by Deno Trakas
“What do you think’s going to happen to him?”
“I think he’ll finally realize how sinister the Ayatollah is, how bad he is for Iran, and he’ll give up and leave, or do something stupid. If he does that, they’ll execute him.”
“Do you think they used Azi in their case against him when they arrested him?”
“Maybe, but they probably didn’t make a case or even charge him.”
“Did you ever have anything to do with the Shah?” Oman asked.
“No.”
“What’d you think of him?”
“Well-educated and polished, but corrupt, racist, egotistical, ruthless in holding onto power—that was the worst thing. SAVAK. But I kind of liked his wife, Shahbanou Farah, even though she was a spoiled brat.”
Oman thought out loud. “I wonder why we let the bastard get so powerful?”
“Like so many of the Iranians, he was afraid of the Russians and talked anti-communism—that’s all it took.”
“Jesus, Garrison, you sure don’t sound like a good CIA boy.”
“Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons they’re letting me out—I think they want me to go back to Langley for reprogramming.”
“What do you think about that?”
“Shit, it’s a joke. But I’ll be glad to get the hell out of here for a while. You see this traffic jam? The whole country’s like a traffic jam: mujahedin blowing up cars, Pasdars hauling innocent people to jail—they arrested a high school girl and pulled out her fingernails because she had on nail polish—and worse. The mullahs are fascists, just as ruthless as the Shah, and they’re going after everyone they don’t like. There’s going to be a bloodbath—it’s already started. That’s what happens when there’s a power vacuum. You did the right thing to come and get Azadeh—stupid but right.”
“You think they would’ve killed her?”
“Depends on what happens to Ghotbzadeh, but yeah, kill her or just let her die.”
Thinking of her, I asked, “How long till we get to Qom?”
“Depends on traffic, and if we have to stop.”
“Why would we stop?”
“Lots of reasons, but let’s hope we don’t.” He swung his worry beads around his middle finger and caught them in his palm. “At the height of the revolution, there was an armed gang on every corner, punks with guns—it was wild. Now, because of the war with Iraq, there aren’t so many.” He snickered. “A lot of them volunteer, and the rest are drafted. They send them in waves over the border and the Iraqis mow them down, the poor schmucks. And the Iraqis do the same, send their boys to the slaughter. Anyway, I don’t know what we’ll run into. Like I said, there may be a police roadblock, but as long as they haven’t found the Nissan and traced it—which is unlikely—or have any other reason to suspect us, we should be okay.”
“Will they check the back?”
“They might look in our bags, but I don’t think they’ll go any farther. We’re counting on it.”
“Jesus,” Oman said.
“Yeah, I’m counting on him too.”
As the temperature began to drop, probably into the forties, Garrison switched on the heater in the cab. Wrapped and covered as she was, Azi should be okay for a while, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. When we hit the Qom highway, Garrison pushed the old Ford up to about 80. If the speed limit was less than that, nobody paid attention, except the heavy trucks and old cars that couldn’t go that fast. Some of the trucks were decorated with colored lights and looked like boxy metal Christmas trees; most of them carried the mandatory pictures of Khomeini taped to their windshields.
Outside the city, we could see enough of the territory to know that we were leaving the foothills of a mountain range and entering a desert. “This is Iran,” Garrison said. “A handful of cities, and the rest is poor villages, mountains and desert, except for a few forests up north and west, and the delta region down near the coast.”
“Where was the failed rescue attempt?” Oman asked.
“East of here.”
“What’s out there?”
“Sand, salt, and Afghanistan. And some wrecked American choppers.”
“Could it have worked?”
“I don’t know—they didn’t exactly publish the plans—but I think so. Not without casualties, though, on both sides.”
“We have to go through mountains, is that right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What about Azi?”
“Hopefully she’ll be inside with us by then.”
“Why can’t we let her out now?”
“Not til after Qom. There’s a lot of traffic and army personnel between here and there—it’d be too risky.”
So we kept driving and Garrison kept talking. I asked him if he knew what had gone wrong in Athens, and he said no, but someone must have gotten lazy—they should have had constant surveillance on the hotel and should have intercepted the terrorist, but somehow he got in AND out, AND WITH AZI, without being detected. Disgraceful. I asked if he thought the CIA had sabotaged the operation on purpose so that the hostage crisis wouldn’t be solved before the election. He said it was possible—Bush had lots of old buddies at the agency, and he’d heard rumors of a deal between the Iranians and the Reagan administration, hostages for arms, but Baizan was a straight-up guy.
“Who do you side with in all this?” I asked.
“I generally don’t give a shit about American politics, but I think Reagan’s dangerous—he sees everything as black or white, and down here in the streets, it’s all shades of gray. And complicated. Carter was clumsy but a lot smarter than people gave him credit for, and he did his damnedest to free the hostages.”
“Are there any other CIA people still here?”
“Iran is unstable and sits between the Soviet Union and the Gulf—you bet your ass we’re still here. But it’s dangerous, as I said, and we’re trying to do more with technology, like satellites, rather than people on the ground. It won’t work, though. You got to have people in the streets, in the bazaar, or you don’t know what’s going on. People like me.”
As we approached Qom in the dark, Garrison pointed out a huge salt lake off to the east, a dead, flat, white expanse that looked like one of the seas on the moon. Garrison said that visitors to Qom swore the drinking water was pumped straight from there, and he was glad we didn’t have to spend the night. A cluster of power lines appeared, then a huge sculpture of a sword rose up in front of the city. “Now doesn’t that make for a pleasant welcome,” Oman said. “Makes me want to settle down and raise a family right here.”
“That’s a symbol of Allah, which tells you something. This is the religious capital of Iran, Khomeini’s headquarters.”
“I should have guessed,” Oman said. “Qom sweet Qom.”
Garrison pulled into a truck stop, got a ration of gas, and picked up some Pepsis, bottled lemonade, several oval-shaped loaves of flatbread, and yogurt. Although I hadn’t eaten since our room-service breakfast in the hotel, almost ten hours ago—it seemed ten years—I didn’t think I was hungry until the smell of fresh bread filled the cab.
We drove into the city of Qom without incident, but on our way out we ran into a military roadblock: a troop carrier blocked the right lane, and a jeep, 20 yards farther, blocked the left, so that all traffic had to zigzag in single file to get through; at both ends of the obstacle course stood an army officer and three or four armed guards. We slowed and entered the line of a dozen vehicles.
“Here we go, guys,” Garrison said. “Let me do all the talking. If someone asks you a direct question in English, pretend to have trouble understanding, and I’ll help. If you feel comfortable with your Spanish accent, use it. Otherwise, just keep it simple—oil fields, pipeline, Bandar, like that. They’ll probably want to see our papers, so hand ’m over when they ask.”
“What if they find Azi?” I asked, stupidly.
“They won’t.”
There was no reason to press him. If they found Az
i, we were dead, it was that simple, whether they shot us on the spot, or threw us in jail and found out later about the breakout.
Every vehicle had to stop. Most were allowed to pass after only a brief pause, while others had to pull over for inspection. Finally we pulled up to the officer in charge of our end of the roadblock. Dressed in a well-pressed uniform and clean-shaven, he looked more like a maître d’ at a classy restaurant than a soldier. He spoke to Garrison quickly, leaning slightly into the window so he could see into the cab. Garrison answered with short phrases. Then Garrison turned to us and said, “Papers.” We handed over our passports, visas, and letters of introduction from a fake Mexican company stating the purpose of our visit. The officer shined his flashlight on them and flipped the pages of our passports carefully, examining the entry stamps. He aimed the light at our faces and compared us with our pictures. Then he spoke in good English, “Why are you going to Bandar Imam?”
Oman answered in slow English with a convincing Spanish accent, rolling his r’s nicely. “We check pipeline, and maybe we help with fire in refinery.”
“What is in the truck?”
Oman answered again. “Carpet and cloth and our clothes.” He held out his arm and pinched the material of his coat sleeve.
The officer glanced back and said something in Farsi, then turned to us and said, “Pull over and get out of truck please.”
I followed Oman out the passenger side, sure that the Iranians would be able to hear my heart pounding, sure that they would know I was guilty the way a dog senses you’re afraid. I tried not to look anyone in the face. We stepped to the back of the truck where a guard was untying a corner of the tarp. Responding to orders from the officer in charge, the guard lifted out our luggage, put it on the ground, and opened each bag. The officer bent over, stuck his hand in each, then nodded and said something else. The guard closed the bags and climbed into the bed of the truck, where he lifted up some of the bolts of cloth. The officer swept his light over the exposed carpets and felt the corner of one of them with his fingers. I could’ve sworn I saw the middle one on the bottom move. He said something to Garrison, but Garrison, instead of pulling out his gun and opening fire as I thought he might, smiled, shrugged, and had a chatty conversation with the man.
The officer signaled the guard, who climbed out, replaced our luggage, and retied the tarp. Garrison and the officer spoke for a minute, and then we had our papers in hand, climbed back into the truck, and pulled away from the roadblock. We drove silently for a few minutes, unable to put our relief into words. Finally Oman said, “That scared the shit out of me. What did he say, Garrison?”
“He said the carpets are imitations, and he guessed someone had made a lot of money off the ignorant Mexicans.” We all laughed, letting our nerves unwind. “Then he wanted to know how much I was charging to drive you to the Gulf. I said a thousand dollars. He asked me if I wanted him to pretend to detain the Mexicans so I could talk him out of it and earn a bonus. I said no, it wouldn’t work because the Mexicans didn’t have any more money after their shopping spree in the bazaar, but I’d made some commission there. He said, ‘Foreigners always have more money,’ but that was all.”
I said, “Did either of you see the carpet move, or was it just my imagination?”
Garrison looked at me and said, “I saw it.”
I took a deep breath and released it. “When can we let her out?”
“We need to go another ten miles or so, just to be safe. We’ll find a place where we can stop.”
When we saw an abandoned gas station, we drove around to the back of the small cinder block building so we wouldn’t be visible from the highway. There wasn’t as much traffic on this road to Arak—most cars and trucks were headed south to Isfahan from Qom—but Garrison explained that almost everyone would stop to help if we just pulled to the side of the road.
Garrison killed the engine and lights and told us to stay put while he made sure no one was watching. He got out and walked the sandy path we’d driven on, circling the building. “He thinks he’s James Bond,” Oman said, “but I’m damn glad he’s with us. I mean shit, knowing what you know now, would you have come over here if you didn’t have any CIA help?”
I didn’t have to think about it. “I’d made up my mind.” I tried to imagine the scene—me, by myself, without Farsi, trying to fool the guards or kill them and get Azi out of the prison . . . I looked at Oman and said seriously, “I would’ve chickened out, or I’d be dead, and I might’ve gotten Azi killed too.”
Garrison came around the far corner of the building and gave a thumbs up. We peeled back the tarp, lowered the tailgate, removed some of the bolts of cloth and two top carpets. Then we slid out the heavy roll of Azi’s carpet and laid it on the sand. “We’ll have you out in a second, Azi,” I said. Garrison and Oman turned the carpet at each end as I played it out from the side. Finally a flip revealed her, and I put my hands under Azi’s neck and waist and eased her onto her back. Her body was stiff and shivering, her arms stuck to her ribs as if she were frozen, but she immediately curled up on her side. Her eyes were closed. “Azi, talk to us, are you okay?” I felt her forehead. “She has a fever.” I took off my blazer and laid it over her.
Oman knelt beside her, across from me, and put the back of his hand on her cheek. “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s bad.” Garrison went to the cab and came back with the supplies he’d bought at the truck stop. Just then she half opened her eyes and let them close again. As I pressed my palm to the side of her face, she opened her eyes again.
“Drink,” she said. I propped her up and held a lemonade bottle to her lips. She sucked on it hard.
“Not too fast,” I said. “How do you feel?”
She nodded. “Where we are?”
Garrison answered, “Just past Qom, headed toward Arak. And we need to get going as soon as you’re ready. Would you like some bread?” She shook her head and pointed to the lemonade bottle I held.
I let her drink the rest of it and asked, “How about some aspirin?” She nodded.
Still kneeling on the other side of Azi, Oman said, “She needs to eat something if she can.” I shook three aspirin out of the bottle I’d carried in my pocket while Oman opened another bottle of lemonade. Azi took one of the aspirin, tilted her head back, put it on her tongue, gagged and spit it out into her hand. I gave her a sip of lemonade.
Oman asked, “Do we have a cup?”
Garrison said no.
Oman held out his hand and I gave him the aspirin. He broke them into pieces and dropped them into the lemonade bottle, saying, “I did this for her at the safe house. I used to do it for one of my girls. She couldn’t take any kind of pill if it wasn’t in liquid. Either that or she had to smoke some grass first. I don’t suppose you have any grass on you, Garrison?”
“Not at the moment, but, in fact, it’s not hard to get here.”
I tore off small chunks of bread, dipped them in yogurt, and fed them to her. Garrison made another circuit of the empty building, then took up a nervous pace, back and forth from one corner to the other. Finally he stopped, hovered over us, and said, “We got to get back on the road.”
“Azi,” I said, “do you feel ready to travel again if we put you up front with us?”
Before she could answer, Garrison said, “She needs to stay in the rug. I know what I said, but that last roadblock scared me. There’s just too much military around, and we’ll all be safer if she’s hidden.”
“But look at her. She’s half dead, she’s shivering, and we’re headed for colder weather.”
“He’s right, Garrison,” Oman said. “I thought you said we’d be okay after we got off the main road.”
“We should be, but I don’t feel right—there’s more risk of getting stopped than I thought. And if we run into another roadblock and she’s in the cab?” Neither of us had an answer. I patted her face. Was she cooler now or was my hand warmer? Was she shivering less or was I just wanting to believe it? “But we
’ll get her out as soon as we can, maybe in an hour,” Garrison said.
“Jay,” Azi said, using my name for the first time since Athens. She sat up straight and turned to look me in the face. “I okay now. I go bathroom, then carpet.” She gave me my coat, pushed against me, and struggled to stand. Oman and I helped her up. Then she shuffled like an arthritic old woman around the far corner of the building.
When she came back, I gave her my sweater, which she put on over her dress and under her chador, and we rolled her up again, loaded the truck, and pulled back onto the highway, heading for Arak, Borujerd, Khorramabad, cities with strange names that meant nothing to me except get the hell out of here.
CHAPTER 21
After driving through the desert west of Qom, we climbed into the Zagros Mountains, where it was snowing. For a while we were able to pass, but finally, at a curve at the base of an incline, somewhere between Arak and Borujerd, we slid off the road onto the shoulder and got stuck. Oman and I got out and tried to push us, but it was no use: the snow was dry like flakes of Styrofoam and only a few inches deep, but under it lay a sheet of ice and the tires had no traction. “There must be a leaking water line or something,” I said.
Oman sat on the rear bumper, jammed his hands into his pockets, and suggested, “Maybe Garrison can call Triple-A.”
Garrison came out of the cab cussing. He kicked at the snow, slipped and fell—we didn’t laugh—and he cussed some more. I gave him a hand. He looked up and down the road—no other cars in sight. He walked to the front of the truck and kept going, scraping away the snow with the side of his shoe, examining the surface of the incline. About twenty feet away he bent down and scratched the road with his fingers, then returned. “The ice stops up there, so if we can just get past it, we should be all right.” He looked down the road again. “I guess I’m going to have to walk back to that last town for help. If a car comes along, I’ll try to flag it down. If someone comes from the other direction, just let them pass. If they stop to help, do your confused Mexican routine. If you get free, wait for me—don’t try to turn around in this.” He started walking.
