What’s your real name? And rank?”
The man shrugged. “My ancestors rode with Timour Tamburlaine, the Mongol, he who enjoyed erecting mountains of skulls. First we go to your base. We will go by car.” He walked past him and opened the door, but Erikki did not move, still looked at the Khan. “I will see my wife tonight.”
“You will see her when - ” Abdollah Khan stopped as again the older man leaned forward and whispered. Again the Khan nodded. “Good. Yes, Captain, you will see her tonight, and every second night. Providing.” He let the word hang. Erikki turned on his heel and walked out.
As the door closed after them, tension left the room. The older man chuckled. “Highness, you were perfect, perfect as usual.” Abdollah Khan eased his left shoulder, the ache in the arthritic joint annoying him. “He’ll be obedient, Petr,” he said, “but only as long as my disobedient and ungrateful daughter is within my reach.”
“Daughters are always difficult,” Petr Oleg Mzytryk answered. He came from north of the border, from Tbilisi - Tiflis.
“Not so, Petr. The others obey and give me no trouble but this one - she infuriates me beyond words.”
“Then send her away once the Finn has done what’s required. Send them both away.” The Slavic eyes crinkled in the good face and he added lightly, “If I were thirty years younger and she was free I would petition to take her off your hands.”
“If you’d asked before that madman appeared, you could have had her with my blessing,” Abdollah Khan said sourly, though he had noted the underlying hope, hid his surprise, and put it aside for later consideration. “I regret giving her to him - I thought she’d drive him mad too - regret my oath before God to leave him alive - it was a moment of weakness.” “Perhaps not. It’s good to be magnanimous, occasionally. He did save your life.”
“Insha’Allah! That was God’s doing - he was just an instrument.” “Of course,” Mzytryk said soothingly. “Of course.”
“That man’s a devil, an atheist devil who stinks of bloodlust. If it hadn’t been for my guards - you saw for yourself - we would be fighting for our lives.”
“No, not so long as she’s in your power to be dealt with… improperly.” Petr smiled strangely.
“God willing, they’ll both be soon in hell,” the Khan said, still infuriated that he had had to keep Erikki alive to assist Petr Oleg Mzytryk, when he could have given him to the leftist mujhadin and thus been rid of him forever. The mullah Mahmud, one of the Tabriz leaders of the Islamic-Marxist mujhadin faction that had attacked the base, had come to him two days ago and told him what happened at the roadblock. “Here are their papers as proof,” the mullah had said truculently, “both of the foreigner who must be CIA and of the lady, your daughter. The moment he returns to Tabriz we will stand him before our komiteh, sentence him, take him to Qazvin and put him to death.”
“By the Prophet you won’t, not until I give you approval,” he had said imperiously, taking their papers. “That mad dog foreigner is married to my daughter, is not CIA, is under my protection until I cancel it, and if you touch so much as one foul red hair or interfere with him or the base until I approve it, I’ll withdraw all my secret support and nothing will stop the Green Bands from stamping out the leftists of Tabriz! He’ll be given to you in my time, not yours.” Sullenly the mullah had gone away and Abdollah had at once added Mahmud to his list of imperatives. When he had examined the papers carefully and found Azadeh’s passport and ID and other permits, he had been delighted, for these gave him an added hold over her, and her husband.
Yes, he thought, looking up at the Soviet, she will do whatever I require of her now. Anything. “As God wants, but she may be a widow very soon.” “Let’s hope not too soon!” Mzytryk’s laugh was good and infectious. “Not until her husband’s finished his assignment.”
Abdollah Khan was warmed by the man’s presence and wise counsel and pleased that Mzytryk would do what was required of him. But I’ll still have to be a better puppeteer than ever before, he thought, if I’m to survive, and Azerbaijan to survive.
All over the province and in Tabriz the situation now was very delicate, with insurrections of various kinds and factions fighting factions, with tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers poised just over the border. And tanks. And nothing between them and the Gulf to hinder them. Except me, he thought. And once they possessed Azerbaijan - with Tehran indefensible as history’s proved time and time again - then Iran will fall into their hands like the rotten apple Khrushchev forecast. With Iran, the Gulf, the world’s oil, and Hormuz.
He wanted to howl with rage. God curse the Shah who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t wait, hadn’t the sense to crush a minor mullah-inspired rebellion not twenty years ago and send Ayatollah Khomeini into hell as I advised and so put into jeopardy our absolute, unstoppable, inevitable stranglehold over the entire world outside of Russia, tsarist or Soviet - our real enemy. We were so close: the U.S. was eating out of our hands, fawning and pressing on us their most advanced weapons, begging us to police the Gulf and so dominate the vile Arabs, absorb their oil, make vassals of them and their flyblown, foul Sunni sheikdoms from Saudi to Oman. We could have overrun Kuwait in a day, Iraq in a week, the Saudi and Emirate sheiks would have fled back to their deserts screaming for mercy! We could get whatever technology we wanted, whatever ships, airplanes, tanks, arms for the asking, even the Bomb, by God! - our German-built reactors would have made them for us!
So close to doing God’s will, we Shi’as of Iran, with our superior intelligence, our ancient history, our oil, and our command of the strait that must eventually bring all the People of the Left Hand to their knees. So close to gaining Jerusalem and Mecca, control of Mecca - Holy of Holies. So close to being First on Earth, as is our right, but now, now all in jeopardy, and we have to start again, and again outmaneuver the satanic barbarians from the north and all because of one man.
Insha’Allah, he thought, and that took some of his anger away. Even so, if Mzytryk had not been in the room he would have ranted and raved and beaten someone, anyone. But the man was here and had to be dealt with, the problems of Azerbaijan arranged, so he controlled his anger and pondered his next move. His fingers picked up the last of the halvah and popped it into his mouth.
“You’d like to marry Azadeh, Petr?”
“You’d like me, older than you, as a son-in-law?” the man said with a deprecating laugh.
“If it was the Will of God,” he replied with the right amount of sincerity and smiled to himself, for he had seen the sudden light in his friend’s eyes, quickly covered. So, he thought, the first time you see her you want her. Now if I really gave her to you when the monster’s disposed of, what would that do for me? Many things! You’re eligible, you’re powerful, politically it would be wise, very wise, and you’d beat sense into her and deal with her as she should be dealt with, not like the Finn who fawns on her. You’d be an instrument of revenge on her. There are many advantages… Three years ago Petr Oleg Mzytryk had taken over the immense dacha and lands that had belonged to his father - also an old friend of the Gorgons - near Tbilisi where, for generations, the Gorgons also had had very important business connections. Since then Abdollah Khan had got to know him intimately, staying at the dacha on frequent business trips. He had found Petr Oleg like all Russians, secretive, volunteering little. But, unlike most, extremely helpful and friendly - and more powerful than any Soviet he knew, a widower with a married daughter, a son in the navy, grandchildren - and rare habits. He lived alone in the huge dacha except for servants and a strangely beautiful, strangely venomous Russian-Eurasian woman called Vertinskya, in her late thirties, whom he had brought out twice in three years, almost like a unique private treasure. She seemed to be part slave, part prisoner, part drinking companion, part whore, part tormentor, and part wildcat. “Why don’t you kill her and have done with her, Petr?” he had said when a raging violent quarrel had erupted and Mzytryk had physically whipped her out of the room, the woman spitting and cursing and fighting till servants hauled her away.