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 the river. He poked his head up over the parapet of the bridge. The great black tanks rolled steadily closer. How soon? He was guessing wildly. He counted seconds, measuring their progress; and then, not calculating but hoping for the best, he put the burning end of the disconnected blasting fuse to the cut end that was still connected with the bombs.
He put the burning fuse down carefully on the ground and started to run.
Ali and the other two guerrillas followed him.
At first they were hidden from the tanks by the river bank, but as the tanks came closer the four running men were clearly visible. Ellis was counting slow seconds as the rumble of the tanks turned into a roar.
The gunners in the tanks hesitated only momentarily: Afghans running away could be presumed to be guerrillas, and therefore suitable for target practice. There was a double boom and two shells flew over Ellis's head. He changed direction, running off to the side, away from the river, thinking: The gunner adjusts his range . . . now he swings the barrel toward me ... he aims . . . now. He dodged again, veering back toward the river, and a second later heard another boom. The shell landed close enough to spatter him with earth and stones. The next one will hit me, he thought, unless the damn bomb goes off first. Shit. Why did I have to show Masud how fucking macho I am? Then he heard a machine gun open up. It's hard to aim straight from a moving tank, he thought; but perhaps they will stop. He visualized the spray of machine-gun bullets waving toward him, and he began to bob and weave. He realized all of a sudden that he could guess exactly what the Russians would do: they would stop the tanks where they got the clearest view of the fleeing guerrillas, and that would be on the bridge. But would the bomb go off before the machine gunners hit their targets? He ran harder, his heart pounding and his breath coming in great gulps. I don't want to die, even if she loves him, he thought. He saw bullets chip a boulder almost in his path. He swerved suddenly, but the stream of fire followed him. It seemed hopeless: he was an easy target. He heard one of the guerrillas behind him cry out, then he was hit, twice in succession he felt a burning pain across his hip, then an impact, like a heavy blow, in his right buttock. The second slug paralyzed his leg momentarily, and he stumbled and fell, bruising his chest, then rolled over onto his back. He sat up, ignoring the pain, and tried to move. The two tanks had stopped on the bridge. Ali, who had been right behind him, now put his hands under Ellis's armpits and tried to lift him. The pair of them were sitting ducks: the gunners in the tanks could not miss.
Then the bomb went off.
It was beautiful.
The four simultaneous explosions sheared the bridge at both ends, leaving the midsection—with two tanks on it—totally unsupported. At first it fell slowly, its broken ends grinding; then it came free and dropped, spectacularly, into the rushing river, landing flat with a monster splash. The waters parted majestically, leaving the river bed visible for a moment, then came together again with a sound like a thunderclap.
When the noise died away, Ellis heard the guerrillas cheering.
Some of them emerged from cover and ran toward the half-submerged tanks. Ali lifted Ellis to his feet. The feeling returned to his legs in a rush, and he realized that he was hurting. "I'm not sure I can walk," he said to Ali in Dari. He took a step, and would have fallen if Ali had not been holding him. "Oh, shit," Ellis said in English. "I think I've got a bullet in my ass."
He heard shots. Looking up, he saw the surviving Russians trying to escape from the tanks, and the guerrillas picking them off as they emerged. They were cold-blooded bastards, these Afghans. Looking down, he saw that the right leg of his trousers was soaked with blood. That would be from the surface wound, he surmised: he felt that the bullet was still plugging the other wound.