Ken Follett - Lie down with lions

She walked on until the cable became taut in her hand, then she turned around again. Ellis was now scaling the canyon wall, presumably searching for the best position from which to observe the Russians as they stepped into the trap.

She sat down beside the stream. Chantal's tiny body rested in her lap. The sling went slack, taking the weight off Jane's back. Ellis's words kept repeating in her mind: If we time this just right, we can kill them all. Could it work? she wondered. Would they all be killed?

What would the other Russians do then? Jane's head began to clear, and she considered the likely sequence of events. In an hour or two someone would notice that this little party had not called in for a while, and would attempt to raise them on the radio. Finding that impossible, they would assume that the party was in a deep gorge, or that its radio was on the blink. After a couple more hours without contact, they would send a helicopter to look for the party, assuming that the officer in charge would have had the sense to light a fire or do something else to make his location easily visible from the air. When that failed,

the people at headquarters would start to worry. At some point they would have to send out a search party to look for the missing search party. The new party would have to cover the same ground as the old one. They certainly would not complete that trip today, and it would be impossible to search properly at night. By the time they found the bodies, Ellis and Jane would be at least a day and a half ahead, possibly more. It might be enough, Jane thought; by then she and Ellis would have gone past so many forks and side valleys and alternative routes that they could be untraceable. I wonder, she thought wearily. I wonder if this could be the end. I wish the soldiers would hurry. I can't bear the waiting, I'm so afraid.

She could see Ellis clearly, crawling along the clifftop on his hands and knees. She could see the search party, too, as they marched down the valley. Even at this distance they appeared dirty, and their slumped shoulders and dragging feet showed them to be tired and dispirited. They had not seen her yet; she blended into the landscape.

Ellis crouched behind a bluff and peered around its edge at the approaching soldiers. He was visible to Jane but hidden from the Russians, and he had a clear view of the place where he had planted the explosives.

The soldiers reached the head of the gorge and began to descend. One of them was riding, and had a moustache: presumably he was the officer. Another wore a Chitrali cap. That's Halam, Jane thought; the traitor. After what Jean-Pierre had done, treachery seemed to her an unforgivable crime. There were five others, and they all had short hair and uniform caps and youthful, clean-shaven faces. Two men and five boys, she thought.

She watched Ellis. He would give the sign at any minute. Her neck began to ache from the strain of looking up at him. The soldiers still had not spotted her: they were concentrating on finding their way along the rocky ground. At last Ellis turned to her and, slowly and deliberately, waved both his arms in the air above his head.

Jane looked back at the soldiers. One of them reached out and took the bridle of the horse, to help it over the uneven ground. Jane had the syringe device in her left hand and the forefinger of her right hand was crooked inside the pull ring. One jerk would light the fuse and detonate the TNT and bring the cliff tumbling down on her pursuers. Five boys, she thought. Joined the army because they were poor or foolish or both, or because they were conscripted. Posted to a cold, inhospitable country where the people hate them. Marched through a mountainous, icy wilderness. Buried under a landslide, heads smashed and lungs choked with earth and backs broken and chests crushed, screaming and suffocating and bleeding to death in agony and terror. Five letters to be written to proud fathers and anxious mothers at home: regret to inform, died in action, historic struggle against the forces of reaction, act of heroism, posthumous medal, deepest sympathy. Deepest sympathy. The mother's contempt for these fine words as she recalled how she had given birth in pain and fear, fed the boy in hard times and easy, taught him to walk straight and wash his hands and spell his name, sent him to school; how she had watched him grow and grow until he was almost as tall as she, then even taller, until he was ready to earn a living and marry a healthy girl and start a family of his own and give her grandchildren. The mother's grief when she realized that all that, everything she had done, the pain and the work and the worry, had been for nothing: this miracle, her man child, had been destroyed by braggardly men in a stupid, vain war. The sense of loss. The sense of loss.

Jane heard Ellis shout. She looked up. He was on his feet, not caring now whether he was seen, waving at her and yelling: "Do it now! Do it now!"

Carefully, she put the pull-ring device down on the ground beside the rushing stream.

The soldiers had seen both of them now. Two men began climbing up the side of the gorge toward where Ellis stood. The others surrounded Jane, pointing their rifles at her and her baby, looking embarrassed and foolish. She ignored them and watched Ellis. He climbed down the side of the gorge. The men who had been scrambling up toward him stopped and waited to see what he was going to do.

He reached the level ground and walked slowly up to Jane. He stood in front of her. "Why?" he said. "Why didn't you do it?"

Because they are so young, she thought; because they are young, and innocent, and they don't want to kill me. Because it would have been murder. But most of all ...

"Because they have mothers," she said.

Jean-Pierre opened his eyes. The bulky figure of Anatoly was crouching beside the camp bed. Behind Anatoly, bright sunlight streamed through the open flap of the tent. Jean-Pierre suffered a moment of panic, not knowing why he had slept so late or what he had missed; then, all in a flash, he recalled the events of the night.

He and Anatoly were encamped in the approach to the Kantiwar Pass. They had been awakened at around two-thirty A.M. by the captain commanding the search party, who in turn had been roused by the soldier on watch. A young Afghan called Halam had stumbled into the encampment, said the captain. Using a mixture of Pashto, English and Russian, Halam said that he had been guide to the fleeing Americans, but they had insulted him so he had abandoned them. On being asked where the "Americans" were now, he had offered to lead the Russians to the stone hut where, even now, the fugitives lay in unsuspecting sleep.

Jean-Pierre had been all for jumping into the helicopter and rushing off right away.

Anatoly had been more circumspect. "In Mongolia we have a saying: Don't get a hard-on until the whore opens her legs," he said. "Halam may be lying. If he is telling the truth, still he may not be able to find the hut, especially at night, especially from the air. And even if he finds it they may have gone."

"So what do you think we should do?"

"Send an advance party—a captain, five troopers a horse, with this Halam, of course. They can leave immediately. We can rest until they find the runaways."

His caution had been vindicated. The advance party reported back by radio at three-thirty, saying that the hut was empty. However, they added, the fire was still alight, so Halam had probably been telling the truth.

Anatoly and Jean-Pierre concluded that Ellis and Jane had woken up in the night, seen that their guide was gone and decided to flee. Anatoly ordered the advance party to go after them, relying on Halam to indicate the likeliest route.

At that point Jean-Pierre had gone back to bed and fallen into a heavy sleep, which was why he had failed to wake at dawn. Now he looked blearily at Anatoly and said: "What's the time?"