The Peregrine Spy (71 page)

“Mister who?” said Rocky.

“Mr. Ross, sir. The press officer.”

“With some newspapermen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shit. Let’s hope for the best.” They climbed the stairs. “Lemme take a look in Belinsky’s old office.” Rocky cracked the door and peered inside. “It’s clear. You guys park in here.”

“Nice touch,” said Frank.

“Don’t be so fuckin’ sensitive,” said Rocky. “Belinsky wouldn’t mind. Gets you outta the way of nosy reporters, is all.”

Walking on a dead man’s grave. Frank remembered the Shah’s words. Americans, whistling in the dark as they walk by my cemetery. He thought of Khomeini at Behest-e Zahara. He thought about death, surrounding them. Like a shroud. He walked into the office that had been Belinsky’s.

“I’ll see what’s up with Mr. Ambassador,” said Rocky. He closed the door behind him.

“You seem wound a little tight, my friend,” said Gus.

“A little,” said Frank. He looked around the barren office. “Being in here doesn’t help.”

“It’s a war,” said Gus. “People get killed. Get over it.”

“I will. Just … give me a minute.”

“Sure,” said Gus. “I wonder what those two reporters are after?”

“Hell, Iran’s the hottest story in the world,” said Frank. “Aren’t you glad to be part of it?”

“No,” said Gus. “And neither are you.”

Frank moved around the metal desk and sat in the straight-backed chair Belinsky had used. Okay, he thought. I can do this. “Seems to me the ambassador would want to stay clear of reporters right now.” I can think like a good covert action man should. “And you’d think his press secretary would help him steer clear.” Get over it, he told himself. There’s a war on.

*   *   *

“He says ten minutes,” Rocky announced as he rejoined them. “He’s in a snit about somethin’.” He closed the door behind him, took a chair, and looked from one to the other.

“What’s with your buddy?” he asked in Gus’s direction. “You decide to move in here, Sully?”

“No,” said Frank. “I don’t much like embassies.”

“Speaking of which, guess what happened in Kabul this morning.”

“Islamic militants took over?” suggested Frank.

“Worse,” said Rocky. “The ambassador, Spike Dubs, got kidnapped. You were right about what Lermontov gave you on the Islamic militants in Kabul. In fact, Sully, I hate to admit it, but you’ve been right about most of the shit you reported.”

“Not reported,” said Frank. “You mean tried to report.”

“Come on. What have I stopped you from reportin’? Lately.”

“You’re funny,” said Frank.

“Me? Funny?”

“Yeah, you.” Frank felt his anger scratching. “Not too long ago, you son of a bitch, you wouldn’t let me report much of anything.”

“I am nobody’s fucking son of a bitch,” snarled Rocky.

“Yeah, you are, and now, all of a fucking sudden, you want me to report everything.”

“Calm down,” said Rocky. He seemed to try to take his own advice. “It took a while, you dumb bastard, but you made your fuckin’ point. Like with that first atmospherics you did.”

“That you fucking sat on.”

“For a while I sat on. I finally sent it, didn’t I?”

“If you guys are really going to go at it,” said Gus, “you want me to hold your coats?”

“No.”

“I was only kidding,” said Gus.

“I wasn’t,” said Rocky. “But you and me don’t need to be goin’ at it, Sully.”

“Why not?”

“I hate to admit it, but it took your fuckin’ friend General Fritz to make me realize you and me been on the same side all along it.”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“Yeah, in a way he is. In his own ass-a-holic way. He was so down on you and the job you’d been tryin’ t’ do, he made me realize in my own way I’d been actin like a fuckin’ Fritz. I’m a field man, always have been. But I learned t’ play the headquarters game.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Come on. I okayed your cable on what Lermontov told you was goin’ on in Kabul, right?”

“Yeah. You did.”

“If State had listened to what we filed, if the embassy in Kabul had paid attention, we wouldn’t have a kidnapped ambassador. I wasn’t your problem. Your problem was back in Langley and Foggy Bottom.”

“And you played their game.”

“You wanna survive in this business, you…”

The staccato thunder erupted from all sides. Windows smashed, and heavy-caliber bullets penetrated the brick walls. The three men spread-eagled on the floor. When the first wave eased, they crawled for desks and couches that offered some degree of cover. The intensity of the fire picked up, ebbed, crescendoed again. Frank looked across the rug toward Gus. Their eyes met. No wonder I’m wound up tight, he thought.

He knew high-rise buildings surrounded the embassy compound on three sides, but the heaviest fire seemed to be coming from across Takht-e Jamshid where two taller buildings flanked the six-story Damavand Hotel. The windows in the room where they’d flattened themselves looked out over the open space behind the embassy. He realized those windows had been smashed from the inside by bullets that had pierced at least two interior walls. In the front window, he thought. And out the back. With my bones in between. He thought of the blue and white floor tiles in the dining room of the Damavand and of the dead weight of Belinsky’s body. He wished they were in the steel vault that surrounded the bubble upstairs. He wished he were back at their overcrowded bachelors’ quarters. He wished he were home in Weehawken. Another loud wave of bullets raked the room. Then the firing slowed.

Stopped.

“Stay down,” said Rocky.

Frank felt wedded to the floor, married to its Persian carpet. Stay down? Shit. I may never move again. I wonder if I’m dead. Dust, rising from the rug, tickled his nose. Guess not.

Automatic weapons thudded from outside the building.

“The fuckers must’ve come through the fences,” said Rocky. The sound of metal shutters being pulled down clattered through the hallway. “Stay put till some marines show up and close those shutters for us.”

Frank stifled a sneeze. He tried stretching his legs. They worked, and he felt a familiar pain in his right knee. He heard the door behind him open.

“Stay down,” ordered a crisp voice. “We’ll secure your window shutters.” Frank heard the shutters rattling down followed by the clang of bullets cracking into them. He looked up and saw a tight pattern of dents in one of the shutters.

“G3s,” said a marine. “Sooner or later they’ll smash right through these damn shutters.”

On cue, the sound of machine-gun fire and the clang of heavy metal bullets striking metal shutters rang like a chorus of anvils.

“There go the front shutters,” yelled one of the marines as he dove to the floor. Still flattened, Frank, Gus, and Rocky did not have to move.

Again, the heavy-caliber firing eased.

“What’ve they got over there?” hollered Rocky.

“Fifty calibers, sir. Maybe some thirties mixed in.”

“Ambassador wants everybody up on the third floor. Move it.”

Frank looked up in time to see the chevrons of a marine sergeant turning away from the open door. He stood and looked to Rocky. Rocky nodded. Frank headed out the door and up the stairs to the vault that enclosed the steel-doored communications room and the bubble. He stood aside as Rocky punched in the code that unlocked the door to the bubble. “In.” Frank and Gus edged into the bubble, and Rocky pulled the door shut behind them. The reassuring whoosh stirred a breeze. Rocky grabbed a walkie-talkie that sat on the plastic table. “Tom. Larry. Somebody. Over.”

“Larry here. Over.” The crackling voice sounded remarkably calm.

“Get everybody outta the basement. Now. Up to the third floor. Now. You got anything down there you wouldn’t want your mother to know about, bring it with ya’, because the mothers are on their way in.”

“We got a demolition box we could use.”

“No time. Grab and run. Now, or you’ll be eating tear gas in a minute.”

“Roger.”

Not more than two minutes later, Rocky opened the bubble door to admit two middle-aged men in shirtsleeves. “No need for you guys to know each other. The drill is we surrender the lower floors, which is a good idea because those G3s’ll cut through those metal doors sooner or later. The ambassador’s had the marines stash their M-14s in the vault. They’ve got shotguns with nothin’ but bird shot in them, tear gas canisters, and sidearms they can use only if they gotta t’ stay alive.”

“Sounds like we surrender again,” said Gus.

“Yeah,” said Rocky. “We surrender again.”

“This surrender drill was planned?”

“Yeah, Gus. Planned and rehearsed.”

Frank wondered if the kidnapping in Kabul and the attack under way around him could have happened on the same morning just by coincidence. He thought again of his cables on Lermontov’s warning about the embassy in Kabul. Rocky had filed them. He wondered if a government that listened to its intelligence could have prevented the assaults. He thought of himself wearing the opaque glasses Lermontov gave him. Rocky with his hearing aid turned off. Back in Washington, an establishment blind and deaf.

“Rocky?”

“Yuh?”

Frank knew they would never come closer to understanding each other than they had a few minutes before, when Rocky confessed to having played the headquarters game, just before the .50-caliber bullets began to fly.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah,” said Rocky. “I’d been meanin’ t’ talk to ya about all that shit.”

Through the thick translucent walls of their plastic bubble they could see the hazy outlines of ghostly human forms heading into the communications room, the embassy’s skeleton crew filing into its mausoleum. I hope they come out alive, thought Frank.

“You can sniff it,” said Rocky. “By now the first floor should be a blanket ’a tear gas. It won’t stop ’em, but it’ll slow the fuckers down. The ambassador, a military attaché who speaks some Farsi, and an Iranian interpreter who must have very big balls will meet the hostiles on the second floor. No marines. No weapons. The message is we want to surrender. Meantime, if we’re lucky, the ambassador got through to Yazdi or some-fucking-body and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some fuckin’ I-ranian help to get us outta this mess.”

“Inshallah,”
said Gus.

“We would’ve been better off in the communications room,” said one of the middle-aged men, Tom or Larry. Frank guessed he would never know which.

“We’re a whole lot better off here,” said Rocky. “You won’t get more than a whiff of gas through the bubble. And they’re packed like dead sardines in there. Hot, sweaty, and panicked. Fact, I wish I coulda let some embassy creeps in here, but that’s a no-no except for the ambassador, and he’ s off bein’ a general.”

“General surrender,” said Gus.

“Give him credit,” said Rocky. “High command says keep the embassy open at all costs. In the face of that, it takes some brains to prepare for the worst, and then it takes some guts to surrender to try to save your troops from gettin’ their ass shot off.”

“You’re right,” said Gus. “I shouldn’t be so snippy.”

“O’Connor’s a cut above the herd,” said Rocky. “The other night, in the middle of all kinds of shit, General Gast and some MAAG guys trapped at Supreme Commander’s Headquarters, the air force guys trapped at Dowshan Tappeh, and our fuckin’ friend here gone missin’, the ambassador gets a call from some gofer in Washington sayin’ Brzezinski wants an update on the probability of the Iranian military staging a coup to save the country from Khomeini. By that time there is no Iranian military. The ambassador tells the guy to tell Brzezinski to go fuck himself. Flat out. That’s what he says. The guy says he doesn’t think that would be an appropriate response. The ambassador tells the guy to ask Brzezinski if he wants him to translate it into Polish. And then he hangs up. Now, I don’t like him sendin’ a message like that to a countryman of mine, but I gotta give him credit.”

*   *   *

As the day wore on, chaos and confusion seemed to Frank to play a larger role than the ambassador’s courage. He guessed close to a hundred people huddled in the communications room. In the spacious and air-conditioned bubble, the five of them enjoyed relative comfort. He doubted more than a hint of tear gas rising from the first floor could seep into the air-tight bubble. He resumed normal breathing and felt normal. And then the electricity died.

“I don’t hear something,” said Gus.

“You don’t hear what?” said Rocky.

“I don’t hear the hum of the air conditioner.” In a moment the lights flickered out. No one spoke. In the awful quiet, the muted sound of automatic weapons outside the building took on a new dimension. The firing seemed to come from two separate areas.

“That’s not just G3s,” said Tom or Larry. “One bunch has AK-47s.”

“Maybe the civil war isn’t over yet,” said Gus.

The clang of heavy metal banging on metal changed the conversation. “They’ve got one of those doors shot to hell, and now they’ll batter it open,” said Rocky.

“Yeah, but who?” said Gus. “The G3s or the AK-47s?”

And which one’s on our side? wondered Frank. If either.

The group armed primarily with German-made G3 automatic rifles battered its way in first. The group bearing mostly Russian AK-47s followed quickly. Pushing and shoving but not shooting, the two groups battled to be the first up the stairway to the second floor, where the ambassador, his military aide, and his interpreter waited. Even when he gleaned the details from the ambassador later, Frank remained confused.

“The group that attacked us, the
Feda’iyan,
obviously operate under the control of George Habash and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”

“Obviously?” said Gus.

“You can tell from the black-and-white headscarves they wear,” said the ambassador.

Frank thought of Munair wearing a similar headscarf a few days before. He doubted that devout Munair and his cab-driving brother-in-law operated under the control of George Habash. He stood in the open air outside the bullet-racked embassy with the ambassador, Gus, and Rocky. A cold winter breeze thinned the lingering tear gas. He wanted to do a cable on the attack but realized he did not know enough about what really happened. And he wondered if Rocky would let him file it. Shit, Frank thought. I should give him more credit that that.