Jean-Pierre and Anatoly finished up at a horse station in the hills above Comar. The place had no name: it was a handful of bare stone houses and a dusty meadow where malnourished nags grazed the sparse grass. The only male inhabitant seemed to be the horse dealer, a barefoot old man wearing a long shirt with a voluminous hood to keep off flies. There were also a couple of young women and a huddle of frightened children. Clearly the young men were guerrillas, and were away somewhere with Masud. The hamlet did not take long to search. When they had done, Anatoly sat in the dust with his back to a stone wall, looking thoughtful. Jean-Pierre sat down beside him.
Across the hills they could see the distant white peak of Mesmer, almost twenty thousand feet high, which had attracted climbers from Europe in the old days. Anatoly said: "See if you can get some tea."
Jean-Pierre looked around and saw the old man in the hood lurking nearby. "Make tea," he shouted at him in Dari. The man scurried away. A moment later Jean-Pierre heard him shouting at the women. "Tea is coming," he said to Anatoly in French.
Anatoly's men, seeing that they were to stay here awhile, killed the engines of their helicopters and sat around in the dust, waiting patiently.
Anatoly stared into the distance. Weariness showed on his flat face. "We are in trouble," he said.
Jean-Pierre found it ominous that he said we.
Anatoly went on: "In our profession, it is wise to minimize the importance of a mission until one is certain of success, at which point one begins to exaggerate it. In this case I could not follow that pattern. In order to secure the use of five hundred helicopters and a thousand men, I had to persuade my superiors of the overwhelming importance of catching Ellis Thaler. I had to make very clear to them the dangers that face us if he escapes. I succeeded. And their anger at me for not catching him will now be all the greater. Your future, of course, is tied to mine."
Jean-Pierre had not previously thought of it that way. "What will they do?"
"My career will simply stop. My salary will stay the same but I will lose all privileges. No more Scotch whiskey, no more Rive Gauche for my wife, no more family holidays on the Black Sea, no more denim jeans and Rolling Stones records for my children . . . but I could live without those things. What I couldn't stand would be the sheer boredom of the kind of job given to failures in my profession. They would send me to a small town in the Far East where there is really no security work to do. I know how our men spend their time and justify their existence in such places. You have to ingratiate yourself with mildly discontented people, get them to trust you and talk to you, encourage them to make remarks critical of the government and the Party, then arrest them for subversion. It's such a waste of time. . . ." He seemed to realize he was rambling, and tailed off.
"And me?'5 said Jean-Pierre. "What will happen to me?"
"You'll become a nobody," said Anatoly. "You won't work for us anymore. They might let you stay in Moscow, but most likely they would send you back."
"If Ellis gets away, I can never go back to France-— they would kill me."
"You have committed no crime in France."
"Nor had my father, but they killed him."
"Maybe you could go to some neutral country—Nicaragua, say, or Egypt."
"Shit."
"But let us not give up hope," Anatoly said a little more brightly. "People cannot vanish into thin air. Our fugitives are somewhere."
"If we can't find them with a thousand men, I don't suppose we can find them with ten thousand," said Jean-Pierre gloomily.
"We shan't have a thousand, let alone ten thousand," said Anatoly. "From now on we have to use our brains, and minimal resources. All our credit is spent. Let's try a different approach. Think: somebody must have helped them hide. That means that somebody knows where they are."
Jean-Pierre considered. "If they had help it was probably from the guerrillas—the people least likely to tell."
"Others may know about it."
"Perhaps. But will they tell?"
"Our fugitives must have some enemies," Anatoly persisted.
Jean-Pierre shook his head. "Ellis hasn't been here long enough to make enemies, and Jane is a heroine—they treat her like Joan of Arc. Nobody dislikes her—oh!" Even as he was speaking, he realized it was not true.
"Well?"
"The mullah."
"Aaah."
"Somehow she irritated him beyond reason. It was partly that her cures were more effective than his, but not only that, for mine were, too, but he never disliked me particularly."
"He probably called her a Western whore."
"How did you guess?"
"They always do. Where does this mullah live?"
"Abdullah lives in Banda, in a house about half a kilometer outside the village."
"Will he talk?"
"He probably hates Jane enough to give her away to us," said Jean-Pierre reflectively. "But he couldn't be seen to do it. We can't just land in the village and pick him up—everyone would know what had happened and he would clam up. I'd have to meet him in secret somehow. ..." Jean-Pierre wondered what kind of danger he might put himself in if he continued thinking along this line. Then he thought of the humiliation he had suffered: revenge was worth any risk. "If you drop me near the village I can make my way to the path between the village and his house and hide there until he comes along."
"What if he doesn't 'come along' all day?"
"Yes . . ."
"We'll just have to make sure he does." Anatoly frowned. "We'll round up all the villagers in the mosque, as we did before—then just let them go. Abdullah will almost certainly go back to his house."
"But will he be alone?"
"Hmmm. Suppose we let the women go first, and order them to return to their homes. Then, when the men are released they will all want to check on their wives. Does anyone else live near Abdullah?"
"No."
"Then he should hurry along that footpath all alone. You step out from behind a bush—''
"And he slits my throat from ear to ear."
"He carries a knife?"
"Did you ever meet an Afghan who didn't?"
Anatoly shrugged. "You can take my pistol."
Jean-Pierre was pleased, and a little surprised, to be trusted that much, even though he did not know how to use a gun. "I suppose it may serve as a threat,' he said anxiously. "I'll need some native clothes, just in case I'm seen by someone other than Abdullah What if I meet someone who knows me? I'll have to cover my face with a scarf or something. ..."
"That's easy," said Anatoly. He shouted something in Russian, and three of the soldiers jumped to their feet. They disappeared into the houses and emerged a few seconds later with the old horse dealer. "You can take his clothes," said Anatoly.
"Good," said Jean-Pierre. "The hood will hide my face." He switched to Dan and shouted at the old man: "Take off your clothes."
The man began to protest: nakedness was terribly shameful to Afghans. Anatoly shouted an abrupt command in Russian, and the soldiers threw the man on the ground and pulled off his shirt. They all laughed uproariously to see his stick-thin legs poking out of his ragged shorts. They let him go and he scuttled away with his hands over his genitals, which made them laugh all the more.
Jean-Pierre was too nervous to find it funny. He took off his European-style shirt and trousers and donned the old man's hooded shirt.
"You smell of horse piss," said Anatoly.
"It's even worse from inside," Jean-Pierre replied.