“I’ve given you my terms,” Darius said. “Let her go, and ride back over the mountains, or I’ll toss the mycotoxins in the fire.”
“Do you expect us to take that seriously?” Ashfar said. “One breath, and it will be all over for you.”
“Fool,” Bijan said. “You know how he thinks. You’re forcing him—”
It struck Darius that Bijan’s warning could be meant as easily for him as for Ashfar, who had motives of his own in refusing a deal. As he retreated inside the cave, the wind delivered the report of a gunshot. Maryam lurched forward. Bijan’s horse reared, nearly throwing him from the saddle. No one else moved. Maryam looked toward Ashfar in confusion as a dark splotch expanded across the faded red of her waistcoat, and then she toppled over. There was a revolver in Ashfar’s fist when he dismounted and knelt over her, and tore open her blouse to show Darius the ragged exit wound in her shoulder.
“This is no fake execution,” he said. “She will not be allowed to die quickly. Another bullet here, another there, and you can watch her bleed to death.”
Ashfar waved the gun so that Darius could not miss it. He tugged his sleeve above his wrist as he placed the muzzle flush against Maryam’s thigh. Maryam’s eyes fluttered, and she screwed up her face as though a hideous insect had landed on her.
“… It is entirely up to you.”
It was not the Imam, but the Prophet himself who said that women were the rope of Satan by which the evil one ensnares men in his ruthless schemes. This, too, Darius saw now was khod’eh, the lie essential for the preservation of the faith as paradise was the lie that robbed men of their will. Did anyone understand this better than he, who having long ago lost paradise was motivated solely by the force of will? “You can have the mycotoxins,” he said.
Ashfar glanced toward the cave. His old man’s beard was coated white, reminding Darius of a malignant Santa Claus.
“Put her on a horse. I’ll give them to you after she’s away from here.”
“Izzat!” Ashfar said.
One of the other men walked his horse into snow dappled with blood. Ashfar tore his handkerchief in half and balled a piece against each side of Maryam’s shoulder, and then buttoned her waistcoat over the wound. Izzat made a stirrup of his hands and slung her into the saddle. She sat erect, oblivious to the color moving again over her breast. Ashfar put the reins in her fingers, and turned the horse down the mountain.
“Give the animal its head. He will bring you to a stable close to the Turkish border station in the valley. There is an Iranian army helicopter also in the valley. If I were you, I would avoid it at all cost.”
To Darius he said, “We are still waiting.”
“Let her go.”
“Not until we have the mycotoxins. What is to prevent you from tossing them in the fire once she is gone?”
Inside the cave Darius experienced the cold in the pain of his thawing limbs. He did not linger at the blaze, the craving for its comfort a weakness as debilitating as a lack of self-confidence or the need to deliberate too long before acting. He stood beside the green ice, and flung the knapsack toward the horsemen. Arcing upward, it died on the wind, and plummeted into the no-man’s-land between them.
Ashfar tightened his grip on Maryam’s horse, which kicked up a squall in its eagerness to be free. “We would like to satisfy ourselves that the mycotoxins are really inside.”
Izzat exhumed the knapsack from a shallow crater in the snow. He brushed off the canvas, and raised the flap.
“What do you see?” Ashfar asked him.
“Bags of yellow powder.”
Darius began to plan for a holding action in which Ashfar and Bijan would lose interest in trying to outlast him in the cold. From the mouth of the cave he watched Ashfar lead Maryam’s horse away. As though it were an idea he was so proud of that Darius had to see it, Ashfar turned the horse back toward him, and then pulled Maryam from the saddle. Another slug from Ashfar’s gun fractured the green ice and rattled around the walls of the cave like a lead ball in a bagatelle. Darius dived out into the snow. The brilliant cold cut through his body as cleanly as a bullet.
Darius could not return fire at Ashfar, who was crouched behind Maryam. A clear shot at Izzat caught him under the jaw as he was leveling his military gun. The bullet blew him back from the knapsack. He landed in a sitting position, gushing blood from a hole above his Adams apple. He brought up both hands to plug the leak, which ran through his fingers staining the snow to the bare earth.
Bijan had removed himself as a factor in the gun battle. An easy target, he was not worth the expenditure of a precious bullet. Ashfar’s heavy revolver blasted snow into Darius’s ear, but went unanswered again as Maryam crawled through the line of fire. Ashfar advanced behind her. His bullets carved a tight pattern close to Darius’s head.
Darius was aware of the fourth man as a shadow in the eddying snow. While Ashfar kept him pinned down, the shadow circled wide around him.
Darius swept the battlefield with his gun. The wind diminished momentarily, presenting the man in broad profile nearly behind him. Darius’s first shot was such an improbable miss that it seemed the frosted air had deflected it. The second knocked the shadow from his horse. Falling, he fired over Darius’s head, and did not move again.
Maryam veered away from the crossfire. Ashfar got off a quick shot from his exposed position, and she wallowed in the snow as the bullet flew past her. Izzat’s horse started into a lopsided gallop. It collapsed onto its breast like a thoroughbred breaking down, and rolled onto its flank. Ashfar threw himself behind the thrashing body, and pumped another flurry at Darius.
Darius’s wet clothes were no barrier to the cold. His belt buckle scooped the snow inside his pants when he edged forward. He had begun shaking so hard that he needed to brace the gun against his forearm to shoot. Ashfar’s head was in plain view above the twitching belly of the horse, but when Darius tried to squeeze the trigger he was amazed to discover that he had dropped the gun. He saw the weapon in the snow beside him, but could not move his hand. More amazing, there was blood in the hand. It streamed from a hole below the bicep, overflowing his cupped palm.
Ashfar rose cautiously onto his knees. The way he looked both ways before stepping around the steaming carcass of the horse he could have been crossing a busy street. He poked Izzat with his toe, and snatched the dead man’s revolver and the knapsack. His awful stare sliced through Darius like a bitter gust of wind.
“You came close this time, closer than usual,” Ashfar said. “It is in the nature of some men to succeed at everything they attempt, and in others always to fail ignobly. With you, it is routine to achieve a reasonable cause for optimism, and then to let the prize slip through your hands. Murdering Farmayan—” He turned toward Bijan, to satisfy himself that the Komitehman was out of earshot. “… was a commendable idea, but hardly worth a stay in an execution cell. And now, taking the mycotoxins all the way into Turkey to end up like this …” He shook his head lugubriously. “Why do you try so hard when kismet obviously is arrayed against you?”
“Had I been persuaded our scientists would end up with the mycotoxins, I might have shut my eyes and gone to Paris content to let them annihilate themselves,” Darius said. “But you would never let Iran have its yellow rain. Criminal regimes more adept than ours would pay you well to have it.”
Ashfar shrugged. “Who is to say the Islamic Republic will not be the winner when I put them on the market? The bidding war should be long and spirited, longer than any war in which one side is armed with such weapons.”
Bijan rode up with his pistol across his knee. His lips were blue, his earlobes blood-red. Yellow mucus was congealed in his mustache, which he scraped against his sleeve. He looked impatiently at Ashfar, who raised Izzat’s revolver ponderously, as though it were the big gun on a battleship that he was training on the space between Darius’s eyes.
No flash accompanied the roar of the gun. The center of Ashfar’s chest exploded, releas
ing a dam burst of blood. A fragment of bone stung Darius’s cheek as he rolled out of the way of the body. Bijan’s gun remained pointed at his face, a gray wisp of smoke frozen to the muzzle.
“He believed the Komiteh was stupid and cowardly, as he believed all men were but him. It appeared easy to use us for his purposes, which were in opposition to God,” Bijan said. “We made no secret that we did not trust him, but his arrogance blinded him to the strength born of our faith. Were he a religious man he would have recognized what we were doing as the method by which good Muslims wage war, biding our time for the opportune moment no matter the cost in martyrs. But then, had he been a good Muslim there would have been no martyrs, none of this.”
Bijan dropped down beside the body, and slung the knapsack across his chest. “You think the same way he did. You knew all along that you were being used, and still you thought you were the one who was clever. You refused to accept that I kept out of your fight not because I was afraid, but because I did not care which of you won. What alone is important to me, what is important to Iran, is that when our enemies have destroyed one another, God willing, we will be there to dance on the ashes.”
Darius pressed the flat of his hand over his heart. That he felt it pumping was insufficient evidence that he was alive. By the suspension of how many physical laws had the high-powered slug that had blasted through Ashfar’s ribs failed to enter his body? Pain limited the range of motion in his arm. He saw Ashfar’s horse toss its head and trot away as Maryam stumbled after it. When it stopped to nuzzle the snow, she snagged the bridle and stroked its neck while it allowed her to gather the reins. Her eyes sought out Darius’s and beckoned to him over Bijan’s shoulder.
Bijan had a foot in the stirrups when Darius grabbed the straps of the knapsack and dragged him onto his back. He sank his knees into Bijan’s chest, punching furiously with his good hand. Bijan lost his gun, and covered his head in his arms, then fought back ineffectively with a sweeping right hand. A short left got in under Darius’s injured arm, and he took its full impact on the chin. Bijan went back to the looping right hands, and when none landed threw the left again. Darius saw the jab coming, but was defenseless against it. A barrage of lefts opened the brittle skin over his eyes. Bijan did not hit hard, but the accumulation of blows wore Darius down. His mouth filled with blood, his punches lost their sting. Bijan shrugged them off and scooped up the revolver.
Darius drove a shoulder into Bijan’s midsection, and twined his fingers in the straps of the knapsack. A stiff left that bloodied his nose was the price to twist the straps around Bijan’s throat. The gun went off with the bark of a small cannon, and Darius’s ears began to ring. Bijan was angling the weapon into Darius’s face when he dropped it suddenly to claw at the straps. Using the knapsack as a fulcrum Darius tightened the canvas noose, increased the pressure until the cords stood out in each man’s neck. Darius noticed a hole where the bullet that, killed Ashfar had torn through the cloth. His grip relaxed, and Bijan scrambled away, yellow powder seeping through the opening as he wrenched frantically at the bag. The wind spun a yellow dust devil around his turban. As he sank to his knees, he might have been under attack by a swarm of bees returning to the hive.
At the end of a mass defecation flight, Darius could not help but think.
“Darius—”
His name on Maryam’s lips for the first time had him running to her before it registered in his consciousness, a clear channel open to his heart. She had lost control of Ashfar’s horse, which reared over her, flailing its hooves. He grabbed the reins, and lifted her into the saddle. The horse bolted, feeling her weight, and Darius skidded over sharp rocks in the snow before he remembered to let go.
His momentum carried him upwind from where Bijan lay on his back. The Komitehman’s features had convulsed into a blue mask behind the yellow ruff of his beard. Jabbering in a low singsong, Maryam prodded the horse toward him. Darius’s knee gave way when he attempted to stand. He raised himself onto his elbows, twisting away from yellow bursts in a fresh shower of snow. “Don’t come near.”
The horse shied, snorting at the wind. Maryam scolded the animal, and it sidestepped into the trampled snow.
“I said stay—”
“You’re in no position to order anyone around,” she answered. “You may as well tell me not to love you, for all you’ll accomplish.”
Maryam held her breath as she marched the horse forward. Darius grabbed the bridle, and was pulled to his feet, and then climbed behind her and took the reins. The horse put back its ears, and pranced skittishly in a tight circle. A current of fear charged the muscles in its breast as it broke for the yellow bursts.
Darius turned the stallion’s head almost against the ribs. The horse bucked, it kicked, it dived onto its forelegs with its ears brushing the snow; it snapped at Maryam’s leg, tearing a piece from her boot, but still it ran straight ahead. With his remaining strength Darius drew back on the reins, wrestled the animal away from Bijan’s body.
He dug his heels into the hocks, and they galloped off the mountaintop. The snow slanted down in pellets that scrubbed the poison from the air. Darius lifted his face into the storm, exultant in its icy freshness. On gentle, gladed slopes the horse evened its gait until they lost the sense of the ground beneath its hooves. Here the snow fell with rain that rose as vapor from the lathered hide, enveloping them in fog.
On clouds they descended into the valley.
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copyright © 1993 by Joseph Koenig
cover design by Heather Kern
978-1-4532-5965-8
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Brides of Blood Page 35
