Nature of the Game by James Grady
“What is in that bag?” demanded Alexi.
“That, Excellency, is only for my end of our bargain.”
The lieutenant paled. The gorilla flexed his hands.
Alexi barked an order in Farsi. The gorilla put the duffel bag on the floor. He searched Jud’s clothing pack, examined the steamer trunk of tools. When he was done, he shrugged.
“How long?” asked Alexi.
“Could take days,” said Jud; thought, Play to his prejudices. “They are tricky people.”
Alexi ordered the gorilla to push Jud’s steamer trunk and pack inside the room—and to lean the duffel bag against a desk in the outer office: “Where it will be safe.”
“Ahmed speaks English. He will see to your needs,” said Alexi, nodding to the lieutenant.
They left Jud alone in the closed office.
Jud studied the steel panel: he had never seen a lock like that. He had no idea how to open it, no belief that he could.
He stared at the dark stain on the floor.
The desk had been rifled. Jud found pictures of children. A picture of a grave. A wallet with Iranian money, personal papers and photo IDs for a man in his fifties. The man had a wistful smile. The bottom drawer held three empty bottles of cheap vodka.
Jud sat in the desk chair. He stared at the safe; peered over the desk at the dark stain on the floor.
This was the office of a functionary. A trusted functionary, a watchman whose duties were crucial yet mindless, a passive post, an underappreciated job in a numbingly depressing room filled by a man invisible except in the ordinary moments when he performed his mundane task: to unlock the safe.
Jud walked around the desk; stared at the stain on the floor.
Then he opened the office door. Alexi and his entourage had departed, leaving only the office staff commanded by a nervous Lieutenant Ahmed. Jud called Ahmed into the inner office.
“You are the responsible officer,” said Jud. Ahmed paled. “It is up to us to get it open.”
“Yes, Excellency!”
“No matter what else.”
Ahmed blinked.
“The Soviet spies who took the key,” said Jud. “Did they use it to take secrets from the safe?”
“No one knows what the Soviets did. Ask His Excellency the General.”
“No. For he is above this. In this room, it is just us.”
Sweat beaded out on Ahmed’s forehead.
“We must pay the price,” said Jud. “Of failure. Or success. Not Alexi: us.”
Ahmed looked at the stain on the floor.
“The man who kept the key, the man of this room,” said Jud. “He was a sad man.”
Ahmed nodded.
“And he drank,” said Jud.
“This is a Muslim country—”
“We are all men. We all live. We all die.”
Ahmed looked at the stain on the floor.
“What happened to the key, Ahmed?”
“He … he lost it!” blurted out Ahmed. “He got drunk and he lost it! We searched his office, his apartment, his car. He had nothing to do but sit in there and drink, and he lost one damn key!”
“Where is he now?” asked Jud.
Ahmed stared at the dark stain on the floor, said, “His Excellency the General … When confronted with failure, he … He is like lightning to implement corrective discipline.”
Jud ordered Ahmed from the room. And then tried to imagine the ridiculous: himself as an alcoholic. Nauseous. Clouded mind. Dizzy. Wanting to lie down.
The leather couch.
Jud lifted the cushions: nothing. No doubt they’d done that.
From his steamer trunk he took a long magnetic probe. Carefully, gingerly, he slid it in the cracks of the couch.
And pulled out an exotically cut steel key.
Grinning, Jud started to summon Ahmed. Stopped.
The hollow handle of a metal hammer in his trunk unscrewed to yield a camera. The man in the outer office expected noise, so he didn’t worry as he pulled up the floorboards to expose an insulated wire. An alarm: predictable. And antiquated. It took Jud two minutes to splice a bypass device into the wire.
The key unlocked the safe.
He found stacks of American money. Letters from Swiss banks. Three silencers for pistols. Twenty-six passports issued from a dozen countries. Surveillance photos of scenes in the U.S., London, Paris. He photographed the passports and surveillance shots, plus documents stamped TOP SECRET in Farsi. He hid Savak’s key with his camera in the hammer, shut but did not lock the safe to secure the alarm circuit, removed and packed his bypass, replaced the floorboards, spread a dozen lockpicks on the floor …
And swung open the steel door. The alarm rang and announced to the world the value of a good safecracker.
The Iranians loved him.
Alexi assigned three Savak officers to be Jud’s constant companions. The four of them stayed in a lavish apartment on a boulevard named for a British queen. One of Jud’s “aides” was always awake. Alexi gave Jud a wardrobe of civilian clothes.
Nights, Jud’s escorts took him out on the town. The evenings usually ended in the New City district, an old section of Tehran famous for its bordellos. Jud’s companions flashed their IDs and doormen bowed them in. Madames with change makers on their waists presented the honored customers with the most expensive colored tokens. The first night, they visited a house offering a selection of boys, but Jud quickly made his preference known. His companions always insisted on Jud’s picking his girl first. Wall hangings and mirrors decorated the whores’ rooms. Condoms waited on the bedstands. Jud assumed that his performances were being filmed.
Days, Jud trained seventeen Savak agents in picking locks and defeating alarms on doors he engineered from Alexi’s American supplies and equipment from the steamer trunk. The students wore beards and long hair that obscured their facial features.
“Speak to them only in English,” Alexi told Jud.
The schoolroom was the lecture hall of a barracks inside Alexi’s fortress. Jud sometimes held examinations in the basement. During one such underground exercise, screams reverberated down the stone corridor from behind a closed door.
“What is that?” Jud asked his pupils, who were nervously trying to pick locks they’d never seen before.
“We hear nothing,” said one student.
“Nothing,” agreed another.
The screams continued for thirty minutes. Then, after an hour’s silence, came a surreal, rasping, echoed whisper:
“Krelley harbay”—please.
Five times a day came the wail of a mosque’s loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer.
During the three weeks he trained his pupils, the closest Jud came to seeing other Americans was the day his escorts were lax and he climbed a ladder to walk along the top of Alexi’s wall.
Jud stood above the gate, staring at the jumbled roofs of Tehran, modern skyscrapers, mosques and minarets, hovels and mansions, and open-air markets. The twin towers of the Hilton hotel looked like tombstones in front of the jagged stone wall of the surrounding mountains. Ten minutes passed before the elite guards in the garden saw him and yelled for him to come down. In the street below, the ragamuffins with old rifles sent up a chorus of conflicting shouts; several of them raised their weapons.
The guards immediately took Jud to Alexi.
“Why did you do this?” asked his formerly biggest fan. “You know the CIA is out there with cameras. Even they could spot you on the wall with the baboons at the gate screaming up at you.”
“Thought I’d fuck with them,” said Jud. “They won’t know who I am, and it’ll drive ’em nuts.”
And their pictures will eventually get into the right hands, thought Jud. Just in case.
“I am not happy with this, Sergeant.”
“Won’t happen again, Alexi.”
Three days later, Jud told Alexi that the students were sufficiently competent at their studies for Jud’s work to end.
“Yes,” said Alexi, “perhaps it is.”
At first light the next day, Alexi and Jud piled into one Mercedes, bodyguards filled another.
“Remember, Alexi,” said Jud as their driver started his engine, “first we drop off the trunk. If I don’t return Uncle Sam’s equipment, my boss is liable to kill me.”
Alexi understood. They met Art in the underground garage. The gorilla carried the steamer trunk to Art’s Ford. Jud’s locked duffel bag stayed in the Mercedes.
“We haven’t much time,” said Alexi as he walked Jud to where Art stood.
“I wanted to punch out clean on the trunk and say hi,” Jud called out to the blond American. Art kept his face blank, stuck out his hand. Jud ignored it, gave him a macho hug.
And whispered in his ear, “In the hammer.”
“Everything’s on line,” said Art as Jud stepped back.
Alexi led Jud back to their car. The two Mercedes sedans roared out of the garage. Jud didn’t look back.
They headed east from Tehran. After three hours, they transferred to army jeeps. Their road degenerated into a rutted dirt trail. Villages grew smaller, fewer, and farther between. The land angled up, from rocky, rolling desert to pyramid hills, eventually stopping at the edge of cold mountains.
It was late afternoon. They climbed out, stretched. The guards walked a perimeter, their machine guns sweeping over the big empty. Jud changed from his city clothes to rugged, nonmilitary wear. Alexi checked his watch.
“We are late, but of course, so are they.” He and Jud had said little during the eight-hour drive.
“I do not know why your superiors bargained for us to arrange this,” he said, “but I worry for you. As a general, I know that sometimes you must send good men where wise men would not go.”
“I’ve never been accused of being wise,” said Jud.
One of the guards shouted and pointed toward a gap in the rugged foothills. A ball of dust rolled toward them.
“Don’t trust these people,” said Alexi, staring at the coming cloud of dust. “They are not civilized. They are not really people. The rules of modern nations mean nothing to them. They are like your American Indians, your Apaches, n’est-ce pas? Only we have yet to be able to put them in camps.”
“Reservations,” said Jud.
“Yes,” replied Alexi. “You should have reservations about this mission.”
A hundred yards from where they stood, the dust cloud swirled, parted. A dozen horsemen galloped forth.
“Kurds,” said Alexi, shaking his head.
They were stocky men on squat horses. Most of them wore fringed turbans and traditional garb for the extremes of desert and mountains. Their British Enfield rifles predated Hitler. They had fairer skin and lighter hair than Persians or Arabs. Legend says that when Solomon exiled five hundred magical jinn to the mountains of Zagros, the jinn first flew to Europe and abducted five hundred beautiful virgins. From this union came the Kurds.
They reined to stop outside the guards’ perimeter. Horses pawed the grounds, snorted vapor clouds. No man spoke.
With one eye on the horsemen, Alexi shook Jud’s hand.
One Kurd led a riderless horse. Jud tied his locked duffel bag behind the empty saddle, mounted the animal.
The leader of the Kurds leered at Alexi. The Kurd spat on the ground. He shouted a command and the horsemen galloped back from whence they’d come. With Jud in their midst.
They rode into the mountains, single file over trails visible only to the Kurds. Night fell. Jud feared that his horse would slip and send them tumbling down a rocky slope to certain death. They made camp at midnight, gave Jud a canteen of cold tea and a dry place to sleep. They were back in the saddle before dawn. Daybreak put them at the snow line in a jumble of crowded peaks. The wind was brittle, and breathing was difficult.
Just before noon, Jud spotted a sentry on a crag above the trail. Ten minutes later, he and the man who’d taken charge of his life road into a cluster of fifty small tents. Children ran to their mothers. The men in the camp hefted their guns.
The leader of Jud’s band rode toward a tent where a scarred man in his early fifties waited, his sons by his side. The Kurds in the camp circled around the arrivals.
Jud’s guide dismounted; Jud followed suit. The guide grunted and jerked his head toward Jud. Spit on Jud’s feet.
Jud knocked the man to the ground.
Half a dozen rifle bolts shot home. The crowd murmured.
The scarred man roared with laughter.
“You American! Yes! You American. American only do that! No Iranian. No Savak. Yes!”
He stepped over his unconscious comrade, clapped Jud on the shoulders, and shook his hand.
“I Dara Ahmedi. Learn good English from Brits.” Dara spat. “Brits no good. America, very, very good.”
He took Jud to his tent, fed him goats’ eyes stewed with vegetables and herbs Jud didn’t recognize.
During the next nine days, Jud inoculated the children against smallpox with his Special Forces medical kit. In front of the camp’s hierarchy, he solemnly gave Dara twenty-five ounces of gold and a new Colt .45 with two extra clips. He helped repair old rifles.
The women and children were fascinated by the warrior-doctor from fabled America. They tried to teach Jud Kurdish songs. He tried to teach them the Beatles, “She Loves You,” but the only part the children mastered was the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus. With the women clapping encouragement, Dara taught Jud the dance of Kurdish men. Jud’s katas excited the young men, and he taught them commando tricks.
“Teach me American poetry,” said Dara.
“Forgive me,” said Jud, “but I know too few poems.”
“What have you done with your life?” asked the Kurd. Dara recited Kurdish and Moslem classics for Jud. He also tried to educate his guest on the politics of the world.
“You tell His Excellency President Nixon, Shah very bad man,” said Dara. “Not trust.”
“I’ll tell my people,” promised Jud.
They broke camp on the tenth day. As Jud and Dara settled on their horses, the Kurd said, “Not for gold we do this. America, Kurdistan: one day they shall rule injustice together.”
The caravan set out, winding their way northeast.
Dara made camps at irregular intervals, some days journeying only a few miles, other days pushing his band to the limits of the children and old people. Scouts ranged ahead of the band, and their flanks and rear were always covered.
“The mountains are not for the foolish,” said Dara.
All the while, Jud monitored the day-date watch given him before he joined the DESERT LAKE troops.
One day, when Dara gave no indication that camp would be broken so the band could move on, Jud pressed him on their pact.
“How much farther?” asked Jud.
Dara spit in the dust at his feet. And laughed.
They were already in the Soviet Union. The mountains suddenly grew eyes.
“The road,” said Jud. “How far?”
“Half days’ ride. Here, no helicopters come.”
“I must go there,” said Jud. “Day after tomorrow. Thursday. Or wait nine more days.”
“Ser chava,” said Dara: “On your eyes.” A solemn ritual phrase used for greetings and farewells. Or oaths.
Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Jud, Dara, and thirty of the strongest and best-armed men bid their farewells, rode away. The rest of the band melted back across the border into Iran.
Dara’s scouts had forgotten more ways through the mountains than modern mapmakers with their satellite photos knew. By dawn, the Kurds huddled along the walls of a gorge leading down from the mountains to a plateau. Below them, the rising sun revealed a dirt road snaking into the heart of Mother Russia.
Even with binoculars, Jud saw no life on the plateau or in the surrounding mountains. He waited until after noon.
A Kurd shaved Jud. From his duffel bag came
And walked out of the mountains alone.
When he reached the road, Jud sat down. An hour later, he saw the dust of the approaching staff car. He flagged it down.
The driver was alone. In the uniform of a GRU lieutenant. He got out of the car.
“Shto vi dielete, zdez?” What are you doing here?
Jud had studied Farsi for sixteen weeks at the U.S. Army’s defense language school—in the mornings. Afternoons, he memorized as many Russian phrases as they could cram into him.
“Maya mashina nye moshet idyot. Mne ravitza schto vi zdez.” My vehicle won’t work. I’m glad you’re here.
The Soviet lieutenant was about Jud’s age, a draftee from Georgia. Jud limped around the front of the car.
“Gdey vasha mashina?” Where is your vehicle?
“O menya yest papya.” Here are my papers, said Jud, reaching inside his overcoat.
The Russian held out his hand for the promised papers. Jud grabbed it, kicked him in the groin, then broke his neck.
Nothing stirred on the plateau.
Jud compared his ID with the dead officer’s: the formats matched. Jud hid the body between two boulders, climbed behind the wheel of the staff car, drove away.
The odometer showed he went 42.4 kilometers, through winding hills, up the slope of a mountain photographed by American spy satellites. As he rounded a roller-coaster curve, he saw the prefabricated dome, the spinning radar dish, three wall-sized concave receptor boards mounted on thirty-foot towers, four long-range antennae:
GRU SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) Site 423, a Soviet ear sucking up electronic signals from all over the Middle East.
American intelligence knew a lot about Site 423. Such knowledge came from espionage and mirror logic: a Soviet GRU SIGINT post would logically resemble an American NSA SIGINT post.
American spooks knew that 423 was a collection and not an analysis site, that it was staffed by eight overworked technicians, three janitor-cooks, two clerks, a master sergeant, a lieutenant who seconded the commanding officer/captain, and another lieutenant who wore a GRU uniform but who actually served the Third Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, the politically superior civilian intelligence agency. The extra lieutenant made sure none of the Soviet personnel at Site 423 betrayed the interests of the KGB—or the State.