Crossfire Page 29

  “Let’s hear it all.”

  “With Didenko’s arrest and now the apparent uprising in Azerbaidzhan, we think two things are possible. The KGB commander won’t want to return to Moscow. He would face certain arrest with his boss. So he might stay there in Baku and help the new government. Or”—Carrara glanced at Murphy—“or he means to continue.”

  “To snatch the gold?” Haines asked, looking up from his phone call.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?” Murphy asked. “Even if they pulled it off, and got back to Baku with it, what then, Phil?”

  “I don’t know, General,” Carrara said. “But I do know that a billion and a quarter dollars’ worth of gold is a very powerful incentive. And at this moment that field commander has everything going for him. He has the force and the ability to go after the gold. There aren’t many people who know what he’s up to. His boss has been taken out of the picture. And he finds himself in the middle of a confusing situation in which normal law and order are probably breaking down. No one there knows what’s happening from minute to minute.”

  The President was still holding the phone to his ear. “He could throw in his lot with the Azerbaidzhan government. A billion plus in gold would be a powerful bargaining chip across any table. No matter what happened afterward, he would end up on top.”

  “Or he wouldn’t have to return to Azerbaidzhan at all,” Carrara said. “Iraq would welcome him with open arms. So would Syria. Even Lebanon. There, with his money and his force, he could carve out his own fiefdom. The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re certainly sufficient to keep us in the dark.”

  The President nodded thoughtfully. “Who is it?” he said into the phone. “Put him on.”

  Murphy had finished with his call and he looked again at some of the photographs.

  “Jim, yes, I just heard. The general is over here from Langley. Are your people ready to confirm?” The President looked at Murphy and Carrara and nodded. “How about Soviet military traffic?”

  “Are we still watching the Baku airfield in real time?” Murphy asked Carrara.

  “Yes, sir. The moment those planes take off and head for Iran we’ll know about it.”

  “All right, I want you over here right away. We’ll meet in the situation room. But it’s important that I be kept up to date. I want to know what’s going on over there. In detail, Jim.”

  Haines finished his call at the same time as the President and they both hung up. “Powell is on his way over,” the security adviser said. “He called my office.”

  “Besides our satellite surveillance of the region, who is watching things over there?” the President asked.

  “We have Bob Wills standing by in Cairo with our station people,” Murphy said. “And of course McGarvey and Bijan Ghfari in Iran.”

  “How about that Delta Force team?”

  “They’re en route from Ankara to Van, a city of some sixty thousand people in eastern Turkey about fifty or sixty miles from the Iranian border,” Carrara said.

  “When will they arrive there?”

  “Within the hour, Mr. President.”

  “And how soon could they be on site? In Iran. At that Russian beacon, I mean.”

  Carrara started to shrug, but then thought better of it. “The straight-line distance is about five hundred to six hundred miles. But assuming we wanted to get there without being detected by Iranian radar, or by the Russian forces, we’d have to take a more indirect route. Let’s say double the distance. Three to four hours from liftoff at Van until touch down on site.”

  “And the Russian forces out of Baku?” the President asked.

  “Almost the same distance, Mr. President,” Carrara said, understanding exactly what he was being asked. “But the Soviet aircraft are a little slower than ours.”

  “Let me get this straight,” the President said. “If our Delta team is placed on standby in Van, there would be enough time for them to reach the target even if we didn’t give them the go-ahead until the Russians lifted off from Baku?”

  “It would be tight, Mr. President, but I believe we could beat the Russians to the punch.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” the President said. “I was beginning to believe that everything was going to depend upon one or two men alone in those mountains.”

  45

  THE DARK BLUE PEUGEOT with government plates was admitted through the gates of Qasr Prison and drew up at a side entrance to the main administration building. Captain Peshadi was alone in the car. It was a few minutes past midnight, and he had been without sleep for two days and two nights. His mood was black.

  The prison was a squat gray stone fortress. Peshadi looked up at the thick walls, rolls of electrified barbed wire glinting in the harsh lights. Get behind these walls and there was no hope, the thought came unbidden into his mind, and he shivered.

  His assistant, Sergeant Turik, was waiting for him in the downstairs staging room. He was noisily drinking tea from a tall, chipped glass, and when he saw Peshadi he put the glass down and grinned.

  “I think our birds have flown the coop,” he said.

  “Abolhasan has finally talked?” Peshadi asked, the first glimmering of hope coming alive. Colonel Bakhtir had been relentless ever since he’d learned that Abbas was missing. His twelve-hour deadline had come and gone, and he was out for blood now. Anyone’s.

  “He gave us the one name we wanted,” Turik said. “But we got even more than that. It was real police work.”

  “You said the ‘birds’ have flown the coop?”

  “South on the Tarasht Highway. They’re long gone by now. Probably in Qom, or somewhere south. Maybe they’re heading for Turkey.”

  Peshadi was becoming impatient. “But you just told me Abolhasan gave us the one name we wanted.”

  “Yes?” Turik asked, incomprehension in his eyes.

  “One name. Where’d the other one come from?”

  “Oh,” the sergeant said, nodding. “There are two of them now, but we don’t have a positive ID on number two.”

  Peshadi waited.

  “We’re working on it,” Turik said.

  Peshadi maintained his patience as best he could. “But how do we know that there are two of them, instead of the one Abolhasan identified?”

  “The Range Rover was spotted twice. Once when it picked up the tall Westerner downtown, and the second time on the highway south.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. I want to talk to Abolhasan,” Peshadi said.

  A pained look came over Turik’s face. “He’s dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Not me. One of the shits in back. The man was a diabetic. Weak heart. There was no way for us to have known.”

  “But you taped his interrogation?” Peshadi asked, half believing for just a fraction of a second that the British might be right. Perhaps theirs was the only civilized police force in the world.

  “Of course.”

  “And the name he gave us?”

  “Bijan Ghfari.”

  “Picarde,” Peshadi said, a little thrill rising in his chest.

  “Yes, and that’s not all,” Turik said. “The office has apparently been closed for good. Everyone is gone. Vanished into thin air.”

  “What about this man with Ghfari? This Westerner? How did we come to learn about him?”

  “Several witnesses spotted the man getting into the Range Rover on a street downtown. They noticed him not only because he was obviously Western, but because he was carrying a big leather bag, and he seemed to be in a great hurry.”

  “Did you get a description?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the sighting on the highway?”

  “The police. But since there was no reason to stop them, they did nothing.”

  “Then why the report?”

  “Because the Rover turned up on the stolen list, and they happened to remember seeing it earlier.”

  “Heading south.”

 
Turik nodded. “It’s out of our jurisdiction now. We can notify Qom and let them handle it.”

  “Did the highway police get a look at our mystery man?” Peshadi asked.

  “Not enough of a look to match a description,” the sergeant said. “But they were sure that there were two people in the car.”

  “Good work,” Peshadi said, and Turik beamed. “Now I would like to talk with these witnesses who spotted the Westerner with the big leather bag.”

  Again the sergeant’s face fell. “They’re not here. We let them go home. There was no reason to hold them. They’d done nothing wrong.”

  Peshadi sighed deeply. It was the lack of sleep, he told himself. “Well, at least we have their descriptions, I hope.”

  “Yes,” Turik said. He plucked a file folder from the table and handed it to Peshadi. “I had them combined and transcribed. They match well.”

  Peshadi opened the file and glanced at the typewritten notes, then closed the folder. “I think that’s all for tonight,” he said.

  “Shall I notify Qom?”

  “I’ll take care of that, Mohammed. You go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you at the office in the morning.”

  “You should get some sleep yourself, Captain,” Turik said, and he grabbed his coat and left.

  Peshadi’s small, overstuffed office was on the third floor of the Ministry of Justice building in the southern part of the city. His was one of the few with lights on.

  It was late. His eyes were on fire, and his throat felt raw; he’d read and reread the description of the Westerner a dozen times, and still he felt that he was missing something … or, better yet, that he knew this man. Tall, husky, obviously Western. Self-assured, but definitely in a hurry. A stranger in a strange land. An alien on another planet. An exotic. Where had he heard such a description?

  Three questions were foremost in Peshadi’s mind. How had the Westerner entered Iran? What was his purpose here? And where had he and Ghfari gone?

  Picarde, S.A., was almost certainly a front for CIA activities in Tehrn, which meant that Ghfari worked for the Americans, and that the Westerner who’d been spotted was an American.

  Here to close down the Picarde operation? Peshadi had had his suspicions, but he’d done nothing out of the ordinary against anyone on the staff. At least nothing out of the ordinary for Iran. What, then, had made them decide to close up shop? And why had they taken the risk of sending someone in to help?

  That line of thinking was getting him nowhere. The man had obviously come to Iran to do something. To accomplish some goal.

  The primary question, Peshadi thought, was what exactly were the Americans up to this time?

  And what about Richard Abbas and the body of his assistant in his apartment? Someone had been tortured up there. What sort of sense did that make?

  Turik came in and went to the tea urn, but it was empty. He looked forlorn.

  “What are you doing here?” Peshadi asked.

  “Couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that bastard with Ghfari.” Turik, who’d also been trained in England, only spoke in such a Western fashion when he and Peshadi were alone. One day he would slip up, though, and Peshadi knew that he would not be able to help the man.

  “I think he’s an American. Probably CIA.”

  Turik nodded.

  “But how did he get into Iran?”

  “By air?” Turik mused.

  “Probably. Under false papers, of course. Perhaps one of the Frenchmen slipped by …”

  Suddenly Turik made a connection. “Russian!” he blurted. He hurried out of Peshadi’s office and raced across the corridor to the operations room, where from a startled night duty officer he grabbed the Open Files book.

  Peshadi had followed him. “What is it, Mohammed?”

  Turik looked up a file number, then retrieved the file from one of the cabinets lining the far wall. He opened it and quickly scanned the notes as he came back to Peshadi. His eyes were shining. “I was right,” he said, handing the police report to Peshadi. “Valeri Vasilevich Bayev. A Russian engineer here to drum up business.”

  “So what?” Peshadi said, but then he read the description.

  “The Russian disappeared from his hotel room last night. He hasn’t been seen since. Or at least he hadn’t been seen until he climbed into that Range Rover.”

  “Maybe not a Russian,” Peshadi said, but then he had another chilling thought, and he looked through the report for information about the man’s passport. Bayev was from Baku. Azerbaidzhan.

  “This is trouble, isn’t it,” Turik said.

  Peshadi looked up. “Considering what’s happening along our northern border right now, I’ll have to agree. But I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s something.”

  Turik was watching him.

  Peshadi turned to the night duty officer, a young man with wisps of a beard on his chin. “I want you to telephone Colonel Bakhtir, wherever he is. Get him out of bed and tell him he is needed here.”

  “Later this morning?” the young man asked, wide-eyed.

  “No, right now,” Peshadi said. “Tell him we have an emergency of the greatest magnitude.”

  46

  WHEN DICK ABBAS AWOKE it was very dark, but he could not see the stars overhead. Again the thought flashed through his brain that he was blind, but gradually he began to see the car off to the left, the flashing red light on the radio beacon twenty-five yards away, and the towering mountain peaks, dark and ghostly in the night.

  The sky was overcast, he realized. That was why there were no stars. Now he could faintly make out the moving clouds obliterating some of the peaks to the west. Whatever weather was moving in on them was coming down the great funnel between the mountains, all the way from Turkey.

  That afternoon Kurshin had given him more water to drink and a thin paste of rice and what was probably curried lamb. He’d thrown up his first mouthful, but he’d kept eating, finally managing to hold some of the food in his stomach.

  By nightfall he was feeling somewhat better, though the pain in his groin was a constant reminder of what had happened to him in Tehrn, to what he had become at the hands of the Russians. As far as he knew, there would be nothing to stop them from carrying out their plans. Shahpur was dead, and Ghfari was too young and inexperienced to be of much help. He might have made contact with Langley, but they would have no idea where he’d been taken.

  By now Peshadi and his people would have found Shahpur’s body, and they would know that something concerning Picarde, S.A., was going on. The entire staff was probably behind the walls of Qasr Prison by now. There would be no saving them. Nor was help coming for him.

  Abbas struggled free of the two thin blankets he’d been given and sat up. His back was stiff and sore from lying on the hard ground, and he was so cold that he shivered uncontrollably for at least five minutes before the episode passed, leaving him breathless and frightened.

  Kurshin was nowhere in sight. Abbas figured he was probably asleep in the back seat of the car.

  His own strength was seriously diminished because of the torture he had endured, and because of the lack of decent food and water over the past … how many days? It was hard to keep track.

  Stumbling to his feet, he stood for a long time until he regained his balance, and then he took a couple of tentative steps toward the car. He expected at any moment to be confronted, or shot.

  He had no doubt that his captor was Russian. No one else could have had the intelligence about the gold shipment, nor would any other country have had the expertise to mount what was turning out to be a sophisticated operation.

  And there was something about the man’s eyes, about his manner in Tehrn. Unlike most Westerners, he’d not been in the least nervous about being in Iran. He’d acted naturally. As a Canadian might act in the United States. So naturally, in Abbas’s estimation, that he could only be Russian.

  He took another few cautious steps toward the car, angling to the left so that he woul
d come up from behind.

  Assuming it was a Russian operation, and this valley was to be used as a landing site, the Soviet aircraft would have to come down the mountain ranges at extremely low altitudes to avoid detection by Iranian radar. That was the reason for the beacon Kurshin had put out: it was meant to guide the aircraft in.

  If Kurshin were dead, or if the beacon itself were put out of commission, the Soviet pilots would not be able to find their way in, and the plan would be wrecked.

  He had no idea what time it was. Kurshin had taken his watch. But he figured it had to be very late, probably well after midnight. The beacon had been operating for more than twenty-four hours. The gold convoy would be close by now, and the Soviet aircraft would be coming in at any time.

  He cocked his head to listen, but the night was silent except for the faint, faraway sighing of the wind through the high passes.

  A few yards from the car, he ducked down below the level of the rear window and half crawled, half scrambled the rest of the way. He carefully tested the trunk lid, but it was locked as he had expected it would be.

  He made his way around to the driver’s side of the car and slowly rose up so that he could see inside. Kurshin was not there. Neither in the back seat nor in the front.

  Abbas slowly rose up so that he could see over the roof of the car. The beacon’s red light winked on and off in a two-second interval. But nothing else moved in the night. Absolutely nothing. Even the distant wind seemed to have suddenly been stilled.

  He remained where he was, standing against the side of the car, for a long time—perhaps ten minutes—waiting for something to happen. Anything.

  Kurshin had not simply walked away. He was here somewhere. But he was invisible. What had happened? What was happening?

  Again he cocked his head to listen. He figured he would be able to hear incoming aircraft from a long way up the valley. But there was nothing.