Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  McGarvey hastily stuffed his things back into his suitcase and hurried into the main hall of the terminal. There he exchanged a few hundred dollars in British pounds for Iranian rials. Even here the Russian ruble was no good.

  As a Russian, he should have taken one of the shuttle buses, but he was impatient to get started, so he took a taxi to a small hotel in Vanak, near the old Sheraton, Hilton, and Hyatt Regency hotels.

  The attention he’d gotten from SAVAK had altered the plan. The agency would check the engineering firms he was supposed to be contacting tomorrow, and find out that no one had heard of him. They would come looking for him immediately.

  The City of Tallahassee would be in port by now, but it would take the better part of the next twenty-four hours for the gold convoy to reach a good position for a Russian ambush. Probably longer. McGarvey had wanted to use the time to poke around Tehrn on the chance that Abbas was still in the city.

  But that was changed now. He was going to have to make contact with Ghfari tonight.

  Wearing the dark, Russian-cut clothes he’d brought with him, McGarvey slipped out of the hotel a few minutes before three in the morning, easily eluded the two sleepy policemen posted in front, and made his way through the nearly pitch-black alleys the four blocks to Ghfari’s apartment.

  There was no one out on the streets at that hour. No delivery vans, no ambulances, not even the police or military. Stepping to the end of an alley, he looked out across a broad boulevard fronted by shops and narrow little stalls that during the day sold hammered brass and copper goods. Above the shops were apartments.

  Ghfari’s flat was above a shop selling translations of the Koran and approved foreign-language books. As a safety precaution Wills had made a sketch of the building’s layout in case McGarvey was coming in on the run.

  “Only as a last-ditch effort, you understand,” Wills had cautioned. “Under normal circumstances Ghfari is watched, but now he’ll be very closely watched.”

  From where McGarvey stood, he could not spot the SAVAK surveillance team that he knew would be there. The only possibility, he decided, was that they were stationed in one of the buildings or shops on the opposite side of the avenue from Ghfari’s apartment. If he crossed the street here he would be spotted.

  A very narrow alley ran behind the shops on this side; he thought it likely that one backed the stalls on the other side, too. If the alleys were also being watched, he would at least have the cover of greater darkness here than on the broad street.

  He turned and hurried back the way he had come, crossing a side street a block away, and taking the alley the long way around. He crossed the broad boulevard a block and a half west of Ghfari’s apartment and covered the rest of the distance in a few minutes.

  This alley, like the other, was not much wider than a cart path. Filled with a foul-smelling jumble of litter and debris, it was more of a refuse dump than a deliveryway. Garbage was evidently tossed out on a regular basis and never collected. Even the smell of human waste was strong. There were probably open sewers nearby.

  Nothing human moved in the alley; only rats skittered here and there in the filth. McGarvey remained in the darkness watching the back of Ghfari’s apartment house fifty yards away. The ground-floor doors and windows of all the apartments were tightly shuttered.

  Gradually he began to realize that no one could get out of the buildings from here. The steel security shutters were all locked from the outside. Short of climbing out a second-story window and jumping down into the alley, the only exit at night would be from the front. Therefore it wasn’t likely that SAVAK would have posted a surveillance team back here. There would be no need for it.

  Nevertheless he approached Ghfari’s building with caution, keeping well within the darker shadows.

  He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, quickly unscrewed the barrel, and slid out the slender steel pin concealed inside. Jaziraf had given it to him on the way out to the airport.

  “Who knows, maybe it will be of some handiness to you,” the Egyptian had said, grinning.

  It took McGarvey a full ten minutes to get the heavy Yale lock open. He unlatched the hasp, and replaced the padlock on the staple with the hasp up so that when he closed the shutter it would look as if it were still locked.

  Very carefully he lifted the metal shutter up on its tracks slowly enough so that it didn’t make much noise. Behind it was an ordinary wooden door, also locked. This lock was rusty and it took McGarvey twenty minutes to get it open.

  He had spent too much time outside, exposed. He had to get into the building.

  A narrow passageway ran front to back, a security shutter on the front door. The bookshop was on the left, and a stone stairway lead up to Ghfari’s apartment on the right.

  There were no sounds from the shop or from the apartment above. The only light in the passageway came through the front shutter from the main boulevard.

  He closed the back shutter and shut the door, leaving it unlocked in case he had to get out in a hurry. Anything was possible. SAVAK could have arrested everyone at the station and could be waiting upstairs now in ambush.

  At the front door he glanced up the stairs, and then peered through the cracks in the shutter at the buildings across the street. At first he saw nothing, but as he was about to turn away he spotted a glint of light from something metal or glass in an upstairs window. He waited patiently for a few minutes longer. Another movement, and then a brief glimpse of a face in the window. SAVAK was there, as he’d figured, watching this place. Which meant there was no ambush waiting for him here.

  Crossing the passageway, he hurried up the stairs on the balls of his feet, making absolutely no noise. There was only one door at the top, with what appeared to be an ordinary tumbler lock. But Ghfari would be very gun-shy just now. If somebody barged in, he might shoot first and ask questions later. And he had probably fail-safed his door.

  McGarvey knocked very softly, hoping that Ghfari would have the presence of mind not to turn on a light.

  There was movement from within the apartment. McGarvey knocked again, softly.

  “Qui est-ce?” someone asked softly.

  “It’s me,” McGarvey answered in English. “From Cairo. There’s trouble.”

  A moment later the lock clicked and the door swung inward. The apartment was very dark. McGarvey stepped inside and stopped short as the barrel of a pistol was pressed against his temple.

  “Your name, quickly now,” the man said in English.

  “McGarvey. Kirk McGarvey.” He could smell gun oil.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Wills briefed me.”

  “A name from Cairo. One name. There is no time now. Tell me or you will die.”

  “Anwar Jaziraf,” McGarvey said without hesitation. SAVAK did not work this way. Only frightened men, backed into a corner, demanded such information in such a melodramatic fashion. Jaziraf had told him the French-born Iranian was good, but young, and at times excitable.

  The gun barrel was withdrawn. Ghfari stepped behind McGarvey and closed the door.

  “Don’t turn on the lights,” McGarvey said.

  “You spotted my friends across the street, then,” Ghfari said, taking McGarvey’s arm. “I will lead you.”

  McGarvey let himself be led across the totally dark room and through a doorway. Ghfari closed this door, then switched on a dim light.

  “How did you get past them?” Ghfari asked. He was a tiny man with a full black mustache. It was obvious he was deeply frightened.

  They were in what appeared to be a very small storeroom or closet. A piece of black cloth had been attached to the bottom of the door. There were no windows. No light would escape. He probably used the place as a darkroom.

  “From the back. I picked the locks on the shutter and the door.”

  Ghfari nodded nervously. “No one saw you come here?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “But we’re going to have to get out of the city sooner than planned. I ca
me in under a Russian passport.”

  “Very good. I tried to tell those idiots not to send anyone carrying French documents. SAVAK is all over us now. I think they will close our office in the next few days. But why are you here tonight like this?”

  “It couldn’t wait until tomorrow.” McGarvey quickly explained what had happened at the airport.

  “There is no doubt thes salopard was SAVAK. You were not on any of his lists. He will check out your story.”

  “Which won’t hold up.”

  “No, of course not,” Ghfari said. He considered the problem for a moment. “You cannot go back to your hotel. They will be back first thing in the morning to keep an eye on you.”

  “Is it Peshadi?”

  Ghfari looked up, his eyes narrowing. “Yes. You have heard of this one?”

  “From Wills.”

  “Well, he’s behind all this, all right. It was him and his sergeant who found Shahpur’s body. I had to identify it, and that prick was standing right over me, ready for me to make a mistake.”

  “Did he ask you about the gun and handie-talkie they’d found?”

  “No, but that’s coming.”

  “Then you’ll have to come with me,” McGarvey said. There was no way he was going to leave the man behind for Peshadi. It wouldn’t take SAVAK very long to open him up.

  “This is my station now.”

  “They’ll have to send someone else in under a different cover. What’s left at the office to take care of?”

  Ghfari was shaking his head. “Nothing,” he said. “All the paperwork has been destroyed. I took the only other gun and handie-talkie over to the safe house for you.”

  “How about personnel?”

  “Iranian contract people who know nothing.”

  “No one else who worked for the Company?”

  “There were only three others. They took off for the Turkish border yesterday afternoon.”

  “Sounds like you were ready for this.”

  “It’s been drummed into my head since Lyon,” Ghfari said. “But if I leave, there will be nothing to start with. We have worked damned hard to get to this spot.”

  “They’ll send someone else, different cover, different everything. Picarde is contaminated beyond repair now. You’re going to have to turn your back on everything.”

  “We have a lot of assets in the field.”

  “Unless they’re compromised, which they will be if you are caught and interrogated, they’ll lie dormant until a new agent handler shows up. It’s happened before.”

  Ghfari sighed deeply, as if he were glad to be convinced. “We will have to leave here tonight.”

  “I’d like to be out of the city by daybreak,” McGarvey said.

  “Impossible. We will have to spend the rest of the day at the safe house.”

  “Why?”

  “No car until after dark. It will also give our satellite two more passes over the region. We will get another update on the convoy’s position.”

  “So will SAVAK if they monitor our transmissions. They’ve got the handie-talkie.”

  “We have always taken enormous chances here, Mr. McGarvey. This is simply another. We have no choice.”

  It was loose, but they had no other choices. At least spending the day in the safe house rather than out on the desert would expose them to much less risk. “This is your city,” McGarvey said.

  Ghfari shook his head. “No. But it could have been.”

  42

  AWAY FROM THE CITIES, especially Tehrn, the interior of Iran was wild, more like a lunar landscape than a place on earth. Bounded to the east by Afghanistan and the rugged Elburz mountains, and to the west by the even taller, more inhospitable Zagros range, much of the ancient nation of Persia was a desolate, windswept high salt plateau.

  Since the reign of the ayatollahs had begun, the populated regions of the country had slid backward by five hundred years. The climate of Islamic fundamentalism had stifled almost all progress. And the eight-year war with Iraq had sapped the economy at a time when a healthy rial was needed the most.

  But nothing had changed in the interior for two thousand years or more. Moses, Christ, or Mohammed would have felt perfectly at home in ninety percent of modern-day Iran.

  Within an hour after the assistant chief of Tehrn station had shown up at the apartment, Kurshin had led an unresisting Dick Abbas out the back way, and they’d climbed into a green Triumph sedan that had been supplied to Kurshin by his Russian embassy contact. The two SAVAK officers in front of the building had not even looked up as they’d driven by, and within the next hour they were outside the city, heading south on the main highway to Qom.

  By that evening they had climbed well above the salt desert and were in the mountains. Kurshin had pulled off the highway into a cul de sac. They’d spent the night in the car.

  All day Thursday they had worked their way farther southwest. The going was very slow because of the poor condition of the roads, and the great amount of military traffic they’d encountered south of Qom.

  It had taken them five hours to skirt the city, which had a population of more than one hundred fifty thousand and its own SAVAK barracks.

  By then, Kurshin had figured, Naisir’s body would have been found in Abbas’s apartment, and the search would be on. But for Abbas alone.

  They’d spent Thursday night in the car, again parked off the highway in the mountains. The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and sleep had been almost impossible for both men, and especially for Abbas. Abbas was not dressed for the cold and he had not eaten in forty-eight hours.

  The sun was coming up now, and it seemed thin and cheerless even to Kurshin, who knew he had won here. The gold would already be aboard the trucks, and the convoy would be on its way northeast. It was only a matter of time now; in twenty-four, perhaps thirty-six hours the gold would be in Russia and he would be on his way back to Europe.

  He urinated at the side of the dirt track and then went back to the car where he pulled one of the full canteens of water from the trunk and drank.

  Next he filled the gas tank with the last of the fuel from the jerry cans, closed the trunk, and went around to the driver’s side.

  Abbas was awake in the back seat and was staring at Kurshin, his eyes dark, his complexion wan. He didn’t look well.

  “May I have some water?” he asked, his voice weak.

  “No,” Kurshin said, getting in behind the wheel and starting the car.

  “If I die from dehydration, I will be of no use to you,” Abbas said.

  Kurshin considered him in the rearview mirror. He shook his head. “I don’t think you will die so soon. But if you pass out I will give you some water to revive you.”

  “I can’t go on much longer like this,” Abbas said.

  “You will manage.”

  “Please,” Abbas croaked. “I’m begging you in the name of human decency. Just a little water.”

  Kurshin turned in his seat and looked closely at the American as if seeing him for the first time. His lip curled a little. “You’re not much of a man, are you,” he said conversationally. “I could kill you now and it would make very little difference to my plans. Or I could keep you alive a little while longer. In the end it is up to you.”

  Abbas’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and his eyes were blinking furiously. He was clearly on the verge of losing control. “What kind of a monster are you?”

  “You can’t imagine,” Kurshin said. He took out his pistol, levered a round into the firing chamber, and calmly reached over the back of the seat and placed the muzzle against Abbas’s forehead.

  The American flinched.

  “What is it to be?” Kurshin asked. “Death now, or life?”

  Abbas said nothing.

  “With life there is hope. Who knows, perhaps something will go wrong at the last minute. Perhaps I will be killed and you will get your chance to escape. Die now and that would be impossible.”

  “I want to l
ive,” Abbas said.

  “Then you will cooperate with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good,” Kurshin said. He withdrew his pistol, eased the hammer down, and laid it on the seat beside him. He had absolutely no respect for men such as Abbas, even though this type made his work easier. The man was weak, and deserved to die. And he would.

  The only two men who had ever earned his respect were Valentin Baranov, and Kirk McGarvey. Baranov was dead, and McGarvey would be soon.

  He eased the car into gear and headed back down to the main highway. “We will get ready to take the gold now,” he said.

  It was getting dark again, and for a little while Richard Abbas thought he might be going blind. He was lying in the cramped back seat of the Triumph as they bumped slowly over an extremely rough track. It was the motion that had awakened him. They were once again off the highway.

  It took a long while for his brain to begin to function properly, but finally he managed to sit up and look outside.

  They were following what appeared to be the dry bed of a mountain stream that would contain water only in the spring. They were very high in the mountains, but above them the even taller peaks were covered with snow. This was a no-man’s land. Nothing lived here except for the eagles. No one would ever want to come here.

  Kurshin was concentrating on his driving. Ten minutes later, after they had gone another half mile, the stream’s course opened onto a narrow defile that had to be a mile or so long and perhaps several hundred yards wide. The ground, from what Abbas could see, was reasonably level and free of large boulders or holes or drift piles.

  It would make a perfect landing spot, Abbas slowly realized. The site was completely hemmed in by taller mountains. Once the aircraft got in, they would be virtually invisible to Iranian radar, and certainly invisible from the highway below. SAVAK would never suspect a thing. Neither would the guards on the gold convoy.

  It was ingenious. The Russians would get the gold, and the Americans would be blamed for it. The Iranians were always ready to believe ill of the Americans.