas were in their positions, which provided them with shelter from the sun as well as cover. The majority of them were in houses close to the cliff, where it would be difficult for helicopters to strafe them; but inevitably some were in the more vulnerable forward positions, nearer the river. The rough stone façade of the mosque was pierced by three arched doorways, and one guerrilla sat cross-legged under each arch. They made Ellis think of guardsmen in sentry boxes. Ellis knew all three of them: there was Mohammed in the farthest arch; his brother Kahmir, with the wispy beard, in the middle; and in the nearest arch Ali Ghanim, the ugly man with the twisted spine and the family of fourteen children, the man who had been wounded with Ellis down on the plain. Each of the three had a Kalashnikov across his knees and a cigarette between his lips. Ellis wondered which of them would be alive tomorrow.
The first essay he had written in college had been about the wait before battle as handled by Shakespeare. He had contrasted two precombat speeches: the inspirational one in Henry V in which the King says: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead”; and Falstaff’s cynical soliloquy on honor in 1 Henry IV: “Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. . . . Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. . . . Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.” The nineteen-year-old Ellis had got an A for that—his first, and his last, for afterward he was too busy arguing that Shakespeare and indeed the entire English course were “irrelevant.”
His reverie was interrupted by a series of shouts. He did not understand the Dari words used, but he had no need to: he knew, from the urgency of tone, that the sentries on the surrounding hillsides had spotted distant helicopters, and had signaled to Yussuf on the clifftop, who had spread the word. There was a flurry of movement throughout the sun-baked village as guerrillas manned their posts, retreated farther into their cover, checked their weapons and lit fresh cigarettes. The three men in the archways of the mosque melted into its shadowy interior. Now the village seen from the air would appear deserted, as it normally would during the hottest part of the day, when most people rested.
Ellis listened hard and heard the menacing throb of approaching helicopter rotors. His bowels felt watery: nerves. This is how the slants felt, he thought, hiding in the dripping jungle, when they heard my helicopter gun-ship coming toward them through the rain clouds. You reap what you sow, baby.
He loosened the safety pins in the firing device.
The helicopters roared closer, but still he could not see them. He wondered how many there were: he could not tell from the noise. He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see a guerrilla dive into the river from the far bank and begin swimming across toward him. When the figure emerged near Ellis he could see that it was scarred old