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  Once more he focused on the flashing beacon. It was an electronic device, its circuits certainly delicate. If they were smashed, there would be no repairing them here. Nor had he seen another such device in the trunk.

  Moving around to the other side of the car, and keeping low, he worked his way the twenty-five yards across the stony ground at the head of the stream bed. His heart was pounding heavily, and he was light-headed with the effort.

  Still there was no sign of the Russian. And yet Abbas thought he could feel the man somewhere very near, almost as if there were a terrible odor on the night air.

  He found a fairly large rock, which he brought over to the beacon.

  The feeling that Kurshin was close was becoming almost overpowering. Abbas raised the rock over his head. Suddenly he was startled by a light, and he stumbled backward a couple of paces.

  For a second he didn’t know what he was seeing. There seemed to be lights all the way up the long, narrow valley. But then it came to him all at once.

  The lights had been strung in two parallel lines, and stretched for a very long distance. Kurshin had laid them out. They were like flashlights, used as landing markers for the incoming aircraft.

  It meant the planes were on their way in. They would be here soon.

  Raising the rock again, Abbas hurried forward, girding himself to the only action open to him, even though he was too late. If the landing lights were on, surely the aircraft had already found this place.

  He started to bring the big rock down with every ounce of his strength, when something shoved him violently off balance from the right, sending him sprawling on his back.

  Kurshin, wearing the latex mask he’d made from Abbas’s face, loomed overhead. “Sorry, but I still need that beacon,” he said reasonably. “And I’m going to need your clothing as well.”

  Kurshin held up a small remote-control device and pushed a button. The runway lights went out, and the night disappeared from Abbas’s eyes.

  47

  FROM QOM THE RAILROAD went to Kashan, while the main highway split straight south to the ancient city of Isfahan, which also was the capital of the province of Isfahan. Here the road climbed and twisted its tortuous way into the massif of the Zagros Mountains, peaks rising to fifteen thousand feet and more.

  McGarvey and Ghfari were well into the range above the city by two in the morning. The weather had begun to turn ugly, with what appeared to be a major front moving in on them from the northwest. They both felt a sense of urgency now; so much time had passed since Abbas had been taken. This was an unforgiving land at any time of the year. But it was especially harsh in the winter.

  An hour out of Tehrn, they had pulled over to the side of the road and had established contact with Langley Center via satellite. They had been told to get off the air and remain off until 2300 hours Greenwich mean time, which was three and a half hours ahead of Tehrn’s timekeeping. There had been no explanations. When McGarvey had insisted on speaking to Carrara, the channel went dead. Ten minutes later they’d not even been able to establish an uplink with the satellite. They’d been locked out.

  It was nearly time now for their scheduled on-air rendezvous, and McGarvey was not happy about the arrangement. If SAVAK had captured a handie-talkie, it was possible they were monitoring Langley’s broadcasts. It was why he’d wanted to limit contact to the one time.

  He rolled down his window, the frigid air instantly filling the car. “We need to find a place to pull off,” he told Ghfari who was driving.

  “Is it nearly time?” the Iranian asked. He’d done all of the driving because it would have looked very odd for a Westerner to be chauffeuring an Iranian. And besides, Ghfari knew the country and McGarvey did not.

  “Another twenty minutes or so.”

  “There is a place very soon, I think.”

  The highway was built along a narrow ledge that plunged a thousand feet or more to their left, and abutted a wall of stone that rose even higher on their right. There was no place to pull off here. And earlier there had been enough traffic, most of it military, to make it risky even at this hour for them to park at the side of the road. Someone would stop and ask questions they could not answer.

  The gold convoy had to be well inland by now. In fact, by McGarvey’s reckoning it was barely six hours south of them at this point, which meant that the Russian ambush could be very close. He considered the possibility that they might have already passed it.

  He could almost smell Kurshin’s presence on the night air, and the sensation made the hair at the nape of his neck stand on end.

  The road suddenly crossed a long suspension bridge that spanned a dramatic cleft in the mountains, and then climbed sharply to the right, the escarpment finally giving way to a mountain valley that rose on the right gradually to the distant snow-capped peaks.

  A deep drainage ditch ran along the upper side of the macadam, and Ghfari slowed down until he found a shallower spot to cross.

  He put the Range Rover into four-wheel drive, eased up onto the stony valley floor, and headed directly away from the highway.

  McGarvey watched out the rear window until he thought that they could no longer be spotted from the road. “Here,” he said. “Turn off your lights.”

  Ghfari pulled up and switched off the car’s lights, the immense darkness instantly closing in on them. This valley got narrower the farther up it ran, finally ending in a snow-covered bowl between two peaks not more than a thousand feet above where they had stopped.

  McGarvey got out of the Range Rover and hiked down about fifty yards along the track they’d taken up, and then stopped and looked back. The car was nearly invisible even at this distance. The highway was another thousand yards below them. There would be no possibility of being spotted up here by a passing patrol, unless their location had already been pinpointed, and someone were to stand on the road and look through binoculars at the exact spot. Which was not likely.

  There had been something ominous in Langley Center’s peremptory response to their plea for information. Something had happened since he’d left Cairo. Something had changed, and it had worried him all the way south.

  By the time he returned to the car, Ghfari had gotten out and had keyed up the handie-talkie.

  “Any response yet?”

  “No,” the Iranian said. “The satellite’s repeater has not even kicked on. But we are a few minutes early, yes?”

  McGarvey nodded, and looked up toward the mountain peaks, and then back down the dark valley beyond the highway to the harsh, forbidding salt plateaus that dominated the interior of the country.

  “When this is over, you’re not going back,” he said.

  “I know,” Ghfari replied. “But this situation will not last forever. Nothing does, except for Allah.”

  “It might take a while.”

  Ghfari managed a thin smile. “I do not think so. Not considering everything else that’s happening in the world. Change is coming, and it will reach Iran as well.”

  The handie-talkie beeped twice, and a rapid string of morse code that identified the particular repeater channel followed.

  McGarvey took the handie-talkie from Ghfari and keyed it. His mission code name was “Tinker.” “Center, this is Tinker, copy?”

  “Roger, Tinker. Stand by for urgent message from Punjab,” the radio operator at CIA headquarters outside Washington said. “Punjab” was the mission code name for Phil Carrara.

  “Tinker, Punjab. Copy?”

  “Copy, Punjab.”

  “Is your present position secure?” Carrara’s voice was small and very far away, but recognizable.

  “For the moment. But we’re getting a little worried here, if you know what I mean. We’re running out of time.”

  “Yes, I understand. But the situation has changed. The bad guys are en route now. I repeat, the bad guys are en route. ETA beacon position estimated at oh-one hundred hours UTC. You copy that?”

  It was barely two hours from now. “Yes
, Punjab, I copy oh-one hundred UTC. What about the shipment?”

  “The timing couldn’t be better for the bad guys,” Carrara radioed, which meant that the Russian forces would be on the ground and in position for the ambush by the time the convoy reached them.

  “Say beacon position,” McGarvey radioed.

  “We think you should remain in place until the situation is secured, Tinker. We are working up a rescue scenario.”

  “Negative, negative,” McGarvey said. “Say beacon location. Our present position is not tenable after first light.”

  There was a slight pause on the frequency. “Listen to me, Tinker. The situation has changed. Warbucks has ordered our strike team from Van. They are already en route. They will take care of our problem.”

  “Warbucks” was the mission name for the DCI, Roland Murphy.

  “They won’t make it in time.”

  “We think they will.”

  “There is a major storm front moving in from the west. The bad guys may make it, but our people will be right in the middle of it now. Say beacon location, goddamnit!”

  “It’s imperative that you not be captured.”

  “We will be if we are forced to stay here. Where is the beacon?”

  There was another pause on the frequency. “All right, Tinker, we have your position now. You’re close. The beacon is about fifty miles south of you. But it is well off the highway, in a long defile. Our maps show it as Qashqai Valley.”

  Ghfari had pulled out a map, and a moment later he pinpointed the valley with his narrow-beam penlight. “Here,” he said.

  “All right, Punjab, we have it located. We can be up there before oh-one hundred.”

  “We will instruct our forces to look for you, Tinker, but there is something else you need to know.”

  “Recall them. We’ll destroy the beacon.”

  “We can’t,” Carrara said. “The bad guys are Didenko’s people. They’re coming down from Baku.”

  “Yes, I know this.”

  “Didenko has been arrested for treason.”

  The news was stunning. It took McGarvey a few seconds to recover. “Why haven’t his people been recalled, Punjab? What else is going on?”

  “There is armed rebellion in Azerbaidzhan. Our best estimate is that bad guys mean to snatch the goods and make for Libya, or Syria. Do you understand?”

  McGarvey understood completely. It meant that Didenko’s people were going to cut themselves loose from Moscow. Coming in here this morning, they would be desperate men with absolutely nothing to lose. Each man would fight like ten. There would be no quarter given by any of them.

  “Does Kurshin know?” McGarvey radioed in the clear.

  “That’s unknown,” Carrara replied. “But we don’t think so.”

  “We’ll start immediately.”

  “Who is with you?”

  “Number three,” McGarvey said.

  “Any sign of number one?”

  “Not yet, Punjab,” McGarvey radioed. “But with any luck there’ll be three of us coming out.”

  “That’s a roger,” Carrara said. “Keep your head down.”

  McGarvey switched off the handie-talkie and looked at Ghfari. “That’s not going to be so easy if SAVAK has monitored this transmission.”

  48

  “NOT YET, PUNJAB,” the first voice said in English. “But with any luck there’ll be three of us coming out.”

  “That’s a roger,” the second American said. “Keep your head down.”

  Captain Peshadi shut off the tape recorder. “The transmissions ceased at that point,” he said.

  Colonel Bakhtir looked extremely troubled. Peshadi faced him across his desk. It was a little past two-thirty in the morning. Most of Tehrn slept, but SAVAK’s headquarters was fully staffed, on emergency footing.

  “Do we know where this valley is?” the colonel demanded.

  “Yes, sir. It is south of Isfahan.”

  “How far from Tehrn?”

  “Five hundred kilometers.”

  “Too far, too far,” Colonel Bakhtir muttered. “Get me a map. I want to see for myself.” He picked up his telephone as Peshadi opened the office door and called for Sergeant Turik to bring the map.

  “Get me General Dadgar,” the colonel told the operator. He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “The map, Hussain?”

  Sergeant Turik came over from the operations room with a large-scale map.

  “Have there been any other transmissions?” Peshadi asked from the doorway.

  “The frequency has been silent,” Turik said. He glanced in at the colonel, and lowered his voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet, Mohammed. But I want you to get us a helicopter and pilot.”

  “Peshadi!” the colonel roared.

  “A fast helicopter, Mohammed,” Peshadi said. “And a good pilot.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now,” Peshadi said. He went back inside and spread the map on the colonel’s desk After a moment he found the valley, and circled it with a pencil. “Here,” he said. “This is the Qashqai Valley.”

  Bakhtir studied the map, tracing a line from the valley down to the highway, and then south. When he looked up Peshadi could see genuine fear in the man’s eyes.

  “Yes, I’m still holding for the general,” he snapped into the telephone.

  “The Americans are involved with something down there,” Peshadi said carefully. “And so, too, are the Russians, unless the transmission we overheard was only a ruse. It’s possible.”

  The colonel waved the suggestion off. “It is no ruse, believe me, Hussain. We have received reports that a people’s revolution may have begun in Baku and a few of the other cities of Azerbaidzhan.”

  “But the communications device is American, as is the satellite its signal reaches. That is what our technicians tell me.”

  “The Americans are involved, there’s no doubt about that. But so are the Russians now.”

  “There is to be a war between them on Iranian soil?” Peshadi asked, amazed at what he was hearing.

  “Not if we can prevent it,” Bakhtir said. “And prevent it we must, at all costs. You can’t know the importance of this.”

  “No, sir,” Peshadi said.

  Bakhtir suddenly stiffened. “Yes, General. I do understand what time it is. But by Allah this is urgent. Iran needs its air force tonight. Immediately.”

  Peshadi went to the door. Across the hall, Turik in the operations room, was perched on the edge of a desk. His sergeant looked up from the phone and nodded: he’d managed to get them a helicopter.

  “No, General, I have not spoken with the imam. There is no time for that. It is why I called you with this. We must hurry —or what is coming from Bushehr tonight will be lost.”

  Bakhtir looked up at Peshadi and genuine relief cleared his features. He nodded. “Of course, General. We believe it may be a two-pronged threat. One from the Soviets, who may have sent an air force of unknown strength through the mountains from Baku. And the other from the Americans themselves.”

  Peshadi could hear the general’s shouts from across the room.

  “Of course it may be an elaborate plot by the Americans themselves, but we cannot deny the reports we’ve been getting out of Baku, and Moscow. Nor can we ignore this threat.”

  Sergeant Turik came to the door, and Peshadi turned to him. “Did you get us a machine?”

  “Yes. By the time we get out to Doshen Toppeh it will be warmed up and standing by. It’s an American-made Cobra. Very fast, and loaded with weapons.”

  “Hussain,” the colonel called, and Peshadi turned back.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Close the door.”

  Peshadi did as he was told. Bakhtir had his hand over the telephone’s mouthpiece.

  “I want you to get down there as fast as you possibly can. The general is checking with his radar squadrons, but considering the mountainous terrain, I don’t think they will see much. Also
he says that the weather is deteriorating in the area.”

  “I understand,” Peshadi said. “We can leave immediately.”

  “Good,” the colonel said. “It’s possible that the air force cannot do anything for us, in which case we will have to rely on the army units coming up with the convoy.”

  “Convoy?” Peshadi asked.

  “Yes, I’ll continue to hold,” Bakhtir said into the phone. “You must know something,” he told Peshadi. “An agreement has been reached with the United States government to release all Iranian money that they have illegally held in their banks since the revolution. Plus interest.”

  Peshadi said nothing. No mention of this had been made on the television or in the newspapers. The news, if it was true, was momentous. Iran’s economy had been badly damaged by the war with Iraq.

  “The payment in the form of gold bullion arrived in Bushehr and is on its way here by convoy. At this moment it is approaching that valley.”

  Peshadi was momentarily confused. “But the amount … . It must be huge!”

  “More than one hundred metric tons of gold, Hussain. Gold which Iran desperately needs. Gold which the Russians would like to have.”

  “Gold that the Americans would like to take back, blaming the Russians for its theft if they can.”

  Colonel Bakhtir was nodding. “Stop them, Hussain.”

  “I will,” Peshadi promised. “But radio the convoy leader and warn them.”

  “It’s not possible,” the colonel said. “There has been no communications with them. Equipment trouble, or some such. One would think that precautions would have been taken given the nature of the shipment. But it is up to us now. To you.”

  “I understand,” Peshadi said.

  “Kill the Americans and the Russians, Hussain,” Bakhtir said. “Kill them all.”

  “Yes,” Peshadi said. “With pleasure.”

  49

  THE BIG AIRCRAFT LURCHED heavily and dropped into an air pocket, coming up short with a loud, bone-jarring bang. KGB Colonel Alexei Berezin looked on unconcernedly as the pissant copilot picked himself up from the deck and continued back to him. This was better than Baku. Anything was better than that.