The seven aircraft in the wing were Tu-16 Badger bombers that had been decommissioned from the air force in 1980, converted to fly airlift missions, and given to the KGB for strike force operations. They had been used to some success in Afghanistan for spot missions, their fuselages and especially their landing gear beefed up for rugged off-runway landings and takeoffs.
For this mission the red stars had been painted out of their camouflaged tails and replaced by the white star on blue background of the U.S. Air Force. An unnecessary deception, the colonel thought. It no longer mattered what the Iranians saw.
Berezin’s elite force of sixty fighting men was divided between two of the aircraft, his executive officer, Major Yurii Myakov, in charge of the second group. There had been no communication between them since takeoff. Nor were communications necessary. Myakov knew his job. Nothing would go wrong on his end.
The copilot finally made it back to where Berezin was strapped to his canvas seat. He had to shout to be heard over the engine noises.
“Captain Sulitsky would like to speak with you on the flight deck, sir.”
“What does he want?” Berezin asked, without bothering to raise his voice.
“It’s the weather, sir,” the copilot shouted. He was clearly nervous. He looked at the troops seated along either side of what had once been the bomb bays in which nuclear weapons were transported.
“What about it?” Berezin asked.
“It’s getting worse.”
“Yes, we can tell,” the colonel said. A few of the troops nearest, who heard his comment, snickered.
The aircraft gave another powerful lurch. “We may have to divert to an alternate landing site.”
“Nyet,” Berezin snapped.
“It may not be possible to land where you wish, sir,” the copilot said.
Berezin waited for several seconds to allow his blood pressure to drop a little. Then he languidly released the buckles that held him in place. The copilot backed up a couple of paces as the colonel rose to his impressive height of nearly six feet six, the battle gear strapped tightly to his chest and back extremely deadly-looking.
“I will come with you to speak to Sulitsky,” he said.
The copilot turned, and moving from one handhold to the next, he worked his way forward. Berezin followed him without holding on, as if the aircraft wouldn’t dare knock him over. His men loved it.
And they were going to have to continue loving it, he thought, because there would be no going back for any of them. Even with General Didenko under arrest, Azerbaidzhan had been in revolt, and it had been up to them to help defend the rodina.
But they had not. In fact, the two militia officers from Moscow who had come to arrest Berezin had even thought that under the circumstances he should be allowed to remain free to fight.
And fight he had. But the only two deaths that could be attributed to him were those two militiamen.
There was no going back. Only forward to pick up the gold, and then onward to the only place fit for a fighting man and his forces: Lebanon. He figured that with his men, and with the weapons the fabulous wealth that would soon be theirs could buy, he could strike a few key targets and set himself up in a stronghold that his few troops and vast fortune could hold until something better could be planned.
Grandiose plans, perhaps, but then Berezin had not gotten to this point in his career by being timid.
He climbed up onto the flight deck, and then pushed the copilot roughly aside and climbed down into the right-hand seat. Outside, the night was invisible. The only thing to be seen was a swirling white fog. Nothing more.
Captain Sulitsky was an extremely competent KGB pilot who’d flown a lot of difficult combat missions in Afghanistan, yet it was obvious that he was having a hard time controlling the aircraft.
“How does it look for us, Mikhail Alexandrovich?” Colonel Berezin shouted.
“Not so good, Colonel,” Sulitsky shouted back without taking his eyes off the instruments. “If the fucking wind shears in these mountains don’t tear us apart, we might just fly into the side of one of the taller peaks.”
“What are our chances of making it to the target?”
“Fifty-fifty, maybe less.”
“Have we still got a good lock on the beacon?”
“Da.”
“Has Iranian radar discovered us?”
“Nyet.”
“Are you frightened?”
Sulitsky laughed. He risked a quick glance at Berezin. “I’m pissing in my pants, Comrade Colonel.”
“But we have a chance of making it?”
“Da.” Sulitsky had turned back to the panel.
“How about the other pilots?”
“If I take us the rest of the way, they’ll follow.”
“We have no other choice. You understand this?”
Again Sulitsky glanced at him. “Yes, I understand perfectly. I just wanted you to confirm how important this was. I wanted you to tell me that we’d have less than a fifty-fifty chance if we didn’t pick up the gold.”
“You were right to ask, Mikhail Alexandrovich, because without the gold, we will have no chance. None whatsoever.”
Abbas was sitting on the ground, out of the wind behind the car, when he thought he heard the sounds of aircraft up the valley. He pulled himself to his feet and looked over the top of the car, but there was nothing to be seen, and now the sounds were gone, blown away on the stiff wind.
He tottered around the side of the car, his legs like rubber beneath him. After he’d tried to destroy the beacon transmitter, Kurshin had beaten him with his bare fists. It felt as if every bone in his body was broken, and what little strength he’d had was gone.
“You heard it too?” Kurshin asked, materializing out of the darkness.
“I didn’t hear a thing.” His voice was weak even in his own ears.
Kurshin looked skyward. “They’re coming.”
“They won’t make it. Not in this wind.”
Kurshin looked at him. Staring into a replica of his own face gave Abbas a momentary chill.
“Curious thing about valleys like this—the wind always funnels between the mountains. No matter what’s happening up there, the wind is going to blow straight up and down the valley.”
“They’ll never get lined up—” Abbas began, but then they both heard the sounds of the aircraft overhead.
Kurshin raised the remote-control device and pushed the button. Instantly the string of portable runway lights he’d brought from Tehrn came to life, crudely outlining the landing area.
“Who are you?” Abbas asked.
Kurshin smiled. “You could not have been a very effective chief of station,” he said. “Certainly not even as good as Thomas Lord.”
For a moment the name meant nothing to Abbas, but then it suddenly clicked in his head, and he staggered back, stunned as if by a physical blow. “Paris,” he said. “It was you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It was necessary to keep your organization in Langley very busy. We wanted to deplete your personnel. We wanted to kill your best, or at the very least keep them involved with cleaning up the messes, with investigating the attacks, and with answering to your president and congressional committees.”
It was almost beyond comprehension. “Who is ‘we?’ Who are you?” he demanded.
“The KGB, of course. Who did you think?”
“But it’s over. We don’t do this anymore. Your people don’t do this. It’s over!”
“Oh?” Kurshin said.
The aircraft were directly overhead now, turning at the end of the valley so that they could make a second pass, this time lining up with the runway lights. The noise was very loud, roaring off the mountains. And there were a lot of planes. But there would have to be, to transport so much gold, and the troops needed to take it from the convoy.
Abbas stumbled backward in despair. The entire monstrous situation was overwhelming. There was nothing he c
ould do about it. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
“Go if you wish,” Kurshin shouted over the wind and the tremendous roar of the big aircraft overhead. His disdain was monumental.
Abbas had half turned and was looking down the dry stream bed, the way they had come up.
“But long before you could reach the highway we would overtake you.”
Abbas looked at the man.
“You’re going to die this morning,” Kurshin said. “And there isn’t a thing you can do to prevent it.”
Abbas started walking toward the stream bed, half expecting a bullet in the back of his head. If Kurshin was calling to him, he could not hear over the roar of the planes. In any event he no longer cared.
The approach of Soviet aircraft was totally unknown to General Mashoud Dayati in the lead Jeep of the gold convoy, but all evening, and into the early morning hours, an unease had grown within him.
By everything that was holy in heaven and on earth, he would be glad when they were past Isfahan and out of these wretched mountains. He had pressed his people for more speed. He was a military man and knew that if there was to be trouble, it would happen here. The region was ideal for an attack. If it was going to happen, he thought nervously, it would come within the next hundred kilometers.
The convoy, which consisted of eighteen identical canvas-covered trucks and two Jeeps—one at the rear, and the general’s in the lead—stretched for over a kilometer. Twelve of the trucks contained the gold bullion, and the six other trucks, dispersed throughout the convoy, contained 84 of the 114 troops under his command. The others were the drivers and relief drivers of the gold trucks, as well as the drivers and passengers of the two Jeeps.
A .50-caliber machine gun was mounted on each of the Jeeps, and the fourteen men in each troop truck made up separate fire teams armed with AK-47 assault rifles, American-made LAW antitank weapons, grenade launchers, and Russian-made SA-7 SAM portable rocket launchers.
They were a formidable force; but more than a hundred metric tons of pure gold was a powerful incentive. There had been rumors that someone within the Iranian military itself might mount an attack on the convoy.
It saddened the general to think that such greed still existed in his country. Western greed. American-spawned greed. Hate bubbled up inside of him at the thought of what the Americans and their puppet shah had done to Iran. The damage was still being repaired, especially the damage to the attitudes of women in the bigger cities. It would take decades, perhaps centuries, before they achieved their ideal.
“You are troubled, my general,” the convoy’s mullah, Abdollah Sabzevr, said from the back seat where he was wedged in beside the machine gunner and his metal boxes of ammunition.
The general looked over his shoulder, at the religious leader. “If there is to be an attack on us, it will come between here and Isfahan.”
Sabzevr looked almost comical in his thick clothes, his wool cap pulled over his ears. The Jeep was open to the cold mountain air.
“Will we be attacked, do you think?”
The general shrugged, then looked ahead, down the deserted highway. “I hope not. By Allah, I sincerely hope not.”
50
MCGARVEY HUNG HALF OUT of the Range Rover’s window, his eyes tearing in the wind as he tried to penetrate the darkness along the road for a way up into the valley.
Ghfari had driven very fast down from the high valley where they’d made contact with Langley Center, bumping onto the highway, and then raced south as fast as the old oil company vehicle could manage.
They’d been on the highway for nearly an hour now. If Carrara had been right about the beacon location, and if the satellite fix on their handie-talkie signal was accurate, they should have been directly below the valley minutes ago. From what McGarvey could see, however, there was simply no way up. The road was blocked by sheer rock walls, by huge boulders, or by impossibly steep gullies that not even the Range Rover could manage to cross.
“I don’t see a thing,” Ghfari said.
“Neither do I,” McGarvey shouted. “But they’re up there, and their forces are going to have to make it back down the hill to stage the attack. There has to be a way.”
“There,” Ghfari said, braking as the headlights found a narrow concrete bridge over a shallow gully. It was a dry riverbed; in the spring melts it would be a torrent.
They came to a stop just before the bridge. McGarvey snatched a flashlight, jumped out of the car, and hurried up the road to the near end of the bridge. Tire tracks led across a narrow ditch on the right side of the road, crushing the sparse mountain grass along two parallel tracks and then disappearing into the stream. What snow there had been here was scoured away by the wind.
Ghfari got out of the car. “Do you see something?” he called.
“Shut off the engine,” McGarvey called back, and he stepped down off the highway and made his way fifteen or twenty yards to the stream bed.
The Range Rover’s engine died, and McGarvey held his breath to listen. The wind roared in the peaks towering somewhere far above them, lost in the swirling clouds. But there was something else. Something he could feel more than hear. Something deep-seated and heavy. A rumbling sound almost like thunder, fading in and out on the wind.
Aircraft. Big, lumbering, transport aircraft. Heavy enough to transport troops and haul more than a hundred tons of gold out over the mountains. Heavy enough to be heard at this distance over the wind.
McGarvey hurried back up to the highway. “This is the place,” he shouted on the run. “They used the dry riverbed.”
“What is that sound?” Ghfari asked. He too had cocked an ear to listen. “It sounds like—”
“Russian transport aircraft,” McGarvey shouted. “Get in!”
“They are here already?”
“They can’t do us any harm if they don’t land,” McGarvey said. “Get in and drive!”
The track was extremely rough, and the Range Rover bounced all over the place. A couple of times they almost tipped over, but Ghfari was a good driver, and he managed to recover nicely without losing time.
McGarvey had reassembled the AK-47 and checked its action. He stuffed the extra clips of ammunition in his belt and jacket pockets, and then cycled a round into the firing chamber of his TK automatic pistol. He did the same with Ghfari’s pistol and laid it on the seat next to the Iranian.
“If those planes land and we’re outgunned, I want you to get the hell out. No screwing around, just run.”
“What are you talking about?” Ghfari asked through clenched teeth as he concentrated on his driving.
“There are going to be some angry people when I start shooting at their airplanes. If the situation falls apart, I want you to run.”
“Where?”
“Your choice,” McGarvey said. “If you head south to warn the convoy, you’d face almost certain arrest and possibly execution as a spy. But you might save the gold. The other way, toward Turkey, would mean freedom.”
Ghfari started to say something when their headlights flashed on a figure stumbling down the stream bed less than a hundred yards above them. Ghfari automatically pulled up.
“Kill the headlights,” McGarvey ordered, snatching the AK-47 and jumping out of the car.
Now he could clearly hear the sounds of incoming aircraft. A lot of them. Not very far away.
Ghfari leaped out of the car and walked out ahead a few feet. He was hearing the aircraft too, but he held up his hand for McGarvey to keep silent.
He walked a few feet farther up the stream bed. “Richard?” he called.
“Bijan?” the answering cry came weakly from above.
“Is it Abbas?” McGarvey called softly.
“I think so.” Ghfari hurried up the slope, McGarvey holding back to cover him in case it was some kind of trick.
A few moments later Ghfari came back out of the darkness helping an extremely battered Dick Abbas.
“It’s the Russians—they’
re coming in now,” Abbas said in a breathless rush. He looked as if he had been in a street brawl, McGarvey thought. He was dressed in a Russian military jump suit with KGB border guard markings.
“Who set the aircraft beacon?” McGarvey asked. “Who did this to you?”
“I don’t know,” Abbas croaked. “But he’s Russian, I think, and damned good.”
“Kurshin,” McGarvey muttered. The incoming aircraft were very loud. It sounded as if one of them was coming in for a landing.
“We’ve got to stop them,” Abbas said, grabbing McGarvey’s arm. “They’re coming for the gold and they mean to blame it on us. The Russian is wearing my clothes.”
“How far is it?” McGarvey asked.
“Quarter of a mile—maybe a little farther. Half a mile at most. The slope opens into a long narrow valley.”
McGarvey turned to Ghfari. “Take him back down to the highway and get the hell out of here. You should be in Turkey within twenty-four hours.”
“What about you?” Ghfari asked.
“I’ll take the handie-talkie. Langley Center will work out something to get me out of here once the show is over.”
“No way,” Abbas interrupted forcefully. “Give me a weapon. I’m going back up there.”
“You can’t—”
“I will!” Abbas insisted. “You owe me this. I want a weapon. I want at least a chance against that son of a bitch.”
They were running out of time. There was no room now for argument. Abbas had apparently been hard used by Kurshin. But he was luckier than most who came up against the man: he was alive.
McGarvey handed him his pistol. “If we can bring down one of the planes as it’s landing, it will ruin the strip for the others.”
“I want just one man,” Abbas said.
McGarvey didn’t answer him.
In the Range Rover, without headlights, they headed up the slope. The sounds of the incoming aircraft were right overhead now, reverberating off the higher mountain walls. Near the top the runway lights cast a faint pinkish glow, and suddenly the night was brilliantly lit when one of the big planes’ landing lights came on.
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