Whirlwind Read online

  As he came down the rise, Scot saw the others go into the schoolhouse. The truck that had brought the Green Bands was parked outside. Villagers were collected in groups, silently watching. Men, women, and children, none of them armed. Kash’kai women wore neither veils nor chador but multicolored robes.

  Scot went up the stairs into the school. The last time he was here, just a few weeks ago, he had given a talk on the Hong Kong he knew when his father still worked there and he would visit from English boarding school during the holidays. It had been hard to explain what Hong Kong was like, with its teeming streets, typhoons, chopsticks and character writing, and foods and freebooting capitalism, the immensity of China overall. I’m glad we came back to Scotland, he thought. Glad the Old Man started S-G that I’m going to run one day.

  “You are to sit down, Captain,” Nasiri said. “There.” He indicated a chair at the back of a low-ceilinged, crowded room. Ali-sadr and four other Green Bands were seated at the table where the teacher would normally sit. Nitchak Khan and the mullah sat in front of them. Villagers stood around.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a…a meeting.”

  Scot saw the fear pervading Nasiri and wondered what he would do if the Green Bands started to beat him. I should’ve been a black belt or boxer, he thought wearily, trying to understand the Farsi that poured out of the leader.

  “What’s he saying, Agha?” he whispered to Nasiri.

  “I…he’s…he’s saying…he’s telling Nitchak Khan how the village will be ran in future. Please, I will explain later.” Nasiri moved away.

  In time the tirade stopped. Everyone looked at Nitchak Khan. He got up slowly. His face was grave and his words few. Even Scot understood. “Yazdek is Kash’kai. Yazdek will remain Kash’kai.” He turned his back on the table and began to leave, the mullah following.

  At an angry command of the leader, two Green Bands barred his way. Contemptuously, Nitchak Khan brushed them aside, then others grabbed him, tension in the room soared, and Scot saw one villager slip out of the room unnoticed. Those Green Bands holding Nitchak Khan turned him around to face Ali-sadr and the other four who were on their feet, enraged, and shouting. No one had touched the old man who was the mullah. He held up his hand and began to speak, but the leader shouted him down and a sigh went through the villagers. Nitchak Khan did not straggle against the men pinioning him, just looked back at Ali-sadr, and Scot felt the hatred like a physical blow.

  The leader harangued all the villagers, then pointed an accusing finger at Nitchak Khan and once more ordered him to obey and once more Nitchak Khan said quietly, “Yazdek is Kash’kai. Yazdek will remain Kash’kai.”

  Ali-sadr sat down. So did the four others. Again Ali-sadr pointed and said a few words. A gasp went through the villagers. The four men beside him nodded their agreement. Ali-sadr said one word. It cut through the silence like a scythe. “Death!” He got up and walked out, villagers and Green Bands frog-marching Nitchak Khan after him, Scot forgotten. Scot ducked down to one side, trying to make himself scarce. Soon he was alone.

  Outside, the Green Bands dragged Nitchak Khan to the wall of the mosque and stood him there. The square was empty now of villagers. As the other villagers came out of the schoolhouse into the square, they too hurried off. Except the mullah. Slowly he walked over to Nitchak Khan and stood beside him, facing the Green Bands who, twenty yards away, readied their guns. On Ali-sadr’s orders, two of them pulled the old man away. Nitchak Khan waited by the wall silently, proudly, then he spat in the dirt.

  The single rifle shot came out of nowhere. Ali-sadr was dead before he slumped to the ground. The silence was sudden and vast, and the Green Bands whirled in panic, then froze as a voice shouted, “Allah-u Akbarr, put down your guns!”

  No one moved, then one of the firing squad jerked his gun around at Nitchak Khan but died before he could pull the trigger.

  “God is Great, put down your guns!”

  One of the Green Bands let his gun clatter to the ground. Another followed suit, another rushed for the truck but died before he got ten yards. Now all other guns were on the ground. And all who stood stayed motionless.

  Then the door of Nitchak Khan’s house opened and his wife came out with the leveled carbine, a young man following, also with a carbine. She was fierce in her pride, ten years younger than her husband, the jingling of her earrings and chains and the swish of her long tan and red robes the only sound in the square.

  Nitchak Khan’s narrow eyes in his high-cheekboned face narrowed even more, and the deep lines at the comers crinkled. But he said nothing to her, just looked at the eight Green Bands who remained. Mercilessly. They stared back at him, then one of them grabbed for his gun, and she shot him in the stomach and he screamed, writhing on the snow. She left him to howl for a moment. A second shot and the screaming stopped.

  Now there were seven.

  Nitchak Khan smiled silently. Now, out of the houses and huts, the grown men and women of the village came into the square. All were armed. He turned his attention back to the seven. “Get in the track, lie down, and put your hands behind you.” Sullenly the men obeyed. He ordered four of the villagers to guard them, then he turned to the young man who had come out of his house. “There’s one more at the airfield, my son. Take someone with you and deal with him. Bring his body back but cover your faces with scarves so the Infidels won’t recognize you.”

  “As God wants.” The young man pointed at the schoolhouse. The door was still open, but no sign of Scot. “The Infidel,” he said softly. “He’s not of our village.” Then he went off quickly.

  The village waited. Nitchak Khan scratched his beard thoughtfully. Then his eyes went to Nasiri who cowered beside the schoolhouse stairs.

  Nasiri’s face drained. “I—I saw—I saw nothing, nothing, Nitchak Khan,” he croaked, and got up and stepped around the bodies. “I’ve always—for the two years I’ve been here I’ve always done everything I could for the village. I—I saw nothing,” he said louder, abjectly, then his terror crested and he took to his heels out of the square. And died. A dozen had fired at him.

  “It’s true the only witness to these men’s evil should be God.” Nitchak Khan sighed. He had liked Nasiri. But he was not one of their people. His wife came up beside him and he smiled at her. She took out a cigarette and gave it to him and lit it for him, then put the cigarettes and matches back in her pocket. He puffed thoughtfully. Some dogs barked among the houses and a child cried, quickly to be hushed.

  “There will be a small avalanche to break the road where it was swept away before, to keep all others out until the thaw,” he said at length. “We will put the bodies into the truck, and pour gasoline over it and them and let it fall off the road into the Ravine of the Broken Camels. It seems that the komiteh decided we could govern ourselves as always and that we should be left in peace as always, then they went away and took Nasiri’s body with them. They shot Nasiri here in the square, as all saw, when he tried to escape justice. Unfortunately they had an accident going back. It is a very dangerous road as all know. Probably they took Nasiri’s body to prove they had done their duty and cleansed our mountains of a known Shah supporter and shot him as he tried to escape. Certainly he was a Shah supporter when the Shah had power and before the Shah ran away.” The villagers nodded agreeably and waited. All wanted to know the answer to the final question: what about the last witness? What about the Infidel still in the schoolhouse?

  Nitchak Khan scratched his beard. It always helped him to make difficult decisions.

  “More Green Bands will come soon, drawn by the magnet of the flying machines, made by foreigners and flown by foreigners for the benefit of foreigners because of the oil that is gathered from our earth for the benefit of enemy Tehranis and enemy tax collectors and more foreigners. If there were no wells there would be no foreigners, therefore there would be no Green Bands. The land is rich in oil elsewhere, easy to gather elsewhere. Ours is not. Our few wells are not im
portant and the eleven bases difficult of access and dangerous—did they not have to explode the mountaintop to save one from avalanche only a few days ago?”

  There was general agreement. He puffed the cigarette leisurely. The people watched him confidently—he was kalandar, their chief who had ruled wisely for eighteen years in good times and bad. “If there were no flying machines there could be no wells. So if these foreigners departed,” he continued in the same gruff, unhurried voice, “I doubt if other strangers would venture here to repair and reopen the eleven bases, for surely the bases would quickly fall into disrepair, perhaps even be looted by bandits and damaged. So we would be left in peace. Without our benevolence no one can operate in our mountains. We Kash’kai seek to live in peace—we will be free and ruled by our own ways and own customs. Therefore the foreigners must go, of their own free will. And go quickly. So must the wells. And everything foreign.” Carefully he stubbed his cigarette into the snow. “Let us begin: Burn the school.”

  He was obeyed at once. A little gasoline and the tinder dry wood soon made it into a conflagration. Everyone waited. But the Infidel did not appear, nor when they searched the rubble did they find any remains.

  NEAR TABRIZ: 11:49 A.M. Erikki Yokkonen was climbing the 206 through the high pass that led at length to the city, Nogger Lane beside him with Azadeh in the back. She wore a bulky flight jacket over her ski clothes, but in the carryall beside her was a chador: “Just for safety,” she had said. On her head was a third headset that Erikki had rigged for her.

  “Tabriz One, do you read?” he said again. They waited. Still no answer and well within range. “Could be abandoned, could be a trap, like with Charlie.”

  “Best take a jolly good look before we land,” Nogger said uneasily, his eyes scanning the sky and the land.

  The sky was clear. It was well below freezing, the mountains heavy with snow. They had refueled without incident at an IranOil depot just outside Bandar-e Pahlavi by arrangement with Tehran ATC. “Khomeini’s got everything by the short and curlies, with ATC helpful and the airport opened up again,” Erikki had said, trying to shove away the depression that sat heavily on all of them.

  Azadeh was still badly shaken by the news of Emir Paknouri’s execution for “crimes against Islam” and by the even more terrible news about Sharazad’s father. “That’s murder,” she had burst out, horrified, when she had heard. “What crimes could he commit, he who has supported Khomeini and mullahs for generations?”

  None of them had had any answer. The family had been told to collect the body and now were in deep and abject mourning, Sharazad demented with grief—the house closed even to Azadeh and Erikki. Azadeh had not wanted to leave Tehran but a second message had arrived from her father to Erikki, repeating the first: “Captain, I require my daughter in Tabriz urgently.” And now they were almost home.

  Once it was home, Erikki thought. Now I’m not so sure.

  Near Qazvin he had flown over the place where his Range Rover had run out of gas and Pettikin and Rakoczy had rescued Azadeh and him from the mob. The Range Rover was no longer there. Then over the miserable village where the roadblock had been, and he had escaped to crush the fat-faced mujhadin who had stolen their papers. Madness to come back, he thought.

  “Mac’s right,” Azadeh had pleaded with him. “Go to Al Shargaz. Let Nogger fly me to Tabriz and fly me back to get on the next shuttle. I’ll join you in Al Shargaz whatever my father says.”

  “I’ll take you home and bring you back,” he had said. “Finish.”

  They had taken off from Doshan Tappeh just after dawn. The base was almost empty, with many buildings and hangars now burned-out shells, wrecked Iranian Air Force airplanes, trucks, and one fire-gutted tank with the Immortals emblem on its side. No one cleaning up the mess. No guards. Scavengers taking away anything burnable—still hardly any fuel oil for sale, or food, but many daily and nightly clashes between Green Bands and leftists.

  The S-G hangar and repair shop were hardly damaged. Many bullet holes in the walls but nothing had been looted yet and it was operating, more or less, with a few mechanics and office staff about their normal work. Some back salary from the money McIver had squeezed from Valik and the other partners had been the magnet. He had given some cash to Erikki to pay the staff at Tabriz One: “Start praying, Erikki! Today I’ve an appointment at the Ministry to iron out our finances and the money we’re owed,” he had told them just before they took off, “and to renew all our out-of-date licenses. Talbot at the embassy fixed it for me—he thinks there’s a better than good chance Bazargan and Khomeini can get control now and disarm the leftists. We’ve just got to keep our bottle, keep our cool.”

  Easy for him, Erikki thought.

  Now they crested the pass. He banked and came down fast. “There’s the base!” Both pilots concentrated. The wind sock was the only thing that moved. No transport parked anywhere. No smoke from any of the cabins. “There should be smoke.” He circled tightly at seven hundred feet. No one came out to greet them. “I’ll take a closer look.”

  They whirled in quickly and out again. Still nothing moved so they went back up to a thousand feet. Erikki thought a moment. “Azadeh, I could set her down in the forecourt of the palace or just outside the walls.”

  At once Azadeh shook her head. “No, Erikki, you know how nervous his guards are and how, how sensitive he is about anyone arriving unasked.”

  “But we’re asked, at least you are. Ordered is the real word. We could go over there, circle, and take a look, and if it seems all right, we could land.”

  “We could land well away and walk in t—”

  “No walking. Not without guns.” He had been unable to obtain one in Tehran. Every damned hooligan has as many as he wants, he thought irritably. Have to get one. Don’t feel safe anymore. “We’ll go and look and then I’ll decide.” He switched to the Tabriz Tower frequency and called. No answer. He called again, then banked and went for the city. As they passed over their village of Abu Mard, Erikki pointed downward and Azadeh saw the little schoolhouse where she had spent so many happy hours, the glades nearby and there, just by the stream, was where she had first seen Erikki and thought him a giant of the forest and had fallen in love, miracle of miracles, to be rescued by him from a life of torment. She reached forward and touched him through the small window.

  “You all right? Warm enough?” He smiled at her.

  “Oh, yes, Erikki. The village was so lucky for us, wasn’t it?” She kept her hand on his shoulder. The contact pleased both of them.

  Soon they could see the airport and the railroad that went north to Soviet Azerbaijan a few miles away, then on to Moscow, southeast it curled back to Tehran, three hundred and fifty miles away. The city was large. Now they could pick out the citadel and the Blue Mosque and polluting steel factories, the huts and hovels and houses of the six hundred thousand inhabitants.

  “Look over there!” Part of the railway station was smoldering, smoke billowing. More fires near the citadel and no answer from Tabriz Tower and no activity on the airfield apron, though some small, feeder airplanes were parked there. A lot of activity at the military base, trucks and cars coming and going, but as far as they could see, no firing or battles or crowds in the streets, the whole area near the mosque curiously empty. “Don’t want to go too low,” he said, “don’t want to tempt some trigger-happy crackpot.”

  “You like Tabriz, Erikki?” Nogger asked, to cover his disquiet. He had never been here before.

  “It’s a grand city, old and wise and open and free—the most cosmopolitan in Iran. I’ve had some grand times here, the food and drink of all the world cheap and available—caviar and Russian vodka and Scottish smoked salmon and once a week, in the good times, Air France brought fresh French breads and cheeses. Turkish goods and Caucasian, British, American, Japanese—anything and everything. It’s famous for its carpets, Nogger, and the beauty of its girls…” He felt Azadeh pinch his earlobe and he laughed. “It’s true, Azadeh,
aren’t you Tabrizi? It’s a fine city, Nogger. They speak a dialect of Farsi which is more Turkish than anything else. For centuries it’s been a big trading center, part Iranian, part Russian, part Turkish, part Kurd, part Armenian, and always rebellious and independent and always wanted by the tsars and now the Soviets…”

  Here and there knots of people stared up at them. “Nogger, see any guns?”

  “Plenty, but no one’s firing at us. Yet.”

  Cautiously Erikki skirted the city and headed eastward. There the land climbed into close foothills and there was the walled palace of the Gorgons on a crest with the road leading up to it. No traffic on the road. Many acres of land within the high walls: orchards, a carpet factory, garages for twenty cars, sheds for wintering herds of sheep, huts and outhouses for a hundred-odd servants and guards, and the sprawling main cupolaed building of fifty rooms and small mosque and tiny minaret. A number of cars were parked near the main entrance. He circled at seven hundred feet.

  “That’s some pad,” Nogger Lane said, awed.

  “It was built for my great-grandfather by Prince Zergeyev on orders of the Romanov tsars, Nogger, as a pishkesh,” Azadeh said absently, watching the grounds below. “That was in 1890 when the tsars had already stolen our Caucasian provinces and once more were trying to split Azerbaijan from Iran and wanted the help of the Gorgon Khans. But our line has always been loyal to Iran though they have sought to maintain a balance.” She was watching the palace below. People were coming out of the main house and some of the outhouses—servants and armed guards. “The mosque was built in 1907 to celebrate the signing of the new Russian-British accord on their partitioning of us, and spheres of infl—Oh, look, Erikki, isn’t that Najoud and Fazulia and Zadi…and, oh, look, Erikki, isn’t that my brother Hakim—what’s Hakim doing there?”

  “Where? Oh, I see him. No, I don’t th—”