The Shield of Darius

by Allen Kent

  To the east…? Ben tried to picture the map in his head but saw only a vast brown blur in eastern Iran. Mashad was somewhere to the northeast, but he couldn’t place anything due east of Tehran beyond Mt. Demavand, the 18,500 foot volcanic peak that dominated the city’s eastern horizon. Afghanistan formed the eastern border, if he remembered correctly, and Pakistan southeast stretching to the sea. Both would mean crossing country that was uncharted on his mental map and Baluchistan, the province that shared the border with Pakistan, was a hotbed of Islamic militarism – not a good choice. Or…north to the former Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan. They were certainly closest, going either northeast or northwest. If he went east, the road passed Mt. Demavand and looped up toward Mashad. He again retrieved his mental map and couldn’t picture any roads or rail lines crossing into Turkmenistan on the east side of the Caspian Sea. He knew they did on the west.

  If he went northwest, he could go back to the square with the statue of Ferdowsi, follow Shah Reza Avenue – or whatever it was now called – out of the city past Mehrabad Airport to the village of Karaj. Then up through the canyon past the Karaj dam, and over the mountains to the Caspian’s southwest coast. He had been that way with the family, all the way up to Sepah on the former Soviet border where he knew a road crossed through a guarded checkpoint into Azerbaijan. At least it had thirty years ago.

  Azerbaijan was not the most stable of the former Republics, with its continual squabble with Armenia. But the country had tried to distance itself from Iran in recent months and Ben probably had a better chance there than anywhere else. And there was the advantage of having been over the route before. He replaced the cucumber, pulled a soggy piece of sangyak from his bundle, smelling the mildew on it as he tore away a bite. He would find a way to go northeast through the mountains to the Caspian Sea, then over into Azerbaijan.

  At dusk he made his way back to Takht-E-Jamshid and at the corner with Roosevelt, turned south through the evening crowd toward his former prison. Instead of following the narrow alleys, what the Iranians call koochays, he stayed on the main thoroughfares, easily finding the old hotel. Ben watched its blackened windows from across the street, quiet and apparently lifeless. No panic or alarm. If he slipped behind the building, he might be able to signal Jim. But the woman’s face in the lower window flashed again before him and he turned away, shuffling west into the heart of the city.

  Pedestrians passed without suspicion, turning aside to avoid him. Alms, one of the great pillars of Islam, had taught them to ignore the poor rather than refuse them. A single old woman trudging along in a wrinkled chador turned their gaze as effectively as Ben’s true appearance might have attracted it. He again found Shah Reza Boulevard and left the lighted avenue to wind through narrow backstreets a block south, moving systematically toward the western side of the city where he knew the houses must eventually thin and turn into dry open brush land.

  The night was again cloudy and moonless, darkening the narrow alleys to black tunnels. Midway down one koochay lined with high compound walls, Ben paused as two men appeared in silhouette at the far end, walking toward him with staggered steps. He thought of turning back, of dodging into a doorway, but they had seen him and might view his retreat with suspicion. Pulling the chador tighter around his face, he shuffled forward, then snatched a breath and swallowed hard, realizing that both men wore the heavy blue uniform of the Tehran police.

  As they approached he quickened his step, looking down at the trash-littered ground in front of him. The men slowed and babbled loudly in Farsi, sentences from which Ben caught only scattered words. Khanoom – woman. Tenah – alone. Beeyaw’eed – come. He felt his face moisten and mouth turn to cotton beneath the cloth cover, but pushed forward, then jerked away as one of the men grasped his shoulder as they passed. Ben crouched lower, tensing as he watched the dark figures move back beside him. Each had a pistol strapped about his waist and both reeked of alcohol. Ben wondered fleetingly why they would take such risks in a country where drunkenness was punishable by public flogging. The policeman laughed and one stumbled into his path, bending down and swaying his hips suggestively in the darkness as he chattered in Farsi. Ben stepped to the side and tried to push past, but the man again caught his arm and twisted Ben toward him. Almost instinctively, Ben’s knee shot upward into the policeman’s exposed groin. Before the gasping groan had died on his assailant’s gaping lips, Ben turned and, clutching his bundle of food between his knees, reached out through the chador with both fists clenched tightly together, hitting the other figure across the side of the head with a sweeping, crushing blow that reeled the man senseless against one of the compound walls. The first officer tried to straighten and Ben retrieved the food, then slammed his knee again into the man’s crotch, and a second time into his forehead as he jerked the head downward with both hands.

  Wearing the chador more as a cape, he vaulted the slumping figure and raced for the end of the alley, dodging as he heard a slurred shout behind him, then the crack of a shot and the chilling whine of a bullet passing his ear. The second shot slammed into his left side just below the shoulder blade with the force of a swinging baseball bat. For an instant, that snapshot in time when fear slows the world to snail pace, Ben felt his whole body shudder and lurch forward in a dreamlike tumble. The blow spun him fully around and reeled him forward into the open cross street, dropping him facedown beneath a glowing streetlamp.

  Sheer terror forced him back to his feet and propelled him across the lighted street into another koochay directly in front of him. No one followed. Either the street was empty or like elsewhere, nobody wanted to get involved. The policemen were too drunk or too badly hurt to pursue him and he fell behind a pile of crates midway down the alley.

  Suddenly it seemed to Ben that he was not awake. There was nothing around him – no thought in his head – that fit together with any reality he could imagine. He was crouching in a koochay somewhere in Tehran, a place that he had known so long ago that it seemed little more than a dreamland. He was still partially wrapped up in a woman’s shawl and he had been shot. He shook his head to cast away the vision, peering hard into the darkness that surrounded him with desperate hope that something would appear that he recognized and understood. A car passed the entrance to the alley, the glow from its headlights racing down the wall opposite and disappearing into the blackness. But the brief illumination had been enough. This was no dreamland.

  The blood was beginning to pool in his loose trousers and he leaned forward, feeling for the hole in his back. He could just reach it by wrapping his right arm across his chest and around his left side. The entry wound was surprisingly small, and there was little pain. Just the throbbing ache of the blow and a hot stream of blood running down his back into his pants. He tore a strip from his pajama top, and forced the wad of cloth into the opening.

  Slowly he drew a deep breath, expecting to hear the ominous sucking sound that meant a punctured lung. His lungs held, but the effort sent a searing knife across his chest and he exhaled with a gasp, groping for the exit wound. The bullet had not come out and he found its hard mass just beneath the skin under his left breast. Again he drew a careful breath. Just the arrow of pain and a crushing ache. No taste of blood in his throat.

  The towel-wrapped bundle rested against Ben’s hip and he wondered how he had managed to hold onto it as he tumbled, then ran for the protecting koochay. Pushing again to his feet, he hugged it against his injured side, tightened the chador about his face and shoulders and lurched down the alley. At each intersection he paused to check the packing in his wound and crossed when the street was empty. Ten blocks from the site of his attack, a high mud wall had broken through in a gaping hole and he slipped into an enclosure filled with the rusting shells of abandoned automobiles. He peered into one, then another, finding each filled with the sleeping bodies and stale, unwashed smell of Tehran’s street people. Near the compound’s center, three ragged men and a woman cradling an infant against h
er breast hunched over an open fire. Ben skirted the circle, finally finding a small British Morris that was turned onto its top and remained vacant. One end of the roof had puddled with an inch of rainwater and he gingerly stripped off the chador and his loose trousers and soaked the blood-stained pants in the puddle. As he pulled his shirt away, the soggy wad tore painfully from his wound and he realized he had already begun to clot. Tearing the shirt into strips, he pressed a ball of material back into the puncture and bound it tightly about his chest. The ache was giving way to a deep burning that climbed his shoulder and stabbed down into his left arm. Ben squeezed what water he could from his trousers and draped them over an exposed floor brace, wrapped himself again in the chador and curled up in the other end of the Morris, slipping into unconsciousness. When he awoke, it was morning.

  Ben reached the edge of the city by evening on his second day, tottering along for brief stretches, crouching beside walls with silent beggars who sat with hands extended, leaving the street to squat beneath a chinar tree in an alley when he needed to check his bandage or empty his bowel. His left side from armpit to waist was purple-black and he clutched the chador with his left hand to keep the arm pressed tightly against his side and the bundle of food.

  The Tehran of Ben’s boyhood was gone. The open space that had once separated the city from Mehrabad Airport was filled with houses, shops and office buildings. On the third day away from the prison, five kilometers beyond the airport, an approaching police car pulled up beside him, the officer on the passenger side shouting to him sharply in words he didn’t understand. He pulled his wrap close about his eyes and responded in high-pitched, thick-tongued noises, shaking his head loosely from side to side until the men sniffed in disgust and drove away.

  Once beyond Mehrabad, he traveled only at night, dozing fitfully during the day in secluded clumps of brush, remembering that it was in this dry brush land that he had once seen a lizard he thought was a Gila monster. Black and pink over its beaded back. But it was the roaming packs of dogs that sniffed at him as he tried to sleep that kept him from any true rest. Each evening he changed the dressing, biting back his cries as he forced what infection he could from the wound by reaching around his left side with both hands and squeezing the swollen flesh. Only a few tattered strips of shirt remained.

  When dark came, he walked with the chador wrapped about his waist, keeping the highway nearby but staying beyond the glare of passing headlights. At one cluster of brick homes, he scaled the mud walls until he found water; an open cistern that he knew must teem with bacteria that would eventually give him diarrhea or dysentery. Three leather-tough pieces of sangyak remained in his food bundle and he rationed them to one a day, but it was thirst that plagued him most. Deep, sapping thirst that cramped his stomach until he pitched forward with dry heaves, throbbing at his temples and piercing his punctured side like a jagged spike. He had to drink the contaminated water or stop moving all altogether.

  Ben rounded the hill overlooking Karaj several hours before dawn of the fifth day and stooped beside a brown rocky outcropping to catch his breath and survey what was now a sprawling city. He had come only forty kilometers from Tehran - forty kilometers that had at one time been open country, but now provided only occasional stretches of dry brushy land. Walking had sapped most of his strength and extended the bruising on his back down into his left hip. The bullet now bulged against his ribs like a small tumor and seemed to have sucked all of the moisture from his body, leaving his lips swollen and cracked and his skin clammy and yellow.

  He leaned against the rocks, watching for movement along the road that skirted the shallow riverbed that ran through the edge of the city, a course of sand and gravel cut wide by raging floods that once had surged down each spring from the Elborz Mountains to the north. The bed was almost dry and he guessed that the giant Amirkabir Dam, built before his family was in Iran, now blocked and controlled the river high above Karaj, diverting precious water and electricity to other regions of the country.

  He remembered that the city had once been known for its agricultural college which stretched with greenhouses and fields of grain and vegetables west beyond the town. An American school friend had lived here, a friend with horses on which they had galloped across the barren desert flats bordering the farm. Outside of the college grounds, the village had been typically rural Iran; brown brick buildings hidden by high mud walls, and narrow dirt koochays lined with thin, straight poplars. The trees, which even in mid-summer seemed only partially in leaf, sucked life from the jubes, shallow smelly ditches that served as sink, laundry and bath to most of the village peasants. In the growing silver light of dawn, Karaj now looked more like Tehran, and Ben feared momentarily that he had been staggering in a hazy circle.

  He rose stiffly and shuffled down the hill to the road. Below and to his right a bridge crossed the streambed, with a row of low shanties lining the far side of the wash. He remembered the bridge, and that a common public well had drawn clusters of chadored women with tall earthen jars to a small grove of poplars on its far side. If it was still there and he reached the well before daylight, he could wash his wound and drink before the women came. Then he would find a place to sleep. He was too weak to cross the mountains to the Caspian. He would sleep, and then decide if Jim Cannon had been right. Perhaps he would never get out alive.

  EIGHTEEN

  When he needed to think – seriously think—Christopher Falen always went to the island. He kept an apartment at Chincoteague across Chesapeake Bay, down the coast into Virginia. Here he found that the neat framed cottages with their tidy fenced gardens had a certain other-worldliness about them that took him away from the frenzied seriousness of the Capitol. From his condominium, he rode a bicycle the few miles out to Assateague National Seashore where the brine air of the gray Atlantic cleared his head, and the rhythmic sloshing of rippled waves against the rocky beach opened his mind and let his thoughts move freely.

  The thing with Javad had shaken him. He had been careless and he knew it. The Sunday following his visit to the farmhouse, he walked slowly south toward Chincoteague Inlet in shorts and an open shirt, gazing absently over the gently rolling water of the Atlantic. As he walked he rubbed his chain-bruised neck and systematically turned the puzzle that Javad had completed for him in his head. It was a pretty slick operation. Steal thirty Americans from every part of the country whose kidnappings, once made public, would provoke widespread outcry and consternation – and then just hold them. Warehouse them. When things got hot, drop them in the U.S. Government’s lap like a whole new Tehran Embassy crisis – but in six undisclosed locations.

  Javad had been right about tapping the national weakness. Americans would do just about anything to save a civilian life, even if it got a bunch of people killed. And when the country was run by the drive to get re-elected, to hell with public good and right decisions. Politicians did what needed to be done to get back in office. Every citizen, informed or not, had a right to vote, and if locked away where he couldn’t, was connected to a million other voters by blood or sympathy. And a million voters who wanted to make a fuss about something could override just about any elected official’s good judgment. Iran had learned from the 1980 hostage crisis that in the United States, national interest is a slave to special interest. Iran had Uncle Sam by the balls, and if the man in the striped pants and top hat raised his fist over the Persian Gulf, he was going to feel the lasting pain of a sharp, twisting jerk.

  Fisher’s people had picked up the Majorca kidnapping team after Broom’s transfer. Like Javad, the captive Persians had all silently disappeared. Falen had no idea what had happened to them. He didn’t really care. His problem now was figuring out what to do about the thirty Americans being held in the Rubaiyat Hotel and he didn’t have much time. When whoever was running this operation in Tehran learned that Javad, Baktiar, and the Majorca team were missing, the hostages would be moved around the country. He’d called Fisher, hoping the faceless voice would have
answers. He was relieved when Fisher answered himself.

  “I have some information for you. How confident are you in the security of your line?”

  “Very. Do you have reason to question it?”

  “No, but this is big. You may want to handle it face-to-face.”

  “There are no face-to-face meetings. You know that. A face-to-face compromises both of us more than an insecure line.” Fisher’s aged voice showed irritation.

  “What about an intermediary?”

  “Is this something you want handled through a third party?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “I didn’t think so. The line’s secure. Tell me what you have.”

  Falen outlined in as little detail as necessary the Iranian warehousing operation, beginning with the passport office and finishing with the delivery location in Tehran. Fisher didn’t interrupt and a long pause followed Falen’s account.

  “You think there are that many?” Fisher asked finally.

  “Perhaps more. That seems fairly certain.”

  “Any idea where they plan to take them when they spread them out?”

  “No idea. I’d assume the nuclear reactor sites and what they consider to be the other most strategic target areas. Bandar Abbas, Abadan, Ahvas. – with some left in Tehran, of course.”

  “And you think that will happen within a week or two?”

  “I’d guess ten days to two weeks at the outside.”

  “What do you see as our options?”

  It was Falen’s turn to pause. “I’ve gone over and over this, and I don’t think we have options.”

  “There are always options”

  “Well then, I don’t think we have good options.”

  “Explain.”

  Falen reviewed the thought that had been developing since he left the farmhouse.

  “It strikes me we have two things working for us. The first is the way the Iranians are running this operation. No one knows these people are alive. In every case, they’re gone without a trace and, in most, they’re presumed dead.”