Lie Down with Lions (1985)

Then it was them. “Can we figure out where they are now? Over.”

“Not yet. I’m on my way to join the search party. Then I’ll get more details. Over.”

“You mean you’re not at Bagram? What happened to your, uh . . . visitor? Over.”

“He left,” Anatoly said briskly. “I’m in the air now and about to meet the team at a village called Mundol. It’s in the Nuristan Valley, downstream of the point where the Linar joins the Nuristan, and it’s near a big lake which is also called Mundol. Join me there. We’ll spend the night there and then supervise the search in the morning. Over.”

“I’ll be there!” said Jean-Pierre elatedly. He was struck by a thought. “What are we going to do with these hippies? Over.”

“I’ll have them taken to Kabul for interrogation. We have some people there who will remind them of the reality of the material world. Let me speak to your pilot. Over.”

“See you in Mundol. Over.”

Anatoly began speaking in Russian to the copilot, and Jean-Pierre took off his headset. He wondered why Anatoly wanted to waste time interrogating a pair of harmless hippies. They obviously weren’t spies. Then it occurred to him that the only person who really knew whether or not these two were Ellis and Jane was Jean-Pierre himself. It was possible—even if wildly unlikely—that Ellis and Jane might have persuaded him to let them go and tell Anatoly this search party had just captured a couple of hippies.

He was a suspicious bastard, that Russian.

Jean-Pierre waited impatiently for him to finish talking to the pilot. It sounded as if the search party down in Mundol was close to its quarry. Tomorrow, perhaps, Ellis and Jane would be caught. Their attempt to escape had always been more or less futile, in reality; but that did not stop Jean-Pierre worrying, and he would be in an agony of suspense until the two of them were bound hand and foot and locked in a Russian cell.

The pilot took off the headset and said: “We will take you to Mundol in this helicopter. The Hip will take the others back to base.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later they were in the air, leaving the others to take their time. It was almost dark, and Jean- Pierre wondered whether it would prove difficult to find the village of Mundol.

Night fell rapidly as they headed downstream. The landscape below disappeared into darkness. The pilot spoke constantly on the radio, and Jean-Pierre imagined that the people on the ground at Mundol were guiding him. After ten or fifteen minutes, powerful lights appeared below. A kilometer or so beyond the lights, the moon glinted off the surface of a large body of water. The helicopter went down.

It landed near another helicopter in a field. A waiting trooper led Jean-Pierre across the grass to a village on a hillside. The silhouettes of the wooden houses were limned with moonlight. Jean-Pierre followed the trooper into one of the houses. There, sitting on a folding chair and wrapped in an enormous coat of wolf fur, was Anatoly.

He was in an ebullient mood. “Jean-Pierre, my French friend, we are close to success!” he said loudly. It was odd to see a man with an Oriental face being hearty and jovial. “Have some coffee—there’s vodka in it.”

Jean-Pierre accepted a paper cup from an Afghan woman who appeared to be waiting on Anatoly. He sat down on a folding chair like Anatoly’s. They looked army, these chairs. If the Russians were carrying this much equipment—folding chairs and coffee and paper cups and vodka—perhaps they would not move faster than Ellis and Jane, after all.

Anatoly read his mind. “I brought a few little luxuries in my helicopter,” he said with a smile. “The KGB has its dignity, you know.”

Jean-Pierre could not read the expression on his face and did not know whether he was joking or not. He changed the subject. “What’s the latest news?”

“Our fugitives definitely passed through the villages of Bosaydur and Linar today. At some point this afternoon the search party lost its guide—he just disappeared. He probably decided to go home.” Anatoly frowned, as if bothered by that little loose end, then resumed his story. “Fortunately, they found another guide almost immediately.”

“Employing your usual highly persuasive recruiting technique, no doubt,” said Jean-Pierre.

“No, oddly enough. This one was a genuine volunteer, they tell me. He’s here in the village somewhere.”

“Of course, they’re more likely to volunteer here in Nuristan,” Jean-Pierre mused. “They’re hardly involved in the war—and in any case they’re said to be totally without scruples.”

“This new man claims actually to have seen the fugitives today, before he joined us. They passed him at the point where the Linar flows into the Nuristan. He saw them turn south, heading this way.”

“Good!”

“Tonight, after the search party arrived here in Mundol, our man questioned some villagers and learned that two foreigners with a baby passed through this afternoon, going south.”

“Then there’s no doubt,” said Jean-Pierre with satisfaction.

“None at all,” Anatoly agreed. “We’ll catch them tomorrow. For sure.”

Jean-Pierre woke up on an inflatable mattress—another KGB luxury—on the dirt floor of the house. The fire had gone out during the night and the air was cold. Anatoly’s bed, across the dim little room, was empty. Jean- Pierre did not know where the owners of the house had spent the night. After they had provided food and served it, Anatoly had sent them away. He treated the whole of Afghanistan as if it were his personal kingdom. Perhaps it was.

Jean-Pierre sat up and rubbed his eyes, then saw Anatoly standing in the doorway, looking at him speculatively. “Good morning,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Have you ever been here before?” Anatoly asked without preamble.

Jean-Pierre’s brain was still foggy with sleep. “Where?”

“Nuristan,” Anatoly replied impatiently.

“No.”

“Strange.”

Jean-Pierre found this enigmatic style of conversation irritating so early in the morning. “Why?” he said tetchily. “Why is it strange?”

“I was talking to the new guide a few minutes ago.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mohammed, Muhammad, Mahomet, Mahmoud—one of those names a million other people have.”

“What language did you use, with a Nuristani?”

“French, Russian, Dari and English—the usual mixture. He asked me who arrived in the second helicopter last night. I said: ‘A Frenchman who can identify the fugitives,’ or words to that effect. He asked your name, so I told him: I wanted to keep him going until I found out why he was so interested. But he didn’t ask any more questions. It was almost as if he knew you.”

“Impossible.”

“I suppose so.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?” It was not like Anatoly to be diffident, Jean-Pierre thought.

“There is no point in asking a man a question until you have established whether he has any reason to lie to you.” With that, Anatoly went out.

Jean-Pierre got up. He had slept in his shirt and underwear. He pulled on his trousers and boots, then draped the greatcoat over his shoulders and stepped outside.

He found himself on a rough wooden veranda overlooking the whole valley. Down below, the river coiled between the fields, broad and sluggish. Some way to the south it entered a long, narrow lake rimmed with mountains. The sun had not yet risen. A mist over the water obscured the far end of the lake. It was a pleasant scene. Of course, Jean-Pierre remembered, this was the most fertile and populous part of Nuristan: most of the rest was wilderness.

The Russians had dug a field latrine, Jean-Pierre noted with approval. The Afghan practice of using the streams from which they took their drinking water was the reason they all had worms. The Russians will really knock this country into shape once they get control of it, he thought.