Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 13

At first I didn’t know what the hell it was. I heard a droning noise, but the chopper was overhead to our rear and I didn’t see it. Then there was a rattling noise. Puffs of dirt dug a line across the road in front of us. I hit the brake, and the helicopter hovered into view up ahead, and another blast of automatic weapon fire dug up the road.

Phaedra’s eyes were wide open. “What the hell is that?”

“A helicopter. Out of the car. Fast.”

“But-”

“They’re trying to kill us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Get out of the car and make it quick. Open your door. That’s right. Now go for the ditch – no, wait, give them a minute to swing across to the other side. Jump for the ditch when I tell you… Okay, now!”

She made a half-hearted leap for the ditch. I sprang out after her and goosed her along, and we wound up in the ditch by the side of the road. She started to straighten up. I grabbed hold of her, pulled her down.

“It smells in here,” she said.

We were calf-deep in water, and she was right; it smelled. I guess it was some sort of drainage ditch, but that didn’t make sense because the area we were passing through was relatively arid. From the aroma it could have been a sewer, except that this was an even more ridiculous notion. We were in the middle of nowhere, with no towns or villages nearby, let alone a city large enough to have sewers. I decided it was just one of those great underground springs that happened to surface. But instead of being a pure, clean, cold underground spring, this one stank like a sewer.

“What are they doing, Evan?”

“Circling.”

“Why?”

“To make another pass at us.”

“They want to make a pass at us?”

“Not that kind of a pass. They want to zoom in on us and shoot the hell out of us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they friends of yours?”

“That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“I mean, do you know who they are?”

“No.”

“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off.”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“I mean yes, I know who they are,” I said.

“You just said you didn’t.”

“I just saw them again. Those crazy sons of bitches.”

“Who are they?”

“Some Russians. Some crazy, cockeyed Russians. They tried to drown me and shoot me and stab me and poison me and explode me. They’re the most hostile bastards imaginable. Oh, great.”

“What?”

“They know we got out of the car.”

“Well, of course they do. They’re not blind.”

“I guess not.” I had the gun out, the butt cozy in my hand, the trigger firm beneath my forefinger. It was reassuring and all that, but I didn’t see what in hell I could possibly accomplish with it. It is possible to bring down a helicopter with a rifle, if you’re a good shot and a lucky person. With a pistol, the only way to manage it is to be flying in the helicopter at the time and to shoot the pilot. Even then it’s a chancy operation at best.

Phaedra started to straighten up. I got a hand on her shoulder and shoved her down again. Her purple silk thing came unglued and began to unwind itself from her flesh. She began to breathe faster, and I turned to her and saw the light glinting wildly in her eyes.

“For Christ’s sake,” I said.

“I can’t help it.”

“I mean, there’s a time and a place for everything-”

“We had time before. And a place.”

“Honey-”

“You just don’t love me at all!”

“Then what am I doing in Afghanistan?”

“Getting us all killed.”

I clenched my teeth. The cruddy little helicopter was hovering all over the place now, buzzing here and there, loosing experimental bursts of gunfire hither and yon. The man flying the thing looked vaguely familiar, and I guessed that I had seen him before on the boat across the Channel, although I couldn’t place him precisely. The joker with the Bren gun – I think that’s what it was, but I wasn’t quite close enough to be sure – was my old Bulgarian buddy with the black spade-shaped beard.

“Why do they want to kill us, Evan?”

“They want to kill me. They don’t care about you.”

“Why?”

“Because they never even heard of you.”

“I mean, why do they want to kill you?”

“Because they’re idiots,” I said. “They know that I know that they plan to overthrow the government of Afghanistan in a couple of days. What they don’t know, although I keep trying to tell them, is that I don’t give a damn what they do with the government of Afghanistan as long as you and I can get out of the goddamned country first. But they won’t – I could shoot them now.”

“Why don’t you?”

I braced my elbow against the side of my body, rested my gun hand on the rim of the ditch. They were hovering directly across the road from us, with the Bulgarian spraying the ditch on that side with Bren gun-fire. I drew a bead on the pilot and let my finger tighten up on the trigger.

“No,” I said, and lowered the gun.

“Oh, Evan. I know it’s immoral to kill, but-”

“Immoral to kill?” I stared at her. “Are you out of your mind? Killing those sons of bitches is the most moral thing I can think of.”

“Then-”

“But if they don’t go back and tell their boss that they accomplished their mission, he’ll know we’re still alive. He’ll know I’m still alive, that is. And he’ll send more clowns after us, and maybe next time we won’t get out of the car in time. But if we let them go home-”

“They’ll tell their boss that they couldn’t get us.”

I shook my head. “Not likely. Nobody likes to run home boasting about a failure. They’ll figure they got us in that ditch. Watch – here they go, up, up and away.”

I was two-thirds right. They went up, and they went up. And then the nose of the Bren gun appeared over the side of the chopper, and a burst of bullets descended, headed for the trunk and gas tank of the 1968 Balalaika sedan.

I grabbed Phaedra and pulled her down flat in the ditch. Filthy water soaked my robes, coursed all over her naked body. She said something, but I never learned what it was, because the sound of the exploding car drowned it out.

“You should have shot them when you had the chance, Evan.”

“I know.”

“Because we’ll never get out of here now.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I’m not very good at walking. And it’s sort of chilly now, and when it gets dark-”

“I know.”

“I don’t mean to complain, Evan.”

“Then shut up,” I explained.

But she was right about one thing. It was silly to keep on walking. All we would accomplish would be to deplete our energy. We were, according to my calculations, something like 375 miles from Kabul. If we walked twelve hours out of twenty-four, and if we managed four miles an hour, it would take us eight days to get to Kabul. This was the mathematical solution, and one of the drawbacks of mathematical analysis is that it doesn’t take everything into consideration. It was possible, for instance, that Phaedra could sustain this pace the first day. It was even possible that she could manage it the second. But while she might be able to travel 48 miles in one day and 96 miles in two, it was quite inconceivable that she could go 375 miles in eight days.

Which meant that walking was a waste of time.

So we sat down. It was twilight, and getting darker fast, and already the air had turned perceptibly colder. We were wearing the same clothing as before, having let the dying sun dry my robe and Phaedra’s silk thing before we left the burned-out Balalaika and struck off down the road. I put an arm around her now, and we huddled together for warmth and comfort, and it was a tender moment, and then I felt a small warm hand insinuate itself beneath my robe.

“No,” I said.

The hand went away and she began to cry. I hugged her and told her that everything would be all right. “I hate myself when I’m like this,” she said between sobs. “But I can’t help it.”

“You’ll be all right.”

“My head gets all strange and I can’t think of anything else. Sometimes I think I never existed before that place. That whorehouse. That I just suddenly happened there one day, that before then I was never even alive.”

“You were alive.”

“I was?”

“Uh-huh. You’ll be alive again.”

“I will?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m afraid, Evan.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“We’ll die on this fucking road. We’ll freeze to death or starve. I’m hungry already.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“How can you be sure?”

So I gave her a little sermon about the earth, and how one defeats oneself by expecting the land to be hostile. It isn’t. There is a modern tendency to suspect that human beings cannot possibly stay alive in any area that is not paved. But one must remember that mankind did not evolve in cities, that cities were a creation of man and not the other way around. There was a time, I told her, when human beings were not terrified at the prospect of breathing air they couldn’t see. There was a time when men and women ate food without first defrosting it. There was a time-

“Evan.”

“What is it?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Lie down. Close your eyes. Sleep.”

“I can’t possibly sleep.”

“Lie down. Close your eyes.”

“I’m wide awake. I can’t-”

While she slept, I took a stick and scratched in the sand. I had left Kabul on the morning of the 15th of November, just midway between Guy Fawkes Day and the scheduled Russian coup. Since then, day and night had had a way of merging together, with too much time passed in a blur on the road, but I was able to work it out a little at a time. As well as I could determine, it was now the evening of the 21st. We had something like four days to get back to Kabul and shake things up.

Because, dammit, they had it coming now. I had given them every chance on earth, every possible chance, and they blew it over and over again. All they had had to do was leave me alone, that was all. I kept catching them and letting them go in munificent gestures of good will, and all they did was go back and organize fresh attempts on my life.

Well, they had gone too far. I was a patient man, but patience has a limit, and my limit had been reached and surpassed. A dagger in my turban, poison in my drink, a gun in my face, a bomb in my restaurant, a foot on my hand – I had contented myself for too great a time with passive resistance. Nonviolence is a marvelous concept, but it can be carried too far.

I’ve always liked Glenn Ford movies. Especially the really lousy ones, where he’s a cop that the crime syndicate is after or a sheepman that the cattlemen are after, and they keep doing mean things to him. They hit him, and they roll him along a piece of barbed wire, and they shove dynamite up his nose, and they throw him in the creek, and they poison his well, and they spill hot coffee on him, and throughout all of this Glenn Ford shows his first expression – irritation.

Then they go too far. They blow up his wife and kids, or they insult his mother, or they step on his blue suede shoes. Whatever it is, it’s the straw, man, and Glenn Ford is the camel’s back, and that does it. At this point he shows his second expression – aggravation.

And he goes berserk and knocks the hell out of every last one of the bastards.

I’d been irritated ever since I swam the English Channel.

I was now aggravated, and they were in trouble.