Turn of the Cards

Chapter Thirteen

The truck park was no-man’s land; King’s X. Mark only hoped the bearded Pasdaran toughs who hung around the gates like wolves respected the ancient sanctity of base. He did realize their record in that line was none too good.

He’d run into a snag. Otto and the Great White Mercedes were fixing to turn around and drive back to Istanbul. Mark could go with him or stay here.

Neither was exactly what he had in mind.

Mark walked across the graveled parking lot sipping fruit juice from a bottle. The sky was high and blue and serenely uninvolved. The morning air was cool, almost chill. Off in the distance a tape-recorded call to prayer played from a minaret.

A voice called his name: “Mark! Mark Meadows!”

Tears filled his eyes. Don’t I get any breaks? He threw his bottle down and without even looking back started to run for the gate. He knew what the DEA would do to him; there was at least some question with the Revolutionary Guard.

He ran into something. It seemed to have the dimensions and solidity of a redwood. It said, “Oof”

He looked up. He was six-four; he looked up anyway. The man he’d run into had a good three inches on him. He also had a hook nose, a wild beard, wild hair, and a round cap on top of his head that looked like one of those little cushions old ladies put on their divans.

Mark looked left and right. The boy he’d collided with had brought his brothers along to play. His big brothers. They wore baggy pants and Western shirts that looked like they’d come from Goodwill and vests over them. They all had knives as long as Mark’s forearm through their belts. They did not look well socialized, at all.

One of them wore a red rose over one ear. He grinned at Mark when he caught his eye. He had a gold tooth.

“Mark! Mark, my man. What’s your hurry?”

He turned to face his doom. In this case Nemesis took the form of a skinny guy of maybe medium height, with a dirty-blond handlebar mustache, round cherry-tinted wire-rim glasses, and a black straw cowboy hat with a big feather panache plastered on the front that made it look as if a sparrow had run into him in a full-power dive. He resembled the counterculture answer to Richard Petty.

“Frank?” Mark asked in a barely audible croak. “Freewheelin’ Frank?”

“One and the same, bro, one and the same.” He gave Mark a huge hug, and then, by God, a Revolutionary Drug Brothers Power Handshake.

“So how the hell have you been, man?” he demanded, holding Mark at arm’s length. “It’s been what? God, fifteen, sixteen years. You’re lookin’ better than I would have thought possible, you lanky son of a bitch. There’s something about you — it’s like you’re more, you know, together than I’ve seen you before. And there’s something else, around the eyes”

“Just crow’s feet, man.”

“Oh, I’m forgetting my manners. Mark, I want you to meet the boys: this is Yilderim, and this is Muzaffar, and Qasim, and this is Ali Sher.”

Ali Sher was the one with the rose. He grinned again at his name and batted his eyes.

“Uh … hi,” Mark said. “Pleased to meet you. What, uh, like, what line of work would you boys happen to be in?”

“They’re mujahidin, Mark,” Freewheelin’ Frank said. “Afghan freedom fighters.”

He took Mark by the shoulders. “C’mon, man. Let’s book over to the chaikhana, toss back a few cups and catch up on old times.”

“So, what’ve I been doing?” Freewheelin’ Frank tossed back his cup of tea and held it out for one of the mujahidin to pour it full from the pot in the middle of the table. The chaikhana — teahouse — was a disappointment, glass and steel and Formica like every other transport caf in the known world, or at least the world known to Mark. They were crowded into a couple of booths by a window looking out over the yardful of semi-trailer rigs. “Well, shit, femme figure out the Reader’s Digest condensed version.”

Back in the old Bay days Freewheelin’ Frank had been Mark’s supplier of hallucinogens and prime smokables. About a year or so after Sunflower turned up at Mark’s door, he’d dropped from view and been seen no more.

“Well, what happened to me was about what you’d expect: somebody blew me up to the pigs, and I had to roll. Went out to Oahu for a couple years until that got too hot. Then, what? Spent a lot of time in Latin America. Hunted investment insects for a while in the Amazon.”

“Investment insects?”

“Yeah. For a while all these West Germans were buying up your collectible bugs as inflation hedges. Nothin’ all that rare, mind you, at least not down in the rain forest. But spectacular. Great big green beetles, walking sticks, that kind of thing. Weird old world we live in, ain’t it?

“That didn’t last. Local authorities wanted to cut themselves in on a piece of the action, namely all of it. Then I just knocked around a bit — ran guns to the rebels in Guatemala, ran pre-Columbian stuff out, mostly to the Japanese. Smuggled emeralds from Colombia — that was all I touched down there, I swear to God; coke lords were getting too crazy to deal with by that point. Fuckin’ Bush’ll do us all a favor if he cleans out those Medellín pukes, let some Japs or Taiwanese take over who aren’t gonna be eat up with dumbass machismo shit.

“After a while I got bored with that and decided to head east, young man. I’m doing pretty well, here, too. Asia’s full of entrepreneurial possibilities in the import-export line.”

He rubbed the bristles on his face. They were almost white down at the point of his chin.

“So you finally decided to hit the hippie trail, old man? The road to Kathmandu. That where you’re headed?”

Mark shrugged. “I don’t know, man. Seriously”

“I heard you got run out of the old US of A.”

Mark didn’t see much point in dissimulation. “That’s right, man.”

Frank leaned forward. “Is it true, what they said on the satellite? You’re really an ace — you scarf some shit and turn into all these super dudes?”

Mark licked his lips, looked around at the brave freedom fighters. They were watching him keenly and smelling about the same. Mi Sher smiled again.

“It’s true.”

Frank leaned back and ran his hand down his jaw with a scraping sound. “Then I got a proposition for you. You seem to be heading east. How’d you like to keep going that way, maybe pick up a little loose change?”

“Doing what?”

“Riding shotgun.”

Mark shook his head. “You lost me, man. What do you mean?”

“We — my bros here ’n’ me — we’re making a run into Afghanistan. It’s maybe a thousand mile between here and Kabul.” He pronounced it “Cobble.” “Now, the Revolutionary Guard, they usually leave us alone, because we’re brave Islamic Holy Strugglers and all, and anyway these Pushtuns can kick the shit outta their low-country cousins any old time they want. But you never can tell. This country is fallin’ apart, just between you and me and the wall, and every third village got some badass holed up in it with a lot of ex-militia boys with guns, figure they’re gonna play The Wind and the Lion now that Ruhollah ain’t here to hold the center anymore.

“Once we get to the border, we got the DRA, that’s the Afghan Army, looking sharp to nail our asses to a board. And they got nasty Mi-35 Export Hind helicopters flying around, and they still got more than one or two Spetsnaz — that’s Russian Green Beret — caravan hunter teams wandering around the countryside looking for dushmans, that’s bad boys like us. So having along a little friend who can fly and shoot some serious fire from his hands has the potential to come in mighty handy.”

“What’re you carrying?”

“Well, the boys themselves. They been on furlough, kind of. Plus we got some antiaircraft and antitank missiles. Russian stuff — buy it offa the Morskoye Pekhota, Naval infantry boys attached to the Black Sea fleet. They’ll do anything for hash oil and Traci Lords videotapes.”

“But I thought the Russians had left Afghanistan,” Mark protested.

“Most of ’em have.”

“Then what’re the freedom fighters fighting against?”

“My man Dr. Najib. The dictator. Soviet puppet with most of his strings snipped.”

“I’ve heard of him. But the TV news always said he was a moderate. Really interested in, like, trying to reform the country.”

“He’s got him some funny notions about reform. He broke into the big time as a professional torturer for KhAD, the Afghan secret police. He’s really into medical experimentation too, if you know what I mean. Can you say, Dr. Mengele? Sure. I knew you could.”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t want to get mixed up in a war or anything.”

“Peace, Love, Dope forever, huh? Well, shit, man, I gotta say I respect you for it. These days it’s War, Hate, and Just Say No. Teach it to the kids in school.”

Actually it was that Mark had just been in a war, and it was pretty bad, and he didn’t want to get mixed up with another. He didn’t say anything about that. He didn’t want Frank to think he was completely crazy.

“Still, man, think about it — where you gonna go? You surehell can’t stay here. You want to get where the DEA can’t lay a glove on you, right? Try Afghanistan. Or if that’s a little too intense, I can pull a few strings and you can just keep trucking into India.”

India. Now, there was an idea. There was a place he could really use his talents; use them to help other people. He could help them manufacture cheap antibiotics to fight disease, safe, biodegradable insecticides to save their crops. Some of those maharajahs were incredibly rich, rich as any oil sheik. Maybe he could get one to spring for a research facility, really get some work done.

Maybe he could find a guru, too. India was a very spiritual place. The Maharishi came from there, and Meher Baba. Maybe it was time to cultivate that side of his nature.

“How about it, man?” Frank asked. “You stay clear of the one or two kingdoms the U.S. has in its back pocket and they’ll never touch you. What do you say?”

“I’ll do it.”

Frank jumped up and threw his hat in the air. “All right!

Come on, boys, saddle up — we got us an ace in the hole.”

The Revolutionary Ministry of whatever it was had let them have a car to drive around in. It was an ’87 Toyota Camry in a shade of blue nobody could ever remember seeing before. It ran well.

J. Bob Belew walked slowly across the truck park. The setting sun stretched his shadow clear to the perimeter fence. He slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door.

“Straw boss says a man matching Meadows’ description was here, all right. But he left three, four hours ago with another American he met here. They say they headed north, as if they were planning to cross the Elburz, for what that’s worth. Which is probably nothing.”

He started the engine. “Does that mean we’ve lost him?” Helen asked from the passenger seat.

“For the moment.”

Helen Carlysle set her mouth and gazed out the window at the distant blue Elburz. In the back where they thought he couldn’t see, Lynn Saxon shot his partner Gary a thumb’s up.

In front, where no one did see, J. Bob Belew smiled. All to himself

It was dark on the windswept Iranian Plateau. It was getting extremely cold in the bed of the canvasback truck grinding up the endless grade toward the Roof of the World, even though one of the mujahidin had given Mark a sheepskin coat that smelled as if the sheep was still living in it, and possibly several other animals as well.

He pulled the coat closer about his shinny frame and tried again to find a comfortable position in which to rest his butt on a lot of wood crates marked in Cyrillic letters. In the near-total blackness he could see the glimmer of starlight on eyeballs turned expectantly toward him, a vagrant gleam from Ali Sher’s gold tooth.

They’d pretty much played out “Give Peace a Chance.” In fact the Afghans didn’t look as if there were anything in the world they were less ready to give a chance to than peace, unless it was a Soviet armored column. But that hadn’t stopped them from singing about it with a will. Now they want more.

“I know you probably don’t drink, either,” he said, “but try this anyway: Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer …