"Bullshit," said Jane in English, but secretly she was glad, against all reason, that he had refused to go on alone.
"I have an alternative suggestion," said Mohammed. "I will go back and divert the Russians."
Jane's heart leaped. Was it possible?
Ellis said: "How?"
"I will offer to be their guide and interpreter, and I will lead them south down the Nuristan Valley, away from you, to Lake Mundol."
Jane thought of a snag, and her heart sank again. "But they must have a guide already," she said.
"He may be a good man from the Five Lions Valley who has been forced to help the Russians against his will. In that case I will speak with him and arrange things."
"What if he won't help?"
Mohammed considered. "Then he is not a good man who has been forced to help them, but a traitor who willingly collaborates with the enemy for personal gain; in which case I will kill him."
"I don't want anyone killed for my sake," she said quickly.
"It's not for you," Ellis said harshly. "It's for me—I refused to go on alone."
Jane shut up.
Ellis was thinking about practicalities, He said to Mohammed: "You're not dressed like a Nuristani."
"I will change clothes with Halam."
"You don't speak the local language well."
"There are many languages in Nuristan. I will pretend to come from a district where they use a different tongue. The Russians speak none of these languages anyway, so they will never know "
"What will you do with your gun?"
Mohammed thought for a moment. "Will you give me your bag?"
"It's too small."
"My Kalashnikov is the type that has a folding butt."
"Sure," said Ellis. "You can have the bag."
Jane wondered whether it would attract suspicion, but decided not: Afghans' bags were as strange and varied as their clothes. All the same, Mohammed would surely arouse suspicion sooner or later. She said: "What will happen when they finally realize they are on the wrong trail?"
"Before that happens I will run away in the night, leaving them in the middle of nowhere."
"It's terribly dangerous," said Jane.
Mohammed tried to look heroically unconcerned. Like most of the guerrillas, he was genuinely brave but also ludicrously vain.
Ellis said: "If you time this wrong, and they suspect you before you've decided to leave them, they will torture you to find out which way we went."
"They will never take me alive," said Mohammed.
Jane believed him.
Ellis said: "But we will have no guide."
"I shall find you another one." Mohammed turned to Halam and began a rapid multilingual conversation. Jane gathered that Mohammed was proposing to hire Halam as a guide. She did not like Halam much—he was too good a salesman to be entirely trustworthy—but he was obviously a traveling man, so he was a natural choice. Most of the local people had probably never ventured outside their own valley.
"He says he knows the way," said Mohammed, reverting to French. Jane suffered a twinge of anxiety about the words He says. Mohammed went on: "He will take you to Kantiwar, and there he will find another guide to take you across the next pass, and in this way you will proceed to Pakistan. He will charge five thousand afghanis."
Ellis said: "It sounds like a fair price, but how many more guides will we have to hire at that rate before we reach Chitral?"
"Maybe five or six," said Mohammed.
Ellis shook his head. "We don't have thirty thousand afghanis. And we have to buy food."
"You will have to get food by holding clinics," Mohammed said. "And the way becomes easier once you are in Pakistan. Perhaps you will not need guides at the end."
Ellis looked dubious. "What do you think?" he asked Jane.
"There's an alternative," she said. "You could go on without me."
"No," he said. "That's not an alternative. We'll go on together."
CHAPTER 18
ALL THE first day, the search parties found no trace of Ellis and Jane.
Jean-Pierre and Anatoly sat on hard wooden chairs in a spartan, windowless office at the Bagram air base, monitoring the reports as they came in over the radio network. The search parties had left before dawn—again. There were six of them at the start: one for each of the five main side valleys leading east from the Five Lions, and one to follow the Five Lions River north to its source and beyond. Each of the parties included at least one Dari-speaking officer from the Afghan regular army. They landed their helicopters at six different villages in the Valley, and half an hour later all six parties had reported that they had found local guides.
"That was quick," said Jean-Pierre after the sixth reported in. "How did they do it?"
"Simple," said Anatoly. "They ask someone to be a guide. He says no. They shoot him. They ask someone else. It doesn't take long to find a volunteer."
One of the search parties tried to follow its assigned trail from the air, but the experiment was a failure. The trails were rather difficult to follow from the ground; impossible from the air. Furthermore, none of the guides had ever been in an aircraft before and the new experience was totally disorienting. So all the search parties went on foot, some with commandeered horses to carry their baggage.
Jean-Pierre did not expect any further news in the morning, for the fugitives had a full day's start. However, the soldiers would certainly move faster than Jane, especially as she was carrying Chantal—
Jean-Pierre felt a stab of guilt every time he thought of ChantaJ. His rage at what his wife was doing did not extend to his daughter, yet the baby was suffering, he felt sure: trekking all day, crossing passes above the snow line, blasted by icy winds. . . .
His mind turned, as it often did nowadays, to the question of what would happen if Jane died and Chantal survived. He pictured Ellis captured, alone; Jane's body found a mile or two back, dead of the cold, with the baby still miraculously alive in her arms. I would arrive back in Paris a tragic, romantic figure, thought Jean-Pierre; a widower with a baby daughter, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. . . . How they would lionize me! I'm perfectly capable of bringing up a baby. What an intense relationship we would have as she grew older. I'd have to hire a nanny, of course, but I'd make sure she did not take the place of a mother in the child's affections. No, I would be both father and mother to her.
The more he thought about it, the more outraged he felt that Jane was risking Chantal's life. Surely she had forfeited all her parental rights by taking her baby on such an escapade. He thought he could probably get legal custody of the child in a European court on this basis. . . .
As the afternoon wore on, Anatoly grew bored and Jean-Pierre became tense. They were both tetchy. Anatoly held long conversations in Russian with other officers who came into the window less little room, and their interminable jabbering got on Jean-Pierre's nerves. At first Anatoly had translated all the radio reports of the search parties, but now he would just say "Nothing." Jean-Pierre had been plotting the routes of the parties on a set of maps, marking their locations with red pins, but by the end of the afternoon they were following trails or dried-up riverbeds which were not on the maps, and if their radio reports gave clues to their whereabouts, Anatoly was not passing them on.
The parties made camp at nightfall without reporting any signs of the fugitives. The searchers had been instructed to question the inhabitants of the villages through which they passed. The villagers were saying they had seen no foreigners. This was not surprising, for the searchers were still on the Five Lions side of the great passes leading to Nuristan. The people they were questioning were generally loyal to Masud: to them, helping the Russians was treason. Tomorrow, when the search parties passed into Nuristan, the people would be more cooperative.