It was the last thing Jones saw. The guard, whom he had only stunned, struggled to his feet, and before Bitov could shout a warning smashed his rifle stock over the back of the American’s head.
Girling twisted the ignition key and the BMW purred into life. It was no longer possible to see the entrance to the embassy. He had hoped for some illumination from the street-lamps. But either they didn’t work, or somebody somewhere had forgotten to pull the switch. He had heard a story once that as fast as municipal workers erected street-lamps here, thieves followed in their wake stripping out the cables. Everything had a price on Cairo’s black market. Everything.
A lone light glowed dimly above the guard’s sentry box, but it was not enough to detail the faces of the few people who had left the building in the last ten minutes.
Girling took a last look through the binoculars. Bugs and moths swarmed around the solitary bulb. Beyond, all was black but for a few lights shining on the second floor. Maybe Lazan was working late. Then again, maybe Lazan didn’t work at the embassy any more. Maybe Lazan was in Tel Aviv. Or maybe he was dead.
Too many maybes…
He inched the BMW out of the parking slot. He hoped he could find Andrea’s restaurant in the blacked-out countryside near the Pyramids.
Bitov could go no further. Not because his courage or strength had deserted him — he derived a certain energy from the fact that he, a Soviet soldier, was carrying one of the pride of America’s special forces on his back. Bitov knew there was no shame in calling a halt. With the sudden change in gradient and the worsening light, further progress wasn’t a question of stamina, tenacity, or spirit. It was simply an impossibility.
The Russian let Jones’s dead weight slip gently to the ground. He positioned the unconscious form so that it sat upright on the rocky ledge, back against the rocks, face turned to the sun as it slipped behind the mountains on the far side of the sand sea.
Bitov sat beside Jones and turned his eyes to the west. All day the sun had been their enemy. Now he was sorry to see it go. He took a sip of water, then tipped some into Jones’s mouth. Most of it dribbled onto the Pathfinder’s T-shirt, but some found its way down his throat. Jones coughed twice, convulsively, then fell silent. Bitov leaned over and listened to Jones’s breathing and checked the wound at the back of his head. There was little change in his condition. Helped by the makeshift bandage that he had fashioned from a bedouin’s robe, the gash in Jones’s scalp had stopped bleeding, but not before the American had lost a good deal of blood. His pulse was coming back up, but he was still a sick man.
The ledge was a six-foot-wide notch in the side of the rock face. Its position, around a third of the way up the escarpment, seemed to coincide with a step-change in the gradient. The first four hundred metres had been steep, but Bitov, summoning deep reserves of strength, had managed to scale it in a little under two hours with Jones on his back.
Bitov twisted on the ledge until he stared at the near-vertical incline above him. The rest of the way would have been testing enough for the fittest of men in broad daylight. But because night was closing in on them, he would be going nowhere until Jones regained consciousness.
The Russian closed his eyes and felt himself lapsing into a light sleep. He gave little thought to the action that had transpired by the well. What were four more dead after the horrors of the Panjshir, Herat, and Jalalabad? To Bitov, soldiery since that winter in 1979 had consisted of little else but killing.
CHAPTER 12
Jones blinked several times and brought his hand up to the back of his head. His hair was caked thick with blood in varying stages of congealment.
Stretching away before him was a landscape of nightmarish beauty. A three-quarter moon bathed the rocks in an electric blue-black light and cast shadows of endless depth. The dunes of the sand-sea stretched endlessly, far below.
Jones spent long minutes trying to fathom why he was on a ledge, a thousand feet up a mountain, propped against the rock like a dummy, with Bitov beside him, sleeping like a baby. He recalled snatches of his attempt to steal the water from the well, but for the most part, his mind was a blank. He tried to get to his feet, but overcome by nausea and pain, tipped forward, striking his head as he fell.
He dreamed he had pitched headlong into the bedouin well and that Bitov was in there with him, holding him down. He came round to find the Russian bringing water to his parched lips.
‘Go on,’ Bitov urged. ‘We have plenty.’ He pointed to two full goatskins further along the ledge.
‘You carried me?’
‘Quiet, Jones.’
‘What happened to the bedouin?’
After Bitov had told him, Jones said nothing. He pulled himself into a sitting position and stared out over the monochrome landscape.
‘The guard caught you stealing his water,’ Bitov said. ‘They would have killed you.’
Jones grimaced. ‘It feels like he already did.’ He raised the water bottle to his lips. Jones wanted badly to hate this Russian, his natural enemy for eighteen years of soldiery, his whole career. Yet the enemy had a human face. And it had saved his life.
Jones lay back against the rocks, trying to ignore the pain in his head. Somehow, he drifted into sleep. When he awoke he was overcome by a feeling of panic. He sat bolt upright. ‘How much longer?’ he stammered.
Bitov remained unruffled. ‘About twelve hours, with just under thirty-five kilometres to go. Distance is not the problem, Jones. Across the sand, I could carry you for a hundred kilometres, further even.’ The Russian pointed to the rock face above them. ‘That is the problem.’
Jones lifted his head slowly. The granite cliff towered above them, its pinnacle lost against a black belt of sky. Just raising his eyes had caused the nausea to return.
‘Stay conscious, Yankee, and let me do the rest.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can help you.’
‘It’s almost vertical, Bitov. You’ll kill us both.’
Bitov grabbed Jones by the belt and pulled him to his feet. ‘Jones, you talk too much. Now you climb.’
Jones slipped the toe of his boot into a notch in the rock and pulled himself a few feet up the cliff face. He turned to find Bitov beside him, watching over him like some grotesque mother hen.
‘Why?’ Jones asked.
Bitov smiled, his one good front tooth glowing bright in the moonlight. ‘Why? Because I want you to be there when we go into the Lebanon, Jones. When we go angel hunting, I want to know who is best.’
For the next two hours, Jones slipped back and forth across consciousness. All the while, Bitov pushed him and pulled him, forcing his fingers into handholds and encouraging his feet into niches in the rock. Sometimes Bitov shouted, sometimes he whispered: whatever it took to drag Jones back from the brink and up to the lip of the precipice.
Jones pressed his face against the rock. It was cool from the night. As he hugged the granite, he caught a glimpse of the sheer drop below him. He no longer knew what was real and what was imagined. His vision swam in and out of focus and the nausea moved like a viscous liquid from the tips of his fingers to the pit of his stomach. It was at that point that he felt the rock beneath his feet crumbling to nothing.
Just as Jones slipped, Bitov grabbed him. He anchored himself to the rock face with a bear-like grip on a granite buttress, steadying the American long enough for him to hook his arm around another pinnacle of rock. Bitov inched himself up the