She struggled against his grip, got free for a moment and struck another blow at the little radio.
He grasped her shoulders and hurled her aside. She stumbled and fell to the floor. She landed awkwardly, twisting her wrist.
He stared at the radio. "It's ruined!" he said. "It's irreparable!" He grabbed her by the shirt and hauled her to her feet. "You don't know what you've done!" he screamed. There was despair and hot rage in his eyes.
"Let me go!" she shouted at him. He had no right to act like this when it was he who had lied to her. "How dare you manhandle me!"
"How dare I?" He let go of her shirt, drew back his arm and punched her hard. The blow landed in the middle of her abdomen. For a split second she was simply paralyzed with shock; then the pain came, deep inside where she was still sore from having had Chantal, and she cried out and bent over with her hands clutching her middle.
Her eyes were shut tight, so she did not see the second blow coming.
His punch landed full on her mouth. She screamed. She could hardly believe he was doing this to her. She opened her eyes and looked at him, terrified that he would hit her again.
"How dare I?" he screamed. "How dare I?"
She fell to her knees on the dirt floor, and began to sob with shock and pain and misery. Her mouth hurt so much she could hardly speak. "Please don't hit me," she managed. "Don't hit me again." She held a hand in front of her face defensively.
He knelt down, shoved her hand aside and thrust his face into hers. "How long have you known?" he hissed.
She licked her lips. They were swelling already. She dabbed at them with her sleeve, and it came away bloody. She said: "Since I saw you in the stone hut ... on the way to Cobak."
"But you didn't see anything!"
"He spoke with a Russian accent, and said he had blisters. I figured it out from there."
There was a pause while that sank in. "Why now?" he said. "Why didn't you break the radio before?"
"I didn't dare to."
"And now?"
"Ellis is here."
"So?"
Jane summoned up what little courage she had left. "If you don't stop this . . . spying . . . I'll tell Ellis, and he will stop you."
He took her by the throat. "And what if I strangle you, you bitch?"
"If any harm comes to me ... Ellis will want to know why. He's still in love with me."
She stared at him. Hatred burned in his eyes. "Now I'll never get him!" he said. She wondered who he meant. Ellis? No. Masud? Could it be that Jean-Pierre's ultimate purpose was to kill Masud? His hands were still 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.