He began cursing, but not too loudly lest anyone hear him, though he seemed to have landed in a remote area, there being no sign of village lights of the kind he’d seen sprinkled below the bomber. As best he could figure it, he guessed the B-52 had been struck well south of what the navigator had earlier told him was Kvoy, one of the ancient cities in Kurdistan region whose unofficial borders had moved back and forth in the towering mountains of eastern Turkey and Iraq to the west and in Iran’s northwestern frontier.
The towering bulk of the mountains, great bastions shrouded in fog, frightened Murphy — the wildness and vastness of them unimaginable twenty-four hours before, before he’d ever heard of Mount Ararat, let alone about these mountains that seemed to cover the world for as far as he could see.
Bundling up the parachute, he began to scrape a shallow trench with his knife to bury the chute, but the ground was unbelievably hard, like baked clay on the Utah salt flats, and he was worried about making too much noise. He stopped and listened, heard nothing, aware only of the sound of dry, cold wind sweeping down from the mountains. Moments later he heard running water and, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the gray dawn, he could make out a small ditch, possibly an irrigation channel, only ten feet or so away from him.
Thinking that it might mean a village nearby, Murphy drew his .45, the handle frigid, and made his way cautiously toward the stream. When he reached it he stopped, listened again, and stared into the fog to see whether there were any buildings nearby. He could see nothing, hear nothing but the water. He scooped up a handful — it had a surprisingly metallic taste, and he guessed it was artesian water rather than runoff from the snowcaps—
“Befarmaid! — Please!”
Murphy swung about, but the pistol was knocked from his hands. The Iranian, an officer of the Third Corps, was a short, thick man, like the four other soldiers now surrounding Murphy, their rifles pressed hard against his chest.
When the officer shone the flashlight directly into his eyes, Murphy instinctively put up his hands and saw his right hand was bleeding from where they’d kicked the pistol out of it. The officer gave an order and one of the men, a faded picture of what looked like an ayatollah on the butt of his Kalashnikov, bent down and retrieved the .45. The officer laughed. “You are idiot,” he told Murphy. “Safety strap is not released.” He meant the safety catch, but Murphy was in no mood to correct him.
“Where did you come from?” the officer asked, his tone sharp, bullying.
“The sky,” Murphy said ingenuously, but the officer took it as sarcasm, whipping the revolver across Murphy’s face. There was a crunch of bone, and Murphy tasted blood, like warm aluminum, running over his lips.
There was a shot — the officer pitching forward, knocking Murphy over. Another shot — a flare. There were several more — sharper rifle shots. Two of the soldiers near him dropped, the other two taking off. A submachine gun chattered, followed by a scream.
Out of the grayness beyond the fringe of flare light, one of the two soldiers who had run off was returning, or rather was being led back, hunched over, begging for mercy, the still-falling flare revealing the fiercest looking man Murphy had ever seen, dragging the soldier by the ear. He was a giant of a man in a white turban, not the kind Murphy had seen worn by East Indians but a turban like those he’d seen among Afghans. The man was wearing a rough, dark green lamb’s-wool vest over a loose-fitting khaki smock, his khaki trousers wrapped about the ankles with puttees, chest crisscrossed with bandoleers, his eyes ebony black, his beard and mustache as white as his turban.
As he pointed his Kalashnikov to the sky, his other hand, holding the prisoner’s ear, flexed, forcing the Iranian soldier to the ground. “Plane?” he asked Murphy, his gun still pointing at the sky. “American?”
Murphy knew he was supposed to give only his name, rank, and serial number, but right now he was willing to give the tall man his Instabank access number and anything else he wanted. “Yes,” Murphy said, “Americ—” His voice gave out, the effort to speak creating a searing cramp from his lower jaw up to his nose where the revolver had struck him. When he tried to “peg” his nose with his ringers to staunch the flow of blood, he felt a mulch of skin and smashed bone, the strange thing being that it was the rest of his face rather than his nose that ached indescribably. What remained of the nose felt numb.
The man in the turban flung the cowering Iranian soldier to the ground next to the dead Iranian officer and offered Murphy his Kalashnikov while spitting on the soldier. Murphy waved the rifle off, not sure he could stay on his feet if the pain didn’t ease up. The Kurd drew his dagger, the Iranian now scrambling backward like an upturned crab but unable to turn over quickly enough to get up and run. The Kurd, muttering an oath, barked out an order, and the man stood up. With one slash, the Kurd disemboweled him, then kneeling and with a few more quick strokes, the dagger flashing in the dying flare light, castrated the still-screaming Iranian, the next moment stuffing the genitals in the now-dead man’s mouth and returning Murphy’s .45 to him.
Murphy had heard now and then of Kurdish rebels, the bane of the Iraqis and Iranians alike, who, like the Afghans far to the east, had never given an inch in their fierce determination to keep the mountains as their own.
“Americans,” the Kurd said, “friends. Stingers.”
Murphy thought he must mean Stinger air-to-air missiles, which the United States had given the Afghans years ago after the Russian invasion.
“Friends!” the Kurd declared again with the same kind of ferocity with which he’d killed the Iranian. “Friends!”
“Yeah,” Murphy said, still holding his nose, his voice nasal. “Very glad—” He tried desperately to think of something else to say but couldn’t. Instead he sat, or rather collapsed to the ground, dimly aware of other figures, Kurds moving in toward him, as he fumbled in his emergency kit with the insane idea that he must get out his phrase book. Instead, his head weaving like that of a drunkard, he began holding the Hershey bar out to them and offered his .45 to the fierce one, who smiled, holding the .45 aloft as treasure. He said something, but to Murphy, though he knew the man was very close, the Kurd’s voice seemed far off, lost in a swirling vortex of explosions and the air commander telling him, screaming at him to bail out. Murphy thought he saw the tall warrior once more — holding up the strip of three condoms from the kit — then blacked out.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Freeman had kept his word. With Cheng having violated the cease-fire the American general had unflinchingly struck back. Now it was Kuang’s moment. Turpan had been destroyed, and late the next day the Taiwanese admiral gave the order.
At 0100 hours, the moonless night wreathed in mist, Admiral Kuang’s ROC — Republic of China — task force, on radio silence, set out from Kuang’s home port of Kaohsiung on the far southwest coast of Taiwan. Steering a course on a northern tack into the Formosa Strait, as if the battle group of one helicopter carrier, two cruisers, two destroyers, and four frigates were following routine maneuvers up the 240-mile-long west coast of Taiwan, the task force proceeded under the electronic umbrella of two Grumman E-2Cs early-warning patrol planes.