around her throat. She felt his grip tighten. She watched his face fearfully.
Then Chantal cried.
Jean-Pierre's expression changed dramatically. The hostility went from his eyes, and the fixed, taut look of anger crumpled; and finally, to Jane's amazement, he put his hands over his eyes and began to cry.
She gazed at him with incredulity. She found herself feeling pity for him, and thought: Don't be a fool, the bastard just beat you up. But despite herself she was touched by his tears. "Don't cry," she said quietly. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. She touched his cheek.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for what I did to you. My life's work ... all for nothing."
She realized with astonishment and a trace of self-disgust that she was no longer angry with him, despite her swollen lips and the continuing pain in her tummy. She gave in to the sentiment, and put her arms around him, patting his back as if comforting a child.
"Just because of Anatoly's accent," he mumbled. "Just because of that."
"Forget Anatoly," she said, "We'll leave Afghanistan and go back to Europe. We'll go with the next convoy."
He took his hands from his face and looked at her. "When we get back to Paris ..."
"Yes?"
"When we're home ... I still want us to be together. Can you forgive me? I love you—truly, I always loved you. And we're married. And there's Chantal. Please, Jane—please don't leave me. Please?"
To her surprise she felt no hesitation. He was the man she loved, her husband, the father of her child; and he was in trouble and appealing for help. "I'm not going anywhere," she replied.
"Promise," he said. "Promise you won't leave me."
She smiled at him with her bleeding mouth. "I love you," she said. "I promise I won't leave you."
CHAPTER 9
ELLIS WAS FRUSTRATED, impatient and angry. He was frustrated because he had been in the Five Lions Valley for seven days and still had not met Masud. He was impatient because it was a daily purgatory for him to see Jane and Jean-Pierre living together and working together and sharing the pleasure of their happy little baby girl. And he was angry because he and nobody else had got himself into this wretched situation.
They had said he would meet Masud today, but the great man had not shown up so far. Ellis had walked all day yesterday to get here. He was at the southwestern end of the Five Lions Valley, in Russian territory. He had left Banda accompanied by three guerrillas—Ali Ghanim, Matullah Khan and Yussuf Gul—but they had accumulated two or three more at each village, and now they were thirty altogether. They sat in a circle, underneath a fig tree near the top of a hill, eating figs and waiting.
At the foot of the hill on which they sat, a flattish plain began and stretched south—all the way to Kabul, in fact, although that was fifty miles away and they could not see it. In the same direction, but much closer, was the Bagram air base, just ten miles away: its buildings were not visible, but they could see the occasional jet rising into the air. The plain was a fertile mosaic of fields and orchards, criss-crossed with streams all feeding into the Five Lions River as it flowed, wider and deeper now but just as fast, toward the capital city. A rough road ran past the foot of the hill and went up the Valley as far as the town of Rokha, which was the northernmost limit of Russian territory here. There was not much traffic on the road: a few peasant carts and an occasional armored car. Where the road crossed the river there was a new Russian-built bridge.
Ellis was going to blow up the bridge.
The lessons in explosives, which he was giving in order to mask for as long as possible his real mission, were hugely popular, and he had been obliged to limit the numbers attending. This was despite his hesitant Dari. He remembered a little Farsi from Teheran, and he had picked up a lot of Dari on his way here with the convoy, so that he could talk about the landscape, food, horses and weapons, but he still could not say such things as The indentation in the explosive material has the effect of focusing the blast. Nevertheless the idea of blowing things up appealed so much to the Afghan machismo that he always had an attentive audience. He could not teach them the formulas for calculating the amount of TNT required for a job, or even show them how to use his idiot-proof U.S. Army computing tape, for none of them had done elementary-school arithmetic and most of them could not read. Nevertheless he was able to show them how to destroy things more decisively and at the same time use less materiel— which was very important to them, for all ordnance was in short supply. He had also tried to get them to adopt basic safety precautions, but in this he had failed: to them caution was cowardly.
Meanwhile he was tortured by Jane.
He was jealous when he saw her touch Jean-Pierre; he was envious when he saw the two of them in the cave clinic, working together so efficiently and harmoniously; and he was consumed by lust when he caught a glimpse of Jane's swollen breast as she fed her baby. He would lie awake at night, under his sleeping bag in the house of Ismael Gul, where he was staying, and he would turn constantly, sometimes sweating and sometimes shivering, unable to get comfortable on the floor of packed earth, trying not to hear the muffled sounds of Ismael and his wife making love a few yards away in the next room; and the palms of his hands seemed to itch to touch Jane.
He had nobody to blame but himself for all this. He had volunteered for the mission in the foolish hope that he might win Jane back. It was unprofessional, as well as immature. All he could do was get out of here as quickly as possible.
And he could do nothing until he met Masud.
He stood up and walked around restlessly, careful nonetheless to stay in the shade of the tree so that he would not be visible from the road. A few yards away there was a mass of twisted metal where a helicopter had crashed. He saw a thin piece of steel about the size and shape of a dinner plate, and that gave him an idea. He had been wondering how to demonstrate the effect of shaped charges and now he saw a way.
He took from his kitbag a small, flat piece of TNT and a pocketknife. The guerrillas clustered closer around him. Among them was Ali Ghanim, a small, misshapen man— twisted nose, deformed teeth, and a slightly hunched back— who was said to have fourteen children. Ellis carved the name Ali into the TNT in Persian script. He showed it to them. Ali recognized his name. "Ali," he said, grinning and showing his hideous teeth.
Ellis placed the explosive, carved side down, on the piece of steel. "I hope this works," he said with a smile, and they all smiled back, although none of them spoke English. He took a coil of blasting fuse from his capacious bag and cut off a four-foot length. He got out his cap box, took a blasting cap and inserted the end of the fuse into the cylindrical cap. He taped the cap to the TNT.
He looked down the hill to the road. He could see no traffic. He carried his little bomb across the hillside and put it down about fifty yards away. He lit the fuse with a match, then walked back to the fig tree.
The fuse was slow-burning. Ellis wondered, while he waited, whether Masud was having him watched and weighed up by the other guerrillas. Was the leader waiting for assurance that Ellis was a serious person whom the guerrillas could respect? Protocol was always important in an army, even a revolutionary one. But Ellis could not pussyfoot around much longer. If Masud did not show today, Ellis would have to drop all this explosives nonsense, confess to being an envoy from the White House, and demand a meeting with the rebel leader immediately.
There was an unimpressive bang and a small cloud of dust. The guerrillas looked disappointed at such a feeble blast. Ellis retrieved the piece of metal, using his scarf to hold it in case it was hot. The name AH was cut through it in ragged-edge letters of Persian script. He showed it to the guerrillas, and they burst into excited chatter. Ellis was pleased: it was a vivid demonstration of the point that the explosive was more powerful where it was indented, contrary to what common sense would suggest.
The guerrillas suddenly went quiet. Ellis looked around and saw another group of seven or eight men approaching over the hill. Their rifles and round Chitrali caps marked them as guerrillas. As they came nearer, AH stiffened, almost as if he were about to salute. Ellis said: "Who is it?"
"Masud," Ali replied.
"Which one is he?"
"The one in the middle."
Ellis studied the central figure in the group. Masud looked just like the others at first: a thin man of average
