"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."
"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 bag 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 mclver's terse message from tehran about the rumored attack on tehran airpon 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 proshah. 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. "mclver'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.
and that retreat wasn't a real emergency, he reminded himself. how to operate in one? last week he had flown to kowiss to pick up some special spares and had asked starke how he planned to operate at kowiss if there was real trouble.
"the same as you, rudi. you'd try to operate within company rules which won't apply then," the tall texan had said. "we got a couple of things going for us: just about all of our guys're ex-service of some sort so there's a kinda chain of command but hell, you can plan all you want and then you still won't sleep nights because when the stuff hits the fan, it'll be the same as ever: some of the guys'll fall apart, some won't, and you'll never know in advance who's gonna do what, or even how you'll react yourself."
rudi had never been in a shooting war, though his service with the german army in the fifties had been on the east german borders, and in west germany you're always conscious of the wall, the curtain, and of all your brothers and sisters behind it and of the waiting, brooding soviet legions and satellite legions with their tens of thousands of tanks and missiles also behind it, just
yards away. and conscious of german zealots on both sides of the border who worship their messiah called lenin and the thousands of spies gnawing at our guts.
sad.
how many from my hometown?
he had been born in a little village near plauen close to the czechoslovakian border, now part of east germany. in '45 he had been twelve, his brother sixteen and already in the army. the war years had not been bad for him and his younger sister and mother. in the country there was enough to eat. but in '45 they had fled before the soviet hordes, carrying what they could, to join the vast german migrations westward: two million from prussia, another two from the north, four from the center, another two from the south along with other millions of czechs, poles, hungarians, romanians, austrians, bulgarians, of all europe all starving now, all petrified, all fighting to stay alive.
ah, staying alive, he thought.
on the trek, cold and weary and almost broken, he remembered going with his mother to a garbage dump, somewhere near nurnberg, the countryside warravaged and towns rubbled, his mother frantic to find a kettle their own stolen in the night impossible to buy one, even if they had had the money. "we've got to have a kettle to boil water or we'll all die, we'll get typhus or dysentery like the others we can't live without boiled water," she had cried out. so he had gone with her, in tears, convinced it was a waste of time, but they had found one. it was old and battered, the spout bent, and the handle loose but the top was with it and it did not leak. now the kettle was clean and sparkling and in a place of honor on the mantelpiece in the kitchen of their farmhouse near freiburg in the black forest where his wife and sons and mother were. and once a year, each new year's eve, his mother would still make tea from water boiled in the kettle. and, when he was there, they would smile together, he and she. "if you believe enough, my son, and try," she would always whisper, "you can find your kettle. never forget, you found it, i didn't."
