Stansell stared at her.
“Task Force Alpha is a decoy operation,” she told him. “A cover for the real mission. We get to play Quaker cannon.”
Like hell, he thought. Cunningham might seem to be playing along, but Stansell didn’t believe he’d let his Alpha go down the drain.
Mary Hauser sat in the cracked bathtub scrubbing her hair, hoping the soap they gave her was strong enough to kill the lice. She couldn’t quite believe it, she had not been interrogated since the general had left, the food was improving and now this — a bath. Either they’re getting ready to release us — possible? — or an important visitor is coming for an inspection, she decided. She sank down into the tepid water and let it wash over her. As she reached for the ragged towel the guard had left her when he took her clothes the door swung open and Mokhtari stood there, holding a dark blanket. Two guards were behind him.
“Put this on. Now.” It was not a blanket but a chador, the shroudlike robe all Iranian women wore.
She stood, drying herself. They’d seen her like this before, she reminded herself, trying not to be upset by what the chador meant — a symbol of subservience. Part of the technique, don’t read too much into it. “I want my uniform back,” she said, slipping the chador over her head and letting the rough cloth fall over her body.
“The hood,” Mokhtari ordered.
She raised the hood and covered her head, and the two guards stepped around the commandant and took hold of her, dragging her out of the bathroom and down the stairs toward her cell. Mokhtari, leading the way, turned into the interrogation room short of her cell. The guards followed, dragging-carrying her. Mokhtari turned, sat behind the desk. One of the guards grabbed the chador and jerked it off.
Mokhtari ignored her, looked into a corner of the room. She followed his eyes, to a man standing in the corner. A dirt-stained shirt barely covered his barrel chest and potbelly. He had massive arms, and fists that slowly clenched and unclenched as he watched her. His pants were unbuttoned. He was barefoot.
“One of my former prisoners,” Mokhtari told her. “He has learned to do what I tell him.” He then spoke to the man in Farsi, after which the man exposed himself, and as Mokhtari watched, reached out and grabbed Mary Hauser, pushed her against the desk and proceeded to perform as ordered.
Bill Carroll led the pack train into the mountain camp of the Pesh Merga, careful to keep his hands in the open. He glanced at a woman huddled against the wall of a hut, her face covered with sores.
“That’s what an Iraqi gas attack does,” Mustapha Sindi said in Kirmanji, the Kurdish dialect. “She’s one of the fortunate ones.” Sindi was riding the lead donkey, still not able to walk very far before his strength gave out, thanks to the severe beating the Iraqi soldiers had given him.
Carroll had asked Sindi only to use his native language so he could learn to talk with the Kurds. With Carroll’s knack with languages, similarities between Kirmanji, Farsi and Arabic were enough to allow him to pick up quickly the rudiments of the Kurdish tongue.
“Do you have a doctor here?” Carroll asked Sindi, “you need attention.” He had come to like the man, who talked nonstop and never complained.
“My cousin Zakia. She is the only female doctor in Kurdistan.” Sindi explained everything to Carroll, a sign that he trusted the American. “She was here when I left but she often goes with the soldiers on raids.”
The makeshift village served as a base camp for the Pesh Merga, the Kurdish patriots fighting for their own homeland inside Iraq. The camp was filled with women and children, refugees from the repeated attacks the Iraqi army had carried out against the Kurds, their own people. There were only a few old men in the camp, and Carroll did not see a single young one.
“Over there.” Sindi pointed to a mud-brick hut. A woman in her mid-thirties appeared in the doorway, leaned against the doorjamb and crossed her arms, face expressionless, waiting for them. She wore camouflaged fatigue trousers and boots, tee shirt stretched across her breasts, and her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. As they approached, Carroll thought he could see a resemblance between Mustapha Sindi and the woman.
“Zakia,” Sindi sighed as Carroll helped him off the donkey.
The woman appraised Carroll, then turned to Sindi. “Wait here,” she ordered, taking her younger cousin inside.
Carroll tethered the donkeys and sat down, his back against the wall, and soon dozed off in the warm sun.
A toe of a boot prodded him awake. Zakia was standing over him. “Mustapha has told me how you saved him.” Her voice had a kind of lyrical undertone. “I thank you.” She was not smiling. “My cousin trusts you, but then he is very young and foolish. It is dangerous to trust strangers in this country.”
Carroll searched for the right words in Kirmanji. “If you give me a chance I will prove myself.” He tried to choose his words carefully, not wanting to be misunderstood. “I rescued Mustapha because I was trying to make contact with the Pesh Merga.”
- “Why?”
Might as well level with her. “I’m trying to help the POWs the Iranians are holding at Kermanshah, and I need help. Yours.”
“An American needs our help?” She turned and walked back into the hut.
“Give me a chance.”
She looked back at him. “It’s not me you have to convince. It is Mulla Haqui. And he hates all foreigners — especially Americans.” She disappeared then into the hut.
Colonel Clayton Leason was looking out the cell window, counting the guards in the watch towers. The distance was too great to see their faces so he would try to identify them, individually, by their actions and habits. He had instructed all the POWs to gather information on the guards — their routines, habits, what they liked … It all would be passed on to his escape committee. He had established a series of cutouts in the prison, isolating the escape committee and shielding it from compromise. Even if Mokhtari were to break him he could never tell who was working on escapes or what their plans were. “Doc, why did you join the Air Force?”
“I guess I was bored with my practice,” flight surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Landis told him. “You get tired of looking down throats, treating colds, flu, and an occasional case of the clap.” Leason nodded. The Doc’s sense of humor was coming back — a sign he was recovering from his last brutal going over by two guards.
“One of my patients was a master sergeant assigned to the local recruiting office,” Doc was saying. “He did a sales number on me. Anyway, the middle age blahs were getting to me and the thought of being a flight surgeon in the Air Force and zooming around in the back seat of a fighter became more exciting with each case of whooping cough that came through the door. So I signed up for a two-year tour.”
“No one can blame you for having regrets,” Leason said, “not after this …”
“Hey, I’ve loved the Air Force, flying in the back seat of an F-4 … And I’ve met some of the best people I’ve known.”
Both men became silent when they heard a cough followed by two rapid coughs — the signal that a message was being passed. Each pressed an ear to the wall and listened to the faint tap code working its way down the cells.
“It’s about Espinoza,” Leason said.
Doc motioned him to be silent. “Sounds like pneumonia. Clay, if I can get to him I might be able to save him, at least ease his suffering.”
“I’ll try to work on Mokhtari, but don’t expect anything.” Leason passed command to Landis. “You’ve got it until I get back.”