"Some of the cutouts have been eliminated"
The other nodded,
"By us or by the SIS ?"
"Both" answered the first man, "We should be safe"
"No", the other replied, "We will never be safe...", then, "Is Peretovsky here yet?"
"Just"
"Then let us meet"
Tehehran was a seething mass of humanity on the best of occasions, but at Midday the heat of the Summer made it close to unbearable, and the influx of foreigners in for the summit was making a mockery of the Shah's much-vaunted traffic control measures. It was chaos out there, and nobody could escape its grasp
Lieutenant-Commander Benjamin Shaw sat beneath the canopy and mopped his brow for the upteenth time. The handkerchief would dry out as rapidly as his forehead would garner new sweat; it was almost as if the moisture was magically finding its way back to its point of origin, except that he was beginning to feel decidedly dehydrated. He looked around for an aide, a servant, anyone, but the Baluchi regiment displaying their drill skills upon the parade ground before them was commanding everyone's attention and it was clear that he was going to have to wait.
Instead, the US naval attache transferred his attention to his fellow sufferers, none of whom was looking happy to be there, many of whom in fact were displaying outright indifference to the Baluchi display, showing a degree of rudeness that Shaw himself felt unable to properly match. It was just too unseemly, he thought, struggling to pretend at interest.
The German looked most haughty of all; some minor aristocrat, he seemed beyond bored, irritated perhaps, and was inspecting the threads of his dress uniform in deliberate, and barbed, detail. Shaw knew the man to be a bore of the worst sort, an old-style Prussian no doubt farmed out to the German embassy here in times before anybody could have expected Tehehran to become the centre of events
An Afghan soldier, a Pashtun of course, sat glaring at the Baluchi as if about to leap down and draw his fearsome sword. The man's rank was not obvious on what seemed to pass for half a uniform, but the way that his aides had scurried around him before the display had begun indicated that formally or not, the man commanded considerable influence, indeed fear in those around him
The Russians had, like the Americans, sent their naval attache to the display, though Shaw wondered at what exactly the Russians had left by way of a fleet. He supposed there were vessels on the Caspian as well as in the Arctic, but from all reports the Baltic Fleet had not been rebuilt after its annihilation in the Russian War, and at best consisted of a couple of second-hand destroyers purchased, he seemed to remember, from the Swedes. Still, he supposed that one did not actually need a navy of one's own to be a naval attache; after all, the man did not bring any ships with him to the land-locked Persian capital.
As an individual the Russian was unprepossessing, something of a contrast from the popular image of the Russian Bear, a much more diminutive figure, somewhat potato-faced and weak of eye. He was staring morosely at the Baluchi regiment, as if it was some sort of punishment to be made to watch its display, and perhaps indeed it was.
Shaw himself had wondered how come he had been singled out for such an 'honour'
At last the music stopped and the Baluchi turned about and stalked off the parade ground. Servants began to move among the spectators once again and, almost too parched to speak, Shaw raised a hand to urgently summon a glass of water.
Hell's teeth, but this was going to be torture...
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
