formed a crowd to the left of the archway. They were subdued: several women were sobbing quietly, and the voices of two men could be heard, one asking questions and the other answering. The crowd parted to admit Jean-Pierre, Mohammed and Jane.
The six survivors of the ambush were huddled in a group on the beaten-earth floor. The three uninjured ones squatted on their haunches, still wearing their round Chitrali caps, looking dirty, dispirited and exhausted. Jane recognized Marullah Khan, a younger version of his brother Mohammed; and Alishan Karim, thinner than his brother the mullah, but just as mean-looking. Two of the wounded men sat on the floor with their backs to the wall, one with a filthy, bloodstained bandage around his head and the other with his arm in an improvised sling. Jane did not know either of them. She automatically assessed their wounds: at first glance they appeared slight.
The third injured man, Ahmed Gul, was lying flat on a stretcher made from two sticks and a blanket. His eyes were closed and his skin was gray. His wife, Zahara, squatted behind him, cradling his head in her lap, stroking his hair and weeping silently. Jane could not see his wounds, but she could tell they must be serious.
Jean-Pierre called for a table, hot water and towels, then got down on his knees beside Ahmed. After a few seconds he looked up at the other guerrillas and said in Dari: "Was he in an explosion?''
"The helicopters had rockets," said one of the uninjured. "One went off beside him."
Jean-Pierre reverted to French and spoke to Jane: "He's in a bad way. It's a miracle he survived the journey."
Jane could see bloodstains on Ahmed's chin: he had been coughing blood, a sign that he had internal injuries.
Zahara looked pleadingly at Jane. "How is he?" she asked in Dari.
"I'm sorry, my friend," answered Jane as gently as she could. "He's bad."
Zahara nodded resignedly: she had known it, but the confirmation brought fresh tears to her handsome face.
Jean-Pierre said to Jane: "Check the others for me—I don't want to lose a minute here."
Jane examined the other two wounded men. "The head wound is just a scratch," she said after a moment.
"Deal with it," said Jean-Pierre. He was supervising the lifting of Ahmed onto a table.
She looked at the man with his arm in a sling. He was more seriously hurt: it looked as if a bullet had smashed a bone. "This must have hurt," she said to the guerrilla in Dari. He grinned and nodded. These men were made of cast iron. "The bullet broke the bone," she said to Jean-Pierre.
Jean-Pierre did not look up from Ahmed. "Give him a local anesthetic, clean the wound, take out the bits and give him a clean sling. We'll set the bone later."
She began to prepare the injection. When Jean-Pierre
needed her assistance he would call. It looked as if it might be a long night.
Ahmed died a few minutes after midnight, and Jean-Pierre felt like crying—not with sadness, for he hardly knew Ahmed, but with sheer frustration, for he knew he could have saved the man's life, if only he had had an anesthetist and electricity and an operating theater.
He covered the dead man's face, then looked at the wife, who had been standing motionless, watching, for hours. "I'm sorry," he said to her. She nodded. He was glad she was calm. Sometimes they accused him of not trying everything: they seemed to think he knew so much that there was nothing he couldn't cure, and he wanted to scream / am not God at them; but this one seemed to understand.
He turned away from the corpse. He was weary to his bones. He had been working on mangled bodies all day, but this was the first patient he had lost. The people who had been watching him, mostly relatives of the dead man, came forward now to deal with the body. The widow began to wail, and Jane led her away.
Jean-Pierre felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Mohammed, the guerrilla who organized the convoys. He felt a stab of guilt.
Mohammed said: "It's the will of Allah."
Jean-Pierre nodded. Mohammed took out a pack of Pakistani cigarettes and lit one. Jean-Pierre began to gather up his instruments and put them into his bag. Without looking at Mohammed he said: "What will you do now?"
"Send another convoy immediately," Mohammed said. "We must have ammunition."
Jean-Pierre was suddenly alert, despite his fatigue. "Do you want to look at the maps?"
"Yes."
Jean-Pierre closed his bag, and the two men walked away from the mosque. The stars illuminated their way through the village to the shopkeeper's house. In the living room, Fara was asleep on a rug beside Chantal's cradle.
She awoke instantly and stood up. "You can go home now," Jean-Pierre told her. She left without speaking.
Jean-Pierre put his bag down on the floor, then picked up the cradle gently and carried it into the bedroom. Chantal stayed asleep until he put the cradle down, then she began to cry. "Now what is it?" he murmured to her. He looked at his wristwatch and realized she probably wanted feeding. "Mama's coming soon," he told her. This had no effect. He lifted her out of the cradle and began to rock her. She became quiet. He carried her back into the living room.
Mohammed was standing waiting. Jean-Pierre said: "You know where they are."
Mohammed nodded and opened a painted wooden chest. He took out a thick bundle of folded maps, selected several and spread them on the floor. Jean-Pierre rocked Chantal and looked over Mohammed's shoulder. "Where was the ambush?" he asked.
Mohammed pointed to a spot near the city of Jalalabad.
The trails followed by Mohammed's convoys were not shown on these or any other maps. However, Jean- Pierre's maps showed some of the valleys, plateaus and seasonal streams where there might be trails. Sometimes Mohammed knew from memory what was there. Sometimes he had to guess, and he would discuss with Jean- Pierre the precise interpretation of contour lines or the more obscure terrain features such as moraines.
Jean-Pierre suggested: "You could swing more to the north around Jalalabad." Above the plain in which the city stood, there was a maze of valleys like a cobweb stretched between the Konar and Nuristan rivers.
Mohammed lit another cigarette—like most of the guerrillas, he was a heavy smoker—and shook his head dubiously as he exhaled. "There have been too many ambushes in that area," he said. "If they are not betraying us already they soon will. No; the next convoy will swing south of Jalalabad."
Jean-Pierre frowned. "I don't see how that's possible.
To the south, there's nothing but open country all the way from the Khyber Pass. You'd be spotted."
"We won't use the Khyber Pass," said Mohammed. He put his finger on the map, then traced the Afghanistan-Pakistan border southward. "We will cross the border at Teremengal." His finger reached the town he had named, then traced a route from there to the Five Lions Valley.
Jean-Pierre nodded, hiding his jubilation. "It makes a lot of sense. When will the new convoy leave here?"
Mohammed began to fold up the charts. "The day after tomorrow. There is no time to lose." He replaced the maps in the painted chest, then went to the door.
Jane came in just as he was leaving. He said "Goodnight" to her in an absent-minded way. Jean-Pierre was glad the handsome guerrilla no longer had the hots for Jane since her pregnancy. She was definitely oversexed, in Jean-Pierre's opinion, and quite capable of letting herself be seduced; and for her to have an affair with an Afghan would have caused endless trouble.
Jean-Pierre's medical bag was on the floor where he had left it, and Jane bent down to pick it up. His heart missed a beat. He took the bag from her quickly. She gave him a mildly surprised look. "I'll put this away," he said. "You see to Chantal. She needs feeding." He gave the baby to her.
He carried the bag and a lamp into the front room as Jane settled down to feed Chantal. Cartons of medical supplies were stacked on me dirt floor. Already-opened boxes were arranged on the shopkeeper's crude wooden shelves. Jean-Pierre put his medical bag on the blue-tiled counter and took out a black plastic object about the size and shape of a portable telephone. This he put in his pocket.
He emptied his bag, putting the instruments for sterilization to one side and stowing the unused items on the shelves.
