Chapter 36: The Sting

WE SLIPPED OUT of the warehouse we were in. Of course, there was no car waiting for us; Maurie had taken that. I had no idea where we were, so Adrienne and I had to trust Cherianne to get us to the airport. She spotted a car in a lot nearby and reached in to hotwire it. Clever girl.

While she drove, she reviewed what she anticipated would be Maurie’s plan. It sounded like another foolish caper.

“The thing to remember is that the major has never shot anyone. He likes to wave his weapon around but I don’t think he’s ever even cleaned it. The same is not true about the terrorists he’s brokering to. The athletes in Munich were not the last that Black September has murdered. They are prepared to kill and to die.”

“Great. Just what we need.”

“Why aren’t you carrying a weapon?”

“I don’t believe in violence.”

“Good luck with that. You need to make sure you stay out of the way then. And protect her. You can’t always depend on women to protect you.”

“I will always protect my master,” Adrienne said.

“You don’t deserve her,” Cherianne said shaking her head. “There’s a phone booth to the right of the main entry. Go there and call your people. Tell them what’s going down. Then hide. I’ll try to warn your crew. No promises, though. If I see the major and his contacts, I’ll have to stay hidden until I can take them out. There are no night flights out of Tehran, so there won’t be many people in the terminal. Just be ready to move and get in the air as soon as there’s an opportunity.”

She pulled up to the passenger terminal at the airport and let us out.

“Good luck, Nate. Get out of the country as quickly as possible.” Cherianne drove away.

I found the phone and tried the number for the embassy.

“American Embassy security,” the voice snapped into the phone.

“It’s Nate Hart. We’ve been released.”

“Hold a moment.” The operator handed the phone off.

“Nate! Where are you?” Robert barked into the phone.

“At the airport. Is everyone else okay?”

“Yes. You and Adrienne?”

“Fell into a vat of shit and came out clean, at least I think so. We should get out of here. Robert, there is still a terrorist cell active who want the rest of the equipment that was stuck in the cargo hold. They are being led by that operative who hijacked our plane in December a year ago. He’ll probably go for another hijacking.”

“Ronda and I are on our way. The crew is at the airport in the pilots’ lounge. We’ll call them when we arrive. There’s no sense alerting anyone before we get there,” Robert said. “Here. Someone has to say hello to you.”

“Are you okay?” Ronda screamed.

“Yes, hon. We might have to attend to a couple of bruises on our pet, but she did a wonderful job.”

“We’ll be there in half an hour.”

“I think I’ll take Adrienne to a quiet corner and sleep for a bit.”

Adrienne and I crept off to a corner in the shadows behind a ticket counter and just hunkered down. I held her as she shivered.

“It’s okay now, Pet. No one is going to hurt us. We’re going back home now.”

“I was worried about you, Master. How could you face down that man with a gun?”

“After our first encounter, I requested and received his service record. Most of what Cherianne said was in it. According to it, he’s never fired his weapon. Several other operatives have talked about how he likes to brandish it around, but in the after-action report our former pilots gave, they said they’d never known him to use it in all the time they’d ferried him around for Air America.”

“That is still too dangerous. I would have died if you’d come to harm.”

“How did you get loose? You were handcuffed just like I was.”

“I am a submissive and have often been in handcuffs,” she giggled. “Any submissive knows not to leave herself vulnerable in the hands of a sadist. I always have a key with me.”

“I don’t know how you do it, but as soon as I’m able, I’m going to arrange a big reward for you. You were amazing.”

“She was playing with me. I could tell before you called me off that I was not landing any blows. She could have killed me in an instant.”

“I am so thankful it didn’t come to that,” I said, kissing her.

I heard footsteps in the concourse and peeked around the corner of the ticket counter where we were hidden. I saw the major walking toward the pilots’ lounge at the other end. Two shadows were following him at a distance.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said. “The major is headed toward the pilots’ lounge and two people are following him.” I watched them go by. “Crap! Here comes Robert and Ronda. Stay put.”

I headed down to the opposite end of the ticket counter and hurried across the open space to where Robert and Ronda were coming through the doors.

“Major Sanders, who kidnapped us, just headed toward the pilots’ lounge. Two guys with guns are following him. I don’t think they are with him. They must be the buyers who were expected,” I said as I caught Ronda around the waist and crushed her to me.

“Where’s Adrienne?” Ronda asked.

“Behind the ticket counter,” I whispered.

“Good,” Robert said. “Both of you go to join her. There’s a belt that takes luggage out to the tarmac. It won’t be running until flights start coming in in two hours. Crawl down the ramp and head alongside the building toward the private terminal on the other side of the lounge. That’s where our plane is. Wait for the pilots and get on board.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“My job.”

He headed down the concourse and I saw he had his own sidearm out. Ronda and I went behind the ticket counter and relayed the instructions to Adrienne. She went first down the luggage ramp followed by Ronda and me.

It was dark, both inside and outside the tunnel. We pushed the flaps open at the end stepped under the weather awning. I suppose even Tehran has foul weather. It was certainly cold and windy enough. We saw someone out on the tarmac patrolling from aircraft to aircraft, but no one was close to the building as we crept along.

We were about a hundred feet away when we saw our flight crew emerge from the pilots’ lounge. Behind them, the three figures emerged, but it looked like the major was being held between the other two. Great. Just great. We waited until we saw Robert emerge, sticking to the shadows. The pilots unlocked the plane and motioned Nancy aboard first. Then they turned to argue with the—apparently, they were hijackers. Suddenly, I saw another shadow under the plane. I saw two flashes and heard a muffled gasp. One of guys holding the major crumpled to the ground.

The other guy spun to see where the shot came from and the major dove to the ground, leaving the other terrorist fully exposed. I saw Robert raising his weapon as the terrorist spotted him. Then there were two more flashes from under the plane and the terrorist fell.

The major jumped up and ran for the door of the plane, only to be grabbed by the pilots and pinned between them. I ran toward the plane.

“Robert! Stand down!” I called as he raised his weapon toward the plane where the shots had come from.

“Come on out,” he commanded, not lowering his weapon.

“It’s okay. She’s ours,” I said, coming up beside him.

“Thanks, Nate,” Cherianne said. She appeared with her hands raised. Robert lowered his weapon.

Luke had pulled the major’s gun from his belt and was looking at it as Jay held the major’s arms pinned behind his back.

“What a filthy piece of equipment,” Luke said. “Don’t you ever clean your weapon?” He ejected the clip and emptied the chamber. Cherianne snapped a pair of handcuffs on him.

A car came around the corner with no lights and pulled up next to us. Two guys dressed in black with face masks jumped out. Cherianne pointed at the two on the ground and the men picked them up and loaded them into the back of the car.

“SAVAK,” Cherianne said to Robert. “The Shah’s secret police. They’ll make sure the bodies are never discovered as soon as the major has identified them. Unless you want to take this person back to the United States to stand trial for his various crimes.”

“We should do that if we know he’s an American citizen,” Robert said.

“Yes, I am. The kid there can vouch for me. He knows who I am,” the major sputtered.

“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” I said calmly. “I have no objection to SAVAK questioning him.” I carefully did not mention Mossad.

“Well, I guess you can take him, then,” Robert said. “We have no evidence that he’s American.”

“Wait! You know very well who I am!” the major exclaimed as the two guys from SAVAK took hold of his arms and marched him to the car with the bodies.

“Thank you for coming back, Cherianne,” I said.

“When I dropped you off, I parked and came around the terminal to hide under the plane. I told you he’d bring them.”

“It looked like he was trying to escape from them,” I said. “I think he thought he could get out of the country without you or us.”

“What are your plans for Sanders?” Robert asked.

“We have a rehabilitation program for him. You don’t need to worry about it. It would just get all caught up in the American judiciary system. My ride’s waiting,” Cherianne said. “Good luck in the future, Nate.”

She got into the car with the others and they left. We boarded the plane and just collapsed into our seats.

There was no one in the control tower and no other planes were lit up on the field. Luke taxied us out to the end of the runway and turned on the plane’s landing lights. We were off the ground and flying west in near silence.

“Would anyone like a drink?” Nancy asked. She looked pretty disheveled.

“You look a wreck, girl,” Ronda said.

“Thanks,” Nancy laughed. “That place is a lounge, not a hotel. We got as much sleep as we could until those guys broke in.”

“Didn’t anyone else wake up?” I asked.

“Nobody there but a couple of bush pilots. They took one look at what was going down and hid in the kitchen,” Nancy said. She unlocked the liquor cabinet and poured us each a glass of cognac. “Who was the scary woman? She just killed those two guys?”

“She’s Mossad,” I said. “The two guys were members of Black September. Mossad is still hunting them all down.”

“Is that what the whole theft and kidnapping was about?”

“I think she was hoping for more, but those two will never be seen nor heard of again, I’m sure.”

“What are we going to do about an installation here?” Ronda asked. “I delivered the dispatches to the ambassador, but we were mostly concerned about getting you back.”

“I move we skip an installation here,” I said. “I’m seriously considering skipping a few others.”

“I don’t blame you, honey. I’m so glad Adrienne was with you.”

“She did land some good blows, didn’t you, pet?”

Adrienne held out her hands. She had scrapes on her knuckles where she’d hit Cherianne.

“Oh, dear,” Nancy said. “I have a first aid kit in back.”

Nancy got the first aid kit and carefully doctored Adrienne’s knuckles as Ronda smooched all over the girl.

“I suppose that isn’t the end of this,” I said to Robert.

“The embassy was alerted and the ambassador was ready to call the Shah. But of course, we had to call the State Department. The ambassador put a call through to let them know you’d been recovered and he promised to call again when our plane was in the air,” Robert said. “You know how the department works, though. My guess is we’ll have orders to leave for Washington as soon as we touch down in Muscat.”

His prediction was pretty much accurate. We went home from the airport in Muscat about six-thirty in the morning. At eight, Robert stopped to pick us up. We barely had time to kiss our wives and children and head back to the airport.

Ronda and Adrienne had to go with me to Washington, DC. At least the three of us—plus Robert—were in first class seats with decent food for the next twenty-eight hours. I had no idea who we’d be meeting with once we arrived.

After a layover in London, we arrived in Washington DC at eight o’clock Friday morning. Two State Department cars met us. That was the first I saw our flight crew, Luke, Jay, and Nancy. Apparently, they didn’t rate first class travel. Sucks.

We got to the Truman Building and were conducted to different conference rooms for debriefing. Ronda and I were left together, but Adrienne was separated. I wasn’t very happy about that, but there was no one I could even complain to. We were brought coffee and a few minutes later, Mr. Martin and our secretary, Josie, came into the conference room.

“Sorry about separating you from Adrienne. She’s fine,” Martin said.

“Are you two okay?” Josie asked, rushing to us.

“We’re fine now,” I said. “Why separate Adrienne?”

“Her relationship to the two of you as a submissive is known. We didn’t want any undue influence over what she said by having you in the room as she gave her statement. When she’s finished, we’ll all get together for lunch.”

“What gives, Mr. Martin? I’m not even sure why we were called in,” I said.

“Oh, come on, Nate. You were abducted and equipment was stolen in a foreign country while on embassy business. Of course we want you here for a debriefing. First off, I wanted to see with my own eyes that you were okay. And I could hardly leave Josie behind. Besides, we need to have notes taken. So, start off by telling me how you are doing.”

“I’m not very happy,” I said. “The ease with which two terrorists could abduct us and steal equipment was amazing. The fact that one was an inept clown and the other was a Mossad agent kept it from being a complete disaster, but it was still stupid to have an embassy car pull up to our plane and have two terrorists grab us.”

“I agree. I want to make sure it never happens again. Ronda, what happened from your perspective?” he asked.

Ronda pushed her pad over to him. I did the same. We’d both spent time on the flights from Tehran and then from Muscat composing our reports on legal pads. They needed to be typed up.

“I knew you’d have written this up like you do all your reports. Josie,” he said, “send these to steno to have them typed up.”

Our secretary took the two pads and handed them out the door, then returned to continue taking notes. I knew she took shorthand and had a feeling she could capture everything that was said in the meeting.

“Now, I’d like you to tell me without the prepared speech exactly what happened. I understand you weren’t feeling well, Ronda.”

“We had a really rough landing in Tehran,” she said. “In fact, it was rough all the way from Kabul. I don’t usually get upset, but I was airsick. As soon as we were on the ground, I ran to the loo and threw up. Nate wanted to help me, but I told him to go ahead and get loaded for the embassy and I’d catch up as soon as I washed my face and changed my blouse. I shooed Adrienne after Nate and let Nancy help me get cleaned up. Robert and the pilots got off with Nate and Adrienne.”

“And that took about how long after Nate got off the plane before you were ready?”

“About ten minutes. I don’t know exactly. I grabbed a clean blouse out of my travel bag and changed. Nancy took the one I’d soiled and said she’d get it taken care of. When I stepped off the plane, I didn’t see anyone, but I heard the guys’ voices around the back at the cargo bay. I assumed the embassy car must be there. When I reached them, it was just Robert, Luke, and Jay. They’d had difficulty getting a cargo strap unfastened and had everything sitting at the edge of the cargo compartment, ready for us to carry to the car.”

“Everything?”

“I guess not. When I asked where Nate and Adrienne were, Luke waved back the way I’d come and said they’d already taken the first load to the car.” Ronda took a deep breath. “I yelled, ‘What car? No one’s over there!’”

“That was the first they knew Nate and Adrienne were missing?”

“They ran around the back and looked where I assumed the car was supposed to have been and there was no one there. That was the first any of us realized that Adrienne and Nate were gone.”

We continued through Ronda’s report, which included the actual embassy car arriving and Ronda’s decision to re-stow the equipment in the cargo bay and lock it up. They left the crew with the airplane and drove to the embassy. As soon as they reached the embassy, they got everyone on alert, having to call the ambassador at home since we were expected to go to a hotel after dropping the equipment and not train until the next day. The embassy was put on lockdown and the Secretary of State’s office was called to indicate there had been an abduction and possible terrorist threat.

Ronda delivered the diplomatic packet to the ambassador and she and Robert stayed with the embassy security team waiting by the phones until we called about one-thirty in the morning.

“Did you get food?”

“Oh. Uh ... Yeah, I guess so. I don’t really remember eating it,” she said. “Nate, did you get food?”

“Adrienne and I didn’t eat anything until we were on the plane headed here yesterday morning,” I said. “I kind of forgot about that. Speaking of which, we haven’t really had breakfast yet. Coffee’s nice, but I could use some food.”

Mr. Martin grabbed the conference room phone and barked orders to someone to get full breakfasts from the cafeteria for everyone who was in debriefing. Food arrived in about fifteen minutes and he gave us some time to eat before we continued. While he was waiting, he received a paper from a messenger at the door and sat to read it.

He looked up at me curiously and waited until I’d finished eating and took another drink of coffee.

“Okay, Nate. Your turn. From the time you got off the plane.”

I went through the events as I recalled them: The problem with the jammed cargo strap, Adrienne and me taking the camera and box of ID blanks to the car, being hit in the head, handcuffed, and having a bag over my head until we arrived in the warehouse.

Then I went through the process of showing them how the equipment worked and praised Adrienne for having escaped her handcuffs and done battle with Cherianne.

“I recognized the woman from a photo session I did with her in Stratford this summer,” I said. “She said she was part of Mossad. I could believe it, the way she fought Adrienne. At least this time, I got a photo of her face.” I pulled the ID picture I took of her out of my pocket and handed it to Martin. He looked at it and nodded.