Little Lost Lambs at the Post Read online

  Keeping Posted: The Lowdown on Jonah

  Oracle by Hafiz

  The Major Meets an Enchantress

  Live Target

  Snowbound Interlude

  The Devil’s Visit

  Lost City

  The Mysterious Knife

  Onslaught of Terror

  Gallant Gesture

  The Lady and the Pirate

  The Admiral Declares War

  Thief Trap

  Amateur Spy

  Queen of the Mountains

  Iron Curtain Incident

  Panic on Flight Nine

  Acknowledgements

  Keeping Posted: The Lowdown on Jonah

  IN Harold Lamb’s entertaining story of an American in Persia—Oracle by Hafiz—some of the most spirited action takes place at a pass. The pass Lamb had in mind—he knows the Middle East as well as most Americans know their own country—is one called “Young Woman Old Woman Pass.” It is exceedingly high, and gets its name from the idea that a young girl starting up would be an old woman by the time she got down.

  Lamb wrote Oracle by Hafiz in his home in Beverly Hills, California, out of knowledge gained in some 59,000 miles of travel in the Middle East. He spent more than two years there in wartime, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in tents. He came back with an unbroken record of defeats at various sports. The Middle East is the homeland of chess, and Lamb was not surprised to lose to Emir Abdullah of Transjordan at that game. He was a little surprised, however, to find that the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza, could beat him at tennis, and that his bridge wasn’t good enough for official circles in Teheran.

  It’s a fine country to visit, he said. “Anywhere in the desert, you can still drive up to a village, pick out the best house and tell the owner you are going to be his guest for the night. In one Zoroastrian home we stayed three days, telling the servants what we wanted done, before seeing our host. You don’t pay for things like that.

  “I wanted to meet the people and live with them, and it is very easy to do, whether they are Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Kurds, Armenians or Asiatic Jews. My only real grief was an excess of hospitality. Most of the folks out there look on an American as a visitor from the Promised Land. The United States seems to them to be a composite of the biggest, toughest and wealthiest nation, expounder of the Atlantic Charter, President Wilson’s idealism, typhus control and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It’s a reputation very hard to five up to.”

  Like the hero of his story, Mr. Lamb got along very well with the mountain tribes, in spite of some differences in viewpoint. He found the tribesmen living quite well, getting such luxury items as tea, sugar and gasoline by raiding highway convoys. One British military attaché arrived at Shiraz, during Lamb’s stay, wearing nothing but gray woolen underwear. He had come through the mountains at a moment when the tribesmen needed clothes.

  One of the many Middle Easterners Lamb visited was Fattah Agha, a tribal head in the mountains south of Lake Urmia. Fattah Agha’s tribe, the Hirkli, was getting along fine, finding good grazing as it moved around and carrying a little contraband salt across the frontier as a sideline.

  Fattah Agha asked with interest how Lamb’s tribe found the grazing and such in the United States. “Do Americans migrate with their animals,” he asked, “or do they build homes in settlements?”

  Lamb told him the Americans had a tendency to build homes and stay in them, although they did migrate around a good deal with their women. Fattah Agha said he supposed it was all right if you liked that kind of life, but added frankly that he couldn’t see how Americans would ever make any money staying in one place all the time.

  Mr. Lamb also picked up a new version of what happened to Jonah. The real story, he was assured, is not the one he had been taught in Sunday school. It seems that Jonah prophesied that the wicked city of Nineveh was due to feel the wrath of the Lord, who would demolish it in forty days. And for forty days a wind shook the strongest of the city’s walls and torrential rains flooded the city’s streets. But when the storm ended, the city was still there. So the inhabitants went looking for Jonah, who lived up the Tigris River, and told him that while they were glad his prophecy had not come to pass, with an inevitable lowering of real-estate values, he must realize that they couldn’t put up with a prophet whose predictions didn’t come true, and they would like to have a word with him down by the river. So they tossed him into the Tigris, where the biggest fish—big, but by no means a whale—swallowed the prophet at a gulp. “They assured me,” said the traveler, “that this is official.”

  Oracle by Hafiz

  AT 1030 hours of a cloudless Sunday morning, Maj. John D. Alford, of the United States Army, extended his lengthy limbs upon the wide limestone steps of the tomb of Hafiz, in Shiraz, which was in a country known as Persia, although it bore the identification of Iran on his maps. Carefully he eased his shoulders back and braced his comfortable aviator-type pull-ons upon a lower step, and proceeded to think about nothing. Sundays he did not work, although the Persians did.

  By simply raising his eyes, he could watch pigeons pairing off along the blue-tiled arches; by glancing down he could observe the routine of lizards among the cracks. The warmth of wine of Shiraz, drunk the night before, neutralized the outer heat of the sun and he felt content. To improve his mind, he opened the book he had brought. It was the poems of Hafiz, translated into English, and the major had heard that these poems meant more to the Persians than any Shakespearean sonnets. He read a line: “Ah, seek the treasure of a mind at rest.” That, Major Alford thought, was well put, and he ceased his rending to watch the progress of a droshky rattling up the road.

  This was what he had expected from Persia, the land of Hafiz and carpets and cats. Rest, with solitude. For many years he had known neither—not at the V.M.I. or West Point, and certainly not on the Volturno, where shellfire had been mixed with rain, nor in the Vosges, where he had come down with double pneumonia on the eve of V-E day. When he left the hospital he had volunteered for special service in Iran because he had fancied there would be no spot on the globe more productive of rest and quiet after the war.

  Iran, he thought, would be more quiescent than his native state of Virginia. The D. in his name stood for Dinwiddle, his intimates in the war theaters had dubbed him Din, and he wanted no more of that. Here and now he was functioning not as an officer, but as a policeman—a trainer, that is, of the Iranian gendarmerie. He was one of a half dozen officers selected by the State Department for supposed qualifications as gentlemen and diplomats to revamp the obsolescent gendarmerie, and, in Din’s opinion, to enjoy life.

  He was returning to his study of Hafiz when, to his annoyance, the droshky stopped at the steps and disgorged two men. The one with the bald head he recognized as his interpreter, Doc Itty—Dr. Itimad Istakhr—medical practitioner and the most experienced liar Din had ever met.

  “Thought I told you to take the morning off,” Major Alford murmured.

  “Bally, bally,” crooned Doc Itty, meaning, “yes, yes.” He crooned when he thought the major was angry. He suffered from acute anxiety lest the inexperienced American make a mistake on this trip. Instead of arguing with Din, Doc Itty—who doubled as medical examiner—tampered with the truth to shape Din’s ends. In so doing, he displayed an artistry worthy of the Thousand and One Nights.

  “Major, this very morning a catastrophe happened.”

  Din waited. Doc waved to his companion, an elder soul in a cutaway and emerald ring, with nice brown eyes—evidently a personage of Shiraz— who made an agitated speech in Iranian, of which Din understood not a word.

  “Yes,” assented Din politely, “but what?”

  “His daughter!” Doc Itty ex
claimed. “The daughter of His Excellency, the Minister of Education, only fifteen years, and stolen last night from the medresse—the academy for women— by tribesmen raiders of Shiraz who climbed the wall and what your FBI calls kidnaped her.”

  Warily, the major studied his interpreter. From the droshky’s seat leaned an anxious old lady, holding the black end of a veil under her eyes. Din decided that the girl had really been lost.

  “I know, doc,” he objected. “But schoolgirls go off sometimes.”

  “From the family of His Excellency? Never! Besides, the tribesmen were seen doing the crime, riding off like Errol Flynn. Bor Ahmadi tribesmen.”

  Doc Itty’s naturally fine imagination had been stimulated by many motion pictures. Yet the two old people looked to Din like impeccable witnesses.

  “Still,” Din parried, “this is a case for the Shiraz police. We only have authority to inspect our road posts.”

  Sensing an argument, the old gentleman broke in, and his lady seconded him from the carriage. “He says,” Doc explained, “the police here are afraid of the tribesmen, who are afraid of nobody. He Rays it is an act of God that an American major should arrive this morning on the scene of the crime to recapture his daughter”—Doc waved toward the bare hills in the west— “from the tribal zone of the Bor Ahmadi, who defeated German parachutists and subdued a brigade of the Iranian army also. His Excellency said beautifully that you must restore his Mihr-i-Jahan to him.”

  “Who? Mary Jane?”

  “Mihr-i-Jahan, his daughter. As you say it in beauty contests, Sweetheart of the World.”

  Offering His Excellency a pacifying cigarette, Din reflected that there was something very fishy about this. He had been present in Iran only two months, but he suspected that the mountain tribesmen who raided road convoys would hardly storm the walls of Shiraz’s women’s academy for just one fifteen-year-old bobbysoxer named Sweetheart of the World.

  “Doc,” he said, “I don’t see how I could do anything.”

  To his surprise, the veiled Victorian lady in the carriage pointed at the book he was holding, and murmured excitedly.

  “Hafiz!” cried Doc Itty, brightening.

  By now, Din had an audience of tomb attendants and women, veiled, with laundry poised on their heads. And this audience registered excitement at mention of Hafiz.

  “Excuse me, major,” Doc intoned, “but you do not know our custom. You were reading Hafiz. Hafiz was citizen extraordinary of Shiraz, and utmost poet of this world and the next. His Divan is our fortune finder.”

  “Your what?”

  “Our foreteller of events, our oracle. Like this: Close your eyes, major, and put your finger on a page, and the line of verse under your finger will tell you the exact conduct you must pursue. No, I will hold the book. Now you must do so, because Her Excellency is willing to let Hafiz decide the fate of her daughter.”

  Din sighed, and tried to remember the approximate page of the beautiful line about seeking rest. He thrust in a tentative finger, and Doc snapped open the book eagerly.

  “Magnificent!” cried Doc. “The most immortal verse of Hafiz.” And he intoned some musical Persian. Peering at the page, Din read in the translation:

  While the audience babbled, Din cogitated. “That doesn’t add up to a thing,” he observed.

  “Excuse me, major! Never did Hafiz speak more clearly. These good people are amazed.”

  “But there’s nothing about—”

  “Think! Is not Sweetheart definitely a maid of Shiraz? And His Excellency says she had a Turkish great-grandfather.”

  “But Bokhara—”

  “Hafiz is a poet, and when he speaks of Bokhara he means a foreign place.” Doc waved a clairvoyant hand. “And the foreign place nearest to Shiraz is the Bor Ahmadi tribal mountains, where you must seek the missing girl.”

  The audience waited, fascinated, for the Virginian to speak.

  Din reflected, remembering only too well the warning given him on his departure by the American colonel in charge of the renovated gendarmerie. His colonel had been long in Iran. “Din, Shiraz is a trouble spot, and I am sending you there because, being only twenty-four years old, yon still believe in Providence. You are from Virginia,” his colonel had warned, “but even if you were from the borough of Manhattan you will meet with more conniving than was ever dreamed of in your philosophy. These people still believe in fairy tales. They will think you are a tin god. There’s only one order— to keep out of trouble with the Bor Ahmadi, who are really tough.”

  In his mind, Din flipped a coin. Then the Victorian lady leaned far out of the carriage. She lowered her veil an inch and laid a jeweled finger on a mole beneath her eye.

  Din looked into the candid eyes of his interpreter. “All right, Doc,” he said, “against my better judgment, this time you win.”

  By fifteen hours in that afternoon, Major Alford did not need to consult Hafiz to know that his mission would be a rugged one. Along the road the villagers denied any knowledge of tribal raiders or a missing girl of Shiraz. And now there were no longer any villages. The road upended sharply, to circle between limestone heights and pine-grown gullies where no human habitation showed.

  Hunched over his map beside Doc Itty and Ibrahim, the driver of the one-and-a-half-ton truck, Din contemplated herds of sheep and black goats grazing over his head. The shepherd boys raced down the slopes to pelt the passing vehicles accurately with stones.

  “We are now entering Bor Ahmadi land,” explained Doc.

  Din glanced back at the two jeeps following in the truck’s dust with the two other drivers and the half squad of gendarmes.

  “Warn them not to shoot at anything,” he requested.

  “Quite unnecessary, major. They will not. If they made one tribal casualty here, all of them would be bloody dead, except you.”

  “Um,” said Din. “If they feel that way, why are they so anxious to trail along?”

  “Because of you, major.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because of my telling them what the colonel told me—that you defeated the Italian army.”

  Din sighed. He wished he knew how to deal with these people who were allergic to truth, but who believed his every word as if he were a white knight or tin god. He would have to keep his word. He would have to look after his eight Iranian henchmen while tracking down an errant damsel in about a thousand square miles of mountains.

  To accomplish that, the only possible plan of operation, Din reasoned, was the most direct—to drive into a Bor Ahmadi hangout and grab a couple of hostages to swap for this girl. If they had the girl. If not—

  In his childhood Din had gained a clear impression that mountain men did not like to be put upon. The hill folk of Tazewell County, Virginia, like the Bor Ahmadi, had cherished no great love for city people or gendarmes. His own Great-grandfather Dinwiddie had assured him that the rifle toters of the Tazewell hills had won the Second Manassas battle in spite of the Confederate general staff. And his present colonel had warned him not to tamper with these mountain men.

  The first Bor Ahmadi to enter Din’s range of vision was a six-foot patriarch with a green skullcap and leaking nose. This patriarch stopped all three vehicles by standing in the middle of the road where it snaked between some bouldere. Ibrahim, the driver, stopped very quickly.

  The patriarch, whose beard was dyed orange with henna, stepped on the running board beside Din. He smelled of mutton grease.

  “This is Pir Sulaiman—Solomon,” enunciated Doc Itty. “Pir is a holy man, like a bishop. He says, drive him up to the Kazerun post.”

  Din still felt uneasy when a line of cars stopped dead on an open road, a target for bombs. “Tell him to find a seat in a jeep.”

  Doc told the Pir. “Pir Solomon says no, he will not sit among gendarmes who contaminate him.”

  Pir Solomon reached in a gnarled hand and fingered the safety lug on the old Springfield that Din had brought along—the American gendarmerie trainers did not car
ry side arms—for a shot at gazelle or mountain sheep.

  “Kih?” he asked.

  “Yamricai,” said Doc, and to the major, “The Pir does not know this rifle. The Bor Ahmadi have captured Mausers from the Germans and Enfields from the British, and Czech Brno rifles from gendarmes, but not yet an American one like yours.”

  Casually Din transferred the Springfield to the other side of his knees. It seemed to him that this Pir was too handy with rifles.

  When they crawled up to the summit of the first pass, Din discovered that by an act of Providence he had two hostages ready and waiting.

  In this pass stood a gendarmerie road post, intended to guard travelers passing through Bor Ahmadi land. It consisted of a ruined caravan serai and tower. Before it four gendarmes had been lined up at attention by a sergeant. So Din felt sure they had sighted his convoy far below. Along the serai wall eight horses were standing, two of them saddled. And a sixth gendarme with bayonet fixed stood rigid behind two prisoners, manacled and sitting uncomfortably in the warmth of the sun.

  Peering under his matted brows, Pir Solomon scrutinized every detail of the post when the truck stopped. On Din’s check list, this post in the Kazerun Pass contained six men and six horses. Thoughtfully he considered the pair of prisoners.

  “Ask this sergeant,” he directed Doc Itty, “why all his men are paraded here instead of riding out on patrol.”

  The sergeant seemed surprised.

  “He says all are needed here,” the physician explained, “to guard these prisoners, who are Bor Ahmadi leaders. This morning many Bor Ahmadi raided the post, objective to stealing horses. After bloody fighting, the sergeant captured these bandits.”