Card Sharks

Tehran.'

It was April 16, 1980. The sunshine of a pleasant spring morning spilled in through the French windows of the Oval Office. The roses were in bloom.

I sucked on my moustache. For one of very few times in my life I had nothing to say.

'It has been decided,' said National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, looking as always like a shaved chow dog, 'to employ a picked force of aces.'

'It's my understanding, sir,' I said carefully, 'that Delta Force has been preparing a rescue mission for several months.'

'How did you know about that?' barked the fourth man in the room. He was a little guy, about my own height, but weedier. He had a moustache even bigger than mine, if not quite as splendid, and a balding head shaped like a doorknob. He was no one I expected to see here, and no one I was happy to. 'That's supposed to be classified.'

'Mr. Battle,' I said, 'I'm in the business. I specialized in high-risk operations when I served in Special Forces, and, as you no doubt know, have continued doing so on a contract basis ever since. As a matter of fact, I was hoping to be included in the mission.' I thought about it a moment. 'If not exactly on these terms.'

'You are perfectly correct, Major Belew,' the President said, 'Zbig and Mr. Battle have proposed an alteration to the plan which had been decided upon. I know that this is kind of an eleventh-hour thing, but I believe in my heart that it's worth doing.'

'Major Belew,' Battle said, pushing his head forward with his eyes shining like anthracite, you're an ace.' He said it breathlessly, as if it were a revelation. Since it wasn't to me, I just stood there and waited.

I still didn't know what he was doing there. I had passing familiarity with his dossier; he'd been a hanger- around the fringes of black ops for years. He'd done a hitch in the Army way back around the time I joined, back in the Fifties, but he had managed to avoid getting into combat. After the Army he got his law degree and joined the FBI. He didn't stick with the Bureau long. He wandered into a succession of official and semi-official government and political jobs — sort of like Cyrus Vance, Carter's Secretary of State, but at a lower level.

One would not expect him to be doing any jobs for Carter. Battle had been a Nixon man. He got himself into some rather warm water over a certain third-rate burglary back in the early Seventies, and dropped out of sight for a while.

When I didn't respond, he went on. 'It's been decided that the rescue mission presents a perfect opportunity for aces to show how much they contribute to this great country of ours. They — you — haven't been in such a good odor since the '76 riots.

'One of the major complications to this operation,' Brzezinski said in his ponderous Eastern European accent, 'has been the number of operators required. The current profile calls for one hundred thirty-two men. A force that size creates logistic nightmares.'

'Makes it a bit hard to be discreet, too,' I said.

'Prezisely.'

The President stood gazing out the window with his hands clasped behind his back. 'We reckon using aces will enable us to do the job with far fewer people, he said. 'With the help of the Justice Department, we have assembled a team of six. You will make seven, if you agree to go.'

I felt the skin of my cheeks get hot. The President turned back to the room.

'Also, there seems to be an ugly tide of bigotry rising in this country, against those touched by the wild card. This could be an opportunity to reverse that tide before it gathers momentum.

He looked me in the eye. 'What do you say, Major? Will you lead an all-ace rescue team?'

It was approximately the craziest idea I'd ever heard in my life. Seven aces against a country full of well- armed religious fanatics, jumping in at the last minute on top of a mission that had been under careful construction for upwards of five months. And aces from Justice, for the good Lord's sake! It was like playing Russian roulette with an autoloading pistol.

There was only one thing to do. I snapped to attention and saluted.

'Mr. President,' I said, 'I'm your man.'

The sun was already up and hot, eight days later, when our three Sea Stallion helicopters touched down in an abandoned salt-mining district near Garmsar, fifty miles southeast of Tehran. That meant we were already behind schedule. With luck that wouldn't signify, since we had nothing to do but keep out of sight — and keep from suffering sunstroke — until dark.

'Thanks for the ride, guys,' said Jay Ackroyd, dropping to the rockhard yellow ground. The jarhead crewmen squinted at him, suspecting he was being sarcastic. He was, to be sure, but he gave them a big grin and a wave. 'It's been real.'

They scowled and turned back to the work of unloading our gear. 'Real reminiscent of a root canal,' he said, turning away. 'Write if you guys find work you're more suited to, hear?'

We had flown overnight in a C-130 Hercules from the former Soviet airbase at Wadi Kena in Egypt to a point in the desert two hundred miles southeast of Tehran and ninety miles from the nearest settlement. Desert One was more name than it deserved. A hundred men from Delta Force would hold it while we went in. Our support would be coordinated from there.

The flight from Desert One, mostly in the dark, hugging broken, tortuous terrain, had not been easy by anyone's standards. Notwithstanding that, I was frankly not impressed. I've been on a lot of heliborne missions, in the Nam and later. The jarheads only got us there by the skin of their teeth.

'Who picked these bozos for a secret mission, anyway?' Ackroyd demanded of me. 'I wouldn't let 'em walk my dog, if I had one. Join the Army and see the Navy not to mention the Marines.'

I gave him a qualified grin. I was also somewhat concerned about the patchwork nature of our supporting elements. It was as if every branch of service wanted to get its oar in, and some of the personnel weren't adequately prepared for this kind of job. The Marine pilots had been so nervous that even our operators right off Civilian Street noticed.

Ackroyd didn't miss much, in all fact. Have to give him that. He was an ace private investigator. Well, he was an ace, and he was a PI. He was in his thirties, brown and brown, an inch or two taller than I. The sort of man you could never pick out of a crowd, a considerable asset in his line of work. He seemed fit enough, physically.

He was our ace in the hole, if you'll forgive the pun. The big reason we could dispense with a hundred and eleven of the 118-man strike team Delta planned to take to Tehran. Since there was no way they could hope to keep the whole operation quiet, there had to be enough guns on the line to provide security; and it would take a lot of warm bodies to escort fifty hostages across Roosevelt Street to the Amjadieh soccer stadium where the choppers would pick them up.

Ackroyd changed all that. He just pointed his finger at you and, pop! you were somewhere else. No muss, no fuss, no noise to alert Student Militants that their hostages were being freed. He was perfect.

Except, he could not seem to take the situation seriously. At least, he declined to take me seriously. My amour propre is usually not too delicate, but I was hoping that, at the narrow passage, he wouldn't take time to toss off a quick one-liner every time I gave an order. He had what today would be described as an Attitude.

There was a commotion from the Sea Stallion's open side door. A small man with dark hair cropped close to his round head in a military do was engaged in a jostling derby with one of the Marines. 'Here,' I said sharply, 'what's going on here?'

The jarhead stepped back away with an insincere smile. 'I was just giving the Sergeant here a hand.'

Sergeant First Class Paul Chung, United States Special Forces, thrust his chest out like a banty cock and glared at him. 'I can take care of myself!' he snapped, dusting himself off where the jarhead had touched him. For all his exotic Oriental appearance his accent was pure Philly.

He stepped straight out of the chopper and floated to the ground, arms folded across his chest.

He was the only serving military man we had — I did my twenty and got out in the mid-Seventies, myself. He was second-generation Chinese-American, but he looked Central Asian. It gave us something to play on, since Iran has a sizable Turkmen minority up in the northeast.

Informally he was known as Dive Bomb. He could adjust the weight of any or all parts of his body at will, sort