He sat up and winced. ‘Tenzing? And Gueng?”
“Tenzing got clobbered, Gueng’s the other side covering us. He’s okay.” “Thank God. Poor Tenzing.”
“Test your arms and legs.”
Gingerly Ross moved his limbs. Everything worked. “My head hurts like hell, but I’m okay.” He looked around and saw the crumpled attackers. “Who are they?”
“Tribesmen. Bandits maybe.” Rosemont studied the way ahead. Nothing moved. The night was fine. “We’d better get the hell out of here before more of the bastards jump us. You think you can go on?”
“Yes. Give me a couple of seconds.” Ross wiped some snow over his face. The cold helped. “Thanks, eh? You know. Thanks.”
Rosemont smiled back. “All part of the service,” he said wryly. His eyes went to the tribesmen. Keeping well down he went over to them and searched where he could. He found nothing. “Probably locals - or just bandits. These bastards can be real cruel if they catch you alive.”
Ross nodded and another spasm of pain soared. “I’m okay now, I think. We’d better move - the firing must have been heard for miles and this’s no place to hang around.”
Rosemont had seen the pain. “Wait some more.”
“No. I’ll feel better moving.” Ross gathered his strength, then called out in Gurkhali, “Gueng, we’ll go on.” He started to get up, stopped as an abrupt keening for danger answered him. “Get down!” he gasped and pulled Rosemont with him.
A single rifle bullet came out of the night and chose Rosemont and buried itself in his chest, mortally wounding him. Then there was firing from the other slope and a scream and silence once more.
In time, Gueng joined Ross. “Sahib, I think that was the last. For the moment.”
“Yes.” They waited with Vien Rosemont until he died, then did what they had to do for him and for Tenzing. And then they went on.
Chapter 22
ISFAHAN MILITARY AIR BASE: 5:40 A.M. To the east the dark night was beginning to lighten with the dawn. The base was quiet now, no one about except for armed Islamic Guards who, with the people of Isfahan in their thousands and led by mullahs, had stormed the base yesterday and now possessed it, all army and air force officers and men confined to their barracks under guard - or free, openly declared now for Khomeini and the revolution.
The sentry Relazi was eighteen and very proud of his green armband and to be on guard outside the shed that contained the traitor General Valik and his family who had been caught yesterday, skulking in the officers’ mess with his CIA foreign pilot. God is great, he thought. Tomorrow they will be cast into hell with all foul People of the Left Hand.
For generations the Relazis had been cobblers in one tiny stall of Isfahan’s Old Bazaar. Yes, he thought, I was a bazaari until a week ago when our mullah called me and all the Faithful to God’s battle, gave me God’s armband and this gun and showed me how to use it. How wonderful are the ways of God. He was sheltered in the lee of the hut, out of the snow, but the damp cold was going through him even though he was wearing all the clothes he possessed in the world - sweatshirt, a coarse shirt over it, a coat and trousers bought secondhand, an old sweater and ancient army coat that once had belonged to his father. His feet felt numb. “As God wants,” he said out loud and felt better. “I’ll be relieved soon and then I’ll eat again - by God, soldiers lived like veritable pashas, at least two meals every day, one with rice, imagine that, and pay every week… pay from Satan but pay even so.” He coughed badly, his breath wheezing, shifted the U.S. Army carbine to his other shoulder, found the stub of the cigarette he had been saving, and lit it.
By the Prophet, he thought gleefully, who would have imagined that we could take the base so easily, so few of us killed and sent to Paradise before we had overwhelmed the soldiers on the gate and swarmed into the camp - our brothers on the base blocking the runways with trucks, and others seizing the aircraft and helicopters to prevent escape of the Shah traitors. Rushing the bullets of the enemy, the Name of God on our lips. “Join us, brothers,” we shouted, “join God’s revolution, help do God’s work! Come to Paradise… don’t go to hell…”
The young man trembled and began to mouth the words imprinted on him by a dozen mullahs reading from the Koran, then translating: “there to live forever with all sinners and the accursed People of the Left Hand, tasting neither refreshment nor any drink but boiling water or molten metal and decaying filth. And when the fires of hell have burned away the skin, they will grow new ones so that their suffering be never ending…” He closed his eyes with the intensity of his prayers: Let me die with one of God’s names on my lips, and so guarantee that I will go straight to the Garden of Paradise with all the People of the Right Hand, to be there forever, never to feel hunger again, never to watch brothers and sisters of the villages with bloated bellies whimper into death, never to cry out in the night at the awfulness of life but to be in Paradise: “there to lie on silken couches adorned with robes of green silk, attended by fresh blooming youths bearing goblets and ewers and cups of flowing wine, with such fruits that please us best and the flesh of such birds as we shall long for. And ours shall be the houris with large dark eyes like pearls hidden in their shells, forever young, forever virgin, amid trees clad with fruit, and in extended shade and by flowing waters, never growing old, forev - ” The rifle butt pulverized his nose and caved in the front of his skull, permanently blinding him and ending forever his normality but not killing him before he tumbled unconscious into the snow. His assailant was a soldier, of an age with him, and this man hastily picked up the carbine - used it to break the lock of the flimsy door and shove it open. “Hurry,” the assailant whispered, sweating with fear. In a moment General Valik poked his head out cautiously. The man grabbed his arm. “Come on, hurry, by God,” he snarled.
“May God bless you…” Valik said, his teeth chattering, then darted back and came out again with two huge bundles of rials that the man stuffed into his battle dress and vanished as silently as he had arrived. Valik hesitated a moment, his heart driving. He saw the carbine in the snow and picked it up, loaded it, and slung it over his shoulder, then grabbed up the attache* case, blessing God that the revolutionaries had been too hasty in their search to discover its false bottom before they were shoved in here to await the coming of the Tribunals.
“Follow me,” he whispered urgently to his family. “But in the Name of God make no noise. Follow me carefully.” He pulled his coat closer around him and led the way through the snow. His wife, Annoush, his eight- year-old son, Jalal, and his daughter Setarem, six, hesitated in the doorway. All wore ski clothes - Annoush a mink over hers that the Islamic Guards had taunted her about as an open representation of the wages of sin. “Keep it with you,” they had said contemptuously, “that alone damns you!” In the night she had been happy for its warmth, huddled on the dirt floor in the unheated shed, wrapping the children in it. “Come along, my darlings,” she whispered, trying to keep her terror from them.
The sentry’s body blocked their way as he lay in the snow, moaning softly. “Mama, why does he sleep in the snow?” the little girl asked in a whisper. “Never mind, my darling. Let’s hurry. Not a sound now!”
Silently she stepped over him. The little girl could not quite make it and had to tread on him, and she stumbled, sprawling in the snow. But she did not cry out, just scrambled to her feet helped by her brother. Together, hand in hand, they hurried onward.
Valik guided them carefully. When they reached the hangar where the 212 was still parked, he breathed a little easier.
This area was well away from the main camp, the other side of the enormous runway. Making sure there were no guards nearby he ran out to the chopper and peered into the cabin. To his enormous relief no guards were asleep inside. He tried the door. It was not locked. He slid it open as quietly as he could, and beckoned the others. Silently they joined him. He helped them up and got in after them, sliding the door to, locking it from the inside. Quickly he made the children comfortable on some blankets under the jump seats, cautioning them not to make their presence known whatever happened. Then he sat beside his wife, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, for he was very cold, and held her hand. The tears wet her cheeks. “Be patient, don’t cry. It won’t be long now,” he whispered, gentling her. “We won’t have to wait long. Insha’Allah.”
“Insha’Allah,” she echoed brokenly, “but the whole world’s gone mad… thrown into a filthy outhouse like criminals … what’s going to happen to us …”
“With the Help of God we’ve got this far, so why not all the way to Kuwait?” They had arrived here yesterday just before noon. The flight from the pickup outside of Tehran had been without incident, all airwaves silent. His trusted chauffeur of fifteen years had driven his car back to Tehran, with orders to tell no one that they had “gone to their house on the Caspian.” “In this escape we trust no one,” Valik had told his wife while they were waiting for the chopper to arrive.
She had said, “Of course, but we should have brought Sharazad, that would have helped her and Tom Lochart
