Christ Almighty! Did Sweeney intercept it and cover for us? But didn’t he say, “clear them through Customs and Immigration - if you can”?
MESSALI BEACH HOTEL: The small fuel truck with Genny and Pettikin aboard swung off the coast road and into the vast hotel gardens, sprinklers going. The helipad was well west of the huge parking lot area. A fire truck already there and waiting. Genny and Pettikin jumped out, Pettikin with a shortwave walkie-talkie, both of them searching the haze out to sea. “Mac, do you read?”
They could hear the engines but not see them yet, then: “Two by five, Charlie…” much static… “but I… Freddy, you take the helipad, I’ll go alongside.” More static.
“There they are!” Genny cried. The 212s came out of the haze about six hundred feet. Oh, God, help them in…
“We have you in sight, Mac, fire trucks standing by, no problem.” But Pettikin knew they were in deep trouble, no possibility of changing the lettering with so many people watching. One engine missed and coughed but they did not know which chopper. Another cough.
Ayre’s voice, too dry, said, “Stand by below, I’m coming into the helipad.” They saw the left 212 detach slightly and start losing altitude, reaching for distance, engine spluttering. The fire fighters readied. McIver doggedly held course, maintaining altitude to give himself the best chance if his own engines cut.
“Shit,” Pettikin muttered involuntarily, seeing Ayre coming in fast, too fast, but then he flared maximum and set her down in dead center, safe, McIver into emergency approach now - for Christ’s sake, why’s he flying alone and where the hell’s Tom Lochart - committed now, no room to maneuver, no one breathing, and then the skids touched and at that moment the engines died.
Fire fighters, in radio contact with the airfield, reported, “Emergency over,” began packing their gear, and now Pettikin was pummeling McIver’s hand and he rushed over to Ayre to do the same. Genny stood beside McIver’s open cockpit door, beaming at him.
“Hello, Duncan,” Genny said, holding her hair out of her eyes. “Good trip?” “Worst I’ve ever had, Gen,” he said trying to smile, not quite with it yet. “In fact I never want to fly again, not fly myself, so help me! I’m still going to check Scrag - but only once a year!”
She laughed and gave him an awkward hug and would have released him but he held on to her, loving her - so relieved to see her and to be on ground again, his passenger safe, his bird safe, that he felt like crying. “You all right, luvey?”
That made her tears flow. He had not called her that for months, perhaps years. She hugged him even tighter. “Now look what you’ve made me do.” She found her handkerchief, let him go, then gave him a little kiss. “You deserve a whisky and soda. Two large ones!” For the first time she noticed his pallor. “You all right, luv?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so. I’m a bit shook.” McIver looked over her to Pettikin who was laughing and talking excitedly with Ayre, the truck driver already pumping fuel into the tanks. Beyond them an official-looking car was pulling in from the road. “What about the others, what’s happened?”
“Everyone’s safe - except Marc Dubois and Fowler Joines. They’re still missing.” She told him what she knew about Starke and Gavallan and Scragger, Rudi and his men. “One fantastic piece of news is that Newbury, he’s a consulate man in Al Shargaz, got a message from Tabriz that Erikki and Azadeh are safe at her father’s place but her father’s dead, it seems, and now her brother’s Khan.” “My God, that’s wonderful! Then we’ve done it, Gen!” “Yes, yes, we have - damn this wind.” She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “And Andy and Charlie and the others think Dubois has a good ch - ” She stopped, her happiness evaporating, suddenly realizing what was wrong. She whirled and looked at the other 212. “Tom? Where’s Tom Lochart?”
SOUTH OF TEHRAN: 5:10 P.M. The deserted oil well was in desolate hills about a hundred miles from Tehran. Lochart knew it from the old days, his 206 was parked beside the fuel pump and he had refueled manually, almost finished now.
It was a way station for helicopters serving this area, part of the great northern pipeline that, in normal times, housed an Iranian maintenance crew. In a rough hut were a few spare bunks for overnighting if you were caught in one of the sudden storms endemic here. The original British owners of the site had called it “D’Arcy 1908” to commemorate the Englishman by that name who had first discovered oil in Iran in that year. Now it belonged to IranOil but they had kept the name, and kept the fuel tanks topped up. Thank God for that, Lochart thought again, the pumping tiring him. At the rendezvous on the coast, he had lashed two empty forty-gallon drums on the backseat against the possibility that D’Arcy 1908 would be open, and rigged a temporary pump. There was still enough fuel left at the shore to top up on the way out of Iran, and Sharazad could work the pump in flight. “Now we’ve a chance,” he said out loud, knowing where to land, how to park safely, and how to sneak into Tehran.
He was confident again, making plans and counterplans, what to say to Meshang, what to avoid, what to tell Sharazad and how they would escape. There’s got to be a way for her to get her rightful inheritance, enough to give her the security she needs…
Gasoline overflowed from the brimful tanks and he swore at his carelessness, capped them carefully, wiped the excess away. Now he was finished, the drums in the backseat already filled and the pump in place.
In one of the huts he had found some cans of corned beef and wolfed one of them - impossible to eat and fly, unless with his left hand, and he had been too long in Iran to do that - then picked up the bottle of beer he had set in the snow to chill, and sipped it sparingly. There was water in a barrel. He broke the ice and splashed water on his face to refresh himself but did not dare to drink it. He dried his face. The stubble of his beard rasped and again he swore, wanting to look his best for her. Then he remembered his flight bag and the razors there. One was battery-operated. He found it. “You can shave at Tehran,” he said to his reflection in the cockpit window, anxious to go on.
A last look around. Snow and rocks and not much else. In the far distance was the Qom-Tehran road. Sky overcast but the ceiling high. Some birds circled far overhead. Scavengers. Vultures of some sort, he thought, buckling his seat belt.
TEHRAN - AT THE BAKRAVAN HOUSE: 5:15 P.M. The door in the outer wall opened and two heavily chadored and veiled women came out, Sharazad and Jari unrecognizable. Jari closed the door, hastily waddled after Sharazad, who walked away quickly through the crowds. “Princess, wait… there’s no hurry…”
But Sharazad did not decrease her pace until she had turned the comer. Then she stopped and waited impatiently. “Jari, I’m leaving you now,” she said giving her no time to interrupt; “don’t go home but meet me at the coffee shop, you know the one, at six-thirty, wait for me if I’m late.” “But, Princess…” Jari could hardly talk, “but His Excellency Meshang… you told him we’re going to the doctor’s and there’s n - ” “At the coffee shop about six-thirty, six-thirty to seven, Jari!” Sharazad hurried off down the street, cut dangerously into the traffic and across the road to avoid her maid who started to come after her, went into an alley, down another, and soon she was free. “I’m not going to marry that awful man, I’m not I’m not I’m not!” she muttered out loud.
The derision had already begun this afternoon, though it was only at lunch that Meshang had announced the great evil. Her best girlfriend had arrived an hour ago to ask if the rumors were true that Sharazad was going to marry into the Farazan family: “It’s all over the bazaar, dearest Sharazad, I came at once to congratulate you.” “My brother has many plans, now that I am to be divorced,” she had said carelessly. “I have many suitors.”