After leaving the carpet factory in the bazaar, Ebtehaj had taken North Team to a house in Abassi Street, where Oster, having refined his new plan still further, left all but five of his men there with orders to wait until dark and then try to make their way out of the city and across the border into Turkey. Oster had decided that what was now required was a small commando team of no more than half a dozen men, and after a few emotional good-byes, he, Schoellhorn, Unterturmfuhrers Schnabel and Shkvarzev, and three other Ukrainians were driven to a pistachio farm northeast of the city.
At the celebrated court of Queen Belghais of Sheba, pistachios were a delicacy for royalty and the privileged elite. Luckily for Captain Oster and his men, Iranian pistachios were no longer the preserve of the wealthy, but popular throughout the country. Jomat Abdoli was one of the largest wholesalers of pistachios in Iran, and farmers from all over the major pistachio-producing provinces sold their crops to him. He roasted and stored them at a facility in Eshtejariyeh, to the northeast of the city. Jomat hated the British. When Ebtehaj, the wrestler, had come to him asking that he hide some Germans, Jomat said he was only too willing to help.
Ebtehaj, Schoellhorn, Oster, Schnabel, and the three others had been sleeping in the main storehouse and had just finished a traditional Iranian breakfast of tea, boiled eggs, salted cheese, yogurt, and unleavened bread when news reached them that a truck carrying Russian troops had been sighted at the foot of the hill leading up to Jomat’s warehouse. Shkvarzev reached for his Russian-made PPSh41 submachine gun. Neither Jomat nor any of the six men at the pistachio warehouse were aware that everyone back at the house in Abassi Street had now been shot resisting arrest. Oster had no idea that they had been discovered. Had he known, he might have assumed that it was their turn next and acquiesced with the Ukrainian officers’ desire to shoot it out.
“No,” he told Shkvarzev, “we wouldn’t stand a chance.” Then he said to Jomat, “Can we hide somewhere?”
Jomat was already picking up a pile of empty sacks. “Follow me,” he said and led them through the main storehouse and the roasting shed into an empty brick silo. “Lie on the floor, and cover yourselves with the sacks,” he told them. As soon as they had done so, he tugged a metal chute over the silo and then pulled open a feeder drawer so that the silo was filled with half a ton of smooth, purple, recently harvested pistachios.
Oster had never given pistachios much thought. There was a cocktail bar at the Hotel Adlon that served them in little brass bowls, and once or twice he had eaten some; he thought he would certainly make a point of eating them more often if pistachios ended up saving his life. Besides, Jomat insisted they were a perfect after-dinner aphrodisiac. “Your Bible’s King Solomon was a great lover,” Jomat had told him, “only because Queen Belghais, she gave him plenty of peste. ” Peste was the Farsi word for pistachios.
Dust filled Oster’s nose and mouth, and he tried to ignore the impulse to cough. What would he have given now for a glass of water? Not the local water that ran alongside the streets in gaping, unprotected gutters called qanats but the pure water that ran off the glacier in his home town in the Austrian Alps. It was typical of the British that they should pipe down the only reliably pure supply of water in Teheran, and then sell it by the gallon to their friends. A nation of shopkeepers, indeed. There were plenty of water carts in and around Teheran, but none of the other embassies trusted these. Which was just as well, he thought. The British sense of hygiene and commerce was going to be their downfall.
Nearly all of Teheran’s horse-drawn water carts had been made by an Australian company, J. Furphy of Shepperton, Victoria, and had arrived in Mesopotamia with Australian troops during the First World War, before being sold on to Iranians when the Australians had left the country. The Iranian drivers of these water carts were notorious sources of unreliable information and gossip, with the result that the word “furphy” had become a local synonym for unfounded rumor. On Oster’s orders, Ebtehaj had purchased a Furphy from the owner of the Cafe Ferdosi, and a Caspian pony from a local horse trader. The Furphy had then been taken to the pistachio warehouse in Eshtejariyeh, where Shkvarzev and Schnabel set about converting it into a mobile bomb.
The tank part of the water cart was made of two cast-iron ends, thirty-four inches in diameter, and a sheet steel body rolled to form a cylinder about forty-five inches long. Filled with 180 gallons of water, the Furphy weighed just over a ton and, carefully balanced over the axle to distribute the weight, was a fair load for a good horse. The frame of the cart was made of wood and fitted with two thirty-inch wheels. Water was poured out of the tank from a tap in the rear, and poured in through a large lidded filler hole on top. It was a simple enough job to use this filler hole to pack the empty Furphy with nitrate fertilizer and sugar, thereby making a bomb that was about half the size of the largest bomb in general use by the Luftwaffe on the eastern front-the two-and-a-half-ton “Max.” Oster had seen one of these dropped from a Heinkel, and it had destroyed a four-story building in Kharkov, killing everyone inside, so he calculated that a well-placed bomb weighing more than a ton was easily capable of bringing down one small villa housing the British embassy.
Oster froze as he heard the muffled sound of Russian voices. At the same time, he saw, in close-up, Shkvarzev’s hand tightening on his submachine gun. The German could hardly blame him for not wanting to be taken alive. A particularly harsh fate was said to await all of Vlasov’s Zeppelin volunteers: something special devised by Beria himself, at Stalin’s express order. Oster didn’t much care if Churchill and Roosevelt survived the explosion, but the prospect of killing Stalin was something else again. There wasn’t a German on the eastern front who wouldn’t have risked his life for a chance to kill Stalin. Lots of Oster’s friends and even one or two relatives had been in Stalingrad and were now dead-or worse, in Soviet POW camps. Stalin’s assassination was something any German officer would be proud of.
The plan was almost too straightforward. Every morning two Iranians set off with a water cart from the U.S. embassy and traveled some two miles across the city to the British embassy to fill a Furphy with pure water. With some of the British gold sovereigns Oster had brought from Vinnica, it was a simple matter to buy off the two Iranians. On Tuesday morning, Oster and Shkvarzev, disguised as locals, would drive two Furphys onto the grounds of the embassy. If they were asked about having two, Oster would tell the British that more water was required because of the visit of President Roosevelt’s delegation. According to the two water carriers bribed by Ebtehaj, the British water supply appeared underneath the roof of the embassy building in an ornamental dome with honeycomb tracery and a pool of water tiled in blue-what the French called a rond-point. The rond-point appeared on the other side of the embassy’s kitchen wall. The harness of the Furphy carrying the bomb would be disabled, necessitating its temporary abandonment. The bomb would then be armed using a cheap Westclox “Big Ben” alarm clock-which to Oster seemed only appropriate-an Eveready B103 radio battery, an electrical blasting cap, and three pounds of plastic explosive. Oster and Shkvarzev would then leave the embassy with one Furphy filled with water and, having left the second Furphy behind, the two men would use both cart horses and ride fifteen miles to Kan, where Ebtehaj would be waiting with a truck-load of roasted pistachios. They would then make the 400-mile journey to the Turkish border. By the time the bomb went off, Oster hoped to be in a neutral country.
Oster thought that if the plan did have a fault, it was that it seemed too simple. He spoke some Persian, and a little English, and since neither he nor Shkvarzev had washed or shaved since their arrival in Iran, he didn’t doubt that in the right clothes they could easily pass for locals. At least as far as the British were concerned. If all went to plan, they would arm the bomb at around nine A.M. and, twelve hours later, just as Churchill’s birthday guests were sitting down to dinner, it would go off. And while Oster did not think this would win the war, it would be enough to force an armistice. That had to be worth any amount of risk.
Oster finally heard Jomat shout that the Russians had left and, breathing a sigh of relief, he and the others began to struggle out from under the pistachios. He did not think that they would be so lucky again. With forty-eight hours still to go before he and Shkvarzev could put their plan into action, it was going to be all they could do to keep their nerve and sit it out.