The Peregrine Spy

by Edmund P. Murray

  “Sounds good,” said Frank, knowing it might never happen. They embraced. Gus hefted his suitcase and turned his back.

  * * *

  Still without his passport, Frank boarded the already crowded bus with a dozen or so people still on line behind him. He recognized it as a regular city bus and noted the large black-and-white photo of Khomeini taped to the front window. He scrambled over suitcases and several pet cages and caught an aisle seat next to a heavy-set man who already had fallen asleep. Lucky man, he thought. He soon realized his own luck as several latecomers found all the seats taken.

  “Don’t worry,” hollered a male voice. “We’ll stand all the way to America if we have to.”

  Subdued laughter underlined the tension of passengers fearful of snipers and mobs along the way. Frank knew the most direct route would take them by the gates of the university. He hoped for a detour. He heard a stir at the front of the bus. Three armed guards had boarded. Two remained by the front door. The third, tall, dark, and clean shaven, executed a difficult passage toward the back. Only when he leaned against a rail in the stairwell of the rear door and their eyes met did Frank recognize Anwar the Taller, carrying a G3 assault rifle, coatless in his blue homafar uniform but without the cap Frank had worn during the battle at Dowshan Tappeh. Very slightly, Anwar shook his head. Frank looked away.

  The bus turned right, leaving the embassy gates, away from the direction of the military compound where for months a swaying, leaning building crane had teased his imagination with its defiance of gravity and its refusal to yield to the alternately frozen and muddy ground it stood on. He knew it must have toppled, yet a crazy hope lingered that it had somehow survived. But nothing had survived: not the military nor the government; not the friendships that had started to form; not the Shah. But the embassy still stands, he thought. A semblance of relations still exists between the United States and the government of Mahdi Bazargan. He glanced again at Anwar, remembering his warning of the civil war that might follow the takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini. He wondered if the embassy, or Bazargan, or Anwar the Taller would survive that. He tried to forget the crane as they turned left onto Pahlavi. The bus rolled across Shah Reza, which meant they would steer clear of the university. At the next major cross street, they turned, very slowly, to the right. He glimpsed an armored personnel carrier ahead of the bus. He noticed Anwar, finger on the trigger of his G3, checking the street through a glass partition on the door. As the bus picked up speed, he relaxed. His finger came off the trigger, and Frank saw him flick the safety.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know the name of this street?”

  After a hesitation, Anwar said, “Shah Nader.”

  “Thank you.” His question reflected only a minimal curiosity about their location. He had wanted to establish a final point of contact with Anwar. His question had been a way of saying, “Thank you. And good-bye.” All his good-byes, even to Lermontov, had been perfunctory. Rocky had been absorbed by the problem of dealing with Teasdale. He’d enlisted the help of Cantwell and an American military doctor who prepared a hypodermic needle in a small room above the cafeteria. Teasdale seemed resigned to the idea of sedation. He appeared already numb, muttering again and again, “I understand. I understand. I understand.”

  “You understand shit,” said Rocky. He turned to Frank. “Long flight home. Lotta time to think about a lotta shit.” He adjusted his hearing aid. “I got a hunch your buddy will make it to the States. And hook up. Maybe catch a mouse. Who knows? You might even find out the truth about all that. Or somethin’ like it. See ya around, boychik.”

  Frank said nothing, suspecting Rocky would not hear his parting words. Rocky shook a fist in Frank’s direction, smiled, and popped a thumb straight up. A finger he might have expected, but Frank had never seen Rocky give anyone a thumbs-up. He returned the gesture. How sad, he thought, two grown men with so much unsaid between them and the best we can do is give each other a thumbs-up. A long flight home. A lot to think about.

  Now he turned his attention back to their strange caravan. Leftist Mojahedin and Islamic revolutionaries protecting Americans from possible snipers who might or might not be Feda’iyan. Warm bodies and an overly protective heating system had made the bus stifling. Frank shrugged off his parka and removed his wool cap. The man next to him had begun to snore. He thought of Ali and the way he always had their Nova warmed and the windows steamed. The bus cut to the right, then made a dogleg left onto a street that soon would no longer be called Eisenhower. He caught a glimpse of the Shahyad Monument where millions gathered on Ashura. Armed revolutionaries ringed the otherwise empty square. He realized they’d encountered virtually no traffic. The revolution, he thought, has become a government. They had engineered the Americans’ evacuation well. They may make the trains run on time.

  * * *

  He changed his mind as he fought his way into the airport terminal. The two Pan Am 747s would carry over seven hundred Americans, plus flight crew, but the mob in the terminal must have tripled that. Adding the Iranians with automatic weapons, Uzis, AK-47s, G3s, and M-14s, to the Iranians behind various counters with no visible weapons, Frank estimated a ground-crew to passenger ratio of three to one. But the service did not rate a gold star. Three men with AK-47s herded them toward a long table: Americans on one side; a motley knot of Iranians on the other, with suitcases gaping like open-jawed alligators and belongings spewed between them. As he approached, he realized competing groups of Iranians each insisted on searching every piece of luggage, arguing among themselves as they went. The largest group ranged in age from teenagers to elderly men and in facial hair from scraggly chin whiskers to full beards. All wore green-and-red headbands and photos of Khomeini pinned to their coats. A younger group, mostly clean shaven and hatless, had apparently come from the collapsed military. The third group seemed more random in age and appearance. Frank noticed a few uniformed homafaran among them and suspected they might be Mojahedin. He wondered what had become of Anwar the Taller. As the contending groups tugged at the contents of bulging luggage, he wondered, too, if the chaotic scene before him previewed the civil war to come.

  Then he saw Anwar, off to his right. Sa’id, also armed with a G3, stood next to him. Anwar nodded, then looked away. In a moment, the crowd swallowed them.

  Several feet in front of him, Frank saw a fur-coated woman struggling to hang on to a pet cage. Two Iranians pulled awkwardly at the metal grill. The woman clung to the handle. “No, no,” she screamed in a piercing soprano. “You can’t take my poopsie poodle. What would poor li’l Chatterbox do without his Momsie-pooh?”

  “Nah saag,” cried an Iranian, again and again. “Nah saag. Nah saag.” The red-faced man standing with the woman began screaming at the Iranian so loudly and rapidly Frank could not distinguish his words. Despite his name and the battle raging around him, Chatterbox remained quiet, sedated, Frank suspected, like Teasdale. Frank wished he had a needle full of sodium Pentothol to jab into the poodle’s barking owner.

  While one Iranian held fast, the other let go of the pet cage, poked a stubby finger into the man’s chest, and shouted over and over again, “Saag. Saag. Saag.” He’d gone from telling the woman no dogs could go on the plane to telling the man he was a dog. The scene promised to turn even uglier. Several Iranians hefted their automatic weapons. Remembering Belinsky, he thought of hitting the floor but realized he would be trampled if shots were fired and panic broke out.

  A young American with sharp features and a bouquet of papers clutched in his bony hand made his way through the circling crowd on the far side of the table. He inserted himself like a letter opener between the stubby-fingered Iranian and the irate Americans and their dog. He spoke to the Americans, nodding like a tightly wound-up doll. Whatever the young American said to his distraught countrymen, it had a calming effect. The woman even picked up his nods; her screams faded to weeping. Armed Iranians appeared behind them and gestured to the man to close their bags and pick them up. Loa
ded down with four overstuffed pieces of leather luggage, the man staggered behind an escort of Iranians. Cradling the pet cage to her, the woman followed. Two more Iranians trailed, gently poking with their weapons. They disappeared around the far end of the table.

  Frank had his suitcase and carry-on bag on the table and opened before anyone noticed him. The man who had screamed at the woman with the pet cage poked into Frank’s luggage. Fully bearded, he wore a green-and-red headband and displayed the Ayatollah’s photo like a badge on his coat. He seemed to find nothing that interested him. He muttered a series of nah-somethings Frank took to mean no guns, no knives, no jewelry, no secret papers, no camera, no forbidden photos, or stash of hidden currency.

  The Iranian looked up. Frank smiled and took a chance. “Nah saag,” he said.

  The man looked puzzled, then grinned and started to laugh and repeat Frank’s joke to others. “Nah saag. Nah saag.” From the way the others joined in his laughter, he gathered the Iranians had not had much fun during their long day. The no-dog man motioned for Frank to close his suitcase. “Farsi mi-danid?”

  If that means do I speak Farsi, thought Frank, the answer is no. “Nah,” he tried. He held thumb and forefinger close together in the universal sign for “very little.” “Kami,” he said.

  “Okay,” answered the Iranian. “Maash-allah. Safar be-kheyr.”

  Except for hearing an “Allah,” Frank had no idea what the man had said. He hoped it meant something like “Go with God.”

  “Mamnoon am.” Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now where the hell is my passport?

  And then he saw him. The man in the unbuttoned black wool jacket with the hood pulled over his head and the empty left sleeve swinging loose as he moved toward Frank. His first thought, crazily, was to show the man his passport. Then he remembered he didn’t have his passport. Or a gun. The man in black, who appeared to be alone, reached inside his jacket.

  Frank had not noticed the homafaran closing in behind the Savak assassin. One of them, whom Frank recognized as the silent, heavy-set weight lifter from the gym, had grabbed the man in black from behind just as he reached into his open jacket. He and a second homafar pulled the jacket down over the hooded man’s right arm and the stump that ended just above his left elbow. With the concealing hood pulled back, the man ducked his head. Frank still could not see his face.

  Sa’id slid into position directly in front of the man. Holding his G3 in one hand, jutting it into the man’s stomach, with the other he removed the metallic M61 machine pistol from its shoulder holster. It had happened very quickly, noticed by only a few people. The Americans who witnessed the scene stood openmouthed. The Iranians looked away and backed off.

  The two homafaran who had grabbed the man kicked his legs out from under him. Sa’id yanked the man’s hair and forced his head up till he looked directly at Frank. The man spat, and Frank studied his burning, bloodshot eyes, nose hooked like a scimitar, and dark, bearded face, sure that someday, somewhere he would see this man again. The arms of the two homafaran formed a yoke, wrapped through the man’s armpits and around the back of his neck, where each man clasped the wrist of the other. It was only as they trundled him out of the waiting area through a side door, with Sa’id leading the way, that Frank noticed Anwar following, with his G3 leveled at the man’s back.

  No one turned to acknowledge Frank. No one had spoken to him.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, lugging his luggage, he approached the banshee backs of the howling mob at what he took to be the ticket counter. He thought of Teasdale. Not a bad way to travel. Sedated. Probably driven out onto the tarmac. Propped up in a first-class seat with a solicitous doctor at his side. Guardian angels like Rocky and Cantwell to watch over him. His luggage whisked through customs by someone else. His passport given a peremptory check. He even gets to fly to Rome and enjoy the mild weather. I fly to Frankfurt and a German winter.

  A fatalistic instinct overtook him. He set his suitcase on its end and sat. The plane won’t take off without you, he told himself. No need to kill a fellow American, one of our own. Or get killed. He’d just encountered death. And lived through it. The crowd will thin. I’ll present my ticket and retrieve my passport. I hope.

  “You owe me.” He turned to see Stan Rushmore looming above him. He wore the tweed jacket he’d had on the day they’d met. Frank noticed Rushmore had managed to button it. I guess I’m not the only one who lost weight, he thought. He stood and shook Rushmore’s hand.

  “Now what have you done for me?”

  “I got your passport.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out several blue-bound American passports. He thumbed through them. “Here you go. Francis Xavier Sullivan. I love that Xavier. Good Jebbie military school on Sixteenth Street. Remember it?”

  “Yeah, I do, but how’d you get this?”

  “The usual way. I spread some dollars around. Rocky thought we oughta make good use of some of the station’s excess, rather than just burnin’ it all. I know a Pan Am guy helps us out.”

  “What about checking in?” said Frank, suddenly remembering the Aeroflot guy who helped out the GRU. And Belinsky.

  “No problem,” said Rushmore. “I’ll take you around and my guy’ll stamp your ticket. I took care of your buddy Simpson a while ago. Come on.”

  Frank followed him around the ticket counter. Rushmore nodded to two armed Iranians who stepped back and let them pass. “I spread some spare rials around, too. Gimme your ticket. Oh, and your suitcase. My buddy’ll check it through. Wait here.” Frank watched him disappear through a door behind the ticket counter. He returned in less than a minute.

  “Everything should be so easy. Here you go. Passport. Exit visa. Luggage receipt. Ticket.”

  “Seat assignment?”

  “Catch-as-catch-can. Except for us who got assigned to ridin’ nursemaid on your friend the defective radio man.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Hasn’t got a care in the world. Him and the doctor, Rocky, and Cantwell all got on board already. For all the good it’ll do them. Look at that mob. Be hours before we get outta here.”

  Frank surveyed the terminal. The noise level had climbed and tempers had shortened.

  “Try to get on board early if you can,” said Rushmore. “But you still got passport controls and customs to go through.”

  “I’ve been through customs.”

  “That was just preliminary. Make sure you weren’t carrying anything into the airport you shouldn’t be. Like a bomb.”

  “Or a poodle?”

  “Like that,” said Rushmore. “Khomeini damn near shut down this whole operation last night when they found idiots on yesterday’s flights tryin’ to hide handguns and fancy knives in their carry-on kits. Couple of wives got pulled outta here today ’cause they had some fancy Iranian jewelry on them. Lot of folks just put just about everything they own in storage. Embassy’s got lists of where they stored personal effects. Cars, too. Even pets. For all the good it’ll do. Idea is, when things get back to normal, embassy’ll have it all shipped back home. But I think what you see out there now is as normal as this country’s gonna get for a long time to come.”

  “I got a hunch you’re right,” said Frank.

  “I talked to another friend of yours,” said Rushmore. “Back at the embassy. Navy officer named Munair Irfani. But in civvies. Showed up at Dowshan Tappeh couple of times there near the end. Said if I saw you to let you know you might have trouble here. Guy with one arm. Wears a black jacket with the hood pulled up.”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “I know who he means.”

  “Involved in the Belinsky mess.”

  Frank nodded.

  “The navy guy said he also warned your homafar buddies from the gym. See any sign of ’em?”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “They helped me out.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  Frank shook his head. “They took care of it. For now, anyhow.”

  * * *


  Armed men searched Frank’s carry-on bag at three more checkpoints. No one frisked him, and he encountered no metal detectors. Only once did the search take more than a few minutes.

  “Let me see your papers,” asked one of the inspectors. Young and clean shaven, the Iranian spoke excellent English with a British accent.

  Frank opened the plastic packet and handed over passport, air force ID, and Iranian residency permit.

  “You will not need this anymore,” said the Iranian. He tossed the residency permit into a box on the floor. “You are air force?”

  “Yes,” said Frank.

  “I also. Formerly captain, Iranian Air Force. Now I am comrade in the Islamic Air Force.”

  “I hope good relations continue between our countries,” said Frank.

  “I agree,” said the former captain in his clipped tone. “We need you for spare parts.”

  * * *

  Frank could see the door to the tarmac beyond a booth where Iranians checked passports and argued among themselves. They appeared to check each passport against names on a list. At least one man spoke English. He questioned each passenger and several times, with passport in hand, disappeared through a door beyond the booth. Each time he returned Frank expected to see someone hauled off behind the mysterious door. Instead, the questioning resumed. The process continued and the line crept forward.

  Through the day he’d made a conscious effort not to look at his watch. He knew the time would pass slowly enough without constant reminders of how slowly the time passed. Now he weakened. Five after one. He estimated they had arrived at the embassy about seven, at the airport by ten. The long day promised to get longer. The line crawled. He glanced down its length and at the far end saw Bill Steele. Big as he is, thought Frank, funny I didn’t see him sooner.

  Frank tucked his carry-on under his arm, turned, and pushed his way through the door to the tarmac. As he approached the plane, he turned back toward the terminal. The sign remained, just as he had seen it the day he arrived.