Lie Down With Lions (19 page)

“Will they come?” Ellis asked.

“Many will,” Masud replied. “Our comrades from the western deserts will not—it’s too far, and they don’t know us.”

“What about the two we particularly want—Kamil and Azizi?”

Masud shrugged. “It is in God’s hands.”

Jean-Pierre was trembling with excitement. This would be the most important event in the history of the Afghan Resistance.

Ellis was fumbling in his kit bag, which was on the floor near his head. “I may be able to help you persuade Kamil and Azizi,” he was saying. He drew from the bag two small packages and opened one. It contained a flat, rectangular piece of yellow metal. “Gold,” said Ellis. “Each of these is worth about five thousand dollars.”

It was a fortune: five thousand dollars was more than two years’ income for the average Afghan.

Masud took the piece of gold and hefted it in his hand. “What’s that?” he said, pointing to an indented figure in the middle of the rectangle.

“The seal of the President of the United States,” said Ellis.

Clever, thought Jean-Pierre. Just the thing to impress tribal leaders and at the same time make them irresistibly curious to meet Ellis.

“Will that help to persuade Kamil and Azizi?” said Ellis.

Masud nodded. “I think they will come.”

You bet your
life
they’ll come, thought Jean-Pierre.

And suddenly he knew exactly what he had to do. Masud, Kamil and Azizi, the three great leaders of the Resistance, would be together in the village of Darg in eight days’ time.

He had to tell Anatoly.

Then Anatoly could kill them all.

This is it, thought Jean-Pierre; this is the moment I’ve been waiting for ever since I came to the Valley. I’ve got Masud where I want him—and two other rebel leaders, too.

But how can I tell Anatoly?

There
must
be a way.

“A summit meeting,” Masud was saying. He smiled rather proudly. “It will be a good start to the new unity of the Resistance, will it not?”

Either that, Jean-Pierre thought, or the beginning of the end. He lowered his hand, pointing the needle at the ground, and depressed the plunger, emptying the syringe. He watched the poison soak into the dusty earth. A new start, or the beginning of the end.

Jean-Pierre gave Ellis an anesthetic, took out the bullet, cleaned the wound, put a new dressing on it, and injected him with antibiotics to prevent infection. He then dealt with two guerrillas who also had minor wounds from the skirmish. By that time word had got around the village that the doctor was here, and a little cluster of patients gathered in the courtyard of the farmhouse. Jean-Pierre treated a bronchitic baby, three minor infections and a mullah with worms. Then he had lunch. Around midafternoon he packed his bag and climbed onto Maggie for the journey home.

He left Ellis behind. Ellis would be much better off staying where he was for a few days—the wound would heal faster if he lay still and quiet. Jean-Pierre was paradoxically anxious now that Ellis should remain in good health, for if he were to die the conference would be canceled.

As he rode the old horse up the Valley, he racked his brain for a means of getting in touch with Anatoly. Of course, he could simply turn around and ride down the Valley to Rokha, and give himself up to the Russians. Provided they did not shoot him on sight, he would be in Anatoly’s presence in no time. But then Jane would know where he had gone and what he had done, and she would tell Ellis, and Ellis would change the time and place of the conference.

Somehow he had to send a letter to Anatoly. But who would deliver it?

There was a constant trickle of people passing through the Valley on the way to Charikar, the Russian-occupied town sixty or seventy miles away in the plain, or to Kabul, the capital city, a hundred miles away. There were dairy farmers from Nuristan with their butter and cheese; traveling merchants selling pots and pans; shepherds bringing small flocks of fat-tailed sheep to market; and families of nomads going about their mysterious nomadic business. Any of them might be bribed to take a letter to a post office, or even just to thrust it into the hands of a Russian soldier. Kabul was three days’ journey, Charikar two. Rokha, where there were Russian soldiers but no post office, was only a day away. Jean-Pierre was fairly sure he could find someone to accept the commission. There was a danger, of course, that the letter would be opened and read, and Jean-Pierre would be found out, and tortured and killed. He might be prepared to take that risk. But there was another snag. When the messenger had taken the money, would he deliver the letter? There was nothing to stop him “losing” it on the way. Jean-Pierre might never know what had happened. The whole scheme was just too
uncertain.

He had not resolved the problem when he reached Banda at dusk. Jane was on the roof of the shopkeeper’s house, catching the evening breeze, with Chantal on her knee. Jean-Pierre waved to them, then went inside the house and put his medical bag on the tiled counter in the storeroom. It was when he was emptying the bag, at the moment he saw the diamorphine pills, that he realized there was one person he could trust with the letter to Anatoly.

He found a pencil in his bag. He took the paper wrapping from a package of cotton swabs and tore a neat rectangle out of it—there was no writing paper in the Valley. He wrote in French:

To Colonel Anatoly of the KGB—

It sounded oddly melodramatic, but he did not know how else to begin. He did not know Anatoly’s full name and he did not have an address.

He went on:

Masud has called a council of leaders of the Rebellion. They meet eight days from today, on Thursday 27 August, at Darg, which is the next village to the south of Banda. They will probably all sleep in the mosque that night and stay together all day Friday which is a holy day. The conference has been called for them to talk with a CIA agent known to me as Ellis Thaler, who arrived in the Valley a week ago.

This is our chance!

He added the date and signed it
Simplex.

He did not have an envelope—he had not seen one of those since he left Europe. He wondered what would be the best way to enclose the letter. As he looked around, his eye fell on a carton of plastic containers for dispensing tablets. They came with self-adhesive labels which Jean-Pierre never used because he could not write the Persian script. He rolled his letter into a cylinder and put it in one of the containers.

He wondered how to mark it. At some point in its journey the package would find its way into the hands of a lowly Russian soldier. Jean-Pierre imagined a bespectacled, anxious clerk in a cold office, or perhaps a stupid ox of a man on sentry duty outside a barbed-wire fence. No doubt the art of buck-passing was as well developed in the Russian Army as it had been in the French when Jean-Pierre did his military service. He considered how he might make the thing look important enough to be handed to a superior officer. There was no point in writing
Important
or
KGB
or anything at all in French or English or even in Dari because the soldier would not be able to read the European or Persian letters. Jean-Pierre did not know any Russian script. It was ironic that the woman on the roof, whose voice he could hear singing a lullaby now, was a fluent speaker of Russian and could have told him how to write anything at all, had she been willing. In the end he wrote
Anatoly—KGB
in European letters and stuck the label on the container, then put the container into an empty drug box which was marked POISON! in fifteen languages and three international symbols. He tied up the box with string.

Moving quickly, he put everything back in his medical bag and replaced the items he had used at Astana. He took a handful of diamorphine tablets and put them in his shirt pocket. Finally he wrapped the POISON! box in a threadbare towel.

He left the house. “I’m going to the river to wash,” he called up to Jane.

“Okay.”

He walked quickly through the village, nodding curtly to one or two people, and headed out through the fields. He was full of optimism. All sorts of risks attended his plans, but he could once again hope for a great triumph. He skirted a clover field that belonged to the mullah and climbed down a series of terraces. A mile or so from the village, on a rocky outcrop of the mountain, was a solitary cottage that had been bombed. It was getting dark when Jean-Pierre came within sight of it. He walked slowly toward it, picking his way gingerly across the uneven ground, regretting that he had not brought a lamp.

He stopped at the pile of rubble that had once been the front of the house. He thought of going in, but the smell as well as the darkness dissuaded him. He called out: “Hey!”

A shapeless form rose from the ground at his feet and scared him. He jumped back, cursing.

The
malang
stood up.

Jean-Pierre peered at the skeletal face and matted beard of the mad fellow. Recovering his composure, he said in Dari: “God be with you, holy man.”

“And with you, Doctor.”

Jean-Pierre had caught him in a coherent phase. Good. “How is your belly?”

The man mimed a stomachache: as always, he wanted drugs. Jean-Pierre gave him one diamorphine pill, letting him see the others, then putting them back in his pocket. The
malang
ate his heroin and said: “I want more.”

“You can have more,” Jean-Pierre told him. “A lot more.”

The man held out his hand.

“But you have to do something for me,” said Jean-Pierre.

The
malang
nodded eagerly.

“You have to go to Charikar and give this to a Russian soldier.” Jean-Pierre had decided on Charikar, despite the extra day’s journey it involved, because he feared that Rokha, being a rebel town temporarily occupied by the Russians, might be in a state of confusion, and the package could get lost, whereas Charikar was permanently in Russian territory. And he had decided on a soldier, rather than a post office, as the destination because the
malang
might not be able to deal with the business of buying a stamp and mailing something.

He looked carefully at the man’s unwashed face. He had been wondering whether the fellow would comprehend even these simple instructions, but the look of fear on his face at the mention of a Russian soldier indicated that he had understood perfectly.

Now, was there any way Jean-Pierre could ensure that the
malang
actually followed these orders? He, too, could throw the package away and come back swearing that he had carried out the task, for if he was intelligent enough to understand what he had to do, he might be capable of lying about it.

Jean-Pierre was inspired with an idea. “And buy a pack of Russian cigarettes,” he said.

The
malang
held out empty hands. “No money.”

Jean-Pierre knew he had no money. He gave him one hundred afghanis. That should ensure he actually went to Charikar. Was there a way to compel him to deliver the package?

Jean-Pierre said: “If you do this, I’ll give you all the pills you want. But do not cheat me—for if you do, I shall know, and I will never give you pills again, and your bellyache will grow worse and worse and you will swell up and then your guts will burst like a grenade and you will die in agony. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Jean-Pierre stared at him in the faint light. The whites of his mad eyes gleamed back. He seemed terrified. Jean-Pierre gave him the rest of the diamorphine pills. “Eat one every morning until you come back to Banda.”

He nodded vigorously.

“Go now, and do not try to cheat me.”

The man turned away and began to run along the rough path with his odd, animallike gait. Watching him disappear into the gathering darkness, Jean-Pierre thought: The future of this country is in your filthy hands, you poor mad wretch. May God go with you.

A week later the
malang
had not returned.

By Wednesday, the day before the conference, Jean-Pierre was distraught. Every hour, he told himself the man could be here within the next hour. At the end of each day, he said he would come tomorrow.

Aircraft activity in the Valley had increased, as if to add to Jean-Pierre’s worries. All week the jets had been howling overhead to bomb the villages. Banda had been lucky: only one bomb had landed, and it had merely made a big hole in Abdullah’s clover field; but the constant noise and danger made everyone irritable. The tension produced in Jean-Pierre’s clinic a predictable crop of patients with stress symptoms: miscarriages, domestic accidents, unexplained vomiting and headaches. It was the children who got the headaches. In Europe, Jean-Pierre would have recommended psychiatry. Here, he sent them to the mullah. Neither psychiatry nor Islam would do much good, for what was wrong with the children was the war.

He went through the morning’s patients mechanically, asking his routine questions in Dari, announcing his diagnoses to Jane in French, dressing wounds and giving injections and handing out plastic containers of tablets and glass bottles of colored medicine. It should have taken the
malang
two days to walk to Charikar. Allow him a day to work up the nerve to approach a Russian soldier and a night to get over it. Setting off the next morning, he had another two days’ journey. He should have got back the day before yesterday. What had happened? Had he lost the package, and stayed away in fear and trembling? Had he taken all the pills at once and made himself ill? Had he fallen in the damn river and drowned? Had the Russians used him for target practice?

Jean-Pierre looked at his wristwatch. It was ten thirty. Any minute now the
malang
might arrive, bearing a pack of Russian cigarettes as proof that he had been to Charikar. Jean-Pierre wondered briefly how he would explain the cigarettes to Jane, for he did not smoke. He decided that no explanation was necessary for the acts of a lunatic.