“Is this the top?” she asked stupidly.
“This is it,” he said. “This is the Kantiwar Pass. We’ve done the worst part of this leg of the journey. For the next couple of days the route will lie downhill, and the weather will get warmer.”
Jane sat down on an icy boulder. I made it, she thought. I made it.
While the two of them looked at the black hills, the sky beyond the mountain peaks turned from pearl gray to dusty pink. Day was breaking. As the light slowly stained the sky, so a little hope crept into Jane’s heart again. Downhill, she thought, and warmer. Perhaps we will escape.
Chantal cried again. Well,
her
food supply had not gone with Maggie. Jane fed her, sitting on that icy boulder on the roof of the world, while Ellis melted snow in his hands for Jane to drink.
The descent into the Kantiwar Valley was a relatively gentle slope, but very icy at first. However, it was less nerve-racking without the horse to worry about. Ellis, who had not slipped at all on the way up, carried Chantal.
Ahead of them, the morning sky turned flame red, as if the world beyond the mountains were on fire. Jane’s feet were still numb with cold, but her nose unfroze. Suddenly she realized she was terribly hungry. They would simply have to keep walking until they came across people. All they had to trade, now, was the TNT in Ellis’s pockets. When that was gone they would have to rely on traditional Afghan hospitality.
They were also without bedding. They would have to sleep in their coats, with their boots on. Somehow Jane felt they would solve all problems. Even finding the path was easy now, for the valley walls on either side were a constant guide and limited the distance they might stray. Soon there was a little stream burbling alongside them: they were below the ice line again. The ground was fairly even, and if they had still had the horse they could have ridden her.
After another two hours they paused to rest at the head of a gorge, and Jane took Chantal from Ellis. Ahead of them, the descent became rough and steep, but because they were below the ice line the rocks were not slippery. The gorge was quite narrow and could quite easily get blocked. “I hope there are no landslides down there,” said Jane.
Ellis was looking the other way, back up the valley. Suddenly he gave a start, and said: “Jesus Christ.”
“What on earth is the matter?” Jane turned and followed his gaze, and her heart sank. Behind them, about a mile up the valley, were half a dozen men in uniform and a horse: the search party.
After all that, thought Jane, after all we went through, they caught us anyway. She was too miserable even to cry.
Ellis grabbed her arm. “Quick, let’s move,” he said. He started hurrying down into the gorge, pulling her after him.
“What’s the point?” Jane said wearily. “They’re sure to catch us.”
“We’ve got one chance left.” As they walked, Ellis was surveying the steep, rocky sides of the gorge.
“What?”
“A rockfall.”
“They’ll find a way over or around it.”
“Not if they’re all buried underneath it.”
He stopped at a place where the floor of the canyon was only a few feet wide and one wall was precipitously steep and high. “This is perfect,” he said. He took from the pockets of his coat a block of TNT, a reel of detonating cable marked PRIMACORD, a small metal object about the size of the cap of a fountain pen, and something that looked like a metal syringe except that at its blunt end it had a pull ring instead of a plunger. He laid the objects out on the ground.
Jane watched him in a daze. She did not dare to hope.
He fixed the small metal object to one end of the Primacord by crimping it with his teeth; then he fixed the metal object to the sharp end of the syringe. He handed the whole assembly to Jane.
“This is what you have to do,” he began. “Walk down the gorge, paying out the cable. Try to conceal it. It doesn’t matter if you lay it in the stream—this stuff burns under water. When you reach the limit of the wire, pull out the safety pins like this.” He showed her two split pins which pierced the barrel of the syringe. He pulled them out and put them back in. “Then keep your eye on me. Wait for me to wave my arms above my head like this.” He showed her what he meant. “Then pull the ring. If we time this just right, we can kill them all. Go!”
Jane followed orders like a robot, without thinking. She walked down the gorge, paying out the cable. At first she concealed it behind a line of low bushes; then she laid it in the bed of the stream. Chantal slept on in the sling, swaying gently as Jane walked, leaving both of Jane’s arms free.
After a minute she looked back. Ellis was wedging the TNT into a fissure in the rock. Jane had always believed that explosives would go off spontaneously if you handled them roughly: obviously that was a misconception.
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 mustache: 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 and 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?”
“Eight o’clock. And we’ve caught them.”
Jean-Pierre’s heart leaped—then he remembered that he had felt this way before, and had been let down. “For sure?” he asked.
“We can go and check just as soon as you put your trousers on.”
It was almost that quick. A refueling helicopter arrived just as they were about to board, and Anatoly judged it wise to wait a few more minutes while their tanks were filled, so Jean-Pierre had to contain his consuming impatience a little longer.
They took off a few minutes later. Jean-Pierre looked at the landscape through the open door. As they flew up into the mountains, Jean-Pierre realized this was the bleakest, harshest territory he had yet seen in Afghanistan. Had Jane really crossed this bare, cruel, icebound moonscape with a baby in her arms? She must really hate me, Jean-Pierre thought, to go through so much to get away from me. Now she will know that it was all in vain. She is mine forever.
But had she really been caught? He was terrified of another disappointment. When he landed, would he find that the advance party had captured another pair of hippies, or two fanatical mountain climbers, or even a couple of nomads who looked vaguely European?
Anatoly pointed out the Kantiwar Pass as they flew over it. “Looks like they lost their horse,” he added, shouting into Jean-Pierre’s ear over the noise of the engines and the wind. Sure enough, Jean-Pierre saw the outline of a dead horse in the snows below the pass. He wondered if it was Maggie. He rather hoped it was that stubborn beast.