height, dressed in khaki clothes and Russian boots. Ellis scrutinized his face. He was light-skinned, with a sparse moustache and the wispy beard of a teenager. He had a long nose with a hooked point. His alert dark eyes were surrounded by heavy lines which made him look at least five years older than his reputed age of twenty-eight. It was not a handsome face, but there was in it an air of lively intelligence and calm authority that distinguished him from the men around him.
He came directly to Ellis with his hand outstretched. "I am Masud."
"Ellis Thaler." Ellis shook his hand.
"We're going to blow up this bridge," Masud said in French.
"You want to get started?"
"Yes."
Ellis packed his equipment into his kitbag while Masud went around the group of guerrillas, shaking hands with some, nodding to others, embracing one or two, speaking a few words to each.
When they were ready they went down the hill in a straggle, hoping—Ellis presumed—that if they were seen they would be taken for a group of peasants rather than a unit of the rebel army. When they reached the foot of the hill they were no longer visible from the road, although anyone overhead in a helicopter would have noticed them: Ellis presumed they would take cover if they heard a chopper. They headed for the river, following a footpath through the cultivated fields. They passed several small houses and were seen by the people working in the fields, some of whom ignored them studiously while others waved and called out greetings. The guerrillas reached the river and walked along its bank, gaining what cover they could from the boulders and sparse vegetation at the water's edge. When they were about three hundred yards from the bridge, a small convoy of army trucks began to cross it, and they all hid while the vehicles rumbled by, heading for Rokha. Ellis lay beneath a willow tree and found Masud beside him. "If we destroy the bridge," Masud said, "we will cut their supply line to Rokha."
After the trucks had gone they waited a few minutes, then walked the rest of the way to the bridge and clustered beneath, invisible from the road.
At its midpoint the bridge was twenty feet above the river, which seemed to be about ten feet deep here. Ellis saw that it was a simple stringer bridge—two long steel girders, or stringers, supporting a flat slab of concrete road and stretching from one bank to the other without intermediate support. The concrete was dead load—the girders took the strain. Break them and the bridge was ruined.
Ellis set about his preparations. His TNT was in one-
pound yellow blocks. He made a stack of ten blocks and taped them together. Then he made three more identical stacks, using all his explosive. He was using TNT because that was the substance most often found in bombs, shells, mines and hand grenades, and the guerrillas got most of their supplies from unexploded Russian ordnance. Plastic explosive would have been more suitable for their needs, for it could be stuffed into holes, wrapped around girders and generally molded into any shape required—but they had to work with the materials they could find and steal. They could occasionally get a little plastique from the Russian engineers by trading it for marijuana grown in the Valley, but the transaction—which involved intermediaries in the Afghan regular army—was risky and supplies were limited. All this Ellis had been told by the CIA's man in Peshawar, and it had turned out to be right.
The girders above him were I-beams spaced about eight feet apart. Ellis said in Dan: "Somebody find me a stick this long," indicating the space between the beams. One of the guerrillas walked along the riverbank and uprooted a young tree. "I need another one just the same," Ellis said.
He put a stack of TNT on the lower lip of one of the I-beams and asked a guerrilla to hold it in place. He put another stack on the other I-beam in a similar position; then he forced the young tree between the two stacks so that it kept them both where they were.
He waded through the river and did exactly the same at the other end of the bridge.
He described everything he was doing in a mixture of Dari, French and English, letting them pick up what they could—the most important thing was for them to see what he was doing, and its results. He fused the charges with Primacord, the high-explosive detonating cord that burned at 21,000 feet per second, and he connected the four stacks so that they would explode simultaneously. He then made a ring main by looping the Primacord back on itself. The effect, he explained to Masud in French, would be that the cord burned down to the TNT from both ends, so that if somehow the cable was severed in one place the bomb
would still go off. He recommended this as a routine precaution.
He felt oddly happy as he worked. There was something soothing about mechanical tasks and the dispassionate calculation of poundage of explosive. And now that Masud had shown up at last, he could get on with his mission.
He trailed the Primacord through the water so that it was less visible—it would burn perfectly well underwater—and brought it out onto the riverbank. He attached a blasting cap to the end of the Primacord, then added a four-minute length of ordinary, slow-burning blasting fuse.
"Ready?" he said to Masud.
Masud said: "Yes."
Ellis lit the fuse.
They all walked away briskly, heading upstream along the riverbank. Ellis felt a certain secret boyish glee about the enormous bang he was about to create. The others seemed excited, too, and he wondered whether he was as bad at concealing his enthusiasm as they were. It was while he was looking at them in this way that their expressions altered dramatically, and they all became alert suddenly, like birds listening for worms in the ground; and then Ellis heard it—the distant rumble of tank tracks.
The road was not visible from where they were, but one of the guerrillas quickly shinned up a tree. "Two," he reported.
Masud took Ellis's arm. "Can you destroy the bridge while the tanks are on it?" he said.
Oh, shit, thought Ellis; this is a test. "Yes," he said rashly.
Masud nodded, smiling faintly. "Good."
Ellis scrambled up the tree alongside the guerrilla and looked across the fields. There were two black tanks trundling heavily along the narrow stony road from Kabul. He felt very tense: this was his first sight of the enemy. With their armor plating and their enormous guns they looked invulnerable, especially by contrast with the ragged guerrillas and their rifles; and yet the Valley was littered with
the remains of tanks the guerrillas had destroyed with homemade mines, well-placed grenades and stolen rockets.
There were no other vehicles with the tanks. It was not a patrol, then, or a raiding party; the tanks were probably being delivered to Rokha after being repaired at Bagram, or perhaps they had just arrived from the Soviet Union.
He began calculating.
The tanks were going at about ten miles per hour, so they would reach the bridge in a minute and a half. The fuse had been burning for less than a minute: it had at least three minutes to go. At present the tanks would be across the bridge and a safe distance away before the explosion. He had to shorten the fuse.
He dropped from the tree and started to run, thinking: How the hell many years is it since the last time I was in a combat zone?
He heard footsteps behind him and glanced back. Ali was running right behind him, grinning horribly, and two more men were close on his heels. The others were taking cover along the riverbank.
A moment later he reached the bridge and dropped to one knee beside his slow-burning fuse, slipping the kitbag off his shoulder as he did so. He continued to calculate while he fumbled the bag open and rooted around for his pocketknife. The tanks were now a minute away, he thought. Blasting fuse burned at the rate of a foot every thirty to forty-five seconds. Was this particular reel slow, average or fast? He seemed to recall that it was fast. Say a foot, then, for a thirty-second delay. In thirty seconds he could run about a hundred and fifty yards—enough for safety, just barely.
He opened the pocketknife and handed it to Ali, who had knelt down beside him. Ellis grabbed the fuse wire at a point a foot from where it was joined to the blasting cap, and held it with both hands for Ali to cut. He held the severed end in his left hand and the burning fuse in his right. He was not sure whether it was time yet to relight the severed end. He had to see how far away the tanks were.
He scrambled up the embankment, still holding both pieces of fuse wire. Behind him, the Primacord trailed in
