Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (12 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Latakia was the kind of city that deserved to be part of a better country than Assad’s Syria. It had the same turquoise waters and electric, wholesome vibe as the other great port cities of the eastern Mediterranean, where you could imagine striding off a boat like Odysseus, with adventure just waiting to fall into your lap. White colonial villas with red tile roofs overlooked the port from green hills that stretched further back inland, hinting that Syria wasn’t some Arab-infested desert hellhole. It was actually an ancient, semi-arid farmer country infested by Assads. And Latakia was damn near the heart of their homeland.

The Assad clan hailed from northwest Syria, in the mountains above Latakia. They were Alawites: not Shiites, not Sunnis, but something entirely different. Mainstream Muslims had never trusted them, so they hid up in the hills with their secret faith, right up until a young Alawite air force commander named Hafez al-Assad seized his moment and toppled the basket-case Syrian government in the 1960s. Hafez and his clan ruled for thirty years, making Syria into a formidable military dictatorship by simultaneously allying with the godless Soviets and revolutionary Iran. Hafez’s tangled alliances lay at the heart of Ambrose’s unusual mission: stop a zealous Iranian bomb maker from delivering the weapons of Soviet atheists to a Shiite Lebanese militia dedicated to destroying Jewish Israel.

All of this history went through the back of Ambrose’s mind as he stood in a line full of Turks and Greeks at the Latakia port’s ramshackle international customs house. He had dumped Wayne’s dossier folders in the green Mediterranean hours beforehand, so even in a worst-case scenario, his mission wouldn’t be immediately apparent. The important parts were either in his head or written in code within his red moleskin notebook. Only two pieces of that file survived; the picture of Jamsheed as a child soldier and the picture of Celestine Lemark staring into the distance with her penetrating eyes. He’d folded them both up and put them in his lapel pocket; close to his heart, where unrequited loves belong.

The line was grinding to a halt, which made him consider slipping into the water and trying to swim past the border post, but he thought better of it. The Assads ruled Syria through the dreaded
Mukhabarat
secret police, and only one rule really counted in police states: thou shall not get noticed. A white guy in a bright red linen shirt dripping with sea water would break that commandment pretty damned quickly once he hit land. That only left him with the direct approach.

The customs agent, a military man with tobacco-yellowed fingers and the bored look of customs agents everywhere, snapped his fingers and motioned Ambrose forward. Ambrose produced the midnight blue Canadian passport Wayne had slipped inside his dossier.

The customs agent looked at him with the dark eyes of a man who lived in uncertain times. “You come for business?” he asked in thick English.

“Yes, friend,” Ambrose answered in crisp Iraqi-accented Arabic, “I’m an import-exporter with offices in London and Tel Aviv. I’m here to buy looted archaeological artifacts. The dealer’s name is Muhammad Zubair.”

The agent’s eyes widened cartoonishly, almost hitting his receding hairline. “What?”

Ambrose smiled and continued cheerily, “Zubair is based here in Latakia. He sent me a price list in London and it seemed reasonable. Greek statues, Roman friezes, the kind of things collectors go crazy over in Europe and Israel.” Ambrose lit a cigarette. “Oh, and something about a bunch of ivory. That’s legal here in Syria, right?”

The officer drew his tarnished pistol, indicating that it was not.

* * *

Ambrose woke up on the floor, surprised to see daylight. When Third World soldiers knocked you out, you were supposed to awaken under a single swinging light bulb that flickered as it threatened to die. Instead, he was in a small cell with a sliding jailhouse barred door, and a window view of the setting Mediterranean sun. That meant he’d been tossed into a normal jail, probably where drunk Russian sailors on shore leave sobered up before they could stumble back to their naval base and help Vladimir Putin offload more weapons to Assad’s armies.

In any event, the cell wasn’t a Mukhabarat interrogation room; despite the public beating that the customs agents had given him in broad daylight, no one had called the secret police. That meant the local authorities were answering to someone else, as Wayne’s instructions had predicted, and Ambrose’s shenanigans had gotten that someone’s attention. Hopefully his name was Muhammad Zubair.

Dried blood surrounded a cut above his left eye, telling him some bastard had been wearing a ring when he punched. His ribs also hurt where he’d taken a single judicious kick from the lead goon. But nothing seemed broken, so all in all it could’ve been worse. Now he just had to wait and see whether Wayne’s dossier was worth a damn.

His bag was missing, so Ambrose passed the time by humming a half-forgotten tune to himself. Tom Waits, maybe, or the Pogues. As he hummed, Ambrose thought of all the Silat techniques he’d learned, spending those hundreds of hours in a sweat-covered Jakarta gym. Once, his leathery old teacher had described an impossible maneuver allegedly developed in Borneo, and probably considered bullshit even on Borneo: when a superior foe had beaten a warrior down, the Silat master let his opponent joke, mocking the master’s weakness. Then the master lunged up, shoved his hand down the taunter’s mouth, and ripped out his jaw. No one could see it coming, so no one could properly defend against it. Then again, if you timed it wrong, the opponent bit your fucking fingers off down to the stump.

Mashhadi and his Iranian masters were only playing this game because they thought no one else cared. They thought that they had broken America in Iraq, so they needled the Great Satan wherever they could—in Iraq, in Yemen, in Lebanon, and in Syria. They were laughing with their mouths wide open.

But Ambrose still didn’t want to have his fingers bitten off.

* * *

The door opened behind him. Ambrose had heard the man approach, but with jailers it was always best to play dumb. Not that it took much skill to hear this guy coming; he filled the cell door when he entered. His arms were twice the width of Ambrose’s legs and his chest almost ripped out of his skintight black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. This guy’s steroids had been using steroids. He didn’t wear a gun, and Ambrose couldn’t imagine he’d ever needed one.

Behind the monster, in walked a normal-sized man with a good tan who wore an electric green polo shirt tucked into grey-white slacks. His shiny white leather loafers didn’t match the slacks, but the amount of gold around his neck probably distracted people from that little faux-pas. His eyes almost matched the shirt, and they were busy taking Ambrose apart, inch by bruised inch.

Ambrose stood up and said, “Hi,” in Arabic while looking Polo in the eyes.

Polo smiled, revealing pearly teeth that matched his shoes. He tsked and said, “Speaking in Iraqi Arabic was a bad idea. There’s only one explanation for how a white person speaks Iraqi Arabic.” He scanned Ambrose from his shoes all the way to his hairline. “But you don’t look military, and your documents are so good that only my intuition tells me they’re forged, Mister Hayes.”

He sat down in a chair and crossed his leg tight, European style. “But let’s assume you actually are Canadian, you learned Iraqi Arabic from some book, and I’m not talking to an American spy right now.” He produced one of Ambrose’s Indonesian cigarette packs, stole one, then tossed the half-empty box to Ambrose. The monster offered Polo a light, wielding his silver Zippo with surprising dexterity in those mammoth hands.

“So anyway,” Polo shirt said, “let’s step back a few hours. Around five o’clock, I was on the balcony of a very nice hotel, giving an interview to some stupid little Englishwoman from the BBC. She was asking stupid little questions, but she had nice legs and was eager for a story, so there is no way on God’s earth that she wouldn’t have fucked me before dinner.”

He leaned forward. “Then I got a call on my unregistered mobile phone, from a bored soldier whom I bribe regularly just because it’s fun to bribe people. He said a Canadian man had appeared at customs, loudly proclaiming my involvement in several dodgy activities. So,” he switched into French, as though testing Ambrose’s alleged Canadian-ness, “Congratulations. You’ve gotten my attention.”

Ambrose responded in mediocre French that was probably good enough to pass for a Canadian who had slacked off in high school, “Sorry about that. I couldn’t think of how else to get a face to face with you, Mister Zubair.”

Muhammad Zubair smiled. “Trust me, Mister Hayes, this isn’t the face to face you wanted.”

Zubair nodded, and the monster
threw
Ambrose ten feet across the room, into the cell’s bars. Ambrose saw white when his head hit the bars, then felt his bruised ribs hit the ground as though he’d been stabbed with a broken beer bottle.

Ambrose gasped raggedly and tried to get some words out. Instead, he just made an anemic little wheeze, like a defective balloon.

The monster wrapped a single hand entirely around Ambrose’s face and lifted him back to his feet. Ambrose felt the back of his head being grinded flat against the metal bars.

Ambrose bit down as hard as he could, imagining that he has trying to tear the entire sole off a leather shoe with his long canines. As the big man grunted and began pulling his hand away, Ambrose shot both of his hands upward. His left hand wrapped around the man’s pinkie and his right hand wrapped around the man’s thumb. Then he made a wish, heard a crack, and the monster stumbled backward, holding his bloody hand and gazing wide-eyed at the two fingers dangling off it like sleepy worms.

Ambrose walked towards him and kneed the monster in the groin four times until he dropped. Then he turned to Zubair and spoke again in Arabic, “Trust me, Zubair, this isn’t the face to face you wanted.”

Zubair blinked, looking at the spreading dark spot in the crotch of the monster’s jeans. He shrugged and said, “Agreed. I don’t suppose an apology would help?”

Ambrose walked around Zubair, and picked a cigarette out of his stolen pack. Then he helped himself to the monster’s Zippo and lit up. “No need to apologize—you didn’t hurt my feelings. But you
did
try to waste my time, which is worse. So I’m going to tell you what I want, and you’re going to do it,” he said.

Zubair nodded, finishing his cigarette before offering, “Let’s go somewhere more private.” He stood up, tossed his cigarette on the concrete, and didn’t bother dirtying his loafers by grinding it out. “Mister Hayes, have you ever seen a completely disassembled Roman temple?”

Chapter Eighteen

Ambrose and Zubair smoked in silence as their elevator dropped downward with a clatter of chains and the distant rumble of a diesel generator that powered the whole dodgy operation. They were underground. It must have been twenty degrees Fahrenheit cooler down here, which gave Ambrose some idea just how far beneath the port of Latakia they had descended.

The elevator finally lurched to a halt, then they shared one of those awkwardly long moments common to elevators everywhere, and especially common to cheap and scary ones: the doors didn’t open promptly. Ambrose knew it
would
open—elevators always did—but somewhere in his reptile brain he, like most people, got the sneaking suspicion that this was indeed the final elevator—the one that
wouldn’t
open, the metal box that would just keep falling all the way to hell.

Then the door slid open with a labored metallic grunt, like an old man passing a kidney stone, and Zubair said, “You’re not getting a car.”

Ambrose stepped out onto an industrial catwalk that overlooked a subterranean loading dock. Wooden crates straight out of Indiana Jones rose twenty feet high in the air all around him. Men shouting in multiple languages were moving the crates using everything from ancient pallet jack to modern warehouse forklifts. The smell of engine grease and cheap Russian cigarettes coated everything.

Ambrose frowned as he breathed in the stink, which cut right through the sweet aroma of his clove cigarette. Ambrose countered, “Twenty-thousand Euros says you’ll find me a car
and
a driver.” He flicked his cigarette over the edge, hoping it landed on someone.

Zubair took his arm and led him away from the railing, towards a rusted set of spiral stairs leading down to the warehouse floor. He said, “After what you did to my man, no one is going to be in any hurry to help you. Even if they did volunteer, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a car with them once you reach the middle of nowhere. You’re fast and you’re vicious. Now that we know that, whoever makes a play on you will adjust their plans accordingly.”

He and Ambrose ducked beneath a forklift as it swung its teeth above them, lifting a crate that rained sawdust on them like snow. Zubair brushed some of the shit out of his hair and continued, “But that’s not the real problem: you’re not getting a car and a driver because me and my outfit
will not
get involved with al-Qaida or Jabhat al-Nusra, or whatever those Sunni barbarians are calling themselves. Life’s too short for that kind of trouble.”

Ambrose lit another cigarette and followed Zubair deeper into the warehouse. He had to yell over the high-pitched klaxon of a green Chinese forklift that whizzed by them. “Fifty-thousand Euros. Live up to your reputation and pretend you know a deal when you see one,” he pressed.

Ambrose had no idea what Zubair’s reputation was, but this had become good old-fashioned haggling, where facts mattered less than well-turned bullshit.

Zubair motioned him toward an office door set against the far side of the warehouse. Then he said, “Reputation is key here, you’re right. Here’s my reputation, Mister Hayes of Vancouver, British Columbia: I’m an Alawite, the same as Bashar al-Assad, and I survive by acting as a middleman for Assad’s government. I sell priceless artifacts that I send thugs to loot from delicate archaeological sites. Then I use this money to buy Russian weaponry for a dictator who is killing his own people.”

He pointed upward, where a crane was lifting several trailer-sized metal containers from one pile to the other. The containers were covered in writing, most of it in Russian, which Ambrose didn’t speak, but each crate also contained a big green stencil in Arabic reading: “Fortress of Homs.” He didn’t recognize the code, if there was one.

Zubair continued, “Those are components for a Russian anti-aircraft battery, to be installed near Homs in the event ‘Canada’ ever decides to get involved in our war,” he pointed the other direction, revealing half a city’s worth of cracked columns, statues, and other beautiful objects hoarded in marble and granite, “That’s what I’m selling to pay for the Russian hardware: half of the temple of Artemis, from the ruins of Palmyra in northern Syria. I’ve had men out there for months with jackhammers and flatbed trucks, dismantling the goddamned thing brick by brick. Hell, I even hired an archaeologist to conduct the dig.”

“I’m betting he’s not on loan from the British Museum or the Smithsonian,” Ambrose said.

The Alawite shrugged. “What does it matter, really? We’ve all got to eat, even crooked archaeologists. And we fill our plates by helping Assad, even if he isn’t writing us paychecks directly. All of the Sunni jihadists know it. We Alawites are heretics and traitors, as far as they’re concerned. In Afghanistan and Iraq, they
behead
people like me and mine.”

They reached the office, and Zubair motioned Ambrose inward while saying, “So no, Mister Hayes, you’re not getting a driver, or any car that could be traced back to me. Sorry, but I need my head more than I need your money, and even my worst paid lackey would give you the same answer. The only reason I’ve survived this long is by strictly adhering to the ‘middle’ part of ‘middle-man,’ and actually using my resources to send an American agent against al-Qaida takes me out of the middle and puts me in the front lines. I’m not hard enough for that kind of life.”

Ambrose slammed his hand across the doorframe, keeping both himself and Zubair from moving inward. “So what am I doing here, Zubair? Why bother showing me your hideout—what is this, anyway, an old Soviet submarine bay—just to tell me to go fuck myself?” He barked loudly enough to make an impression over the sound of industrial machinery.

Zubair narrowed his green eyes, ducked beneath Ambrose’s arm, and walked into the office. It looked like any warehouse foreman’s office anywhere, with a generic desk finished in lacquered particleboard, a little green library lamp atop the desk, a bulletin board on the wall with forget-me-not notes pinned to it. The walls were a different story. To the side of Zubair’s desk hung a floor to ceiling map of Syria. Dozens of places were circled in red ink, and hi-liter marked routes between them, fanning out from Latakia itself. Many of the hi-liter tracks didn’t even look like roads. Up in the northeast, there were sites circled in green. That would be Palmyra, and the other priceless archaeological sites Zubair bragged about pillaging. Few of the hi-liter tracks went to Damascus. The war had moved far beyond the capital, and while Assad hid in a bunkered Damascene palace, men like Zubair fanned out around the country, supplying the regime’s troops with the instruments they needed to burn Syria to the ground. Then the men like Zubair would also root through the ashes like pigs in a shallow graveyard.

The fixer sat down at his desk and motioned for Ambrose to sit across from him. Zubair said, “I brought you here because I needed you off the street before someone else noticed you. Whether it was Russian sailors or Assad’s Mukhabarat, the results would have been the same: you get captured, interrogated, probably killed, and you squeal my name in the process. Assad’s people would look the other way for most of it, but not after you deliberately mentioned Tel Aviv, you silly motherfucker. So I brought you somewhere safe, where I can keep an eye on you.” He reached down behind his desk and Ambrose tensed up, ready to spring if Zubair came up with a gun. Instead, he came up with Ambrose’s crappy little red Indonesian tote bag.

Zubair dumped it on the table, as if demonstrating that he hadn’t tampered with the contents. “Four packs of cigarettes, minus the pack I took; a little red journal,” he held up the moleskin notebook, “Some extra clothes, though evidently no underwear; headphones; six triple-A batteries;
no
weapons of any kind; and…a Walkman?” he said while examining the scratched metal lump that was Ambrose’s battery-powered mp3 player.

“It’s an Indian iPod knock-off. I bought it because it
looks
like a Walkman, so no street kid would ever bother to take it. And it plays just fucking fine, thanks,” Ambrose retorted.

Zubair looked at the sad metal thing and clicked his tongue. That was a little habit of most coastal Syrians and Lebanese, which had more meanings than ‘aloha’ to a Hawaiian. “They don’t believe in hazard pay for you ‘Canadians,’ do they, even when they send you into a hell like Syria,” he observed.

Then he pulled out the thing Ambrose was hoping he’d overlooked, knowing full well that men like Zubair didn’t overlook things. It was a little black plastic cylinder with a round metal depressor on its backside. Zubair opened it up with a twist and gingerly took out the contents: three fat tubes with needles at the end, one long and tan, another short and black, a third electric yellow.

Zubair held them up and said, “I frequently deal in medical supplies, too, especially military grade. I recognize an autoinjector when I see one—spring-loaded syringes designed to deliver a dose of chemical automatically when stabbed into the thigh or buttock. Typically used in situations where the patient does not have enough mental clarity or muscle control to use an ordinary syringe,” he held up the tan tube, “Pralidoximine. An organic salt that inhibits foreign chemicals from latching onto the receptors in human cells,” he held up the short black tube, “Diazepam, to stop violent seizures,” he held up the yellow tube, “Atropine. An extract of deadly nightshade that counteracts irregularities in the Vagus nerve and can practically restart a stopped heart. I hear it feels like being fucked by lightning. Used in conjunction, the effects can be miraculous.”

His voice lowered to a whisper. “You’re finally here; you’re who they’ve sent to deal with Assad’s chemical weapons.” He pushed the autoinjector syringes further onto the table, eyeing them like snakes. “We all knew he’d use them eventually, but we prayed he’d see wisdom first. Once he used those weapons, there would be no going back; America would have to act.”

Ambrose answered, narrowing his eyes, “I’m not here for Assad, or you, or the soldiers who are gassing civilians in little villages that the world will never miss. I’m here for an Iranian,” he pointed at the autoinjectors, “And he might not go down easily.”

“And you think al-Qaida can help you?”

“Not knowingly, but yes. Yes they fucking will,” Ambrose jerked a thumb towards the wall map, “And that’s why I need a car with a driver who can get me into their territory so we can talk.”

The fixer’s eyes twinkled. “There are
two
autoinjectors, Mister Hayes of Vancouver, British Columbia. How, may I ask, will your partner get out into the field to meet you?”

Ambrose smiled without showing his teeth. “Best drop that line of thinking, Zubair.”

Zubair chuckled, “Fine, but al-Qaida won’t help you, they’ll execute you. I only
suspect
you’re CIA, and if I spoke better English, I’m sure I could confirm that. The jihadists, though, they will
know
that you’re CIA, whether you are or you aren’t. That’s the mythology they’ve created for themselves, and once you step into their world, you’re not walking out alive.”

“Only the Iranian gets a chance at this head.” Ambrose hissed, “So get me a car, Zubair. We’re still talking, so I know you’re not turning me over to Assad. And I’ve heard enough to know you’re not in bed with the Iranians: you’re a black marketer with lines to Russian arms and European auction houses—the ayatollahs have nothing you want.”

Zubair clicked. “You’re behind the times, Mister Hayes: every arms dealer in Syria speaks a bit of Farsi, not to mention Chinese. I have a lot of people who would be offended if I crossed an important Iranian.”

“So you’re afraid of Iran, you’re afraid of the jihadists, you don’t have a car, and you don’t have a driver,” Hayes observed as he blew cigarette smoke straight at Zubair’s face, “So why are we still talking, Zubair? Why haven’t you shot me and placed a call to someone in a turban using all of that Farsi you speak?”

The arms dealer
did
have a black mobile phone on his desk, and both of them were looking at it. Zubair reached for it, and Ambrose mentally prepared to break his hand into pulp.

Zubair picked up the phone and dropped it in a desk drawer. He sighed, then said, “Because this country has gotten too crowded. I shouldn’t
need
to speak Farsi,” he flashed his eyes green eyes upward, “Or English, or French. Because I wish foreigners had never encouraged Assad to buy all these fucking tanks and rockets and chemical weapons; because men like me don’t exist in countries where things
work
.”

Ambrose graced him with a grim smile, one bastard to another. “Be fair,” he said in rapidly improving Syrian Arabic, “even Norway probably has one or two of you.”

That made Zubair chuckle a little. Then he replied, “I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t have your driver, or a car to spare. But,” he got up, went to the map, and traced his finger along one of the highlighted roads, “For a pack of those clove cigarettes and your twenty thousand Euros I
will
give you a good map, and the means to find al-Qaida on your own.”

Zubair took another one of Ambrose’s cigarettes, lit it, then began to politely repack the contents of Ambrose’s ugly red bag. “Assuming, Mister Hayes, that the CIA taught you how to ride a motorbike.”