Wild Cards 13 : Card Sharks

by George R. R. Martin

  "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.