Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  Madame eyed him sideways, puzzled. When Mac picked up Amir and the dressing case, she gathered up her jacket and followed him silently out of the car. With a glance of admiration at his superior who had wheedled the difficult lady into coming with them, Sergeant Ardalan departed smartly to secure their car.

  Above them the glow of sunset darkened. The vociferating crowd of fugitives parted, obedient as a herd of animals, to let the man in uniform through. Then the laden peasants began to struggle fiercely to get their families into the car doors.

  When Ardalan eased the car up to them on the station gravel. Amir objected immediately that it was a poor kind of automobile. Lifting the kid into the front seat, Mac explained that it wasn’t much to look at, but had a four-wheel drive. Then, helping the young lady into the rear seat, he swung up beside her. Producing his map, he pointed out their destination. "We’re going there, Yusuf, To Sabakhs.”

  Ardalan winked. "Yes, sir. I understand."

  Gripping his arm. Mac said, "I want to be sure you do. sergeant. The gendarmerie of Iran has authority to arrest only civilian lawbreakers. Madame Badr Khan has broken no such law. His excellency the minister can issue operational orders, but not to an American officer serving as technical adviser. That clear? Now, if a war is breaking out up here, it has to be dealt with by your Parliament, the Majlis thing, or the army chief of staff. Not by us. You know all that, sergeant.”

  Tight-mouthed, Ardulan was silent.

  "We’re really going to this mountain place. It works out like this: we may gain something by taking his wife up to Badr Khan. I’d like you to come, hut if you don’t agree, I'll drive myself."

  Silently the noncom pointed at the track. All the crowd had managed to squeeze into the cars or pile onto the flat. As Mac watched. the whistle wailod and the train began to back downgrade toward Tabriz.

  Longingly the stocky sergeant stared after it until the headlight became a red eye in the smoking dusk. "I know all you told me, sir." he said slowly, "but you are making a grade-A mistake.” With a gesture of resignation, he switched on the car’s lights. "I know also it is my duty to accompany where you go.”

  By sunup Major McCoy began to feel he had made a mistake. They’d had to pull out and wait for light, because the cart track led them nowhere over bare ridges. Dozing, numb with the chill of the heights, he called himself a show-off, falling for a pretty woman to get her out of trouble. She trusted him all right, sleeping beside him, wrapped in her sables, with the boy in her arms. . . .

  Light slanted across blue pine heights, like the Blue Ridge summits, only without signs, bridges or gas stations. But the woman picked out familiar landmarks. and showed Ardalan where to head in.

  When he smelled smoke. Mac didn't think about it until he saw where it came from—drifting from the gutted walls of a big house. Outside, in a garden of sunflowers, a man’s body lay sprawled and stripped to socks and undershirt.

  Around the next bend a rifle echoed and the slug cracked the air close. Quickly Mrs. Badr Khan stood up, sending a shrill cry back to the red-clay slope above them. From a pine growth horsemen appeared—bearded men with rifles, looking like Boer commandos in blue homespun. They held their fire, their heads turning after the car, like animals in a watching herd. Mac remembered that his colonel had warned him: "The mountain tribes are cut off from civilization, which means typhus and taxes and conscription to them, so they fight it and loot it.” But the breakout of these Sabakhs folk would start a chain reaction through the mountain area as a forest fire jumps from ridge to ridge—over in India new frontiers were shaping in blood, and the tribes were moving on the cities of Kashmir.

  The woman kept standing up to be seen, holding to Mac as they detoured past a parked battery of mountain guns hitched to American-built one-and-a-half-ton trucks with Russian identification painted on them. To Mac’s experienced eye, those were guns of the Skoda works, and he wondered how they had got to the Kurdish mountains. In the same second, he realized that he and the woman had switched identities; he was now the one in protective custody. Like Ardalan, Mac carried no weapon. Without the lady's escort, he had a slim chance of getting out, whereas he had an excellent chance of being held as hostage.

  Ten minutes later he had proof of it. The car spurted up a rise, swinging into the street of a white clay village where horses, sheep and men milled around them.

  "Sabakhs," said Sergeant Ardalan.

  Empty faces of bearded boys pressed close to them. Hands snatched at objects in the car. Rifles, slung over the sheepskin coals, were Mausers with German-army numbers, well cared for. Mac had a crazy sensation that hie was back in an Italian village full of enemy equipment—until Mrs. Badr Khan made her boy stand up. At sight of their chieftain’s son, the tribal folk broke out into deep mutters of joy and their hands patted him.

  "To your left, sir." Ardalan pointed. "You can inspect our road post, but I do not think you can have contact with it."

  Under a bare flagpole twelve dejected figures sat in the early-morning sun, stripped to their gray undies. Perceiving the American officer, the gendarmes rose uncertainly to their bare feet. Behind them a pair of hefty Kurds, slung with cartridge bandoleers, mounted guard with the Brno rifles of the gendarmes. Mac swore wordlessly.

  Looking at him, Ardalan asked, "Will you try to break out down the road, sir? Madame still accompanies our vehicle."

  "Forget madame.” His helplessness put an edge to Mac’s temper. "We ought to get those men released.”

  Fatalistically the sergeant shook his head. "Madame wishes to be put down only at command post of Badr Khan."

  Madame poked the sergeant impatiently. The car lurched forward. A half dozen Kurdish warriors, rifles slung, jammed themselves on the sides of the car as it churned out of the village, up into roadless green pastures.

  That ride gave the major a queer feeling, sweeping him on through the shreds of clouds, over fresh late grass blue with cornflowers, over the shoulder of the mountain, where herds of sheep galloped away, up to the shining sky of the peaks. Above the clouds, this was the ancestral home of the Kurds. And the woman beside him flung her head high, glancing down at him scornfully, as if at a shorn Samson. Now that she was home she pretended no more to respect him.

  Ahead of him uprose the gray granite spine of the peak. In front of it, upon a sapling pole, a flag spread in the breeze, the red, white and green flag of an unacknowledged nation, the mountain Kurds. Horse lines led away from the flag, with rows of low black tents. And Mac grunted, sighting a tank beneath the flagpole.

  This tank, obviously stalled among the boulders, careened crazily, a paint-blistered affair of top-heavy tin, but still a tank mounting a pair of light machine guns. As he passed it, Mac recognized it as an obsolete Italian model. He wondered if he had mountain sickness or was simply seeing illusions. The demountable Skoda guns might have found their way on horseback to this cloud kingdom of Sabakhs, but not an Italian relic of the western front.

  Inconceivably, to him, shrill march music blared. Then the car jolted to a stop. Through the watching fringe of tribal marksmen strode a young giant, six feet six, in corduroy sport coat, baggy breeches and riding boots.

  "Amir, kuja'st” he shouted.

  Sergeant Ardalan stiffened. "Badr Khan asks, sir, where is Amir?"

  The boy was not visible in the pack on the car. but Mrs. Badr Khan cried out joyfully and sped to her husband's side. After clasping her hand, the Kurdish chieftain turned his broad brown face to Mac. He was tense with pride and temper— ready, Mac judged, to go off the deep end at a word.

  "Sir. he asks now," put in the sergeant, "what kind of a hired police operative are you, to arrest his wife and son?"

  Promptly the major shoved his way out of the car. From behind Badr Khan a quick-footed bodyguard appeared, holding out a fine sporting rifle to his master. Mac stopped where he was.

  "No one arrested them," he said. "I brought them home, that's all.”

  Badr Khan turned to question h
is wife, his eyes narrowed in disbelief. At him the lovely lady smiled without answering. Evidently she intended to be no help to Mac, who remembered with misgivings the telegram and the way he had taken her under escort on the train.

  "His Highness Badr Khan now says you have brought them with object of making bargain with him, and he is not liking same.”

  "That’s a complete lie.”

  As the sergeant translated that, his face went white.

  The long arm of the Kurd reached out for his weapon; then he shouted something and swung away. Ardalan said he would prove he was not lying. Two hillmen caught the major’s arms and hurried him after their chieftain toward the cliff. The march music swelled louder, with a fine chorus of voices joining in. Mac had heard it, or something like it, before. And he found himself keeping step with the beat of the chorus of invisible voices. He felt helpless to understand what was happening around him.

  When his guards halted their rush, he blinked in the glaring sunlight. Familiar objects began to take shape around him. On an ordinary table a massive radio blared forth the music. Its aerial wire led up the face of the cliff.

  Above him gaped the mouth of a cavern. Within its shade a carpet had been spread; two easy chairs stood on the carpet, and the chairs were occupied by two men looking like ordinary Europeans in store clothes. They had lined, guarded faces, one thin and alert, the other heavy and drowsy over a silk shirt without a tie. They looked like any pair of travelers or sidewalk-cafe sitters. While Badr Khan spoke impatiently, they studied the American spotlighted by the sun.

  Ardalun’s voice prompted Mac, "He is saying how these visiting gentlemen heard from their radio the order given you, objective to arresting madame and her son."

  Badr Khan paced between the officer and the two foreigners like a referee in a ring, watching the fighters in their corners. And Mac thought, He knows they are against me.

  As he opened his mouth to explain about the telegram, Mac thought of something else. That wire had reached him along the railroad from Teheran. It would not have been broadcast for anyone to hear. Then the two foreigners hadn’t heard the order over the air; they had heard a tip-off from somebody in Teheran. But how?

  Mac kept quiet, thinking, pulling a cigarette from his pack and forgetting to light it. Women’s voices shrilled in the deafening march music. Women and men, an army march, Russian music. The radio at the moment must be tuned to Tiflis, not Teheran.

  "Badr Khan says, will you answer, sir.

  Pepped-up Russian music from the nearby Caucasus. Mac pulled his arm free of his handlers and pulled the visor of his cap down against the sun’s ray; stepping to the table, he glanced down the face of the radio at the markings, in German. Could any hands but Russian collect so much ex-German, ex-Italian war loot, with Skoda products of Czechoslovakia, and transport them to the Kurdish mountains? All the questions licked into one answer in his mind: No.

  "All right. Here it is,” he said, thinking about it. "I did bring up Badr Khan’s family because I wanted to see the lady wife home. But I have something else to tell him. He’s being tricked.”

  "By who is he, sir?"

  At that, Mac realized his mistake. Badr Khan didn't like it. The thin stranger half smiled; the heavyweight settled back in his chair. The two of them would have harmless identity papers—as Armenian or Slovak dealers in scrap, like as not. The odds were, the Kurd knew their real identities. It was a good guess that they had promised more than weapons to this trigger-minded youngster who had been sweating it out alone in his mountains—too long alone.

  "By your two friends here," he said, and stopped Ardalan, who started to translate. It was a good bet that the two in the chairs did not know any English. "You understand me all right, Badr Khan."

  The big Kurd waited, not showing anything in his face. Mac wanted to say, Don't you understand; nobody but the Russians will gain by civil war in Iran. He couldn't say that. He had to back his words up, and he had no scrap of proof to back them.

  "You've a nice country up here, Badr Khan," he said carefully. "Why not stay with it as it is? If you win down in the valleys, what do you win? A few villages and a piece of railroad. In the end, you’ll lose. You'll be back here with part of your people dead, like the Boers of Oom Paul."

  Badr Khan's smile had a twist to it. Abruptly the blare of march music ceased. The thin European had switched it off, and he had understood Mac well enough, because he made an answering speech, like a trained lawyer at the bar.

  He asked—the sergeant repeating it mechanically to Mac—if the flag over their heads did not stand for the freedom the Kurdish people deserv? Or if the starving peasantry of the Iranian valleys would not join the Kurds' fight for liberation? He asked why the American officer of Iranian police had come to the land of Badr Khan, unless to spy out the new weapons of the brave Kurdish people?

  As the stranger made his oration, an answering murmur went through the mass of tribesmen gathered around them. In his chair the heavy man moved, and it creaked. When he spoke, Badr Khan paid instant attention.

  "Major, you are paid to do this,” he told Mac. "Nobody pays me. I do what I decide is right for my people. How much land did your American Government leave to the Indians in their country? Do not think that I will be like your Indians.”

  Mac couldn't argue against the strangers. A cold anger made his voice unsteady. "Yes, I’ve seen your new weapons, Badr Khan,” he blurted out. "And I can tell you one thing. Those hitch-hiking Czech guns won’t last an hour against field artillery with range finders.”

  Something like doubt shadowed Badr Khan's eyes. Then he shook his head. "My two friends, as you call them,” he replied in his precise English, "are indeed friends. They brought me what arms they had. You have brought only words.”

  Around him Mac sensed the antagonism of the mountain folk. No more than a brigade strength of riders camped here under the flag, stirred by the music. They will use their weapons until they are killed, he thought. They are like children with a new toy.

  "All right,” he gave in. "You have your wife and son back. I haven't anything more to say, Badr Khan."

  As if touched by someone, the big Kurd swung around, staring. "Where is he—where is Amir?”

  At the word, his wife came forward to touch his arm and point toward the flagpole. Flinging his henchmen aside, Badr Khan ran down to it and shouted exultantly.

  Following him, Mac sighted the kid with his toy under his arm and his feet planted wide, staring up at the immobilized Italian tank.

  Reaching him, Badr Khan caught up the boy, hugging him. There was no mistaking the father’s joy at getting his son back safe.

  "He is saying.” explained Sergeant Ardalan at Mac’s ear, "how his heart was torn, and now it is whole altogether again.”

  Evidently Amir came first in his father’s affections. Watching the two of them, Mac felt a sharp stab of sympathy for them, and inwardly he cursed the political plotting that would not leave them at peace in their uplands.

  Amir, however, wriggled from his father’s arms and gave out in a loud voice. Was this thing, he wanted to know, all of the great tanks given to his father, the khan? When Badr Khan patted him clumsily, Amir pulled away and exhibited his model of the Tiger. Chewing his thumb, Badr Khan scowled at the shining model and the rusty seams of his own machine of war.

  That one was junk, cried his son. And Mac held his breath as he watched. Taking a step front and center, Amir gave out a violent sneeze, "Krr-chook!” In just that manner Mac had demonstrated how to blow over an ancient Fiat. Around them, the tribesmen began to laugh.

  "Why isn’t it going?” Amir wailed, in tears. "Can you make it go?”

  The broad face of Badr Khnn flushed dark. He did not know how to answer his son. Before his eagerly listening followers he was losing face.

  In his mind, Mac flipped a card, and he walked over to the big Kurd. "Maybe the sergeant and I can get this thing to working, Badr Khan," he said slowly. "If you'll tell me, straight
, which way you want it to go."

  Gripping his son's hand to silence him, Badr Khan looked from the major to the stalled machine and the undisciplined array of his followers. He looked from his anxious wife to the gray granite peak of their mountain home. For a count of ten he studied the rocks at his feet. Then he lifted his head with decision.

  "Here," he said quietly. "It will stay here, and so will I stay in my country. Major, that is a straight answer.”

  An hour later Major McCoy sat at ease with tunic unbuttoned at the table in the gendarmerie post of Sahakhs. With their uniforms and shoes restored to them, the personnel of the post fetched tea, bread slabs, honey and fruit—the gift of Madame Badr Khan—for his breakfast. For the first time in fourteen hours he lighted a cigarette and relaxed. He felt tired as well as hungry.

  "Sergeant," he admitted, "you were right all along about the situation."

  Almost lightheartedly, Sergeant Ardalan accepted a cigarette and put it in his cap. "Major," he stated with approval, "you made a very fine GI talk. Don’t you think he believed it?”

  "No," said Mac. "But he believed Amir."

  Iron Curtain Incident

  I suppose most of us citizens of the U.S.A. have forgotten how good we have it. In my case I’ve forgotten plenty since my 6th Army Group spent one Christmas at a plaice called Saarbrücken. Now this night I’m thinking of was one of the bad ones last winter. Snow over the Rockies had backed up the westbound air traffic at the Chicago terminal. My particular bunch had been standing too long in the line-up at the gate when the loudspeaker rasped: “Departure of Flight T-117 temporarily delayed.”

  Back at the counter they had erased the departure time of T-117, our flight, from the board. They only told us there’d be some delay owing to weather. The big man who’d been at the head of the line argued with them until he found out it was snowing at Denver, and the delay might be an hour or all night. He said then he’d miss his connection. The lady with the dyed poodle said they ought to send us to a hotel, where we’d be comfortable. Most of the single seats in the lounge were occupied. Over at the magazine stand the marine corporal bought himself a sporting extra, and the young couple with the new baby got a comic to amuse their older child. Other couples went to telephone to kill time. It was as if a switch had been thrown and they couldn't resume being themselves until the loud-speaker called them back to the gate.