Card Sharks

A Wind from Khorasan
The Narrative of J. Robert Belew

President Carter's head was sticking out of one of those terrible polyester sweaters of his like a turtle's. He looked at me with his sad Eleanor Roosevelt eyes and said, "I want you to lead a mission to rescue the hostages in Tehran."

It was April 16, 1980. The sunshine of a pleasant spring morning spilled in through the French windows of the Oval Office. The roses were in bloom.

I sucked on my moustache. For one of very few times in my life I had nothing to say.

"It has been decided," said National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, looking as always like a shaved chow dog, "to employ a picked force of aces."

"It's my understanding, sir," I said carefully, "that Delta Force has been preparing a rescue mission for several months."

"How did you know about that?" barked the fourth man in the room. He was a little guy, about my own height, but weedier. He had a moustache even bigger than mine, if not quite as splendid, and a balding head shaped like a doorknob. He was no one I expected to see here, and no one I was happy to. "That's supposed to be classified."

"Mr. Battle," I said, "I'm in the business. I specialized in high-risk operations when I served in Special Forces, and, as you no doubt know, have continued doing so on a contract basis ever since. As a matter of fact, I was hoping to be included in the mission." I thought about it a moment. "If not exactly on these terms."

"You are perfectly correct, Major Belew," the President said, "Zbig and Mr. Battle have proposed an alteration to the plan which had been decided upon. I know that this is kind of an eleventh-hour thing, but I believe in my heart that it's worth doing."

"Major Belew," Battle said, pushing his head forward with his eyes shining like anthracite, you're an ace." He said it breathlessly, as if it were a revelation. Since it wasn't to me, I just stood there and waited.

I still didn't know what he was doing there. I had passing familiarity with his dossier; he'd been a hanger-around the fringes of black ops for years. He'd done a hitch in the Army way back around the time I joined, back in the Fifties, but he had managed to avoid getting into combat. After the Army he got his law degree and joined the FBI. He didn't stick with the Bureau long. He wandered into a succession of official and semi-official government and political jobs — sort of like Cyrus Vance, Carter's Secretary of State, but at a lower level.

One would not expect him to be doing any jobs for Carter. Battle had been a Nixon man. He got himself into some rather warm water over a certain third-rate burglary back in the early Seventies, and dropped out of sight for a while.

When I didn't respond, he went on. "It's been decided that the rescue mission presents a perfect opportunity for aces to show how much they contribute to this great country of ours. They — you — haven't been in such a good odor since the '76 riots.

"One of the major complications to this operation," Brzezinski said in his ponderous Eastern European accent, "has been the number of operators required. The current profile calls for one hundred thirty-two men. A force that size creates logistic nightmares."

"Makes it a bit hard to be discreet, too," I said.

"Prezisely."

The President stood gazing out the window with his hands clasped behind his back. "We reckon using aces will enable us to do the job with far fewer people, he said. "With the help of the Justice Department, we have assembled a team of six. You will make seven, if you agree to go."

I felt the skin of my cheeks get hot. The President turned back to the room.

"Also, there seems to be an ugly tide of bigotry rising in this country, against those touched by the wild card. This could be an opportunity to reverse that tide before it gathers momentum.

He looked me in the eye. "What do you say, Major? Will you lead an all-ace rescue team?"

It was approximately the craziest idea I'd ever heard in my life. Seven aces against a country full of well-armed religious fanatics, jumping in at the last minute on top of a mission that had been under careful construction for upwards of five months. And aces from Justice, for the good Lord's sake! It was like playing Russian roulette with an autoloading pistol.

There was only one thing to do. I snapped to attention and saluted.

"Mr. President," I said, "I'm your man."

The sun was already up and hot, eight days later, when our three Sea Stallion helicopters touched down in an abandoned salt-mining district near Garmsar, fifty miles southeast of Tehran. That meant we were already behind schedule. With luck that wouldn't signify, since we had nothing to do but keep out of sight — and keep from suffering sunstroke — until dark.

"Thanks for the ride, guys," said Jay Ackroyd, dropping to the rockhard yellow ground. The jarhead crewmen squinted at him, suspecting he was being sarcastic. He was, to be sure, but he gave them a big grin and a wave. "It's been real."

They scowled and turned back to the work of unloading our gear. "Real reminiscent of a root canal," he said, turning away. "Write if you guys find work you're more suited to, hear?"

We had flown overnight in a C-130 Hercules from the former Soviet airbase at Wadi Kena in Egypt to a point in the desert two hundred miles southeast of Tehran and ninety miles from the nearest settlement. Desert One was more name than it deserved. A hundred men from Delta Force would hold it while we went in. Our support would be coordinated from there.

The flight from Desert One, mostly in the dark, hugging broken, tortuous terrain, had not been easy by anyone's standards. Notwithstanding that, I was frankly not impressed. I've been on a lot of heliborne missions, in the Nam and later. The jarheads only got us there by the skin of their teeth.

"Who picked these bozos for a secret mission, anyway?" Ackroyd demanded of me. "I wouldn't let 'em walk my dog, if I had one. Join the Army and see the Navy not to mention the Marines."

I gave him a qualified grin. I was also somewhat concerned about the patchwork nature of our supporting elements. It was as if every branch of service wanted to get its oar in, and some of the personnel weren't adequately prepared for this kind of job. The Marine pilots had been so nervous that even our operators right off Civilian Street noticed.

Ackroyd didn't miss much, in all fact. Have to give him that. He was an ace private investigator. Well, he was an ace, and he was a PI. He was in his thirties, brown and brown, an inch or two taller than I. The sort of man you could never pick out of a crowd, a considerable asset in his line of work. He seemed fit enough, physically.

He was our ace in the hole, if you'll forgive the pun. The big reason we could dispense with a hundred and eleven of the 118-man strike team Delta planned to take to Tehran. Since there was no way they could hope to keep the whole operation quiet, there had to be enough guns on the line to provide security; and it would take a lot of warm bodies to escort fifty hostages across Roosevelt Street to the Amjadieh soccer stadium where the choppers would pick them up.

Ackroyd changed all that. He just pointed his finger at you and, pop! you were somewhere else. No muss, no fuss, no noise to alert Student Militants that their hostages were being freed. He was perfect.

Except, he could not seem to take the situation seriously. At least, he declined to take me seriously. My amour propre is usually not too delicate, but I was hoping that, at the narrow passage, he wouldn't take time to toss off a quick one-liner every time I gave an order. He had what today would be described as an Attitude.

There was a commotion from the Sea Stallion's open side door. A small man with dark hair cropped close to his round head in a military do was engaged in a jostling derby with one of the Marines. "Here," I said sharply, "what's going on here?"

The jarhead stepped back away with an insincere smile. "I was just giving the Sergeant here a hand."

Sergeant First Class Paul Chung, United States Special Forces, thrust his chest out like a banty cock and glared at him. "I can take care of myself!" he snapped, dusting himself off where the jarhead had touched him. For all his exotic Oriental appearance his accent was pure Philly.

He stepped straight out of the chopper and floated to the ground, arms folded across his chest.

He was the only serving military man we had — I did my twenty and got out in the mid-Seventies, myself. He was second-generation Chinese-American, but he looked Central Asian. It gave us something to play on, since Iran has a sizable Turkmen minority up in the northeast.

Informally he was known as Dive Bomb. He could adjust the weight of any or all parts of his body at will, sort of like Hiram Worchester. He could add mass to a punch, or he could make himself feather-light and drift on wind currents. We figured to use him for recon, or if we needed someone to get over the ten-foot wall that surrounded the compound or onto a roof.

I watched him tightly as he grounded and walked away. He had an attitude too, what you usually call your Small Man Syndrome — not everyone handles it as gracefully as I, though then again I'm more middle-sized. I'd been hoping he was too professional — or too smart — to start a dustup with our ride out of here.

The Marine in the doorway muttered something about "ragheads" and turned away. When the sun had come up Chung had gotten on his knees and bowed toward Mecca to pray; though American-born, he was a practicing Muslim. The Marines got quite a kick out of that. I decided he might not need a chewing-out after all.

Amy Mears appeared in the door, blond, frail, and ethereal as a Maxfield Parrish nymph. A good-enough looking kid with short black hair and eyes of startling green materialized beside the chopper.

"Here, honey," he said. "Allow me."

She nodded. He grabbed her by the waist, plucking her neatly from the suddenly-helpful hands of the crew, and swung her down. He offered her his forearm.

"I never knew you were such a gentleman," she murmured.

"Yeah," the kid said. "I got class coming out the ass, baby."

Her smile slipped. She gently liberated her arm.

That was Billy Ray. A kid he truly was, too; he was all of twenty years old, still a student at Michigan University. He had been on his way to NFL stardom as a running back until he busted his leg in three places in the first quarter of the Rose Bowl. People began to suspect there was something unusual about him when he tried to get back into the game before halftime. A blood test for xenovirus Takis-A ended his hopes of an athletic career; he had jumped at the offer from Justice to get in on a secret mission.

He was security for our team. He was a hand-to-hand combat expert, stronger than a nat, quicker, and a great deal meaner. There was anger in those green eyes, lots of it. If he could direct that anger against the enemy he could be a lethal — and silent — asset.

Ackroyd materialized at Mears' elbow, guided her away from Billy Ray with a greater degree of deftness than one expects from window-peepers, at least outside of detective fiction. Ray's eyes tracked them like green laser beams.

I watched him tightly. If he couldn't control his rage he'd blow the lid off the mission. There had not been time enough for me to decide which was most likely. Roll the bones, roll the bones …

The choppers lifted with a whine and headed for their own hideout. The team had rattled around inside one of the big RH-53s; two of them would be enough to lift off team and hostages both, if something should happen to Mr. Ackroyd, which God forbid. The third was along as backup. Choppers are unreliable beasts.

We were truly out in the boondocks, and unlikely to attract more trouble than we could handle. Just in case, I issued disguises and weapons and turned a deaf ear to grumbling. We took shelter from the lethal sun in a fossilized shack with busted-out windows that let the hot Persian wind blow right through to our bones.

I was hoping my team would get some sleep during the day. Naturally, that was optimistic. Everybody was keyed up to the extent they barely fit inside their skins. They didn't have the soldier's knack for snatching sleep where you can find it, or a soldier's gut appreciation of why that's needful.

Harvey Melmoth volunteered to take first watch. I went out to pick him a nice spot on a little hardpacked sand hill where he could keep watch on the surrounding desolation.

"I don't need that," he said in a whisper — he couldn't talk any louder than that. He pushed away the Kalashnikov AKM I was trying to hand him. A fold of his red and white checked kaffiyeh fell in front of his mouth, further muffling his words. "I won't take life."

He was a little balding guy dwarfed by his baggy Western-castoff Third World battle dress. He had a prissy little mouth and blue eyes swimming behind round spectacles thick as armor plate. He looked as if a walk back into the stacks would tax him; an obstacle course would drop him dead in his tracks. And yet here he was, key component in the hairiest commando mission since the West Germans took down the hijacked airliner at Mogadishu.

His ace name was "the Librarian." His power was to project a zone of absolute silence for a radius of about five meters. He would be crucial in enabling us to gain entry to the Embassy, neutralize any guards we encountered, and get to the widely-scattered hostages without alerting our enemy.

"Think of it as a prop," I said, pressing the rifle on him. "The point is, if people see you holding that thing, they're liable to reckon we're too mean to mess with. If we don't have to fight, it's less likely that anyone gets hurt. Us or them."

He showed me a timid little chipmunk smile beneath his moustache. "I'm not worried, Major. Adventure fiction is bad fiction. We're having an adventure. Surely I can't die in a bad novel?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "Make sure to lend your guardian Muse" — he nodded brightly — "a hand by keeping your eyes open."

He reached inside the baggy tunic he wore. "Is it all right if I read?" he asked, pulling out a paperback copy of Jude the Obscure.

"Later," I said and walked back to the shack.

"I'm not afraid," Chung was saying when I got back. "Whatever happens, I can handle it."

"I like to see confidence," I said, "but a man who feels no fear is either stupid or psychotic. We're in danger every minute we're on the ground here, and I don't want anyone to forget it. Fear is our friend; it's Evolution's way of keeping us on our toes."

Ray was sitting on the table kicking the heels of his cowboy boots against the dusty plank floor. "What's to be afraid of? Nobody ever died from pain."

I gave him a hard look "Say that after you've done time in the basements of Evin Prison with SAVAMA beating on the soles of your feet with a steel cable."

He jutted his jaw. Ackroyd made a contemptuous sound.

"The Mechanic versus Kid Wolverine! The fight of the century!" He gave a sideways look to Damsel. "What do you think, kid? If the macho bullshit gets any deeper in here, we could always stand on the table to try to keep an airway open."

Lady Black had turned her cape reflective side out. She looked entirely cool. Her laugh sounded the same.

"You've got your own swagger, Popinjay," she said. He scowled at the nickname. "They've got their tough talk, you've got your smart mouth. It's all insecurity talking."

Ackroyd glowered and found something fascinating in the white-bright landscape outside. He did not savor the taste of his own medicine.

Joann Jefferson — Lady Black, so-called for obvious reasons — was a Justice Department operative, a cool, tall woman in her mid to late twenties. Her skin was black, but nowhere near as black as her form-fitting suit, or the flip side of the cape she had pulled about her clear to the eyes. The garments seemed to suck in light like a black hole.

Her power was to draw energy into herself. She would be useful for turning out the lights at need — during our wonder week of training at Delta's Camp Smokey in North Carolina, she had shown that she could blow out a generator in seconds flat. Since she could also drain electrochemical energy from a human body, she could render a sentry quickly and quietly unconscious — or dead, an alternative she abhorred.

She gave me a quick glance above the dazzling folds of the cape. I looked hurriedly away. The old Adam was staring; she was no beauty, I suppose, but she was a handsome woman, and her poise and quick dry wit made her thoroughly attractive.

Besides, Lady Black could not control her energy drain. The suit was insulated, the cape energy-absorbent on one side and reflective on the other, to modulate intake/output. However warm her blood might run, her embrace would be mortal cold.

Of course, bouncing away from her my eyes struck Mears. She was gazing at Paul Chung and smiling.

Her Justice Department employers had codenamed her Damsel. She had curly blonde locks hanging in enormous blue Walter Keane waif eyes. In a purely physical way she was far prettier than Lady Black. Just the same she was less to my taste; she was what you might call vapid.

Her talent was to make nats into temporary aces. When he was running over the team's dossiers with me, Battle indicated that the Powers That Were hoped she might be able to really boost the power of an individual who already happened to be an ace; a human blast of nitrous oxide, as it were. When I asked him whether that had actually been tried he dodged behind the ever-handy National Security / Need-to-Know barricade, like a rodeo clown giving the slip to a Brahma bull. I took it that meant "no."

You should realize how common that kind of thing is in the military, and shadow ops in particular. You would think when lives and great causes are at stake, everything would be run in a bright, clean, efficient manner. Well, that's McDonald's, not special missions. When we were prepping for the raid on the Son Tay POW camp in 1970 — which was a smashing success, by the way, except Intelligence neglected to tell us the NVA had moved all the prisoners out a few weeks before — one of the squaddies made up patches that showed a mushroom and a pair of cartoon eyes against a black background, and sported the legend "Kept In The Dark — Fed Only Horseshit."

I was not particularly encouraged when Mears took me aside in the Camp Smokey rec hall. "I don't think they quite understand my power," she said plaintively.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She bit her lip, looked around the room. Chung was refusing to concede another hopeless game of ping-pong to Billy Ray, who wasn't even using a paddle. Ackroyd was offering color commentary to Joann, who paid him no mind.

"I can't just turn my power on and off," Mears said. "I have to really care about a guy. There has to be chemistry."

When I accepted command of the mission, I accepted it on the government's terms, a decision I was to repent at leisure. They picked the team for me; I had no input. I was not allowed to drop Mears. I could have offered to resign, or hold my breath until I turned blue; Battle, with Zbig Man backing him, had made abundantly clear one would do as much good as the other.

Understand, please: I'm a professional warrior; I'm also, unfashionable as it was then, a patriot. When my country tells me to saddle up and go, I saddle up and go. But I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or the infallibility of the top brass.

Back in our cozy Persian hideaway, Chung was failing to notice Damsel giving him the dewy eye. He was in a funk because all his conversational gambits seemed to fall flat. I could only hope he would wake up and see which way the reaction arrow pointed — and that Damsel wouldn't panic if we came to dagger's-drawn with the happy lads of Pasdaran.

Well, this was surely an interesting crew, from a sociopsychological standpoint: take a bunch of civilians, who happen to have been gifted with extraordinary powers courtesy of an alien virus, put them under intense stress in a situation they were in no way equipped to handle, and just watch those social dynamics fly.

… As I said: bizarre. You can see the outlines of a real workable mission, here. You can also see seams you could sail the Nimitz through. There was something here I could not put my finger on.

I checked my watch. Nine hours to sunset. I hoped nobody's personality would disintegrate before the enemy even got a shot at us.

The sun had dropped almost to the distant blue ripple that was the mountains near the holy city of Qom when Ackroyd, on watch, came racing down the hill waving his arms and shouting, "We've got company!"

"Fine," I said, stepping from the shed. In my hand I had my sidearm, a Tokagypt 9mm, based on the old Browning 1908 by way of the Soviet Tokarev. It was a trophy from an earlier adventure a little farther west, and a nice touch, I thought: just the thing an officer of the Nur al-Allah's Palestinian auxiliaries would tote. "Now get back to your post and keep an eye on them."

It was a pair of vehicles, a battered Chevy truck and a dapper little tan Volkswagen Thing that looked as if it ought to have a Panzerarmee Afrika palm tree stenciled on its side. "Take up firing positions," I ordered, "and get ready to rock and roll."

"Why?" Ackroyd demanded. "They're what we were briefed to expect."

"Because I said so," I said, "and because if we take one little thing for granted, we will all end up dead, and not as soon as we'd like to be."

The two vehicles stopped in swirls of white dust in front of the shack. A lanky form unfolded from behind the VW's wheel and removed Ray-Ban shades from the front of a large round head topped by a Panama hat.

"What's this?" he said, gesturing to the Kalashnikov barrels poking out the shack's windows. "Perches for birds?"

"My operators," I said, "getting a crash course in life behind enemy lines. How on God's green Earth did they get you into Tehran, Casaday?"

O.K. Casaday grinned without apparent sincerity. He was old-line CIA; I had rubbed up against him a few times in Vietnam, and occasionally since. He was the sort of shadow operative who didn't put much stock in notions like sincerity.

"That spooky ace bastard Wegener, from GSG-9," he said. "Arranged to slip me in as a member of a Krauthead TV crew."

"The people pointing guns at you are all ace bastards, Casaday," I pointed out. "Hearts and minds. Do you speak German?"

He laughed. "Fuck no. But then, neither do many of these sand niggers."

"Don't get cocky; a lot of Iranians've worked as Gastarbeiter in Germany. Who's your friend?"

The pickup driver had dismounted and leaned his back to the door. He looked like a local, with a dark hawk's face and curly black hair. He wore Levi's and a white T-shirt that molded itself revealingly to his iron-pumped pecs, but he had that spoiled rich-boy look to him. I can recognize it right off; I have a touch of it myself.

"Name's Daravayush," Casaday said, lifting the hat and taking a handkerchief from a pocket of his white linen suit and mopping the line of his blond hair. It was getting thin, I was pleased to note. I was forty-five, ten years older than he was, and mine wasn't. "He's your trusty guide and native bearer. Used to be one of the Shah's bodyguard."

I raised a brow. I had encountered little rich Iranian boys who thought they were tough before. But Pasdaran — the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — and SAVAMA, Khomeini's secret police, were hunting former members of the Shah's entourage with fanatical zeal. What they did when they caught them was unpleasant even by the standards of Third World atrocities. To run the risks he was by staying in-country, our interpreter had to have some unlooked-for depths.

"You been in touch with Desert One?" Casaday asked.

I nodded. You might have read about the hijinks at the base camp, since they weren't classified, as our part was: how Delta blew up a gasoline tank truck and captured a busload of Iranian peasants. But you have to understand, what happened there had no effect on us — until later.

"Well, you're getting your two AC-130 gunships flying top cover tonight, as promised. The Iranians have those two Phantoms ready to scramble at Mehrabad, and that armored division still has elements at the Ordnance Depot near the Embassy."

I nodded. This was all known and factored in. Our mission planners estimated that the armored vehicles at the Abbas Abad depot would take a minimum ninety minutes to reach the Embassy after the alert was raised, even though it was just a few blocks away. I concurred, knowing something about how regular soldiers conduct their affairs — and not just in the Third World, either. Still, it was reassuring to know the Night Shadows would be up there with their Gatling guns and 105-mm howitzers, in case the tanks or the Phantoms tried to wade in.

Casaday climbed back into his jeep. "I can't say it hasn't been real," he said, and drove away.

I gestured the boys and girls out of cover. "Let's get ready to roll, people. We have a diplomatic reception to attend in just a few hours. We don't want to be late."

"Who's this?" Billy Ray said, pointing to the pickup driver.

"Our guide. Name's Daravayush."

"Gesundheit," said Jay, with an eye on the Damsel, of course.

Daravayush grinned. "You can call me Darius," he said in excellent English. "It's the Western form of the name."

"Are you an ace?" Damsel asked, eyeing his biceps.

"No. I was told that you would make me one."

She got a little vee between her brows. I took it he did not light her Bunsen. Well, they could hash it out themselves. I got busy getting my grumbling troops in motion loading our traps in the truck.

The neighborhood Komiteh was trying to do its Ayatollah proud. They had a clapped-out little Paykan sedan pulled across the street, and fires going in oil drums either side of it — for dramatic effect no doubt, but also for warmth; Tehran is high desert, nestled right up against the Elburz Mountains. It gets cold at night in April.

"What do I do, boss?" Darius asked out the Chevy's open widow. He had an edge of nerves to his voice.

"Drive right up," I said. "I'll Handle it."

Tehran had that dark hunkered-down look of a city in a war zone. According to our intelligence that was mainly beause the zanies had purged the people who knew how to run the power grid, but occasionally you heard a pop or a little rainsquall ripple of gunfire, off in the distance. Periodically you got the boom of something bigger, bouncing around along the boxy modern buildings and blue mosque domes.

We'd gotten into central Tehran by freeway, getting waved through a couple of Pasdaran checkpoints without a pause. Now we were working our way down on the Embassy from the north. The Embassy itself was in a fairly non-residential district, but unfortunately we had to pass through a few neighborhoods on the way. That meant exposing ourselves to the mercies of officious Soviet-style block committees.

Or exposing them to ours; that was the kind of role we'd picked to play.

As the truck's brakes squealed us to a stop I gave my crew the once-over. Chung was wound tight as a bull-fiddle, just vibrating. Damsel sat right up next to him, her highly Occidental hair and face obscured by the folds of a kaffiyeh, her highly female figure muffled by bulky paramilitary drag. During the day she'd been showing more and more attention to the sergeant, which had caused Billy and Ackroyd to throw out their chests and strut around her even more.

Right now Ackroyd was flexing the forefinger of his right hand as if to warm it up. His "gun," he called it; it was the crutch he needed to make his projecting-teleport trick work. His real gun was propped against the side of the truck, getting its furniture all banged up. He had no interest in firearms, claiming that his ace gave him all the firepower he needed. I had not managed to pound into his head that the piece was necessary to sustain our appearance.

He wasn't a stupid man, Jay wasn't. Not by any means. He just didn't see anything past his preconceptions. I wouldn't think that would be a big help as an investigator, but military analysis types are the same way. Go figure.

I couldn't see Ray's mouth for his headdress, but his eyes smiled at me, mean and green. He cracked his knuckles. I gave him a little nod. Yeah, boy, we might need to see how much of a Wolverine you are.

The Librarian was hastily tucking his copy of Hardy under his fanny. He still had that idiot composure. No worries about him breaking here, anyway.

Lady Black was in the front seat with Darius, huddled under a black chador head-covering that went quite naturally with the rest of her getup; she looked like every other woman in Iran who didn't want to get her face slashed by the fundamentalists. The veil was a major help. There was no way we could explain wandering the streets of Tehran with a black woman. She must have been sweltering, but she didn't complain once the whole trip.

I jumped out of the pickup bed, ostentatiously readjusted the Tokagypt in my belt, and swaggered forward with my finest terrorist bravado. Which was fine indeed, since by that time in my long, bad life I was a pretty experienced terrorist.

There were a half dozen of them in their baggy Western-castoff style clothes, a couple of wizened old codgers, couple middle-aged men with important bellies, an adolescent with a cocked eye and an eight-year-old with a mock Kalashnikov carved out of wood. A cheap portable radio was scratching out Vivaldi, of all things. The allegro non molto from Concerto Number Four, "Winter," from The Four Seasons. Western classical music was the only music the mullahs would let the government radio play.

One of the middle-agers drew his gut up into himself and said, "You must show papers."

"'Papers?'" I repeated in atrociously-accented Farsi — which, fortuitously, was the only kind of Farsi I spoke. "Papers? What kind of nonsense is this? Papers? We are strugglers in your Revolution, you mutes who cannot speak the language of the Prophet!"

He blinked at me. I got right in front of him — today we'd call it in his face. "Speaking of papers, you pustulent dog, can you read your Q'ran in the True Tongue?"

His fleshy lips worked. He swallowed visibly. Gotcha. Pious Muslims are supposed to be able to read the Book in Arabic. Persians are notoriously lax about this.

"You filth!" I screamed, not omitting to give him a spray of spittle. "Just as I suspected! You are not Muslims at all! You're filthy Jew spies! I wouldn't be surprised if you were jokers, too! Pull up your shirt, so that we may gaze upon the abomination of your deformities!"

He actually started to do that. Then he stopped himself. "Please, jenabe agha, honored lord, we are good Muslims, we did not realize — "

"Then get out of our path, you pigs, you twisted menstrual rags!"

The teenybopper popped the clutch trying to get the Paykan out of our way and knocked over one of the oil drums. Flaming junk went everywhere, igniting the hem of one old codger's robe. He started hopping around and squalling. I was rather hoping to see him go up, but the others knocked him to the ground and were beating out the flames when we pulled around the corner and out of sight.

"'Abomination of your deformities?'" Darius said out the driver's window. "Your command of our language is truly … formidable, Major."

I grinned at him and got my headcloth back in front of my face. Tanned as I was, I was still a little pale to pass for an Arab indefinitely.

"That's all it took?" Ackroyd said. "You just yelled at them? Jesus, we never had to bother with all this ace-commando crap. We could have just sent half a dozen New York cabbies. They'd knock this town on its kiester."

"That's why we're going in disguised as Palestinians," I said.

"But the Palestinians observe the Treaty of Jerusalem," the Librarian whispered. "What are we doing here with all these guns?"

"The Palestinian government observes the Treaty," I said, "mostly."

"Lot of the Palestinians don't much care for that, Harvey," Billy Ray said. "They still wanna push Israel into the sea. So they turn into evil, wicked, mean and nasty terrorists."

I nodded. Ray was not just a humming bundle of muscle and fury after all. "We're radicals, terrorists, here as allies of the Nur, who's a great buddy to the Ayatollah. We're an arrogant lot of bullies; we have a modus vivendi with Pasdaran. Anybody else who gets in our way, we shoot — and the Palos will do that."

"You mean you treated those boys back there with grandmotherly kindness?" Chung asked, black eyes glittering. He was the only one of us not wearing a kaffiyeh.

I nodded. He gave a too-shrill yip of laughter.

Damsel huddled closer to him. "I'm scared," she said.

Ackroyd caught Billy Ray's eye. He rolled his. Ray gave him a tight grin and a tighter nod. I was glad my face-cloth hid my own expression.

Chung glanced back. "I wonder what they made of me."

"Probably took you for a local. That was the plan, anyway. You and Darius are the only ones who'll pass."

He worried his lower lip with his teeth. "I hope they don't think I'm Kirghiz. I hate it when people think I'm Kirghiz. Back in my unit, they called me 'the Flying Kirghiz.' I hate that."

"Paul," I said, "you're supposed to be Kirghiz. Or Turkmen, which is almost the same thing. They got both flavors in northwest Iran, along with Kypchak and Kazakh and Uzbek."

"Oh my," added Ackroyd.

"What damn difference does it make?" Ray growled.

"I'm Yunnan," Chung said, in a pleading key.

"What does that have to do with the price of pussy in Pakistan?" Ray asked.

"A lot," Chung said. "We're not Kirghiz."

"Paul, nobody knows what Kirghiz are," I said.

"A nomadic people of the Tienshan and Pamir highlands of Central Asia," Harvey whispered, "belonging to the Northwestern Group of Turkic-speakers. They were the last Turkish rulers of Mongolia, being driven out in AD 924. In the 13th century Jenghiz Khan forced them from the Yenisei steppe to their current habitat."

"Okay, so almost nobody knows what Kirghiz are."

"Paul, old buddy," Ray said with a nasty smile, "lighten up. Yum-yum or Curb-jizz, you're all towel-heads to me."

Chung's round brown face went pale. I could see the muscles knotting under his skin, feel the rage beating off him.

"Ray," I said quietly, "put a sock in it."

He showed me a defiant glower. I matched him, keeping my face emotionless. After a moment, he looked away.

Darius thumped his free fist on the top of the cab for attention. I craned forward to talk to him, glad for the interruption.

"Do you speak Arabic, Major?" he asked.

"No."

"What happens if we encounter real Palestinians?"

"Drive the other way," I said, "fast."

***

Crouching to peer over the five-foot parapet of the apartment roof we watched the woman, so muffled by her chador she resembled an ambulatory black sack, walk down Roosevelt Avenue with a bunch of oranges in a net bag. The two walking guards, their German G3 rifles slung over the backs of their woolly-pulley sweaters, spared her a single surly glance through the darkness and kept pounding their beat. The four boys flanking the gate never even looked her way.

"Jesus," Billy Ray said under his breath. "Doesn't she know there's a revolution on?"

"Life goes on, son," I said. "I've seen it before, a thousand times. No matter how tough things get — and the Tehranis have it pretty easy here, as far as emergency situations go — life goes on. Even if artillery is dropping a few blocks away, people still go to the store and cheat on their wives and goof off at their jobs. Kids still play."

"Gee, you make it sound so attractive," Ackroyd said. "Almost like having a real life."

"Only Americans think having things easy is a necessary condition of life," I said. "For most people it's a goal, not a sine qua non."

Billy Ray showed teeth to the Damsel. "Don't you love it when he talks dirty?"

She moved over so her flank was touching Chung, rested her arm on his hunched shoulder. He gave her a strained, slightly furtive look and concentrated back on the street.

Our building lay across the street from the northern part of the Embassy compound. In happier times it had been an upper-middle class apartment. Even though life does go on, the occupancy rate had dropped precipitiously since the street filled up with armed zealots. If they got to raising a fuss in the middle of the night, you didn't want to lean out the window and yell at them to shut up. I felt reasonably safe from chance detection up here.

Darius duckwalked over and grabbed the Damsel by the arm. "Hey," he said. "You're supposed to make me an ace. It was in the deal. Let's get to it, huh, baby?"

"What are you talking about?" She tried to pull away. "You're hurting me."

"Where do we do it?" he asked. "Right here on the roof? I've always wanted to be an ace. I also always loved little blonde girlies like you — "

About that time Ray caught him by the upper arm and threw him across the roof. About twenty feet. He landed hard, rolled over, picked himself up groaning to his knees.

"All right, buddy," Billy Ray said. "If we can't get along, let's get it on."

Darius came up with a Browning High-Power in his hand. Ray moved like a mongoose, crossing the intervening space in three lightning steps and kicking the pistol away before the Iranian could squeeze the trigger. The Browning went skittering across the gravel with a sound that turned my bowels to ice water.

"Harvey," I said. The Librarian was quick on the uptake, I'll give him that. He dropped his Hardy and scrabbled to my side.

The roof became quiet. Very quiet. Ray had grabbed Darius by the front of his T-shirt and dragged him to his feet, preparatory to punching his face in. Darius was digging in a back pocket of his jeans, no doubt for a knife. When he produced it, Ray would pull his arms and legs off and shower him down on the Pasdaran like confetti, I hadn't any doubt.

I grabbed up an AKM, racked the bolt, and fired a burst into the roof at their feet.

It didn't make the slightest sound. A bomb going off would have made no more, though the rolling overpressure would've kicked up quite a fuss once it got beyond the limits of the Librarian's hush-field. The bullets gouged into the asphalt at the combatants feet and stung their legs with gravel. That got their attention.

I pulled a finger across my throat. The gesture signified both cut in the directorial sense and what I would literally do to their gullets if they kept this nonsense up. Billy Ray released Darius, and the two stepped away from each other. I gestured for them to take up positions well apart from one another, then touched Harvey on the arm and smiled at him.

Sound came back. It was very strange, like having a switch thrown: suddenly the city sounds were there again, the distant traffic noise, the faint yammer of an argument from the building next door, a gunshot, blessedly far away.

"Ray, get on the horn to Angel Station. It's time to check in." Since he was strongest, our Wolverine got to carry the AN/PRC-77, which was a heavy beast. Using the radio was a touch on the risky side, with the Abbas Abad garrison less than a mile to the west. But we needed to communicate, and word was that the people who could operate — or at least maintain — the Shah's radio-direction finding equipment were high on the list of purgees.

I put the Kalashnikov back on safety and returned to my own spot by the parapet. My mood was black. I had had to use a weapon to keep discipline. That's the worst possible command procedure. It was a lick on me.

The primary mission of Special Forces, and their despair, is taking indigenous forces and trying to turn them into soldiers. Or at least credible guerrillas. Indiges are notoriously unstable and exasperating to deal with — that's i-n-d-i-g-e-s, by the way. Most of my Special Forces brethren leave out the "e," which would make the "g" hard. Most of my Special Forces brethren are slightly on the illiterate side, I fear.

We all of us, in what you civilians call the Green Berets, have a special secret fear. It's that we might someday be called upon to whip Americans into fighting trim, and they'd be just as aggravating as indiges from the ceiling-fan country of your choice. And guess what? I had five Americans, well-educated, intelligent, reasonably well socialized, and aces into the bargain. And guess what? They were acting just like indiges.

Darius was looking at Damsel as if to burn her clothes off with those hot black eyes. She was shrinking up against Paul Chung.

The warmth of her nicely-rounded little body at last penetrated his paranoid insecurity. He put an arm around her.

I moved over to Darius. "What is your problem?"

He spat in the gravel near my feet. I let it go by. "When I was recruited by your government, I was told I could become an ace. It's why I agreed. I want it." He flicked his eyes toward Damsel. "I want her."

"I don't know anything about that. I wasn't party to any such agreement. If you have a grievance, take it up with the person you cut the deal with. Meanwhile, keep your hands off my people."

He laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. "She'd have come around quickly enough, if I had met her when I was with Sazman-e Amniyat Va Ettelaat-e Keshvar," he said. "She would have had no choice, you know? But I think she would have come to like it." He shrugged. "Or not. She's just a woman. Who cares what she enjoys?"

Since shooting him through the head would reflect poorly both on my wit and my command abilities, not to mention giving our position away, I moved away. I made sure not to hurry.

Ackroyd caught my eye, flipped his head off to one side, obviously signaling for a private chat. I nodded and walked to meet him beside the elevator housing.

"Just what the hell is going on here?" he demanded in a fierce whisper.

"Isn't it a little late in the day to be asking that question? There are fifty Americans held hostage in the Embassy, we're here on a commando raid to rescue them — "

"Get serious," he hissed. I forbore from pointing out the irony to him. "Don't you think there's something a little funny here?"

"Eight of us versus four and a half million heavily armed fanatics? My sides are splitting as we speak."

He made an irritated wave of his hands. "No, look. I mean, look at us. What do you see? A handful of deuces. Second-string aces."

"There are some pretty potent powers here," I said.

"Give me a fucking break. Where's Howler? Where's Golden Boy? Where's Cyclone, for Christ's sake? You'd think he'd eat this up with a spoon, he's such a headline hound."

— I should set the record straight here for the first time. I've heard a lot about how Cyclone was involved in the Embassy raid. Matter of fact, I read it in the Xavier Desmond book about the WHO world tour — the UN, not the rock band — that came out after his death.

The late Vernon Henry Carlysle took no part in the mission, at any level. I was surprised to discover he was not involved. This was just the kind of high-profile stunt that usually drew him like a fly to honey.

It may have been a command decision by old Vernon, as in, "if I'm not in command, my decision is no." Or maybe he was just smarter than I am. Or maybe the people who set the thing up had reason not to want to use him. But he wasn't in it. -

"Maybe they were busy," I said in as neutral a voice as I could manage. If a commander has his doubts, he's an irresponsible fool to share them with those under his command.

"That's crap," Ackroyd said. "I know 'military intelligence' is a contradiction in terms, but not even you buy that. We've been set up like bowling pins."

"No." My head seemed to be shaking of its own volition. "The mission has some problems. It may turn into a total SNAFU. But that's the nature of events, not conspiracy." I showed him teeth underneath my moustache. "What you said about oxymorons isn't exactly untrue."

I saw no conviction in his eyes. "We're talking about our country, here," I reminded him. "Our own people. Americans. They're not going to set us up for a fall."

"What about Watergate?" Ackroyd demanded, volume rising. "What about the McCarthy hearings?"

But then Billy Ray was waving to me and holding up the radio's handset. It might be that I wasn't ungrateful for the interruption.

"Got 'em," Ray said. If he resented the means I'd used to break up the fight, he didn't show it. I can say this for the kid, he did not seem the grudge-holding type. If you made him mad, he either busted your head right off, or he put it behind him.

I nodded thanks, walked over to take the mike. "Angel Station, this is Stud Six, over." Stud — as in seven-card — was our unit codename. Six is military-speak for the man in charge.

"Jack of Hearts, we have a problem, over."

"Knave of Hearts," I corrected. "What's your problem, over?"

"Angel Two is down. Repeat, Angel Two down."

That meant one of the Sikorskies at Angel Station — the chopper hide-site, a few miles north of the vacation spot where we'd spent the day — was sick and not expected to get better. It was no big deal. That's why we brought three; in a pinch, we and the hostages could all cram into one and take off again. Conceivably.

I rang off. Joann Jefferson was looking at me again. I went and sat down beside her.

She was flushed and breathing rapidly. She had not shown nerves before; I hoped she wasn't getting near any major fracture points.

"Knave of Hearts," she said. "I still can't get over that. Not ace or king."

"Using aces for codenames would be giving a little too much away. Besides — I know what I am."

She laughed. She had a good laugh — hearty, though she had presence of mind to keep it way down. "And I'm the Queen of Spades."

I shrugged. "You picked it."

"I know what I am, too." She nodded to Damsel, who was talking in a low voice to Chung. "So why aren't you chasing after little girl lost, there? I'm pretty sure you're the type who likes girls."

"K'ung-fu Tzu tells us that gentlemen never compete. She has ample suitors anyway, I think."

She gave me an arched eyebrow. I grinned. I do that too, when I am, shall we say, extremely skeptical.

"You don't like blondes?"

"I have very catholic tastes, which isn't altogether surprising in a High Church boy like myself. But I'm also a professional. I have this iron-bound rule about sex with subordinates: I don't do it. Not, I hasten to add, that I'm often tempted by those under my command. I like girls, and prefer women, but that's the extent of it."

I tugged the end of my moustache. "Maybe my tastes aren't quite so catholic after all. Still, I find Woman infinitely variable, and infinitely diverting."

She laughed again — giggled, more. "You are more full of bullshit than any white person I ever met," she said. "I like you. You're funny. And you treat me like a person. You don't expect me to make the coffee, and you don't go — bending over backwards or anything."

"Ms. Jefferson, I am a male chauvinist pig in good standing. I don't let that interfere with my job, either. What you are to me now is precisely what the others are: an operator, to use the jargon of this milieu. One, I'll add, who's given me considerably less trouble than certain others."

She bit her lip. "After this is over — I mean, if we survive — " She looked away then. "Never mind. I'm sorry I opened my mouth. I don't have much experience at this."

"Practice never hurt anybody." I undid the Velcro cover and checked my watch. "We still have a few minutes before H-Hour."

She shook her head. "It's stupid anyway," she said, and it was her turn to be little girl lost. "I can't touch anybody, you understand? If I do, I kill them. I can't help it. I can have friends, if anybody wants to be friends with a black freak like me. I can't — "

I reached a fingertip and touched her briefly on the cheek. She jumped. My whole finger went numb.

"When you have the luxury to think about anything but the mission," I said, "consider the ramifications of my special gift. One can do wonders with prosthetics."

She frowned, slightly, which made her look almost intolerably cute. I decided I wasn't missing anything in passing Damsel by. "Right now, it's time to go back to playing soldier. Listen up, everybody."

They clustered round, Darius hanging slightly back. "It's almost time to move, people. So bring it on home: tell me what you're going to do."

Ackroyd pointed a finger. "The guy in the watchtower goes bye-bye the second we hit the street."

"We walk up to the walking guards and I greet them as a pious Turkmen comrade," Chung said.

"I make everything quiet," Harvey whispered.

"I black one out," Joann said, "both if I can."

"If not I pop him," Ackroyd said.

"Or I take him," Ray added with a flash of teeth.

"Or I just shoot him," I said. "We'll play it by ear. Same drill with the boys at the gate."

"Right," Chung said. "Then I get light and kite up for a peek over the wall — "

"While I make the gate open. Slick as a whistle, we're inside."

"We go straight," Ray said, "for the Chancellery." It was the biggest structure, and the closest to the main gate. Most of the hostages were held inside. Since many of its doors were hardened, it had been expected to be the toughest target for Delta, since they'd have to use explosive entry. For us it was a breeze.

"Then we proceed clockwise," the Librarian said, "very methodically."

There were only six buildings, out of a total of fourteen, that were feasible to house hostages, not to mention captors. That simplified things.

Ackroyd cast a glance over the wall at the thickly-wooded compound. "I can't get over how big it is."

"That's what twenty-seven acres looks like, city boy," Ray said. "Why the surprise? We been through a full-scale mock-up twenty-five times, back at Smokey.

Ackroyd shrugged. I understood him. No matter how exact a model is, it can never really prepare you for the reality. If only more of our mission planners could grasp that little fact….

From overhead came a welcome noise: the faint baritone hum of a Night Shadow's four engines. Our Archangels had arrived to watch over us.

I raised my eyes to the sky. A few clouds, mostly stars. "'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,'" I said.

"Zero hour, people. Time to move as if we have a purpose."

We were so high on adrenaline when we hit the ground floor of the apartment where we'd been lying-up that we were damned near flying. We all had weapons in hand, even though it was questionable whether a week's hurried training made any of our civilians a greater threat to the bad guys than to themselves. But what the hey? With luck we wouldn't need to shoot anybody. We were aces, and even if none of us was exactly Golden Boy or the Great and Powerful Turtle, we were hard core.

We were on. Felt we were ten feet tall and covered with hair. Felt immortal.

You know what always happens when you get to feeling that way. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make cocky.

Damsel stopped at the foot of the echoing cement stairs. She made Chung halt too by grabbing his arm. She went up on tiptoe — she was that tiny, that she had to stretch for Chung — and kissed him on the cheek.

"You're the one," she breathed. "You're my Hero."

Darius sneered. Blocked right behind the clinch, Billy Ray said, "Give me a flicking break."

But something happened to Paul Chung in that moment. I saw it in his eyes. He seemed to, well, expand. What it actually amounted to I couldn't imagine.

"Let's get a grip here, people," Ackroyd muttered. "'We got guns, they got guns, all God's children got guns.'"

"He's right," I said, tapping Chung on the shoulder. Was it my adrenaline-fueled imagination, or did I feel a kind of electric tingle? "We're in a war zone now. Move out as I taught you, by pairs, rolling overwatch to the front doors, then out into the street and across."

Chung and Mears hunkered down inside the stairwell, covering with their AKs. Thirty feet away across the lobby the night was black and empty beyond the glass doors. Taking Darius with me, I dodged quickly out and to the left. We pressed up against the wall to our side of the long-dormant elevator bank.

I waved the next pair forward. Ray and Jefferson ran across a debris-littered floor to take up position on the far wall.

Ackroyd and the Librarian advanced to the door. They and Mears and Chung were supposed to flank the entrance while Darius and I hit the street. If the Pasdaran guards thought there was anything unusual about a fidayin patrol emerging from a mostly-deserted apartment building — and in Tehran, there really wasn't — they would be too circumspect to say so. They were scared spitless of us too. A reputation for craziness is a wonderful thing.

But it doesn't make you bulletproof.

In spite of everything we'd drilled in, little Harvey walked bolt upright, as though he was heading back to roust some boisterous teens from the stacks. As he reached the front of the foyer a guy in a sweater popped right out on the sidewalk in front of him, screamed something with Allah in it, and cut loose with an Uzi from the hip.

The glass blew in around us like a crystal razor snowstorm. Harvey's right leg snapped out from under him. He pitched onto his face.

Ackroyd pointed a finger. The gunman vanished.

I raised my AKM. The doorway filled up with bodies and bearded screaming faces. I held down the trigger and gave them something to scream about. They fell back from the door.

The echoes of gunfire seemed to keep on rebounding off the foyer wall as the Iranians fell back to regroup. I scuttled to Harvey, bent over him. I rolled him onto his back. His face was pale, his pants leg wet with blood. The blood wasn't just blasting out, though. That meant the femoral hadn't been hit, which meant he was not going to bleed to death in the next thirty seconds or anything. Which meant the best immediate action was -

"Ackroyd!" I yelled. "Pop him out!"

The detective pointed. Harvey vanished, gone to the medevac tent back at Desert One.

"Jesus!" Ackroyd said. "Which way do we go now? Up the stairs?"

"We don't want to get trapped on the roof," I said. "Out the back — into the alley."

Darius hit the back door first and stopped dead. Locked. "Out of my way, diaper head," Billy Ray growled. He walked into the door and right on through without slowing.

The night air was cool and full of the sounds of angry voices. There was a mob out on Roosevelt, between us and the Embassy, howling for infidel blood. It must have assembled in the time it took us to get down the stairs.

Real coincidental, wasn't it?

No time to think about that now. The mob had nerved itself to risk the fate of their writhing, moaning brethren blocking the front entrance and swarmed in, trampling them in their lust to catch us. I gave them another whole magazine through the foyer to reveal to them the error of their ways.

"Come on," I said. "Next building. We need to get some space between us and them."

Another heavy steel door faced our alley from the next brick building — they take security seriously in these ceiling fan countries. Not seriously enough to keep Billy Ray out when he was this motivated, though. As we crowded into the darkness of a short hallway filled with musty storeroom smells we heard the baying of the pack flood into the alley at our backs.

There was an interval of running, hearts drumming, as we crashed through doors, dashed up short flights of stairs and down alleys. And then we had space to try to force some stinking alley air back into our lungs while Billy unlimbered the radio.

Damsel was crying. Chung had his arm around her. He was standing tall, taller than his inches.

"What happened?" Ackroyd demanded. He grabbed the front of my blouse. "What the fuck happened?"

"Calm down," I said. "Something went wrong."

"Something? We're blown. Harvey may be dead. All you can call that is something?"

"I call it war. He's a casualty. We need to work on not joining him. And he's not going to die — they'll patch him up at Desert One."

"Right."

Ray handed me the microphone. "Archangel One, Archangel One, this is Stud Six. Archangel One, we need the Sword of the Lord in one hell of a hurry."

"Stud Six, this is Archange l One," a voice came crackling back. "You're going to have to wait for it. Maximum sorry, over."

"Angel One, what the hell are you talking about? Roosevelt Avenue is full of angry mob. We've got one man down. We need the streets swept. Over."

"Stud Six, I say again: you're gonna have to wait, over."

"Archangel, we have no time."

"Orders, Stud Six. They had an accident back at Desert One. Chopper crashed into a C-130. Be advised we can take no action without clearing it through the man upstairs."

For some reason I was very particularly struck by the fact that our line to the President ran through Battle and Brzezinski. I had little time to ponder the thought, because just then a vehicle cruised past the end of the alley. A light-colored Volkswagen Thing. At the wheel sat a tall man in a Panama hat and tropical suit.

He turned his big head to stare at me. He still wore his sunglasses, like a traffic cop. He drove on.

A moment later the pack came swarming around the corner. I dropped the microphone and grabbed for my AKM.

"You were right!" I yelled to Ackroyd. "We're screwed, blued, and tattooed."

Not many of the charging Iranians had guns — just a mob, not the Guard yet, thank God. But they had clubs and fists and stones and — yes — swords. And numbers, of course. We can't forget those.

I had too many of my own people between me and the mob to fire effectively. I switched the selector to single shot and poised, waiting for a shot.

Chance put Ray and Ackroyd at the front. The detective reacted more coolly than I imagined he could. He just started aiming that finger and picking off the rushing rioters, pop-pop-pop. Every time he pointed, one vanished.

Unfortunately, he didn't have a full-auto teleport. They swarmed us.

That was where young Billy came into his own. He caught the first man to reach him by the face. Bones crunched, blood flowed. Billy hurled him back against his buddies.

The youthful Wolverine became a whirling dervish of fists and feet. He stove in skulls against the brick walls, ripped limbs from sockets, popped out eyes. He rammed his hand into a big bearded man's chest, pulled his heart out, and showed it to him, like something from a bad chop-socky flick. Ackroyd, who'd fallen back, overwhelmed, turned away and puked.

Someone swung a length of pipe overhand at Billy's head. He threw up an arm to block. His ulna cracked with a sound like a gunshot.

He grabbed the pipe-wielder by the loose front of his shirt and head-butted him. When he let the Iranian go the man's eyes were rolled up as if to stare at the deep dent in his own head.

I stepped forward past the indisposed Ackroyd, jammed my Kalashnikov into the gut of the next man up, blew him down. Then I hosed the alley.

The survivors of Ray's fury turned and fled. As they departed the alley, their better-armed and smarter — or luckier — comrades leaned around the wall and began to rip fire at us.

Billy Ray said, "Fuck," and stepped back. Blood started from his shoulder where a round had taken him.

"I can handle this," Chung said.

"Paul, they're too far away to punch," I called over my shoulder. I was busting caps desperately now, not concerned with hitting anything, just trying to get the bad guys to pull their heads back.

"I've gone beyond that, now," he said. "She's made me a new man."

"Paul, what are you talking about?" Lady Black asked.

"Watch." And he raised a few inches off the ground, and took off down the alley like an F-4 on afterburner.

Now, keep in mind, he couldn't do this. 1t would be like me suddenly discovering that I could dead lift a tank, or shoot fire from my fingertips. He'd had his ace for years; all he could do was get lighter than air and float, or glide slowly down. He had no powered flight.

You couldn't tell that to him. He hit the gunmen as if he'd been fired from a cannon and knocked them flying in all directions. Then he began to swoop back and forth, driving back the mob like a flying hammer.

Damsel held clasped hands before her face. "My Hero," she breathed.

Billy looked at me. What the fuck? he mouthed.

I shrugged. The Librarian was the one with all the answers, and he was gone.

Lady Black was at Ray's side. "You're hurt," she said.

He had a bullet through one shoulder and a bad break in the other arm, and I noticed he'd taken a good shot to the face with a rock or some such, that had pushed his right cheekbone in pretty well. He shrugged her off. "I'm fine," he said, and the words were only slightly distorted.

There was no rear door in the next building, and I could hear voices inside the one we'd last vacated. "We need to get moving down the alley," I said. "Paul! Paul, come on!"

I don't know if he heard me. He was swooping back and forth, enjoying a power he'd never known, having the time of his life.

I saw him fly back into view at the head of the alley. He paused a moment, hanging in midair, to flash us a V-for-victory.

From out of sight down the street a heavy machinegun hammered. Paul Chung came apart in midair like a melon dropped from a skyscraper.

"Paul!" Damsel shrieked. She started to throw herself toward the place where the bloody bits of her Hero were raining from the sky. Ackroyd caught her arm.

"Come on," he said, "let's get out of here!"

We ran. Into the alley stormed the mob, heartened by the arrival of heavy support. Shots cracked.

One caught Amy Mears in the calf. She screamed and went down. Her wrist came out of Ackroyd's grip.

The crowd flowed over her like surf.

Ackroyd started popping frantically, dancing, trying to get a line of sight to her. The mob formed a writhing impenetrable wall between them. I caught a glimpse of Damsel as her headrag came free, revealing her unmistakably Western and feminine mass of curls. The crowd howled in outrage mixed with lust. There's nothing like old-time puritanical religion to give a mob the taste for rape.

"Help me! Oh, God, help me!" Amy screamed, as her clothes were wrenched away. The mob closed in between us, forcing the rest of us back like incoming tide.

Billy Ray waded back into the crowd. Somebody hit him in the chest with a fire axe. He rocked back, busted the hardwood handle with a hammerfist blow, then plucked the sharp stub from the wielder's hands and jabbed it through his belly.

For the moment the mob had lost interest in chasing us, but they hadn't forgotten us. Guns flashed. Billy Ray grunted again as more bullets hit him.

I grabbed Ackroyd by the arm. "In the name of God, come on! There's nothing we can do!"

"They'll rape her!"

"They'll do worse to us if they catch us. Run, you idiot."

He flailed at me with his arms. I slapped his face. Then I took my own advice. He followed, weeping.

Lady Black was helping support Ray. The pain and sheer structural damage were taking toll. Another man would've been dead long since. He was still on his feet, if barely.

Yeah, he had his ace, that gave him strength and endurance and the power to regenerate damage — if that system hadn't been overloaded by what was done to him. What kept him going now had nothing to do with the wild card. It was guts.

Lady Black had them too. If I'd been her, and seen what was happening to my fellow female up the alley, I'd have taken off in huge bounds like a gazelle.

Oh, yes, we were a gutty bunch. Even Ackroyd, who'd stood his ground as long as any man ever did in the face of odds like that. The problem was those odds. Comes a time when they beat guts, every time.

— The pack was holding itself up in the narrow alley, fighting like hyenas over the spoils. Rape was gone from even their reptile brains by now — I hope. I saw one wave something white and slim above his head, brandishing it like a trophy. Damsel's right leg, I think it was….

Around the building, out onto the street. And after all we'd survived and sacrificed, we weren't home free: here came a fresh bunch around the next corner back from the alley, waving swords and clubs and cheering as if Tehran had just won the World Series.

Lady Black and Billy had fallen inevitably behind. Ackroyd and I looked at each other. In his eyes was raw hatred, but also raw determination. We turned and faced the mob, prepared to go down fighting.

Bearded faces opened in triumph. Clawed hands reached for Joann and Billy. Jay was popping the bastards, and I was running through magazines as fast as my piece would cycle.

It was all for nothing.

Lady Black let go of Billy and stepped to the side. She reached to the front of her baggy blouse, tore it open. Then she grabbed the neck of her protective black suit and pulled it down to her navel, baring her chest.

The sheer unexpectedness of it made the crowd falter briefly a few steps from her. Possibly they were admiring the prizes they were about to lay hands on.

White light exploded from Joann's face and chest. My vision went away for a moment.

When it returned, I could just make out a street filled with writhing bodies. As I blinked away great bright balloons of afterimage I saw that many had their faces seared and fingers seared away. Others lay still, blackened to motionless mummies.

Joann stood there with a faraway look in her eyes. "It's been building for a long time," she said. "Building and building."

I grabbed the hanging front of her suit and pulled it up. She nodded, absently, and started pulling it back into place. The pursuit was off our tails. For the moment. We turned and made what speed we could.

"Archangel One, Archangel One, do you have an answer yet, over?"

With a little room to move, we had found a three-story building with pointed-arch doors and windows and climbed up to the roof. Since our pursuers didn't know where we were, the risks of staying at street level outweighed the risk of being trapped up here.

Down in the streets they still hunted us. They'd broken into packs now, a few in vehicles, most on foot.

Joann bent over Billy Ray, who lay on his back with his head propped on the radio pack. The unit miraculously still worked. Jay Ackroyd sat with his head between his knees and just breathed. He had thrown away his kaffiyeh. His hair was in serious disarray.

"Stud Six, I'm afraid the word is negative, over."

"Negative on what? Fire support or pickup? Over."

A pause. Atmospherics crackled. I wanted to squeeze an answer from the microphone with my fingers.

"Stud Six, that's negative on both." Archangel One had the decency to be weeping openly. "We got the word. We're pulling out; Angels One and Three are already gone. It's over, man. Over."

I didn't think he was handing the conversational ball back to me. Nonetheless I grabbed it: "On whose orders?"

"This came all the way from the top." And in the sudden thunderous silence I barely heard him say, "Good luck, Stud Six. Archangel One — out."

"They're leaving us," Ackroyd panted. "The fuckers are pulling out and leaving us."

"That about sums it up," I said, throwing down the mike. No point in handling it gently any more.

He raised his head and looked at me and gave me a shaky smile. "Well, I guess I drew the short straw, didn't I?"

"How do you mean?"

"I pop you all back to Desert One," he said. "Then I guess I get to go play Twenty Questions with the Revolutionary Guard."

"No."

He stared at me. "Hey, do you think I'm a fucking moron, you tin-plated hero?" he flared. "I can't pop myself. Or are you such a stupid fucking military jock you didn't realize that?"

"I realize it," I said. "But you aren't popping me anywhere."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about, I'm not leaving you behind. I've lost three people already. I'm not losing more without a fight."

"You left Damsel quick enough."

"She was gone, Jay." I was surprised how quiet my voice was. I just didn't have the energy to get emotional. "There was nothing we could do for her without getting the rest of us killed. It was a command decision. I made it. I have to live with it."

"I know all about that," Joann said. She had torn her chador into strips and bandaged Ray as best she could with it. Now she moistened a fragment from a canteen and dripped water between the boy's bloody lips. He was breathing with a sound like the A train. I didn't think it was too good a sign.

"How did you do that back there, by the way?" I asked.

"All that energy I store up," she said, color draining from that handsome face, "it has to go somewhere."

She shook her head. "I'm going to see them every time I shut my eyes the whole rest of my life," she said, "those faceless men — "

I squeezed her shoulder. "It goes away after a while," I said. "Or at least, you don't get the dreams so often." She looked up into my eyes.

"I know, child," I said quietly.

I turned away. "Where's Darius?" she asked suddenly. "I haven't seen him since, since — "

"Since they nailed Harvey, back at the apartment," Ackroyd said. "Motherfucker ditched us."

I nodded. "I never did like cops much," I said, "especially secret ones."

Ackroyd frowned. "You mean — he wasn't just a bodyguard, was he?"

"No."

"He was SAVAK. A torturer."

"One of the worst, I suspect."

"When did you know?"

"Not for sure till he told me, up on the roof. But I suspected it the minute I laid eyes on him."

"You son of a bitch," Jay said. "You'd jump in bed with the fucking Devil himself, wouldn't you?"

"If it helped me accomplish my mission." I held up a hand. "Save the denunciations, Ackroyd. It's time to use your magic finger. Billy first."

"Hey — " the kid said, trying to rise. He had come back around at some point. "You can't — get rid of me. I won't go — "

Joann pressed him down with her fingertips. "You have no choice, Billy," Ackroyd said.

I hunkered beside the boy. "If you live, son — and I'm afraid you will, as tough as you are — you're going to need an ace name."

"What's the matter with … Wolverine?"

"Your alma mater might sue. No, I have the name for you. I name thee Carnifex."

"What's — that mean?"

"Latin for 'Executioner.'"

He smiled and gave me the circled thumb-and-forefinger OK sign. And vanished.

Ackroyd pointed his gun at Lady Black. "Ready, Ms. Jefferson?"

"Just a moment." She stepped up, briefly held his face in both gloved hands. Then she did the same to me. I hugged her. I had to keep my head well back — she was taller than I. But I hugged her hard, and she hugged me back.

She stepped backward and was gone.

— I jumped, caught Ackroyd by the wrist, shoved his hand and pointing finger skyward.

"Try that again," I said, "and I'll break both your trigger fingers. Got that?"

A moment, and he nodded. I let him go, but kept a wary eye upon him.

"I didn't send them to Desert One," he said.

I froze in the act of stooping to gather the Kalashnikov magazines I'd made Lady Black and Billy carry, and relieved them of before Ackroyd popped them out. "We've been given the royal shaft," he said. "I don't trust anybody right now, least of all the military. I sure as hell wasn't sending them back to Desert One."

A moment. I nodded. "Smart move. Where'd they go?"

"The scoreboard in Yankee Stadium." He shrugged. "It's kind of a catch-all target for me."

I laughed. "You must be seriously suspicious, if you'd trust them to Steinbrenner instead of our own people. I wonder if the Yankees are playing at home tonight?"

I held out Joann's Kalashnikov. "Take this."

"No way. I don't have a clue how to use it." An ugly smile twisted his lips. "The recoil would probably throw my aim off so I'd shoot you."

"We don't want that, now, do we?" I drew my Tokagypt, reversed it, offered that.

"No." He held his extended forefinger up. "This is all the gun I need."

"If we get in the middle of it you and I might not be able to take everybody out, me shooting and you popping," I explained, choking down my impatience. "You have to know that by now, after what happened in the alley. We need to make them put their heads down. Pointing your finger at them just won't cut it."

"All right." He snatched the pistol away.

I let him lead off down the stairs, not my favorite tactical move, but I still didn't trust him behind me with the fickle finger of fate.

Halfway down the block a pickup truck with cracked and faded blue paint was parked. I smiled, tapped Ackroyd's shoulder, headed us toward it. "Pray it has fuel," I said.

"What, did you happen to bring a key?" I shook my head. "I suppose you re going to hotwire it, then?"

"Better. Got a penknife?"

He stuck the Tokagypt down the front of his pants and dug into a pocket. I winced. I wanted to remind him where the expression going off half-cocked came from, but this was no time to start teaching him to handle firearms with respect.

He looked past me then, and his eyes got wide. He grabbed the Tokagypt out of his waistband and aimed it at a doorway behind me. He had somehow gotten the safety off; the pistol barked as it came online.

I fell against the door of the truck, momentarily half-blinded and deafened. I smelled burning hair — mine — singed by the muzzle flash.

Panic sent a spasm into Ackroyd's finger. He pumped the trigger, spraying bullets wildly all over the front of the building until the last round went and the slide locked back.

I grabbed the gun out of his hands. "Jesus Christ, you idiot, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

He pointed. "Someone in that door. Pointing a gun at you. I — oh, dear God, no!"

He raced past me to the door, knelt down. When I came up with him, AKM at the ready, he was sobbing convulsively and stroking the cheek of the person he'd shot.

A boy of about eight, lying sprawled in the doorway. Curly dark hair, black eyes wide open to stars they'd never see again. One of those toy wooden Kalashnikovs lay on the steps beside him.

I took Ackroyd by the shoulder and pulled him away. He sat down on the curb by the truck, dropped his face to his hands, and bawled like a baby.

I laid my left forefinger on the curb and chopped the tip off with Ackroyd's knife. Blood spurted. I held the stump up.

"Our keys," I said.

Ackroyd stared horror-struck between his fingers. "Oh, God, you're sick, you're really sick."

I pressed the stump over the lock, felt my soul flow, become one with mechanism. I opened the lock unto us, then pulled my finger away. It came free with a soft sucking sound.

I slid my AKM in, climbed in after it. I shut my door, leaned across to open the passenger door. "Get in," I said, and put command into my voice.

Dully Ackroyd rose and walked around the truck. As he slid in and shut the door I pressed my severed finger against the ignition. The truck coughed once and started.

"Quarter tank," I said — I felt it, the way you have a rough idea how hungry you are. "Slovenly drivers here. Don't keep topped off."

"It was the gun," Ackroyd said in a voice of lead. "If I didn't have the gun, he wouldn't be dead."

"Yes he would. He looked like he was holding down on us. I would have dropped him myself. I told you, I'm taking you out of here. I exerted my will, and the engine coughed once and started.

We picked up an honor guard a quarter mile from the airport. A Nissan pickup, filled with authentic heroic Palestinian freedom fighters. Somebody must have passed the word; it was oh-dark thirty, and there were no streetlights, so they could not have gotten a good enough look at us to see our faces were paler than the Tehrani norm. But they passed us going the other way, whipped a U, and came on, blasting over the top of the cab with their trusty Klashin.

I put the pedal to the metal. The rear window blew in and sprinkled us with sugared glass. Ackroyd ducked.

"Can't you make the driver disappear?" I asked.

He gave me a hate stare. Then he raised his head, cautiously, poked his finger up over the bottom of the now-empty window.

I was splitting my attention between screeching down the narrow street at eighty miles an hour and the wing mirror. I saw the Nissan lurch to the side and hit a parked Paykan. Fidayin went rolling out like apples from a vendor's cart.

"Bullseye!" I cheered. "Well done."

He grinned and bobbed his head. Then he realized those bodies sprawled all over the street there were not dummies or stunt men. Some of them would be getting up again slowly, if ever. He turned his face forward and buried it in his hands.

"More company," I said, a few seconds later, looking in the rearview.

"You want me to murder them too?"

I shook my head. "Too many. If one gets too close, I may call on you. But save it."

"I don't believe I'm here," he said. "Why did they do this to us? Why would they set us up like this?"

"So we could take a fall on behalf of the wild card. We fail. Maybe the hostages back there die. Who's to blame? Aces, of course. President Jimmy, too, I guess — he's too soft on us wild cards to suit some tastes."

"And you went along with it," Ackroyd said.

I felt my cheeks begin to burn. "Yeah," I said, "yeah, that's right. I like the thought of dying. I like the thought of people under my command getting tortured and killed. I like being in charge of the biggest balls-up since the Mayaguez raid — "

No, I told myself, you don't have the luxury to snap now. You're good at handing out tough talk; it's time to shut up and soldier, soldier.

And count your losses later. I made my jaw clamp. It was much tougher than making the truck go where I wanted.

"I'm sorry," Ackroyd said. "That was cheap."

"Yeah. So please shut up for a while."

There was some more wild driving, bullets cracking past our ears — they don't whistle, they go faster than sound for the most part, make little sonic booms — and then Ackroyd said, "There's a chain link fence up ahead."

"Mehrabad International Airport," I said.

"Uh — don't you think you should slow down?"

"No," I said, "because then I couldn't do — "

I hit the fence. Metal broke with squeals of protest, and dragged sharp claws back along my body the truck like fingernails on a blackboard.

"— this."

"Jesus Keerist!" Ackroyd yelped. "You're out of your fucking mind!"

"If you don't quit saying that, you'll give me a complex."

He turned in his seat. "I don't know what kind of jackass scheme you have in mind, but it isn't working. They're still on our tail."

"No worries." I was heading toward a point I remembered from studying the aerial recon photos. "Look up ahead."

There they were, as advertised: the dark broken-nosed shapes of a pair of American-made F-4s.

"What are those?"

"Your tax dollars at work. Gifts to our noble ally, the Shah of Iran."

"What are you planning to do," he asked, "ram them and go out in a blaze of glory?"

There were a pair of men in flightsuits standing by the nearer Phantom, performing a preflight check. Or trying to. One of them was scratching his head under his helmet. The other was kicking the tires. Pilots hadn't fared so well under the new regime, either; these guys probably knew a lot more about Khomeini's book The Explication of Problems than they did about the flight manual on this baby.

The one scratching his head saw us. He tapped his buddy on the arm. He gave off bending to peer into the wheel well and turned to stare at us.

I steered right for Fric and Frac. They fled.

There were ground crew with their little carts fussing with the plane. Hoping some of them still had a clue as to what they were doing, I stopped the truck, stepped out and fired my Kalashnikov in the air. They joined their pilots in bunny impressions.

We'd extended our lead over the pursuit, but they were closing fast. I drew my Kabar sheath knife and laid my left hand on the tarmac.

"What the hell are you doing now?" Ackroyd demanded.

"Don't look," I said, and cut off my hand. It was not a neat process.

It hurt like the Devil, I have to tell you. Maybe I'm sick as that illegitimatus Battle, with that dumb stubbing-the-cigar-on-his-own-arm trick of his — I was surprised he didn't whip that out on poor President Jimmy.

"Climb aboard," I said, and started up the hook-on ladder into the pilot's seat. I only have so long before the blood loss starts to get to me.

Ackroyd had watched the whole thing — why should he start to listen to me now? He managed to pull himself off his knees despite the dry heaves and scurried up into the back seat. Following my example he jettisoned the ladder.

I pressed my stump to the console. Any old where would do. "Ahh — " Nothing like the feel of fusion with a fine piece of machinery.

"Poor girl," I said. "They've treated you badly. But you'll pull through for us, won't you?"

I could feel Ackroyd's eyes boring through the headrest into my skull. "Don't we need flight suits?" he demanded.

"I'll try not to do anything radical enough to black us out." I felt for the twin engines, reWed them, felt their power surge. It's why pilots are such an arrogant lot — there's nothing like the feeling of unbridled power a jet fighter imparts. And they only get it at one remove, poor sods. I got it all.

A horrible light dawned on Ackroyd. "Do you know how to fly this thing?" he demanded.

"No."

He started to clamber out. "I just remembered," he said, "I have an appointment to get my nails done. Pulled out by the roots, that is."

I dropped my canopy on him, trapping him. "Calm yourself, my boy," I said — I was starting to feel giddy now, I don't mind telling you. "This baby knows how to fly herself."

Outside, our pursuers drew up alongside in their vehicles, apparently afraid to open fire on one of the Ayatollah's personal warplanes. What they did didn't matter. I showed them our tail, and flame, and we rose into the sky and freedom.

***

The Shi'ites have a prophecy, that the Antichrist will appear in the desert of Khorasan, to lead an army of 144,000 Jews in battle against the faithful at Armageddon. Desert One lay smack in the middle of Khorasan.

I wonder if Battle knew that all along. Probably not.

Later they said it was Cy Vance who talked Carter into puppying, after the crash at Desert One. The loss of life shook him, and his bowels turned to water at the thought of what the world would say if he turned a Night Shadow's miniguns on a crowd of civilians in the streets of Tehran.

Well, all that's true enough — at the crunch, Jimmy Earl didn't have the sand to carry through. But it wasn't just Vance working on him. It was Brzezinski. And Battle, back at Desert One, spinning long-distance tales of how the mission was a wash and it was time to cut his losses.

I told them over and over at debriefing how I'd seen Casaday there, leading the mob. They said over and over that I was mistaken. That it wasn't Casaday, couldn't have been. Then they told me that he had been trying to pull the mob off our trail.

Eventually I was told — officially — to drop the matter. I'm a good soldier, and even I have to sleep sometime. I dropped it — openly.

You wonder how I got the idea there was some kind of high-level conspiracy against wild cards — what brought me clear around the world and back to Vietnam. Do you have an idea, now?

— That's the story you wanted, but it's not all the story. Here's how our adventure differed from the bad fiction poor old Harvey thought couldn't hurt him: our escapade had consequences. It left marks on the souls of those who survived. It always does.

Billy Ray survived, of course. He even kept the name I gave him. I'm flattered. We just shipped him back from here; he was a prisoner of war, of sorts. Working for that devil, our old friend Battle.

Casaday was here too, but he got away. Which was good, because I would have killed him on sight, and Mark would disapprove of that. And I respect Meadows. It's not many hippie peacefreak wimps who conquer their own country from the communists.

Lady Black — well, once she wasn't my subordinate any more I was free to follow certain leads she'd given me. She's a lovely child. We've continued to keep in touch. 1n more ways than one. I'll spare you the details, but I will say that metal isn't the only kind of substance my spirit will enter into — and some of the other ones conduct energy very slowly.

As I told her, I do wonderful things with prosthetics.

Ackroyd never crossed my path again. We're both happier that way. I guess he still blames guns for killing that kid. A real shame his moral courage doesn't match his physical. If he faced up to what he did — instead of blaming objects — I wager he'd sleep better.

By the way: Harvey Melmoth. The Librarian. He died, you know. Exsanguination resulting from an insult to the arteria femoris, the report read.

Bullshit. I told you, that bullet never hit his femoral artery. I've seen enough of those wounds to know. Jay Ackroyd was right all along, you see. They sent us to Tehran to die.

It was a conspiracy. It's still going on; what you're investigating is part of it too. It was following up strands of that conspiracy that led me to Mark and back to Nam. It's big, and it means to finish the wild cards for good.

One last thing, before you turn that tape recorder off: President Carter took personal responsibility of the failure of the rescue mission, and ordered the records sealed in an effort to protect aces from the storm of recrimination. That was big of him; too bad it didn't work. Aces were blamed anyway, even if the public didn't know which ones were involved.

But he was wrong again. The responsibility was mine, and mine alone. I lost three good men and women — I don't count Darius, and I hope they pulled him apart much more slowly than they did Amy. The rest of my team was permanently scarred, one physically, all mentally.

Their blood is on my hands. I grieve them every day. The responsibility is mine.

So ends the narrative of J. Robert Belew, USSF, retired.