Nature of the Game (27 page)

Where the guard held his AK-47 across his chest. Frowned.

Jud raised his left wrist and tapped his watch.

Hesitation. The guard swung the gate open.

Defeating the impulse to floorboard the car was one of the hardest things Jud ever did. When he rounded a curve and the lights of Site 423 vanished from his mirror, he yelled for joy. And pushed his foot to the floor.

Forty-two point four kilometers to the group. Twenty-five miles over a twisting, roller-coaster road. He was shouting, singing as he fought the steering wheel. Twilight faded. He pulled on the car's headlights. And went faster. Faster.

An old moon lit the high desert sky. Five miles from the gorge, a yellow stream flowed into his rearview mirror.

He beat them to the gorge, jumped from the car, and ran. When he was halfway up the gorge, yellow eyes clustered around his deserted car. Doors slammed. Flashlights winked on, bounced up the trail behind him.

“Here!” Dara's whisper. Hands pulled Jud into shadows.

“Let's go!”

“No,” said Dara. “Not yet.”

“We don't need this!” argued Jud.

Dara only shook his head.

The forty Spetsnaz soldiers had superior firepower and advanced military training. The Kurds had position and tradition. And surprise. The Russians were clustered together, no scouts, chasing one man, helicopters useless in the mountainous night. Dara's men cut them to pieces in seventeen minutes, stripped the bodies in six. Before the frantically radioed Soviet relief force reached the plateau, the Kurds were in their saddles, disappearing into the mountains they'd won with Solomon's curse.

“See?” Dara called out to Jud as they rode away. “America's enemies—the Kurds' enemies. We forever friends.

“
Kurdistan!
” bellowed Dara.

His victory- and booty-flushed comrades echoed his cry through the stone sentinels of time.

Two years from that night, in May of 1972, President Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger would meet with the Soviets in Moscow and agree to defuse tensions in the Middle East. Less than twenty-four hours after that, Nixon and Kissinger would visit Tehran, where the perpetual Iran-Iraq border was again a hot issue. Nixon agreed to the Shah's plan to funnel arms to nationalistic Kurds in Iraq. Better to let the Kurds bleed over borders than Iranians. The Kurds got $16 million in CIA-supplied arms, and promises of U.S. support for their dreams of an independent Kurdistan. Hundreds of Kurds—including Dara—flocked to the insurrection against the Soviet-backed Iraq regime. In March 1975, to promote his position within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Shah cut off all American aid to the Kurds. Iraq crushed the rebellion. The Kurds' pleas for help to the CIA and to Kissinger went unanswered. Several hundred Kurdish leaders, including Dara, were executed. Iran turned Dara's refugee family over to Iraq. No Kurd was granted political asylum in the U.S.

Asked about the Kurds, Kissinger told Congress, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

After his mission to Site 423, Jud returned to Art in Tehran the same way he'd left, with a stop at Alexi's walled headquarters to shower and change into “civilized” clothes. When Alexi left the underground garage, Jud gave the Soviet briefcase to two carloads of heavily armed Americans. In thirty-one minutes, the briefcase was on a U.S. jet bound for Andrews Air Force Base.

“Come on,” Art told Jud. “Before I take you back to the DESERT LAKE team, I'll buy you dinner.”

They drove to the chic Shimiran district in Art's Ford. Dressed in sports coats and slacks, they could have been off-duty oilmen. A locked briefcase rested on the car's floor. Art watched his mirrors, said little to the exhausted man by his side.

They ate in a hole-in-the-wall bistro whose harried owner did everything. The tables had red-and-white-checkerboard plastic tablecloths, candles stuck in wine bottles. Terrible French accordion music blared from a cassette deck next to the cash register. The dour faces of an elderly American couple who were ignorantly overpaying the owner lit up when they saw Art and Jud coming down the narrow brick passageway leading to the café.

“Are you two young men Americans?” asked the old lady.

“
Dien cai dau
,” replied Art.

The old couple blinked at the Vietnamese expletive.

“I'm sorry,” said the old man, “no Farsi.”

They hurried away in search of a taxi to their hotel

The only other customer was a glassy-eyed, fat African black in an ill-fitting blue suit, tie askew, six empty wine glasses in front of him. Art and Jud took the table in the far corner, sat so they both faced the narrow door. They ordered whiskeys and steaks. The whiskeys came first. The owner laid a serrated-edge steak knife next to each of their glasses.

“You don't have much to say,” Art told Jud when the proprietor scurried into the kitchen to cook their meal. Art set his briefcase on the floor.

“Knowing the Spetsnaz were there really helped.”

“Ignorance is why we have jobs,” Art said.

“Is that why?”

For the first time since the ambush of the Russians, Jud laughed. He drank the whiskey. A European woman in her thirties hurried into the café, looked around. She sat at table for two about ten feet from them, took cigarettes from the big purse she put on the table, lit up, and tried to ignore the two Americans eyeing her. The owner brought her a glass of red wine.

“You're a smart man,” said Art. “A young man.”

“Please, you're not my type.” Jud laughed again.

Suddenly the whole world was funny: this blond American captain who liked dark sunglasses; the American tourists; the owner cursing as he did a thousand things at once; the fat African drunk; the woman puffing on her foul-smelling cigarette; the terrible accordion music in this shabby French café in this absurd Persian city. Mangled Russian bodies strewn through a gorge, Russians who'd been even more surprised to discover Dara's Kurds than Jud had been surprised to see
them
at Site 423. Infiltration via
horses!
It was funny; it
had
to be funny. Had to be. Funny. Had to be. Hilarious. Jud laughed and he laughed. Laughed. The table shook with his mirth, rattled the whiskey glasses.

“Breathe out,” hissed Art. “Again. In. Out.”

Jud blinked. Stopped laughing.

The woman was looking at the blank wall beside her. The drunk African's eyes were trying to focus on the mysterious merriment. Two men in baggy suits entered the café, took a table by the door. They stared at Jud.

“You're back,” said Art. “You're out. You're clear.”

“I'm fine,” said Jud. “Fine.”

Art had the owner bring two more whiskeys. The owner was from Algiers; he didn't dispute his customers. He scurried to take an order from the men by the door.

“You know,” said Art, “you can leave the Army soon.”

“You and I aren't in the Army,” said Jud.

“We may have superseded the uniforms, but the bond is still there. Do you intend to keep it when your hitch is up?”

“Depends,” said Jud.

“On what?”

“On who,” corrected Jud. “On the big you.”

Art set down his empty glass, picked up his steak knife, and idly used its point to trace patterns on the checkerboard tablecloth. The woman lit another cigarette.

“A great deal of time and money has been spent in …
creating
you,” said Art.

“Kind of like a tree.”

“Any god can make one of those,” said Art.

The African belched loudly, shifted in his chair.

“The thinking is that Jud Stuart is just coming into his own. Whether or not you keep the formal tie to the Army.”

“What's the thinking on that?” asked Jud.

The African lurched to his feet. He stumbled toward the cash register, fumbling in his pockets and calling for his bill. The two men by the door moved their feet so he wouldn't crush them.

“A uniform is fine,” answered Art, circling the knife point on the tablecloth. “As far as it goes.” He shrugged. “It's a big world out there. Where we are, life is … flexible.

“And what we do,” he added, “is the most important work.”

“That's what I want,” said Jud.

The African pressed some bills into the proprietor's hand, staggered out the door and up the bricked passageway to the street where Art's Ford was parked. The owner pushed the buttons on the cash register; it dinged open.

“What about you?” Jud asked Art.

“Me?” Art smiled and nonchalantly flipped the steak knife end over end, caught it by the blade.

The woman knocked over her wineglass as she fumbled in her purse, standing, turning, facing the two Americans.

Awkwardly dragging a silenced pistol from her purse.

Jud saw her move in slow motion; saw the black hole of the sausage-barreled handgun seek him. For one shimmer of eternity, that a woman was going to shoot him was unfathomable.

Art threw the steak knife at her. She flinched, twisted her gun arm to block the knife. Its handle bounced off her elbow.

The two men by the door scrambled to their feet, their hands diving into their suits. Jud blinked. Then threw the table at the two men as the proprietor screamed.

The table knocked the men against the wall. One fell. The other lost his orientation as he swung an Uzi from under his suit. His finger jerked in the trigger guard. The machine-gun burst ripped a jagged red line in the owner's white shirt.

Jud charged behind the thrown table, diving beneath the gun, trying to tackle the two assassins, to get in close where he'd stand a chance. The machine gunner jumped back, bumped into his partner, and chopped his gun down on Jud. Jud hit the floor, the Uzi swinging toward him …

But Art had grabbed the woman's gun arm, punched her in the stomach, the face, dropped her like a doll as he ripped the pistol from her hand, turned, and squeezed off half a dozen rounds into the two male assassins.

“The door!” yelled Art. “Check outside!”

Jud grabbed an Uzi from a dead man.

“Clear!” he said. “Up to the street!”

“There'll be a driver,” said Art. “Maybe a backup team.”

He upended the woman's purse. “Get their papers!”

“
Who?
” Jud asked as he took documents from the dead men's pockets. The proprietor lay still, his white shirt now soaked red.

“Alexi doesn't know you fucked him,” said Art, reloading the pistol with a clip from the woman's purse. He unscrewed the cumbersome silencer. “Russians. This sloppy, they're second-string. Or contracts. Scrambled fast before you left country. Either one of Alexi's boys sold us out or Savak accidentally got you made, got you followed. Item recovery or payback: either way, same end.”

The woman lying facedown on the floor moaned.

“Shouldn't have panicked when you saw me play with the knife,” Art told the prone form. “We hadn't made you.

“Get my case,” he ordered Jud.

When Jud turned around with the briefcase in hand, Art had straddled the woman. He grabbed her hair with his left hand, lifted her off the floor, and slit her throat with the steak knife.

Blood sprayed at Jud. He yelled, “We could have …”

“What?” said Art.

The woman died in Jud's silence. Art let her go.

“There are no losers.” Art dropped the bloody knife.

They crawled out the kitchen window, abandoned the Ford. “It's sterile,” said Art. Half a mile away, on a crowded street, Art walked up to a cabdriver standing beside his vehicle.

“Taxi?” he said, coming close enough to kiss the man.

The cabbie felt something hard poke his groin. Looked down and saw the barrel of the woman's gun shoved against his zipper. Art's other hand slapped a wad of bills on the cab's roof. The driver swallowed hard. Dropped the keys on the roof, scooped up the money, and vanished into the crowd.

Art drove.

The DESERT LAKE team was bivouacked at an Iranian Army base on the outskirts of town. Half a mile from the lights of the base, Art pulled the cab to the side of the road.

“They finish in twelve days,” said Art. “Until then, you don't leave the base, you don't get noticed. You're instructing in the field medicine rotation. Anybody asks, you've been inoculating kids in the countryside. As a favor to the Shah.”

He turned off the cab's engine.

“Now's the time to ask to say good-bye,” said Art.

The night stayed as it was, silent, still.

“Is there anywhere better to go?” Jud finally asked.

“Not in this life.”

“Gone this far,” said Jud, “might as well see what's next.”

Art opened the briefcase between them. Fresh dark stains marred its surface. He turned on the cab's dome light.

“There's paperwork that has to get fed into the system,” said Art. “It's all filled out, but we need your signatures.

“Hell,” joked Art, “it's your life.”

Jud laughed as he signed dozens of forms: Army discharge papers, secrecy agreements, letters, official and private documents that built a bland legend around his history. He signed a thick application form to the United States Secret Service, Department of the Treasury. A letter dated weeks in the future accepted him for training in the February 1971 class of agents. His training diploma was the second-to-the-last document in the case.

The last document was a set of Treasury Department orders dated five months in the future, May 1971. The orders assigned uniformed Secret Service officer Jud Stuart to the technical security and protective services division and detailed him to the White House.