Whirlwind

by James Clavell

  Once more the engines spluttered and Hakim Khan called out over the noise, “Erikki, forget it for tonight!” But Erikki did not hear him. Hakim moved away from the noise, nearer to the gate, Azadeh following him reluctantly. His walk was ponderous and awkward, and he cursed, unused to his crutches. “Greetings, Highness,” the policemen said politely.

  “Greetings. Azadeh,” Hakim said irritably, “your husband’s got no patience, he’s losing his senses. What’s the matter with him? It’s ridiculous to keep trying the engines. What good would it do even if he could start them?”

  “I don’t know, Highness.” Azadeh’s face was white in the pale light and she was very uneasy. “He’s…since the raid he’s been very strange, very difficult, difficult to understand—he frightens me.”

  “I don’t wonder! He’s enough to frighten the Devil.”

  “Please excuse me, Highness,” Azadeh said apologetically, “but in normal times he’s…he’s not frightening.”

  Politely the two policemen turned away, but Hakim stopped them. “Have you noticed any difference in the pilot?”

  “He’s very angry, Highness. He’s been angry for hours. Once I saw him kick the machine—but different or not is difficult to say. I’ve never been near to him before.” The corporal was in his forties and wanted no trouble. The other man was younger and even more afraid. Their orders were to watch and wait until the pilot left by car, or any car left, not to hinder its leaving but to report to HQ at once by their car radio. Both of them realized the danger of their position—the arm of the Gorgon Khan had a very long reach. Both knew of the servants and guards of the late Khan accused by him of treason, still rotting in police dungeons. But both also knew the reach of Inner Intelligence was more certain.

  “Tell him to stop it, Azadeh, to stop the engines.”

  “He’s never before been so…so angry with me, and tonight…” Her eyes almost crossed in her rage. “I don’t think I can obey him.”

  “You WILL!”

  After a pause she muttered, “When he’s even a little angry, I can do nothing with him.”

  The policemen saw her paleness and were sorry for her but more sorry for themselves—they had heard what had happened on the mountainside. God protect us from He of the Knife! What must it be like to marry such a barbarian who everyone knows drank the blood of the tribesmen he slaughtered, worships forest spirits against the law of God, and rolls naked in the snow, forcing her to do the same.

  The engines spluttered and began to die and they saw Erikki bellow with rage and smash his great fist on the side of the cockpit, denting the aluminum with the force of his blow.

  “Highness, with your permission I will go to bed—I think I will take a sleeping pill and hope that tomorrow is a better…” Her words trailed off.

  “Yes. A sleeping pill is a good idea. Very good. I’m afraid I’ll have to take two, my back hurts terribly and now I can’t sleep without them.” Hakim added angrily, “It’s his fault! If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be in pain.” He turned to his bodyguard. “Fetch my guards on the gate, I want to give them instructions. Come along, Azadeh.”

  Painfully he walked off, Azadeh obediently and sullenly at his side. The engines started shrieking again. Irritably Hakim Khan turned and snapped at the policemen, “If he doesn’t stop in five minutes, order him to stop in my name! Five minutes, by God!”

  Uneasily the two men watched them leave, the bodyguard with the two gate guards hurrying after them up the steps. “If Her Highness can’t deal with him, what can we do?” the older policeman said.

  “With the Help of God the engines will continue until the barbarian is satisfied, or he stops them himself.”

  The lights in the forecourt went out. After six minutes the engines were still starting and stopping. “We’d better obey.” The young policeman was very nervous. “The Khan said five. We’re late.”

  “Be prepared to run and don’t irritate him unnecessarily. Take your safety catch off.” Nervously they went closer. “Pilot!” But the pilot still had his back to them and was half inside the cockpit. Son of a dog! Closer, now up to the whirling blades. “Pilot!” the corporal said loudly.

  “He can’t hear you, who can hear anything? You go forward, I’ll cover you.”

  The corporal nodded, commended his soul to God, and ducked into the wash of air. “Pilot!” He had to go very close, and touch him. “Pilot!” Now the pilot turned, his face grim, said something in barbarian that he did not understand. With a forced smile and forced politeness, he said, “Please, Excellency Pilot, we would consider it an honor if you would stop the engines, His Highness the Khan has ordered it.” He saw the blank look, remembered that He of the Knife could not speak any civilized language, so he repeated what he had said, speaking louder and slower and using signs. To his enormous relief, the pilot nodded apologetically, turned some switches, and now the engines were slowing and the blades were slowing.

  Praise be to God! Well done, how clever you are, the corporal thought, gratified. “Thank you, Excellency Pilot. Thank you.” Very pleased with himself he imperiously peered into the cockpit. Now he saw the pilot making signs to him, clearly wishing to please him—as so he should, by God—inviting him to get into the pilot’s seat. Puffed with pride, he watched the barbarian politely lean into the cockpit and move the controls and point at instruments.

  Not able to contain his curiosity the younger policeman came under the blades that were circling slower and slower, up to the cockpit door. He leaned in to see better, fascinated by the banks of switches and dials that glowed in the darkness.

  “By God, Corporal, have you ever seen so many dials and switches? You look as though you belong in that seat!”

  “I wish I was a pilot,” the corporal said. “I th—” He stopped, astonished, as his words were swallowed by a blinding red fog that sucked the breath out of his lungs and made the darkness complete.

  Erikki had rammed the younger man’s head against the corporal’s, stunning both of them. Above him the rotors stopped. He looked around. No movement in the darkness, just a few lights on in the palace. No alien eyes or presence that he could sense. Quickly he stowed their guns behind the pilot’s seat. It took only seconds to carry the two men to the cabin and lay them inside, force their mouths open, put in the sleeping pills that he had stolen from Azadeh’s cabinet, and gag them. A moment to collect his breath before he went forward and checked that all was ready for instant departure. Then he came back to the cabin. The two men had not moved. He leaned against the doorway ready to silence them again if need be. His throat was dry. Sweat beaded him. Waiting. Then he heard dogs and the sound of chain leashes. Quietly he readied the Sten gun. The wandering patrol of two armed guards and the Doberman pinschers passed around the palace but did not come near him. He watched the palace, his arm no longer in the sling.

  IN THE NORTHERN SLUMS: The ramshackle, canvas-colored ambulance trundled through the potholed streets. In the back were two medics and three stretchers and Hashemi lay on one, howling, hemorrhaging, most of the front of his loins torn out.

  “In the Name of God, give him morphine,” Armstrong gasped through his own pain. He was slumped on his stretcher, half propped against the swaying side, holding a surgical dressing tightly against the bullet hole in his upper chest, quite oblivious of the blood pumping from the wound in his back that was soaking the crude dressing one of the medics had stuffed through the rent in his trenchcoat. “Give him morphine. Hurry!” he told them again, cursing them in Farsi and English, hating them for their stupidity and rough handling—still in shock from the suddenness of the bullet and the attack that had come out of nowhere. Why why why?

  “What can I do, Excellency?” came out of the darkness. “We have none of this morphine. It’s God’s will.” The man switched on a flashlight and almost blinded him, turned it onto Hashemi, then to the third stretcher. The youth there was already dead. Armstrong saw they had not bothered to close his eyes. Another burbling screa
m came from Hashemi.

  “Put out the light, Ishmael,” the other medic said. “You want to get us shot?”

  Idly, Ishmael obeyed. Once more in darkness, he lit a cigarette, coughed, and cleared his throat noisily, pulled the canvas side screen aside for a moment to get his bearings. “Only a few more minutes, with the Help of God.” He leaned down and shook Hashemi out of his unconscious peace into waking hell. “Only a few more minutes, Excellency Colonel. Don’t die yet,” he said helpfully. “Only a few more minutes and you’ll get proper treatment.”

  They all lurched as a wheel went into a pothole. Pain blazed through Armstrong. When he felt the ambulance stop, he almost wept with relief. Other men pulled away the canvas tail cover and scrambled in. Rough hands grabbed his feet and dragged him down onto the stretcher and bound him with the safety straps. Through the hell mist of pain he saw Hashemi’s stretcher being carried off into the night, then men lifted him carelessly, the pain was too much, and he fainted.

  The stretcher bearers stepped over the joub and went through the doorway in the high wall, into the sleazy corridor and along it, down a flight of stairs, and into a large cellar that was lit with oil lamps. Mzytryk said, “Put him there!” He pointed to the second table. Hashemi was already on the first one, also strapped to his stretcher. Leisurely Mzytryk examined Armstrong’s wounds, then Hashemi’s, both men still unconscious.

  “Good,” he said. “Wait for me upstairs, Ishmael.”

  Ishmael took off the grimy Red Cross armband and threw it into a corner with the others. “Many of our people were martyred in the building. I doubt if any escaped.”

  “Then you were wise not to join the meeting.”

  Ishmael clomped upstairs to rejoin his friends who were noisily congratulating themselves on their success in grabbing the enemy leader and his running dog, the foreigner. All were trusted, hard-core Islamic-Marxist fighters, not a medic among them.

  Mzytryk waited until he was alone, then took a small penknife and probed Hashemi deeply. The bellowing scream pleased him. When it subsided he lifted the pail of icy water and dashed it into the colonel’s face. The eyes opened and the terror and pain therein pleased him even more. “You wanted to see me, Colonel? You murdered my son, Fedor. I’m General Petr Oleg Mzytryk.” He used the knife again. Hashemi’s face became grotesque as he howled, screaming and babbling incoherently, trying to fight out of his bonds.

  “This’s for my son…and this for my son…and this for my son…”

  Hashemi’s heart was strong, and he lasted minutes, begging for mercy, begging for death, the One God for death and for vengeance. He died badly.

  For a moment Mzytryk stood over him, his nostrils rebelling against the stench. But he did not need to force himself to remember what these two had done to his son to drag him down to the third level. Pahmudi’s report had been explicit. “Hashemi Fazir, you’re repaid, you shiteater,” he said and spat in his face. Then he turned and stopped. Armstrong was awake and watching him from the stretcher on the other side of the cellar. Cold blue eyes. Bloodless face. The lack of fear astonished him. I’ll soon change that, he thought, and took out the penknife. Then he noticed Armstrong’s right arm was out of the straps, but before he could do anything Armstrong had reached up for the lapel of his trenchcoat and now held the tip and the hidden cyanide capsule it contained near his mouth. “Don’t move!” Armstrong warned.

  Mzytryk was too seasoned to consider rushing him, the distance too far. In his side pocket was an automatic but before he could get it out he was sure that Armstrong’s teeth would crush the capsule and three seconds left was not nearly enough time for vengeance. His only hope was that Armstrong’s pain would make him faint, or lose concentration. He leaned back against the other table and cursed him.

  When the stretcher bearers had tightened Armstrong’s straps in the darkness of the ambulance, he had instinctively used his strength against the straps to give himself just enough space to pull out his arm—in case the pain became too much for him. Another capsule was secreted in his shirt collar. He had trembled through Hashemi’s dying, thanking God for the respite that had allowed him to drag his arm free, the effort terrible. But once he had touched the capsule, his terror had left him and with it, much of his pain. He had made peace with himself at the edge of death where life is so utterly sublime.

  “We’re…we’re professionals,” he said. “We didn’t murder your…your son. He was alive when…when General Janan took him away for Pahmudi.”

  “Liar!” Mzytryk heard the weakness in the voice and knew he would not have to wait much longer. He readied.

  “Read the official…official documents… SAVAMA must have made some…and those of your God-cursed KGB.”

  “You think I’m such a fool you can set me against Pahmudi before you die?”

  “Read the reports, ask questions, you could get the truth. But you KGB bastards never like the truth. I tell you he was alive when SAVAMA took him.”

  Mzytryk was put off balance. It wouldn’t be normal for a professional like Armstrong—near death, one way or another, to waste time suggesting such an investigation without being certain of the outcome. “Where are the tapes?” he said, watching him carefully, seeing the eyes beginning to flicker, great tiredness from loss of blood. Any second now. “Where are the tapes?”

  “There weren’t any. Not…not from the third level.” Armstrong’s strength was ebbing. The pain had gone now—along with time. It took a bigger and bigger effort every second to concentrate. But the tapes must be protected, a copy already safely en route to London along with a special report. “Your son was brave and strong and gave away nothing to us. What…what Pahmudi hacked…hacked out of him I don’t know… Pahmudi’s thugs…it was them or your own scum. He was al…alive when your lot took him. Pahmudi told Hashemi.”

  That’s possible, Mzytryk thought uneasily. Those motherless shiteaters in Tehran messed up Iran, misread the Shah for years, and befouled our work of generations. “I’ll find out. By my son’s head I’ll find out but that won’t help you—comrade!”

  “One favor deserves…one deserves ano…another. You knocked off Roger, Roger Crosse, eh?”

  Mzytryk laughed, happy to taunt him and exploit the waiting. “I arranged it, yes. And AMG, remember him? And Talbot, but I told Pahmudi to use this shiteater Fazir for that 16/a.” He watched the cold blue eyes narrow and wondered what was behind them.

  Armstrong was searching his memory. AMG? Ah, yes, Alan Medford Grant, born 1905, dean of counterintelligence agents. In 1963, as Ian Dunross’s secret informant, he fingered a mole in the Noble House. And another in my Special Branch who turned out to be my best friend. “Liar! AMG was killed in a motorcycle accident in ’63.”

  “It was assisted. We’d had a 16/a out on that traitor for a year or more—and his Jap wife.”

  “He wasn’t married.”

  “You bastards know nothing. Special Branch? Turd heads. She was Jap Intelligence. She had an accident in Sydney the same year.”

  Armstrong allowed himself a little smile. The AMG motorcycle “accident” had been organized by the KGB but had been restaged by MI6. The death certificate was genuine, someone else’s, and Alan Medford Grant still operates successfully though with a different face and different cover that even I don’t know. But a wife? Japanese? Was that another smoke screen, or another secret? Wheels within wheels within…

  The past beckoned Armstrong. With an effort he put his mind on what he truly wanted to know, to check if he was right or wrong, no time to waste anymore, none. “Who’s the fourth man—our arch traitor?”

  The question hung in the cellar. Mzytryk was startled and then he smiled, for Armstrong had given him the key to have his revenge psychologically. He told him the name and saw the shock. And the name of the fifth man, even the sixth. “MI6’s riddled with our agents, not just moles, so’s MI5, most of your trade unions—Ted Everly’s one of ours, Broadhurst and Lord Grey—remember him from Hong Kong?—and not
just Labour though they’re our best seeding ground. Names?” he said gloating, knowing he was safe, “Look in Who’s Who! High up in the banks, the City, in the Foreign Office—Henley’s another of ours and I’ve already had a copy of your report—up to Cabinet, perhaps even into Downing Street. We’ve half a thousand professionals of our own in Britain, not counting your own traitors.” His laugh was cruel.

  “And Smedley-Taylor?”

  “Oh, yes, him too an—” Abruptly Mzytryk’s gloating ceased, his guard slammed shut. “How do you know about him? If you know about him… Eh?”

  Armstrong was satisfied. Fedor Rakoczy had not lied. All those names on the tapes already gone, already safe, Henley never trusted, not even Talbot. He was content and sad, sorry that he would not be around to catch them himself. Someone will. AMG will.

  His eyes fluttered, his hand slid away from his coat lapel. Instantly Mzytryk rushed the space, moving very fast for such a big man, and pinioned the arm between the table and his leg, ripped the lapel away, and now Armstrong was powerless and at his mercy. “Wake up, matyeryebyets!” he said exultantly, the penknife out. “How did you know about Smedley?”

  But Armstrong did not answer. Death had come quietly.

  Mzytryk was enraged, his heart thundering. “Never mind, he’s gone, no need to waste time,” he muttered out loud. The mother-eating bastard went into hell knowing he was the tool of traitors, some of them. But how did he know about Smedley-Taylor? To hell with him, what if he told the truth about my son?

  In the corner of the cellar was a can of kerosene. He began to slop it over the bodies, his rage dissipating. “Ishmael!” he called up the stairs. When he had finished with the kerosene he threw the can into the corner. Ishmael and another man came down into the cellar. “Are you ready to leave?” Mzytryk asked them.

  “Yes, with the Help of God.”

  “And with the help of ourselves too,” Mzytryk said lightly. He wiped his hands, tired but satisfied with the way the day and the night had gone. Now just a short ride to the outskirts of Tabriz to his helicopter. An hour—less—to the Tbilisi dacha and Vertinskya. In a few weeks the young puppy Hakim will arrive, with or without my pishkesh, Azadeh. If it’s without, it will be expensive for him. “Start the fire,” he said crisply, “and we’ll be going.”