Rashid concealed his relief.
Paul was deeply grateful to see Rashid coming down the steps of the schoolhouse. It had been a long wait. Nobody had actually pointed guns at them, but they had got an awful lot of hostile looks.
'We can go to the hotel,' said Rashid.
The Kurds from Mahabad shook hands with them and left in their ambulance. A few moments later the Americans left in the two Range Rovers, followed by four or five armed guards in another car. They drove to the hotel. This time they all went in. There was an argument between the hotel keeper and the guards, but the guards won, and the Americans were assigned four rooms on the third floor at the back, and told to keep the curtains drawn and stay away from windows in case local snipers thought Americans inviting targets.
They gathered in one of the rooms. They could hear distant gunfire. Rashid organized lunch and ate with them: barbecued chicken, rice, bread, and Coke. Then he left for the school.
The guards wandered in and out of the room, carrying their rifles. One of them struck Coburn as being evil. He was young, short, and muscular, with black hair and eyes like a snake. As the afternoon wore on, he seemed to get bored.
One time he walked in and said: 'Carter no good.'
He looked around for a reaction.
'CIA no good,' he said. 'America no good.'
Nobody replied. He went out.
'That guy is trouble,' Simons said calmly. 'Don't anybody take the bait.'
The guard tried again a little later. 'I am very strong,' he said. 'Wrestling. Wrestle champion. I went to Russia.'
Nobody spoke.
He sat down and fiddled with his gun, as if he did not know how to load it. He appealed to Coburn. 'You know guns?'
Coburn shook his head.
The guard looked at the others. 'You know guns?'
The gun was an M1, a weapon they were all familiar with, but nobody said anything.
'You want to trade?' the guard said. 'This gun for a backpack?'
Coburn said: 'We don't have a backpack and we don't want a gun.'
The guard gave up and went out into the corridor again.
Simons said: 'Where the hell is Rashid?'
2_____
The car hit a pothole, jolting Ralph Boulware awake. He felt tired and groggy after his short, restless sleep. He looked through the windows. It was early morning. He saw the shore of a vast lake, so big he could not see the far side.
'Where are we?' he said.
'That's Lake Van,' said Charlie Brown, the interpreter.
There were houses and villages and civilian cars: they had come out of the wild mountain country and returned to what passed for civilization in this part of the world. Boulware looked at a map. He figured they were about a hundred miles from the border.
'Hey, this is good!' he said.
He saw a filling station. They really were back in civilization. 'Let's get gas,' he said.
At the filling station they got bread and coffee. The coffee was almost as good as a shower: Boulware felt raring to go. He said to Charlie: 'Tell the old man I want to drive.'
The cabby had been doing thirty or forty miles per hour, but Boulware pushed the ancient Chevrolet up to seventy. It looked as though he had a real chance of getting to the border in time to meet Simons.
Bowling along the lakeside road, Boulware heard a muffled bang, followed by a tearing sound; then the car began to buck and bump, and there was a screech of metal on stone: he had blown a tire.
He braked hard, cursing.
They all got out and looked at the wheel: Boulware, the elderly cabby, Charlie Brown, and fat Ilsman. The tire was completely shredded and the wheel deformed. And they had used the spare wheel during the night, after the last blowout.
Boulware looked more closely. The wheel nuts had been stripped: even if they could get another spare, they would not be able to remove the damaged wheel.
Boulware looked around. There was a house a ways up the hill. 'Let's go there,' Boulware said. 'We can phone.'
Charlie Brown shook his head. 'No phones around here.'
Boulware was not about to give up, after all he had gone through: he was too close. 'Okay,' he said to Charlie. 'Hitch a ride back to the last town and get us another cab.'
Charlie started walking. Two cars passed him without stopping; then a truck pulled up. It had hay and a bunch of children in the back. Charlie jumped in, and the truck drove out of sight.
Boulware, Ilsman, and the cabby stood looking at the lake, eating oranges.
An hour later a small European station wagon came tearing along the road and screeched to a halt. Charlie jumped out.
Boulware gave the driver from Aadana five hundred dollars, then got into the new taxi with Ilsman and Charlie and drove off, leaving the Chevrolet beside the lake, looking like a beached whale.
The new driver went like the wind, and by midday they were in Van, on the eastern shore of the lake. Van was a small town, with brick buildings in the center and mud-hut suburbs. Ilsman directed the driver to the home of a cousin of Mr. Fish.
They paid their driver and went in. Ilsman got into a long discussion with Mr. Fish's cousin. Boulware sat in the living room, listening but not understanding, impatient to get moving. After an hour he said to Charlie: 'Listen, let's just get another cab. We don't need the cousin.'
'It's a very bad place between here and the border,' Charlie said. 'We're foreigners, we need protection.'
Boulware forced himself to be patient.
At last Ilsman shook hands with Mr. Fish's cousin and Charlie said: 'His sons will take us to the border.'
There were two sons and two cars.
They drove up into the mountains. Boulware saw no sign of the dangerous bandits against whom he was being protected : just snow-covered fields, scrawny goats, and a few ragged people living in hovels.
They were stopped by the police in the village of Yuksekova, a few miles from the border, and ordered into the little whitewashed police station. Ilsman showed his credentials and they were quickly released. Boulware was impressed : maybe Ilsman really was with the Turkish equivalent of the CIA.
They reached the border at four o'clock on Thursday afternoon, having been on the road for twenty-four hours.
The border station was in the middle of nowhere. The guard post consisted of two wooden buildings. There was also a post office. Boulware wondered who the hell used it. Truck drivers, perhaps. Two hundred yards away, on the Iranian side, was a bigger cluster of buildings.
There was no sign of the Dirty Team.
Boulware felt angry. He had broken his neck to get here more or less on time: where the hell was Simons?
A guard came out of one of the huts and approached him, saying: 'Are you looking for the Americans?'
Boulware was surprised. The whole thing was supposed to be top secret. It looked like security had gone all to hell. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'm looking for the Americans.'
'There's a phone call for you.'
Boulware was even more surprised. 'No kidding!' The timing was phenomenal. Who the hell knew he was here?
