Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  In addition to these seventeen men, six guards were assigned to the Site, for a total of twenty-three Soviet soldiers. SIGINT is a twenty-four-hour job, so at least a third of the personnel were always asleep. If Site 423 needed help, a post of the KGB’s crack Border Guards was sixty-three kilometers away. But nothing ever happened at Site 423.

  When Jud topped the road’s last roller-coaster hill, he saw a dozen troop trucks and six jeeps parked inside the chain link fence. Outside the fence, six squads of men stood in ranks before three sergeants, who were leading them in a karate drill.

  Jud slowed his car, blinked, felt his world collapse.

  The almost one hundred extra Soviet soldiers were not supposed to be there.

  Some of the exercising soldiers showed their toughness by wearing only T-shirts against the cold. Blue-and-white-striped T-shirts, of the kind worn only by Spetsnaz, the elite Soviet troops that are the counterpart to America’s Special Forces.

  A dozen Spetsnaz faces saw Jud’s car. If he turned around, they’d suspect. They’d chase. Radio for helicopters.

  “Shit!” whispered Jud. He drove forward.

  The GRU guard at the gate checked Jud’s ID, waved him to a parking spot. A camp guard escorted Jud to the command center. He carried the mailbag from Jud’s car, let Jud carry the dead lieutenant’s briefcase. The guard whispered a warning, words Jud didn’t understand, but a tone he knew to answer with a nod.

  Inside the command center, a colonel wearing paratrooper wings had the Site’s captain, two lieutenants, and sergeant major quivering at attention as he screamed at them. Three technicians wearing earphones sat in front of the sophisticated console deck of the SIGINT equipment; their faces were pale, their hands trembled.

  Jud understood none of the colonel’s rapid-fire Russian.

  The colonel whirled. Jud saluted, pulled the proper papers from the dead man’s briefcase. “O menya yest papya!”

  The colonel glanced at the paperwork, threw it to the captain. The Spetsnaz officer yelled at Jud for two minutes—and ended his harangue with the unmistakable lilt of a question.

  That Jud didn’t understand; that he couldn’t answer.

  The silence between them grew. Electric space heaters labored to heat this room. Sweat ran down Jud’s cheeks. He wanted to vomit; faint. The colonel leaned so close Jud could smell his sour-cabbage-and-tea breath.

  “Da?” screamed the colonel.

  “Da tavarish!” Yes comrade! Jud yelled back.

  “Bah!” The colonel jerked his thumb toward the closed door of the inner office.

  And Jud scurried inside, closed the door. He was alone.

  His mission was a Skorzeny operation, nicknamed after the Nazi commando who turned deception and audacity into an art form.

  The lieutenant Jud had killed on the road was one of many anonymous junior officers dispatched each week from the Soviet bureaucracy. The officer’s job was to see that the daily reports of Site 423 had been filled out and to certify them with a rubber stamp. He delivered and picked up camp mail. The Americans knew that the rubber-stamping officer arrived at 423 on Thursday afternoons.

  Jud’s mission was to replace the lieutenant, utilize the predictable conversation patterns he’d memorized to slide into the rhythm of a routine-numbed base, gain entry to the command center office—and use the camera sewn into his overcoat to photograph the technical manuals stored there. The manuals would give U.S. scientists data on what the Soviet ears could hear, thus pointing the way to countermeasures that might give the Americans a giant lead in the perpetual seesaw intelligence race. Anything else Jud could acquire would be icing on an already sweet cake.

  Under the optimum mission scenario, Jud’s espionage would go undetected; as he made his escape, he would fake a car accident on the mountain roads, leaving the lieutenant’s body in the car. The best intelligence is what your enemy doesn’t know you know.

  Under the worse-case mission scenario, Jud would be discovered as an impostor while at Site 423. But with only a handful of non-combat-trained technicians opposing him, the mission planners projected Jud’s chance of success and escape at 60–40.

  No scenario accounted for the presence at Site 423 of a hundred of the Soviet Union’s toughest and craftiest soldiers.

  The office matched the sketches drawn for the CIA two years earlier by a Soviet Army deserter they’d sucked up in Finland: a small room crammed with files and shelves. Stacks of reports sat on the desk, awaiting the stamp in the briefcase Jud carried. Against one wall was a cement-encased, dull-gray safe.

  Yugoslavian, thought Jud, secured with the most exotic lock available to the GRU: a standard American Yale.

  The manuals were on a shelf, three thick volumes. He had enough film sewn into the lining of his overcoat, but that was a two- to three-hour job. The Site personnel were paranoid, fearful that one of the weekly rubber-stamp lieutenants might be a KGB spy sent to check on them. They avoided the lieutenants. Normally, Jud would have had plenty of time to photograph the manuals, search the office, and stamp the reports before anyone checked on him.

  Today’s clock is almost out, thought Jud.

  He stuffed the manuals in the briefcase.

  Lockpicks hidden in his tunic let him open the safe in eleven minutes. He stole a highly prized onetime encrypting electronic key shaped like a garage-door opener, files stamped TOP> SECRET.

  He cracked the office door. The only sounds coming through the opening were the whir and click of computers; static being shifted by electronic ears. He unsnapped his holster.

  Jud stepped into the control room. The three technicians and the sergeant stared at him. Jud held his finger to his lips, cocked his head toward the outer door.

  Puzzled, but recognizing a coconspirator and an officer, the sergeant eased the outer door open; looked out; nodded to Jud.

  He left them with a salute.

  Slow, he told himself. Easy. Walk to the car as if Lenin and Stalin and all the other gods have sent you there.

  All around him in the evening light, Spetsnaz troops prepared their vehicles, checked their weapons. A training mission? A cross-border operation? Didn’t matter.

  Forty-seven paces to the car. Fifty slow-driving seconds to the closed gate.

  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 K
urds’ 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 c
hopped 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.