The Shield of Darius

by Allen Kent

  Fisher grunted acknowledgement.

  “The other advantage,” Falen continued, “is that as far as we know they’re all still together. If we lose either of those two factors, this could become a real mess.”

  “I agree with that.”

  Falen selected his words carefully. “If we try a rescue, we’re probably going to lose the advantage of secrecy. The news people will find out somehow and spread this all over page one. Plus, if a rescue fails, Iran will scatter the hostages around and immediately compound our problem. Our success with rescues has been mixed, and we’ve never had to go into central Tehran. I think that’s a bad choice.”

  Again, Fisher grunted his agreement.

  “We could leave them there and hope the situation never develops that will force Iran to play its hand. If that happens, after awhile they’ll take care of the problem for us by eliminating the hostages before anyone knows they have them.”

  “You believe the situation will develop though, don’t you,” Fisher guessed.

  “Yes. If we don’t provoke it, I think they will. They’ll be like a kid with his first ten bucks. Even if he can’t find a way to spend it, he likes to flash it around to make sure people know he has it. This Shi’ite-Sunni division in Iraq is getting more serious again and Iran’s threatening to intervene more actively. Syria might provide another provocation. I think they’ll do something soon if we don’t”

  “Why don’t we let them?” Fisher suggested.

  “Let them?”

  “Yes. Let them start something and announce they have the hostages.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious. It may be just what we need. An international incident that will force this country into action – and others who see this kind of international blackmail as having gone way too far across the line.”

  Falen considered the suggestion skeptically. “For one thing, it will make us look like idiots, letting thirty people disappear without knowing or doing something about it. Plus, you’ve got more faith in the American government than I have. They won’t react in a responsible way. The public is pretty sick of our two Middle East wars. They won’t be very excited about another.”

  “The State Department is very aware of the unusual number of disappearances,” Fisher said. “They just don’t know why, and aren’t sure what to do about it.”

  “I haven’t seen or heard anything about it,” Falen said.

  “Part of their confusion – and again to our advantage. They are hoping it doesn’t become public until they have some answers. But it does suggest we could look pretty foolish if this came to the public’s attention. Iran’s developing nuclear capability, and something has to be done. There’s no guarantee they will use it responsibly. We’ll have to take some action.”

  “Believe me,” Falen said, remembering his FAC days as Eddie Warren. “We won’t do what you think we should. These Iranians have played it smart. They’ve snatched people we won’t be willing to sacrifice. Can you imagine what would happen if we hit a place where the public knew five housewives with little kids at home were being held? Hell, they’d have every head in Washington. Not likely.”

  “So, what do you suggest?” Fisher prompted.

  “We can’t wait. We’ve got to act within a week and we’ve got to act in such a way that this doesn’t become public knowledge.”

  Again there was silence at the other end.

  “Is there a way that can be done?” Fisher asked finally.

  “I’m not sure. But I believe so.”

  “Are we talking about these people disappearing for good?’

  “That’s the way I see it.”

  “I’m not sure I can support that….”

  “See what I mean?” Falen muttered. “You even have trouble with the idea. Do you think the President would do anything to Iran if the whole country knew about it – and what the likely result might be?”

  “The risks are significant.”

  “Fewer than the alternatives.”

  “I’m not sure I have the resources to get this done,” Fisher said.

  “Hell, I thought this is exactly the kind of thing you did. You sure as hell knew when I was getting choked by that crazy Iranian bastard.”

  “I didn’t. The man I had watching him did. And, by the way, he was watching without sound so he didn’t know what the Iranian said. We don’t need to worry about him.”

  “The least of my concerns,” Falen said. “What about this other deal?”

  “I’d hardly call it routine. The international implications are enormous.”

  “But we’ve got the situation and can’t just let it go.”

  “We’d need someone inside,” Fisher suggested.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You sound like you have a plan.”

  “The beginnings of one, and it would leave you with complete deniability. Do you want to leave it to me?”

  Fisher paused. “The Government can’t be implicated. That’s out.”

  “Hell, I know that. But you’ve got to give me free rein otherwise.”

  “You realize you’ll be on your own.”

  “I’m always on my own. You made that clear up front.”

  “If it goes badly, it’s all yours then.”

  “Shit,” Falen spit into the phone. “What would you guys do without us? Take responsibility for something? Or just not do anything?”

  “Listen. You know the way it works. That’s why we’ve taken such good care of you all these years. You’re the one who suggested letting you handle it. And I’ve been a bit worried about you lately. It’s wasn’t like you to get careless with the Iranian.”

  “You’re right. But I’ve got that worked out. And I’ll handle this for you and keep the government clean. Just don’t come back on me if you don’t like the approach.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. A messy operation’s likely to attract attention.”

  “It won’t be messy. In fact, I haven’t even got it all worked out, but I don’t hear any better ideas. I need free rein.”

  “It’s your operation,” Fisher said. “I think the Pentagon is planning some action in the Gulf, but I’ll try to keep everything under control here until you get it taken care of.”

  “A week,” Falen said.

  As Falen now looked out over the cold gray expanse of ocean, he wondered if he’d over-estimated his ability to deliver. He also wondered if he was as sure about limited options as he’d expressed to Fisher. His FAC days still inclined him to see the best solution as calling in an air strike.

  He turned back north along the beach, cutting across the dunes toward his bicycle. As he walked and rode the three miles back to Chincoteague he refined the plan, anticipating and working around potential problems. At the apartment he placed a call through one of Fisher’s secure links to Israel, then to American Airlines Flight Reservations. With his meeting arranged, he pulled a Baltimore number from his billfold, dialed Kate Sager and assumed his Washington sophisticate persona when her voicemail answered .

  “Kate? Chris Falen. Listen, I hope I’m not intruding. Last time we talked, I didn’t leave on a very good note and hoped I could make it up to you. I’ve rented a place on the beach out at Chincoteague. Just south of Pocomoke City. Wondered if I could talk you into coming out for dinner this evening? I’ve gotta leave for Europe first thing in the morning to see what I can find out about these passports that are being taken. It might help if we could go over everything one more time. Just dinner. Do you have some time?”

  . . .

  Had Chris Falen phoned four hours earlier, Kate might very well have accepted. She’d had kids up to her eyebrows the night before and would very willingly have abandoned them for a night almost anywhere. She had also been about to enter a session with David King and representatives of CommTech to discuss a buyout offer on the company when her mother called. Mom just wanted to see if Kate was “spending as much time with the children as she shoul
d be,” and had capped the conversation with quotes from an article in the latest issue of Good Housekeeping. The article was proof positive, Mother assured her, that children of single working women were less well-nourished, prone to neurosis, and scored poorly on SAT tests! To put it mildly, it hadn’t been a good morning.

  Kate was also finding it increasingly difficult to tuck the children in at night and stretch out alone on the king-sized bed to read until she slipped into uneasy sleep. She was lonely and sick of having to do everything by herself. And she was finding that the enigmatic Mr. Falen was the only person in her life who seemed to understand what she was trying to deal with. Plus, his voice had a constant calm to it - never tense or overly emphatic, but rich and reassuringly mellow. The admission that she found his company soothing made Kate feel guilty and she certainly wasn’t looking to replace Ben. But some calm reassurance was just what she needed on a day like this, and she wasn’t finding it anywhere else.

  Following her encounter with Falen at the little league park, Millie Davis, who knew when a stray cat walked through the neighborhood, assured her that she’d be a fool to let Falen escape without at least one tumble in the hay.

  “And where did you find him?” she said, her voice dripping with “It hasn’t taken you long.”

  “Strictly business,” Kate said flatly, never ceasing to be amazed by Millie’s shallow insensitivity.

  “Oh, I’m sure. I wouldn’t mind doing a little business with him myself.”

  “Business business.”

  “Well, just the same. Don’t kick him out of a board meeting,” Millie said.

  Aside from the irritation, she’d ignored Millie at the time but found since that when she felt the need to really vent, to unload her frustrations and let go of her ‘strong business woman’ face for a few hours, the only person who seemed at all appropriate for the release was Chris Falen.

  Fortunately by two in the afternoon, forty minutes before his call, Kate had managed to convince Dave King that the buyout offer wasn’t in the best interest of the company and wasn’t something she could commit to on her own anyway. PJ had called her at the office to tell her he loved her and apologize for being a brat. She hung up knowing he wasn’t headed irretrievably toward a life of drugs and a 500 on his SAT, and was feeling very much in charge. She wanted to go home after work, order pizza, play Yahtzee with the kids, and tell her mother to take a flying leap.

  As she left the office, Dave stopped her in the hall. “You did a helluva job with the CommTech people today. To be honest, without Ben here I wasn’t sure we ought to try to keep this operation going.”

  “I could see you were a bit uncertain about things when we went into the session. But we’re as solid as we’ve ever been. You saw the sales reports and the P & L statements. This isn’t something that can be decided without Ben anyway, and if they want to talk purchase again, he’d say they’d better add a hundred million.” She turned and walked lightly down the stairs and through the computer room to the outside.

  “Without Ben….” If he never returned, she wondered if she would ever be able to completely accept the idea.

  NINETEEN

  Braced against a poplar beside the Karaj well, Ben Sager was wrestling with the same thought. If he couldn’t get across the mountains to the border within another day, he knew he would be too weak to try. The griping knot in his stomach was a constant reminder that he hadn’t eaten in two days, and his drinks from the open cisterns were beginning to take their toll. He lurched more and more often down the riverbank to a stand of thick willows to relieve himself; burning watery waste that scalded his buttocks and legs. He had spent most of the night before in the dark cool of the river, keeping the bandaged wound out of the murky stream, but hoping that the rest of his body might soak up some nourishment from the brown water. The bullet wound now extended burning tendrils through his lungs and rib cage. He had been free for a week, and he was running out of time and life.

  As the late afternoon sun spread the webbed shadows of the chinar trees out toward the river, he struggled to remain upright and covered against the tree; to be just one more chadored figure sitting aside from the others who had come for water, squatting in flat-footed silence, paying little apparent attention to anything.

  The appearance was deceiving. Since reaching the well he had watched with studied care the movements of an attendant who parked a fleet of small blue and yellow buses in a lot adjacent to the public pump. Hour by hour he counted vehicles, logging their schedules in his head, learning the routines of the little man in the dark tattered jacket and pajama-like pants. The attendant took the buses from their drivers after the last run of the day, filled them with diesel fuel from a pump beside his shed, and hung the keys on a numbered board inside the crude, brick hut.

  From his vantage point beside the poplar, Ben could see the board through the door and knew that each bus had two sets of keys. There were now fifteen buses in the lot. Some he had seen off and on during the day, following short, repeated routes around the village or back and forth to Tehran. Five had come in from longer routes and came across the bridge from the north, probably from Qazvin or Tabriz, or down through the canyon past the dam from Chalus and the Caspian coast. Ben was watching the routine on one of these five. Number yazdah. Eleven. It had gone out approximately two hours after sunup in the morning and returned before noon, then left again at mid-day and was back several hours before the attendant locked up his shed for the evening. During the final two hours of the man’s workday, the keys to Bus Eleven hung unused on the board while their keeper wandered about the lot, fueling incoming buses and making tea over a cut down fifty-gallon drum filled with charcoal.

  As Ben watched the man hang up the keys for Bus Eleven on the afternoon of his second day at the well, he waited until the women left with their afternoon water, then struggled to his feet and shuffled along the road to the bus lot. Number Eleven had finished its second run and sat fueled and ready for the next morning. With his chador showing no more than his dark eyes, Ben waited until the attendant disappeared behind his shed to prepare evening tea, then slipped quickly into the shack and lifted the front set of keys for the bus from the board. The rush to the shed drained the last of his strength and he collapsed against the outside of the building; a beggar woman too pathetic to shoo away. At dusk the attendant closed and locked the shed, muttered something at Ben as he passed, and walked along the road toward the village.

  As night fell over Karaj, Ben pushed himself upright against the bus shed, letting the chador fall loosely to his shoulders. He walked with slow measured steps across the lot to Number Eleven and unlocked the bus. Its seat was soft and comfortable and he sat for a long moment, resting against the wheel, knowing that once the bus moved, he would no longer be an unnoticed beggar. With the key in the ignition, he drew a slow breath, and turned it. The bus started immediately, its deep rumbling diesel engine throbbing loudly in the quiet night of the village. No one came. Ben painfully depressed the clutch, forced the gear stick into low, and eased the bus forward out of the lot. He turned right across the river bridge, then left onto the highway that led up into the dark mountains past the Amirkabir Dam toward Chalus. His chador was folded beside him on the seat, his sunken chest covered only by a single cloth strip that held his bandage in place. The lights of passing vehicles showed only a thin, bearded driver making a late run north to the Caspian.

  The bus was an awkward length on the twisting road that climbed almost immediately from Karaj into the mountains, and its mechanically linked steering was stiff and exhausting. On the first sweeping bend north of the village, Ben’s left side knotted under the strain and he failed to pull the bus quickly enough into the turn. It rumbled off the hard surface, bouncing and scraping noisily through rocks and low thick brush that bordered the roadway. He leaned hard into the wheel with his right arm, gradually easing it back onto the asphalt. The infection was showing itself as almost uncontrollable shaking that increased as h
e strained to master the stubborn coach. As he skirted the deep reservoir that spread like black glass behind the towering concrete slope of the dam, he forced the bus against the cliff face to his right, away from the low railing that separated him from a steep plunge into water fifty feet below. God, how he wished he had something to eat, something that would calm his frazzled nerves and give him an ounce of strength.

  At 8850 feet, a sign in English and Farsi marked the summit and entrance to a lighted tunnel. The bus clattered and rumbled through the raw stone passage as if about to disintegrate, adding to his general anxiety and to a fear that he had damaged the undercarriage when he left the road. The tunnel ended in a sudden rush of thick, damp air and he realized that he was on the Caspian side of the mountain. Gingerly he slid the driver’s window back, breathing the heavy air that smelled of decaying plants and distant sea. The sparse, brackish vegetation that had lined the road above Karaj gave way to thick, lush forest that arched over his path, forcing him toward its center. Forty kilometers below the summit he reached a long sweeping downgrade and saw across the dark mat of treetops, the lights of the coastal town of Chalus flickering against the black water of the Caspian Sea. Ben tried to raise his left arm to the wheel, but it refused to move. An hour of relentless strain had sucked away the last of its motion. But there was comfort in the black stretch of horizon. Only the southern tip of the Sea dipped into Iran, with most of the Caspian bordered by Russia and the former Soviet Republics. He was getting close and he could smell and feel it in the humid air. For an instant, Ben felt it again – the rush of the Damascus bazaar. He had survived the city and the flight to Karaj. He had made it through the mountains. A hundred miles north, maybe less, was the border. Ben was on his way out.

  The bus accelerated down the grade and he let it climb to 100 kph on the speedometer: just over 60 miles an hour. As it edged toward 110, he tapped the brake, feeling his heart seize and body drain again into a cramping knot as the pedal sank without resistance beneath his foot. Ben stood on the brake, pumping frantically and praying for the slightest pressure, but the black pad clapped impotently against the floorboard. He knew that behind the bus a thin trail of brake fluid, dripping from a line damaged when the bus left the road, marked his descent from the summit.