Whirlwind Page 14

  I haven’t thought about my war for years, Kasigi was thinking, a sudden wave of fear going through him, remembering his constant terror of dying or being maimed, terror that had consumed him—like today when he was certain they were all going to die and he and his companions had been frozen with fear. Yes, and we all did today what we did all those war years: remembered our heritage in the Land of the Gods, swallowed our terror as we had been taught from childhood, pretended calm, pretended harmony so as not to shame ourselves before others, flew missions for the emperor against the enemy as best we could and then, when he said lay down your arms, thankfully laid down our arms, however much the shame.

  A few found the shame unbearable and killed themselves in the ancient way with honor. Did I lose honor because I didn’t? Never. I obeyed the emperor who ordered us to bear the unbearable, then joined my cousin’s firm as was ordained and have served him loyally for the greater glory of Japan. From the ruins of Yokohama I helped rebuild Toda Shipping Industries into one of Japan’s greatest firms, constructing great ships, inventing the supertankers, bigger every year—soon the keel of the first million-tonner to be laid. Now our ships are everywhere, carrying bulk raw materials into Japan and finished goods out. We Japanese are rightly the wonder of the world. But, oh, so vulnerable—we must have oil or we perish.

  Out of one of the windows he noticed a tanker steaming up the Gulf, another going toward Hormuz. The bridge continues, he thought. At least one tanker every hundred miles all the way from here to Japan, day in day out, to feed our factories without which we starve. All OPEC knows it, they’re gouging us and gloating. Like today. Today it took all my willpower to pretend outward calm dealing with that…that odious Frenchman, stinking of garlic and that revolting, stinking, oozing vomit mess called Brie, blatantly demanding $2.80 over and above the already outrageous $14.80, and me, of ancient samurai lineage, having to haggle with him like a Hong Kong Chinese.

  “But, M’sieur de Plessey, surely you must see that at that price, plus freight an—”

  “So sorry, m’sieur, but I have my instructions. As agreed the 3 million barrels of Siri oil are on offer to you first. ExTex have asked for a quote and so have four other majors. If you wish to change your mind…”

  “No, but the contract specifies ‘the current OPEC price’ and w—”

  “Yes, but you surely know that all OPEC suppliers are charging a premium. Don’t forget the Saudis plan to cut back production this month, that last week all the majors ordered another sweeping wave of force majeure cutbacks, that Libya’s cutting her production too. BP’s increased its cutback to 45 percent…”

  Kasigi wanted to bellow with rage as he remembered that when at length he had agreed, provided he could have all 3 million barrels at the same price, the Frenchman had smiled sweetly and said, “Certainly, provided you load within seven days,” both of them knowing it was impossible. Knowing too that a Romanian state delegation was presently in Kuwait seeking 3 million tons of crude, let alone 3 million barrels, to compensate for the cutoff of their own Iranian supplies that came to them through the Iran-Soviet pipelines. And that there were other buyers, dozens of them, waiting to take over his Siri option and all his other options—for oil, liquid natural gas, naphtha, and other petrochemicals.

  “Very well, $17.60 a barrel,” Kasigi had said agreeably. But inside he swore to even the score somehow.

  “For this one tanker, m’sieur.”

  “Of course for this tanker,” he had said even more agreeably.

  And now this Australian pilot whispers to me that even this one tanker may not be safe. This strange old man, far too old to be flying yet so skilled, so knowledgeable, so open, and so foolish—foolish to be so open, for then you put yourself into another’s power.

  He looked back at Scragger. “You said we could make a peace maybe in time. We both ran out of time today—but for your skill, and luck, though we call that karma. I truly don’t know how much time we have. Perhaps my ship is blown up tomorrow. I will be aboard her.” He shrugged. “Karma. But let us be friends, just you and I—I don’t think we betray our war comrades, yours and mine.” He put out his hand. “Please.”

  Scragger looked at the hand. Kasigi willed himself to wait. Then Scragger conceded, half nodded and shook the hand firmly. “Okay, sport, let’s give it a go.”

  At that moment he saw Vossi turn and beckon him. At once Scragger went forward to the cockpit. “Yes, Ed?”

  “There’s a CASEVAC, Scrag, from Siri Three. One of the deck crew’s fallen overboard…”

  They went at once. The body was floating near the legs of the rig. They winched it aboard. Sharks had already fed on the lower limbs and one arm was missing. The head and face were badly braised and curiously disfigured. It had been Abdollah Turik.

  NEAR BANDAR DELAM: 4:52 P.M. Shadows were lengthening. Beyond the road the land was scrubby, and beyond that stony foothills rose to snowcapped mountains—the northern end of the Zagros. This side, beside the stream and marshes that led at length to the port a few miles away, was one of the numerous oil pipelines that crisscrossed this whole area. The pipeline was steel, twenty inches in diameter, and set on a concrete trestle that led down into a culvert under the road, then went underground. A mile or so to the east was a village—low-lying, dust-covered, earth-colored, made from mud bricks—and coming from that direction was a small car. It was old and battered and traveled slowly, the engine sounding good, too good for the body.

  In the car were four Iranians. They were young and clean-shaven and better dressed than usual, though all were sweat stained and very nervous. Near the culvert the car stopped. One young man wearing glasses got out from the front seat and pretended to urinate on the side of the road, his eyes searching all around.

  “It’s all clear,” he said.

  At once the two youths in the back came out swiftly, a rough, heavy bag between them, and ducked down the dirt embankment into the culvert. The young man with glasses fastened his buttons, then casually went to the trunk of the car and opened it. Under a piece of torn canvas he saw the snub nose of the Czech-made machine pistol. A little of his nervousness left him.

  The driver got out and urinated into the ditch, his stream strong.

  “I wanted to, Mashoud, but couldn’t,” the youth with glasses said, envying him. He wiped the sweat off his face and pushed at his glasses.

  “I can never do it before an exam,” Mashoud said and laughed. “God grant university will open again soon.”

  “God! God’s the opiate of the masses,” the youth with glasses said witheringly, then turned his attention to the road. It was still empty as far as they could see in both directions. South a few miles away, the sun reflected off the waters of the Gulf. He lit a cigarette. His fingers trembled. Time passed very slowly. Flies swarmed, making the silence seem more silent. Then he noticed a dust cloud on the road, the other side of the village. “Look!”

  Together they squinted into the distance. “Are they lorries—or trucks, army trucks?” Mashoud said anxiously, then ran to the side of the culvert and shouted, “Hurry up, you two. There’s something coming!”

  “All right,” a voice called from below.

  “We’re almost done,” another voice said.

  The two youths in the culvert had the sack open and were already packing the flat bags of explosive haphazardly against the welded steel pipe and along its length. The pipe was covered with a sheath of canvas and pitch to protect it from erosion. “Give me the detonator and fuse, Ali,” the older one said throatily. Both of them were filthy now, the dirt streaked with sweat.

  “Here.” Ali handed it to him carefully, his shirt clinging to his skin. “Are you sure you know how to do it, Bijan?”

  “We’ve studied the pamphlet for hours. Didn’t we practice doing it with our eyes closed?” Bijan forced a smile. “We’re like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Just like him.”

  The other shivered. “I hope the bell’s not tolling for us.�
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  “Even if it does, what does that matter? The party will conquer, and the Masses will have victory.” Bijan’s inexperienced fingers awkwardly jammed the highly volatile, nitroglycerin detonator against one of the explosives, connected one end of the fuse beside it, and piled the last of the bags on top to hold it in place.

  Mashoud’s voice called out even more urgently, “Hurry, they’re…we think they’re army trucks with soldiers!”

  For a moment both young men were paralyzed, then they unreeled the length of fuse, tripping over each other in their nervousness. Unnoticed, the fuse end near the detonator came away. They laid the ten-foot length along the ground, lit the far end, and took to their heels. Bijan glanced back to check everything, saw that one end was spluttering nicely, and was aghast to notice the other end dangling free. He rushed back, shakily stuffed it near the detonator, slipped, and slammed the detonator against the concrete.

  The nitroglycerin exploded and blew the lag of explosives next to it and that blew the next and the next and they all went and tore Bijan to pieces with twenty feet of the pipe, blowing off the culvert roof and overturning the car, killing two of the other youths and ripping a leg off the last.

  Oil began gushing from the pipe. Hundreds of barrels a minute. The oil should have ignited but it did not—the explosives had been wrongly placed and detonated—and by the time the two army trucks had stopped cautiously a hundred yards away, the oil slick had already reached the stream. The lighter oils, gaseous, volatile, floated on the surface, and the heavier crude began to seep into the banks and marshes and soil, making the whole area highly dangerous.

  In the two commandeered trucks were some twenty of Khomeini’s Green Bands, most of them bearded, the rest unshaven, all wearing their characteristic armbands—peasants, a few oil-field workers, a PLO-trained leader, and a mullah—all armed, all battle-stained, a few wounded, the uniformed police captain bound and gagged and still alive lying on the floor. They had just attacked and overwhelmed a police station to the north and were now heading into Bandar Delam to continue the war. Their assignment was to help others subdue the civilian airport that was a few miles to the south.

  The mullah leading, they came to the edge of the blown-up culvert. For a moment they watched the oil gushing, then a moaning attracted them. They unslung their guns and went carefully to the overturned car. The youth missing a leg was lying half under it, dying fast. Flies swarmed and settled and swarmed again, blood and entrails everywhere.

  “Who are you?” the mullah asked, shaking him roughly. “Why did you do this?”

  The youth opened his eyes. Without his glasses everything was misted. Blindly he groped for them. The terror of dying engulfed him. He tried to say the Shahada but only a petrified scream came forth. Blood welled into his throat, choking him.

  “As God wants,” the mullah said, turning away. He noticed the broken glasses in the dirt and picked them up. One lens was fractured, the other missing.

  “Why should they do this?” one of the Green Bands asked. “We’ve no orders to sabotage the pipes—not now.”

  “They must be Communists, or Islamic-Marxist carrion.” The mullah tossed the glasses away. His face was bruised and his long robe torn in places and he was starving. “They look like students. May God kill all His enemies as quickly.”

  “Hey, look at these,” another called out. He had been searching the car and found three machine pistols and some grenades. “All Czech made. Only leftists are so well armed. These dogs’re enemy all right.”

  “God be praised. Good, we can use the arms. Can we get the trucks around the culvert?”

  “Oh, yes, easily, thanks be to God,” his driver, a thickset bearded man said. He was a worker in one of the oil fields and knew about pipelines. “We’d better report the sabotage,” he added nervously. “This whole area could explode. I could phone the pumping station if there’s a phone working—or send a message—then they can cut the flow. We’d better be fast. This whole area’s deadly and the spill will pollute everything downstream.”

  “That’s in the Hands of God.” The mullah watched the oil spreading. “Even so it’s not right to waste the riches God gave us. Good, you will try to phone from the airport.” Another bubbling scream for help came from the youth. They left him to die.

  BANDAR DELAM AIRPORT: 5:30 P.M. The civilian airport was unguarded, abandoned, and not operational except for the S-G contingent that had come here a few weeks ago from Kharg Island. The airport had two short runways, a small tower, some hangars, a two-story office building, and some barracks, and now a few modern trailers—S-G’s property—for temporary housing and HQ. It was like any one of the dozens of civilian airports that the Shah had had built for the feeder airlines that used to service all Iran: “We will have airports and modern services,” he had decreed and so it was done. But since the troubles had begun six months ago and all internal feeder airlines struck, airplanes had been grounded throughout Iran and the airports closed down. Ground crews and staff had vanished. Most of the aircraft had been left in the open, without service or care. Of the three twin jets that were parked on the apron, two had flat tires, one, a cockpit window broken. All had had their tanks drained by looters. All were filthy, almost derelict. And sad.

  In great contrast to these were the five sparkling S-G helicopters, three 212s and two 206s lined up meticulously, being given their daily bath and final check of the day. The sun was low now and cast long shadows.

  Captain Rudiger Lutz, senior pilot, moved to the last helicopter and inspected it as carefully as he had the others. “Very good,” he said at length. “You can put them away,” He watched while the mechanics and their Iranian ground crew wheeled the airplanes back into the hangars that were also spotless. He knew that many of the crew laughed at him behind his back for his meticulousness, but that didn’t matter—so long as they obeyed. That’s our most difficult problem, he thought. How to get them to obey, how to operate in a war situation when we’re not governed by army rules and just noncombatants in the middle of a war situation whether Duncan McIver wants to admit it openly or not.

  This morning Duke Starke at Kowiss had relayed by HF McIver’s terse message from Tehran about the rumored attack on Tehran Airport and the revolt of one of the air bases there—because of distance and mountains Bandar Delam could not talk direct to Tehran or to their other bases, only to Kowiss. Worriedly Rudi had assembled all his expat crew, four pilots, seven mechanics—seven English, two Americans, one German, and one Frenchman—where they could not be overheard and had told them. “It wasn’t so much what Duke said but the way he said it—kept calling me ‘Rudiger’ when it’s always ‘Rudi.’ He sounded itchy.”

  “Not like Duke Starke to be itchy—unless it’s hit the fan,” Jon Tyrer, Rudi’s American second-in-command, had said uneasily. “You think he’s in trouble? You think maybe we should go take a look at Kowiss?”

  “Perhaps. But we’ll wait till I talk to him tonight.”

  “Me, I think we’d better get ready to do a midnight skip, Rudi,” mechanic Fowler Joines had said with finality. “Yes. If old Duke’s nervous…we’d best be ready to scarper, to get lost.”

  “You’re crazy, Fowler. We’ve never had trouble,” Tyrer said. “This whole area’s more or less quiet, police and troops disciplined and in control. Shit, we’ve five air force bases within twenty miles and they’re all elite and pro-Shah. There’s bound to be a loyalist coup soon.”

  “You ever been in the middle of a coup for crissake? They bloody shoot each other and I’m a civilian!”

  “Okay, say the stuff hits the fan, what do you suggest?”

  They had discussed all sorts of possibilities. Land, air, sea. Iraq’s border was barely a hundred miles away—and Kuwait within easy range across the Gulf.

  “We’ll have plenty of notice.” Rudi was very confident. “McIver’ll know if there’s a coup coming.”

  “Listen, old son,” Fowler had said, more sourly than usual, �
��I know companies—same as bloody generals! If it gets really tough we’ll be on our tod—on our bloody own—so we’d better have a plan. I’m not going to get my head shot off for the Shah, Khomeini, or even the Laird-god Gavallan. I say we just scarper—fly the coop!”

  “Bloody hell, Fowler,” one of the English pilots had burst out, “are you suggesting we hijack one of our own planes? We’d be grounded forever!”

  “Maybe that’s better than the pearly gates!”

  “We could get shot down, for God’s sake. We’d never get away with it—you know how all our flights are monitored, how twitchy radar is here—bloody sight worse than at Lengeh! We can’t get off the ground without asking permission to start engines…”

  At length Rudi had asked them to give him contingency suggestions in case sudden evacuation was necessary, by land, by air, or by sea, and had left them arguing.

  All day he had been worrying what to do, what was wrong at Kowiss, and at Tehran. As senior pilot he felt responsible for his crew—apart from the dozen Iranian laborers and Jahan, his radio op, none of whom he had been able to pay for six weeks now—along with all the aircraft and spares. We were damned lucky to get out of Kharg so well, he thought, his stomach tightening. The withdrawal had gone smoothly with all airplanes, all important spares, and some of their transport brought here over four days without interfering with their heavy load of contract flying and CASEVACs.

  Getting out of Kharg had been easy because everyone had wanted to go. As quickly as possible. Even before the troubles, Kharg was an unpopular base with nothing to do except work and look forward to R and R in Tehran or home. When the troubles began everyone knew that Kharg was a prime target for revolutionaries. There had been a great deal of rioting, some shooting. Recently more of the IPLO armbands had been seen among the rioters and the commander of the island had threatened that he’d shoot every villager on the island if the rioting didn’t stop. Since they had left a few weeks ago the island had been quiet, ominously quiet.