1
1943
TEHERAN, IRAN
Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov sat on the edge of the army camp bed, as he had all night, listening to the British embassy settle down around him. After being awake for more than two days, he’d been afraid to lie down and perhaps miss his chance. Though that was doubtful with the combination of broken ribs stabbing like knives with every drawn breath and the iron-hard canvas of the folding cot. He knew the guards would never stop pacing the hallways, because Prime Minister Winston Churchill was still somewhere within the building, definitely in a more comfortable bed. But two hours had passed since Alexsi’s ears told him the last shift had changed, and the footsteps were taking longer and longer to pass with military regularity before the door of the little room they had him locked into.
With an air of regretful necessity, it had to be said. Frightfully sorry, old chap—for your own safety, you understand. They actually spoke that way, just like in the English novels he had read. The Germans would have told him that he would be shot if he attempted to escape. The Russians would have shot someone in front of him to make sure he absorbed the message. The British were much more civilized about it, which slightly mitigated Alexsi’s resentment. Though he had absolutely no intention of returning to Berlin as their spy. Since they did not seem open to discussion, especially now with their prime minister’s endorsement, it was definitely time to leave.
The wristwatch the British had been either polite or careless enough to leave on his wrist read 3:10 in the morning. Everyone who wasn’t asleep was tired, and he would have just enough time before dawn.
The footsteps creaked in front of his door, and he counted off the seconds it would take until they turned the corner out of sight.
Alexsi rose quickly. Too quickly, for he almost cried out from the pain. He’d blown a house full of German commandos down nearly on his own head, and the parts of his body that weren’t in agony had stiffened up from the battering they had taken. He hobbled toward the door like an old man, suddenly fearful of being unable to move quickly if he needed to.
He plunged his hand down into his waistband, to the pocket he had sewn into the front of his underwear for the little Russian folding knife he had carried since he was a boy. A trick taught to him by Azerbaijani smugglers who shrewdly noted that even the most conscientious policemen searching for hidden weapons balked at putting their hands on another man’s groin. Alexsi had found it to be true, with the exception of Soviet secret police guards of the Lubyanka prison, who ruthlessly examined every last possible hiding place, including the interior of your ass with an unsurprising lack of gentleness. Even so, he had gotten the knife past them, and it had saved his life on more than one occasion.
Alexsi had filed the smaller of the two blades down to his own specifications, and an old warded door lock was useful only to keep your friends from barging in on you. He jimmied it open as quietly as he could and peeked out.
The hallway was empty. He’d been locked in an interior room with no window, in what he judged to be the basement of the building.
Alexsi crossed the hall and tried the first door on the opposite side. He was looking for an outside window. No luck on the first two rooms. He’d noted the row of small ground-level ventilation windows as he was led into the embassy, a former Persian mansion.
A glance at his watch told him that the guard would be coming back soon. Alexsi closed the door behind him and stood silently in the darkness of the musty storeroom. Precious time was passing, but impatience was always the enemy.
The guard’s footsteps trailed away again. As soon as Alexsi opened the next door down, the heightened visibility told him that there was a window. The room was filled with wooden file cabinets and a small desk barely large enough for a man to sit at.
Alexsi picked his way to the far wall carefully, since bumping into anything would sound like a bomb going off in the early-morning silence. And any light would be a beacon under the bottom of the door.
It was a small window, nearly square, and just slightly above the level of the ground outside. Alexsi eyed it warily—it would be a very tight fit. He tested his weight against a nearby chair, and propped it up against the wall. Standing on it, he examined the window carefully, feeling around the frame. Yes, there were two alarm wires joining at a contact plate just under the bottom latch. He found the wires by touch, as they were nearly painted over. They looked old enough to be long-disused, but this was not the time for foolish risks.
Alexsi used his knife to pry the wires away from their brackets around the window, and this gave him enough slack to gather them together. With his knife he carefully scraped away a section of paint and then the insulation on each wire to expose the core, finally twisting them together to keep the alarm circuit closed when he opened the window.
He raised it carefully, grimly awaiting an alarm bell. Nothing. With ears tuned to the sound of running feet, he locked the window open with the little metal rod on the hinge and poked his head out to see what the guard situation was like. It appeared that the landscaping was at least partially hiding him from sight of the walkways. Excellent. He waited a bit longer for someone to kick in the door of the room, but all was quiet.
Time to move. Alexsi pulled the bulky wool Soviet Army tunic over his head, trying not to cry out loud from the pain in his ribs. The wide elasticated bandage the British doctor had bound them with would have to remain on.
Pushing the tunic out onto the grass above, he tried to go out headfirst. No, his shoulders were too wide for the window frame. He extended one arm through the window to turn his shoulders sideways, and with the extended hand pushing on the outside wall turned himself faceup.
His legs were off the chair now, dangling inside the building, and the pain in his rib cage was so incredible he was afraid he might lose consciousness. A cold sweat washed over his body. Alexsi was wedged tightly in the window frame with only one hand free and the other pinned against him. He realized that his agitated pushing was only making things worse, and there was no quick way through. He stopped, took a deep breath, and resolved that the only solution was to calmly wiggle an inch at a time.
The scraping sound of hobnailed boot soles on stone made him freeze. The low hedge in front of his face was bordering a walkway. Lying on his back on the grass, Alexsi looked up in despair to see a British soldier coming down the walk.
All the sentry would have to do was look down. The rifle was slung over his shoulder, and the fixed bayonet gleamed in the moonlight. Alexsi only hoped the soldier wouldn’t panic and pin him to the ground with it, like a butterfly in a case. He closed his eyes, not only out of resignation but because he had been trained that all animal eyes gleamed at night.
The footsteps passed and nothing happened. Alexsi snuck a look up. The sentry had his hands in his pockets against the night chill, and was walking hunched over as if the helmet on his head was weighing him down.
Alexsi began breathing again. He was bathed in icy sweat that made it feel like Moscow in the winter. He resumed wriggling through the window, and every move was like being stabbed in the lungs.
Finally he was far enough out to get his left arm through the window frame, and both hands pressing on the outside wall speeded his progress.
Then he was free. He rolled over in the grass and leaned back in to close the window behind him. Starting to shiver uncontrollably, even though it was well above freezing, he pulled the placket-front gymnasterka tunic back over his head.
And that was the problem. It would be easy enough to slip back over the wall, which was how he had arrived at the embassy. But then he would be walking the highly patrolled streets in the ripped and disheveled partial uniform of a Red Army private soldier. With incredible luck he might make it a block or two before being picked up.
He had another idea. His twin careers as first a thief and then a spy had proven that a bit of unexpected boldness often paid off better than elaborate sneaking about.
The lush landscaping of the embassy grounds made it easy to stay out of sight. That and the fact that British soldiers on guard insisted on marching to and fro as if on parade, rather than waiting quietly in the shadows for some intruder to pass by.
Unfortunately, they might have been clumsy but there were a great many of them. It took Alexsi longer than he had hoped to ease his way through the trees to the rear side of the embassy. The approaching dawn was beginning to purple the horizon.
He was rewarded with the sound of a vehicle engine, and homed in on it. There was an open area of grass between the tree trunk that was concealing him and the hedge that was his destination. Alexsi surmounted this by crawling slowly along the line of shadow cast by the tree in the moonlight. Still on his belly blending in alongside the hedge, he peered through it to the sight of an orderly row of American jeeps. Even more perfect, these had fabric tops all neatly buttoned up around them to protect the driver and passengers from the elements.
Predictably, there was a sentry stamping around the perimeter of the car park. Alexsi waited until the fellow reached the side corner with his back turned, then made a little hop over the edge as if curling around the pole of a high jump. After a moment to get his breath back, he was up and inside the jeep. The door was only a simple metal latch.
Almost in spite of himself he had to pause to touch the flexible but clear plastic window in the canvas cover of the door. He had never seen its like before. The inside smelled of canvas, grease, and petrol.
Fortunately these vehicles had no ignition key. He’d had to teach himself to drive one shortly after arriving in Iran.
Now it was time for one of those decisions where you would either be patting yourself on the back for the next week or regretting everything for the rest of your life, however long that might be. Alexsi decided to wait, curling up in the well beneath the steering wheel, out of sight of the passing guards.
The sky progressively lightened, and he kept checking the luminous hands of his watch. Soon it would be too late, and he would have to chance it.
Then a jeep engine started, two rows of vehicles away from him. Alexsi popped up into the driver’s seat and pushed his foot against the starter button next to the accelerator pedal. The engine briefly turned over and died.
Alexsi’s stomach dropped, and he fought the urge to plunge his foot down on the starter again. He took a breath to calm himself and lightly tapped the accelerator to give the engine some petrol. Then he pushed the starter and accelerator pedal at the same time. The starter ground away sickeningly for a moment; then the engine caught. Alexsi pumped more petrol into it, and twisted the lever to activate the lights. Turning the wheel, he released the clutch and pulled out into the open space between the rows.
Alexsi held up a moment to let the other jeep get in front of him, then followed it toward the gate.
The jeep in front paused before the closed metal gate, and after a brief wait honked its horn. A soldier finally emerged from the guard shack, making a rude gesture as if to say, I’m coming, I’m coming. He opened the gate and angrily waved the jeep through.
Alexsi let the clutch out again and followed the first jeep through the gate. The soldier on guard had already positioned himself to close it, and didn’t even look over at him.
The first jeep turned left. Alexsi turned right. He’d been worried that a single jeep might be seen as an interesting diversion in the boring small hours of the morning. But confronted with two the guard couldn’t wait to get back into his warm little shack. Even in the German Army, soldiers were always vigilant about anyone trying to enter a guarded facility but never paid attention to anyone leaving. Now that he was driving about Teheran in exactly the right vehicle, it made no difference that he was in the wrong uniform.
2
1943
TEHERAN, IRAN
As a cold November dawn broke over the city, Alexsi in his purloined jeep was cheerfully waved through two British Army checkpoints. The reception might have been different if he were driving toward the high-security areas of the British and Russian embassies, rather than away from them.
In the poor southern district of Persepolis he came to a stop before the wide wooden doors of a ground-level garage that had originally been the ground-level animal stable of a very old building. From a nearby minaret came the adhan preparatory call for fajr, the dawn prayer. For Alexsi the timing couldn’t be more perfect, as it had nearly emptied the streets.
Alexsi unlatched the jeep door, twisted halfway out, and yanked off one of his Russian sapogi knee boots. Shaking it, he was rewarded with a tinkling sound as the key he had secreted inside fell out onto the pavement.
Boot back on, Alexsi unlocked the garage doors and swung them open. In a moment the jeep was inside and the doors were bolted tight from the inside. He lit the kerosene lamp that had been standing ready on a tall shelf.
There was nothing inside the garage but that otherwise-empty shelf. Any thief would have immediately left disgusted, just as Alexsi intended. He dragged the shelf down the length of the wall and picked up the steel pry bar that had been hidden by its base. Picking his spot, he rammed the end of the pry bar into a seam in the exposed-brick wall. A dozen bricks removed, Alexsi reached into the cavity behind the wall and lifted out one of three large metal toolboxes and a full-length mirror.
After propping the mirror up, Alexsi stripped naked and examined himself critically, like an actor about to take on a new character. He had already decided which of his three emergency identities to use. Both the British and the Soviets would be searching for a European in Teheran, so that was what he absolutely could not be.
With hand clippers Alexsi cut his hair down to a rough stubble. His beard was already two days old, which was perfect. Then, using a sponge fastened to the end of a stick, he stained every millimeter of his skin and scalp with the contents of a large bottle of black walnut oil. As it dried he paid particular attention to his face, his neck, and inside the ears. Any streaking or uneven discoloration would give the game away. A few days of sun and dirt would do for him before the oil wore off.
When he was satisfied that the walnut oil had dried completely, Alexsi donned a complete set of terribly worn Iranian workingman’s clothes. The jacket already had Iranian rial and British pound notes rolled up tightly and sewn into the seams, but only a few small-denomination coins went into his pocket. The battered leather belt had British sovereign gold coins sewn into the center, and its weight was comfortingly substantial. He finally laced up the scuffed shoes and again examined himself in the mirror. The final touch was a stained skullcap. The disguise was good. He could pass for a poor Iranian, even at face-to-face distance. A carefully soiled and aged Iranian passport and identity card were the extent of his papers. A cheap workman’s sheath knife stuck in his belt supplemented the pocketknife returned to its hiding place in his underwear. Other than that, his only baggage was a frayed canvas shoulder bag that held a single change of equally shabby clothing and a few cheap toilet articles.
Copyright © 2022 by William Christie