Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

She gave me a quick glance above the dazzling folds of the cape. I looked hurriedly away. The old Adam was staring; she was no beauty, I suppose, but she was a handsome woman, and her poise and quick dry wit made her thoroughly attractive.

Besides, Lady Black could not control her energy drain. The suit was insulated, the cape energy-absorbent on one side and reflective on the other, to modulate intake/output. However warm her blood might run, her embrace would be mortal cold.

Of course, bouncing away from her my eyes struck Mears. She was gazing at Paul Chung and smiling.

Her Justice Department employers had codenamed her Damsel . She had curly blonde locks hanging in enormous blue Walter Keane waif eyes. In a purely physical way she was far prettier than Lady Black. Just the same she was less to my taste; she was what you might call vapid.

Her talent was to make nats into temporary aces. When he was running over the team's dossiers with me, Battle indicated that the Powers That Were hoped she might be able to really boost the power of an individual who already happened to be an ace; a human blast of nitrous oxide, as it were. When I asked him whether that had actually been tried he dodged behind the ever-handy National Security / Need-to-Know barricade, like a rodeo clown giving the slip to a Brahma bull. I took it that meant "no."

You should realize how common that kind of thing is in the military, and shadow ops in particular. You would think when lives and great causes are at stake, everything would be run in a bright, clean, efficient manner. Well, that's McDonald's, not special missions. When we were prepping for the raid on the Son Tay POW camp in 1970 — which was a smashing success, by the way, except Intelligence neglected to tell us the NVA had moved all the prisoners out a few weeks before — one of the squaddies made up patches that showed a mushroom and a pair of cartoon eyes against a black background, and sported the legend "Kept In The Dark — Fed Only Horseshit."

I was not particularly encouraged when Mears took me aside in the Camp Smokey rec hall. "I don't think they quite understand my power," she said plaintively.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She bit her lip, looked around the room. Chung was refusing to concede another hopeless game of ping-pong to Billy Ray, who wasn't even using a paddle. Ackroyd was offering color commentary to Joann, who paid him no mind.

"I can't just turn my power on and off," Mears said. "I have to really care about a guy. There has to be chemistry ."

When I accepted command of the mission, I accepted it on the government's terms, a decision I was to repent at leisure. They picked the team for me; I had no input. I was not allowed to drop Mears. I could have offered to resign, or hold my breath until I turned blue; Battle, with Zbig Man backing him, had made abundantly clear one would do as much good as the other.

Understand, please: I'm a professional warrior; I'm also, unfashionable as it was then, a patriot. When my country tells me to saddle up and go, I saddle up and go. But I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or the infallibility of the top brass.

Back in our cozy Persian hideaway, Chung was failing to notice Damsel giving him the dewy eye. He was in a funk because all his conversational gambits seemed to fall flat. I could only hope he would wake up and see which way the reaction arrow pointed — and that Damsel wouldn't panic if we came to dagger's-drawn with the happy lads of Pasdaran .

Well, this was surely an interesting crew, from a sociopsychological standpoint: take a bunch of civilians, who happen to have been gifted with extraordinary powers courtesy of an alien virus, put them under intense stress in a situation they were in no way equipped to handle, and just watch those social dynamics fly.

… As I said: bizarre. You can see the outlines of a real workable mission, here. You can also see seams you could sail the Nimitz through. There was something here I could not put my finger on.

I checked my watch. Nine hours to sunset. I hoped nobody's personality would disintegrate before the enemy even got a shot at us.

The sun had dropped almost to the distant blue ripple that was the mountains near the holy city of Qom when Ackroyd, on watch, came racing down the hill waving his arms and shouting, "We've got company!"

"Fine," I said, stepping from the shed. In my hand I had my sidearm, a Tokagypt 9mm, based on the old Browning 1908 by way of the Soviet Tokarev. It was a trophy from an earlier adventure a little farther west, and a nice touch, I thought: just the thing an officer of the Nur al-Allah's Palestinian auxiliaries would tote. "Now get back to your post and keep an eye on them."

It was a pair of vehicles, a battered Chevy truck and a dapper little tan Volkswagen Thing that looked as if it ought to have a Panzerarmee Afrika palm tree stenciled on its side. "Take up firing positions," I ordered, "and get ready to rock and roll."

"Why?" Ackroyd demanded. "They're what we were briefed to expect."

"Because I said so," I said, "and because if we take one little thing for granted, we will all end up dead, and not as soon as we'd like to be."

The two vehicles stopped in swirls of white dust in front of the shack. A lanky form unfolded from behind the VW's wheel and removed Ray-Ban shades from the front of a large round head topped by a Panama hat.

"What's this?" he said, gesturing to the Kalashnikov barrels poking out the shack's windows. "Perches for birds?"

"My operators," I said, "getting a crash course in life behind enemy lines. How on God's green Earth did they get you into Tehran, Casaday?"

O.K. Casaday grinned without apparent sincerity. He was old-line CIA; I had rubbed up against him a few times in Vietnam, and occasionally since. He was the sort of shadow operative who didn't put much stock in notions like sincerity.

"That spooky ace bastard Wegener, from GSG-9," he said. "Arranged to slip me in as a member of a Krauthead TV crew."

"The people pointing guns at you are all ace bastards, Casaday," I pointed out. "Hearts and minds. Do you speak German?"

He laughed. "Fuck no. But then, neither do many of these sand niggers."

"Don't get cocky; a lot of Iranians've worked as Gastarbeiter in Germany. Who's your friend?"

The pickup driver had dismounted and leaned his back to the door. He looked like a local, with a dark hawk's face and curly black hair. He wore Levi's and a white T-shirt that molded itself revealingly to his iron-pumped pecs, but he had that spoiled rich-boy look to him. I can recognize it right off; I have a touch of it myself.

"Name's Daravayush," Casaday said, lifting the hat and taking a handkerchief from a pocket of his white linen suit and mopping the line of his blond hair. It was getting thin, I was pleased to note. I was forty-five, ten years older than he was, and mine wasn't. "He's your trusty guide and native bearer. Used to be one of the Shah's bodyguard."

I raised a brow. I had encountered little rich Iranian boys who thought they were tough before. But Pasdaran — the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — and SAVAMA, Khomeini's secret police, were hunting former members of the Shah's entourage with fanatical zeal. What they did when they caught them was unpleasant even by the standards of Third World atrocities. To run the risks he was by staying in-country, our interpreter had to have some unlooked-for depths.

"You been in touch with Desert One?" Casaday asked.

I nodded. You might have read about the hijinks at the base camp, since they weren't classified, as our part was: how Delta blew up a gasoline tank truck and captured a busload of Iranian peasants. But you have to understand, what happened there had no effect on us — until later.