Wild Cards 13 : Card Sharks

by George R. R. Martin

  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 mi
ght 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.