Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (13 page)

2012

September

Friday

Chapter Nineteen

The Iranian embassy in Damascus had a beautiful blue and turquoise tile façade that remained unscathed despite two years of civil war that had swept across the country all around it. Even Assad’s presidential palace had been bombed, but not so the embassy. Jamsheed just hoped they had coffee. As he got out of the black Mercedes that had picked him up at a military airport outside the capital, the armed guards in the courtyard eyed him suspiciously. If he were wearing his uniform, they would have broken then backs snapping to attention. Few common soldiers like them ever got to see a Revolutionary Guard colonel. Fewer still would ever see a colonel in Quds Force. But to them, he was just some good-looking fool in a suit showing up at the embassy after midnight. If they’d noticed the single black leather glove he wore on his left hand, they might have reached a different conclusion.

The Iranian ambassador met him in the oak-paneled embassy foyer. Despite the late hour, he looked commanding and alert in his black mullah’s robes. Gholamreza Yazdi wasn’t an ayatollah yet, but he was a hungry young mullah well on his way. Damascus was a crucial steppingstone on the way to the Supreme Leader’s inner circle in Tehran, and Jamsheed sensed that Yazdi was the type of man who would stop at nothing to taste that kind of power. Still, Jamsheed knew he could just pull rank if the young man became too meddlesome, but that was a classless way to do things. Iranians were prickly when it came to manners, and browbeating the young man would reflect badly not just on Jamsheed, but on his commanding officer, Major General Qasem Soleimani. He owed Soleimani too much to ever bring that disgrace upon him.

The ambassador kissed Jamsheed on the cheek and then Jamsheed reciprocated. Jamsheed noticed that the mullah smelled faintly of whiskey. Jamsheed filed that away for later, because it was always good to know which clerics were secret drinkers.

“Colonel Mashhadi, it is excellent to finally meet you. How was your flight?” the ambassador intoned sweetly.

Jamsheed gave his best fake smile and replied, “Please, Ambassador: just call me Jamsheed. The flight went very well, thank you. Iraqi airspace let us fly right through, and Syrian fighters escorted me to Damascus as soon as we crossed the border.”

Ambassador Yazdi smiled again, full of oil. “You are a national treasure, Master Jamsheed. The Syrians knew that if you were injured, Iran would not take it lightly.”

Jamsheed wished that the ambassador were right. “You are too kind, Ambassador. Forgive the lateness of my arrival, but may we retire somewhere to discuss business? As you can imagine, my presence in-country could be…problematic, if the enemies of the Revolution discovered me, so it’s best I accomplish my task quickly.”

Yazdi pointed up the vanity staircase with a flourish of his black robes. “We have an excellent parlor upstairs, where I entertain various dignitaries to great success. I would be honored if you took tea with me there, Master Jamsheed,” he suggested.

“I would be pleased to bring you such honor,” Jamsheed said.

Tea
, he thought.
Why do we Iranians always insist on tea?
All he needed was a coffee, or even better, a stiff drink. Alcohol might have been ungodly, but God surely knew that fighting a holy war was thirsty business.

The ambassador led him up to a magnificent oriental salon that the deposed shah of Iran’s cronies would have envied, with its gilded chairs and five hundred year old rugs. The irony of this opulence wasn’t lost on Jamsheed. The great Imam Khomeini had lived in a shack while plotting the Revolution in exile. Two generations later, his disciples lived like the decadent king Khomeini had overthrown.

A servant in a white smock and whiter gloves soon brought them steaming black tea. None of that Lipton piss that poor people drank throughout the Middle East nowadays. This was real, black Indian tea. As with everything in the room, it smelled like success.

Yazdi was eyeing him from across the little teak table that separated their low overstuffed chairs. He was looking for something; some hint as to Jamsheed’s purpose, some choice tidbit from the lips of the legendary soldier. Something to indicate what the ambassador already suspected: the Supreme Leader had finally noticed his abilities, and was about to give him responsibilities commensurate with his talent.

Jamsheed dashed that hope when he took the black glove off his left hand and raised his teacup.

By Iranian Muslim standards, it was a bit impolite for Jamsheed to pick up the cup with his left hand. The sight of the hand itself overshadowed that sticking point. Instead of fingernails, the tip of each cuticle bore a blue-black scar where something had ripped the nail away from the finger. Where the nails should have been there was smooth, pale pink skin that anyone who had seen burn victims could interpret: after the nails were ripped off, the gushing holes were cauterized with intense heat. In Jamsheed’s case, it had been the pinpoint blue fire of a blowtorch that had turned his skin a crumbling black for months before it went smooth and pink.

The eagerness had evaporated from Yazdi’s face like rainwater off a hot rock.
Now you know me, boy. Now you know what I am
, Jamsheed thought. He drank his tea quietly, very pleased with the genuine Indian vintage. He was even more pleased to watch the ambassador try to drink his own tea without looking at that mangled hand.

When they were finished, the same servant removed the tea tray and returned with a box of cigars. Jamsheed chose a good Cohiba vintage that no one in Iran could have bought for love or for money, and Yazdi followed suit by choosing the same kind. The servant cut both cigars and lit them with a gilded Zippo that, for all its shine, Jamsheed imagined had “made in China” stamped on its ass. The air thickened with blue smoke, and finally Yazdi got up the nerve to talk.

“So, Master Jamsheed: will your operation be headquartered here in Damascus? If so, we have several safe houses to choose from where you and your team can rest until the mission goes active,” Yazdi offered.

Jamsheed blew out a single fat smoke ring and replied, “The mission went active the second I got on that plane in Tehran. I don’t have a team with me. I don’t need much rest.”

Yazdi cocked an elegant, plucked eyebrow. “Then I’m sure you will be meeting up with one of the covert Revolutionary Guard cells already here in Syria. I would be happy to send out any communications that may facilitate your rendezvous.”

“Every Revolutionary Guardsman in this country is busy serving God somewhere else. Trust me; I see the daily radio communications that they send home to Iran. Half of them are bogged down in Aleppo by street fighting, the rest are chasing Sunni jihadists across the Iraqi border. I have different allies, and they already know I’m coming,” Jamsheed said flatly.

“Not Syrians. Assad’s government would have told me. You’re working with Hezbollah,” Yazdi said warily.

Jamsheed shrugged. “They have served us well in this war. The Guardian Council decided it was time to reward them. Quds Force agreed to carry out the assignment, so here I am. Don’t fret—I will be out of here quicker than a ghost, and what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

It was a lie, of course. What we don’t know is exactly what’s most likely to hurt us. Luckily for Jamsheed, Yazdi was a hard man to feel bad for. Plus, if the whole thing blew up in their faces, Jamsheed would have the luxury of being dead, while this young bastard would be very alive and very easy to pin the blame on.

“What do you need?” the ambassador asked.

“I need an all-terrain vehicle with good tires and a full tank of petrol, along with a discreet local soldier to drive it,” Jamsheed answered.

Jamsheed crushed out his cigar in an ivory ashtray, three-quarters unsmoked. The ambassador waved his servant over, and the white-gloved man produced a mobile phone that Yazdi used to make a hushed phone call. When it was over, Yazdi waved the man away with a flick of the wrist.

Yazdi said, “A truck and a driver will come around shortly. Armored and full of petrol, with military-grade tires and some small arms in the back, though God willing you won’t need them.”

Jamsheed nodded.

They sat in silence for a few minutes; long enough for Jamsheed to notice that Yazdi had the unnaturally smooth breathing of a disciplined man scared halfway to death. An antique grandfather clock in the corner of the room ticked off the hours. Then the servant produced a different mobile phone in mid-ring, and Yazdi informed Jamsheed that his truck was ready. Jamsheed thanked him, picked up his small duffle bag, and went on his way.

He left his black leather glove on the table.

Chapter Twenty

Jamsheed’s driver was a wiry young man with prematurely grey temples and the auspicious name Salman. Salman was the only Iranian follower of the Prophet Muhammad—praise be upon him—and he proved to be a military genius when leading the early Muslims in their desperate battles against the infidel Arabs who controlled holy Mecca in the seventh century. Jamsheed couldn’t tell whether Salman was a genius, but the man drove well and spoke decent Farsi, so he was good enough. He also had an air of quiet class that made Jamsheed wonder whether he had Iranian blood in him to match his name, but Jamsheed was too polite to ask about the racial background of a complete stranger.

Salman drove them north out of Damascus on the ruins of what had been a major highway connecting Damascus with Homs, a large city that the civil war was devouring down to its very foundations. As their old Soviet UAZ armored truck crushed over rocks and skirted potential minefields, Jamsheed wondered what it must have been like, in those early days of Islam. How often had Muhammad’s own followers traveled under starry sky with enemies on all sides, danger around every bend of the road?

In Damascus, ambassador Yazdi had said they were insane to take that route alone at night without an armed escort. Yazdi had no faith in their cause. He still thought they were fighting a war to preserve Syria’s weak-chinned, cowardly president Bashar al-Assad. Jamsheed knew better. The Syrian civil war was a sideshow; they were fighting to defend Islam itself against the Americans and the Israeli Zionists, who would stop at nothing to see all Muslims dead. To fight for Islam meant to fight for humanity, and Iran wasn’t about to let humanity down.

Assuming the Arabs didn’t botch everything. They had fought the Israelis for three generations with nothing to show for it. Whenever America strode with bloodied hands into Islam’s heartland, every Arab leader slithered under a rock. But that age was over. Iran had supplied Hezbollah with enough weaponry to keep Israel off-balance, Iran had trained the Iraqis in how to kill the American occupiers, and while Iran’s proxies kept the Great Satan and the Little Satan busy, the Supreme Leader’s servants would complete Iran’s nuclear program. The Arabs had failed to defeat the United States and Israel for seven decades. Iran would not.

Once their jeep reached Homs, they planned on turning south and rendezvousing with Hezbollah forces currently surrounding Qusair, a crucial supply town on the Syrian-Lebanese border. While Hezbollah crushed the rebels and retook the town, Jamsheed would follow regular Syrian troops to the hiding place of these so-called “Tuva” canisters and modify their couplings to fit the RPGs and Katyusha rockets in Hezbollah’s arsenal. Once Hezbollah secured Qusair, he would transfer the modified canisters to them. Then Hezbollah would truck them into Lebanon, where the weapons would disappear into hidden weapon caches that Israel would never find. It was a good plan, assuming Hezbollah did its part. They were Shiites, thankfully, and they believed in the holy authority of Iran’s ayatollahs. But they were still only Arabs.

Salman whistled to himself as they drove through the dark moonscape of central Syria. Jamsheed wished he were back in Tehran. Better yet, Paris. At least you could get a drink in Paris.

* * *

Homs was less than two hundred kilometers from Damascus, but it still took them more than four hours to reach the city’s outskirts. Some of that was due to bombed-out sections of road, but most was due to Salman. He frequently stopped the car and turned off the headlights, following an instinct Jamsheed couldn’t place. Then they sat quietly, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for twenty minutes, until Salman felt confident enough to continue. Even then, it felt like they drove half the way with their headlights off, seeing only by starlight. Jamsheed liked Salman. The young man knew his business, and did his duty with quiet precision. Jamsheed decided that he
must
have had Iranian ancestors.

As dawn broke, Jamsheed finally saw the high desert of central Syria. It was a land of yellow dust, punctuated by pockets of brownish green where farmers had diverted underground springs to water crops. Syria was ancient—older even than Iran--and Jamsheed couldn’t imagine how old most of those farms must have been, or how many generations of a single family had eaten lunch under the shadow of those willow trees. In the middle of one burnt-out field he saw a red calf, little more than skin and bone, standing over the corpse of a cow as crows ate its dead eyes.

Even at daybreak, Homs made its own darkness. The yellowish walls of its ruined buildings matched the yellow land around it, but omnipresent plumes of black smoke from inside the city brought out the contrast in the buildings’ facades, until they looked practically banana-yellow to Jamsheed. The black plumes combined into a single cloud that hung low over the city like a pocket of midnight. They were still miles from the city itself, but Jamsheed noticed little flecks of grey, like snowflakes, hitting along their windshield. It was ash, or whatever other shit flew about when a city of six hundred thousand people slowly committed suicide.

A few muffled
pop-pops
resounded in the distance, and Jamsheed watched whole buildings crumble silently to the ground, hit by artillery positions he couldn’t see. The Syrian army was winning, at the meager cost of their country’s third-largest city.

“Is there always that much smoke?” Jamsheed asked.

Salman narrowed his eyes, casting an appraising eye over the scene. “From the small sources, yes. Both sides use burning tires as road blocks, and the traitors use them to mask air targets, so government planes can’t hit them,” he smiled, “Not that it works.” Salman pointed into the heart of the city and said, “That big plume in the middle, though—that’s unusual. Probably a shell hit a weapons depot. You should see the fireball that makes.”

“I have. Just not in Syria.” Jamsheed muttered. “Let’s drive. I want to reach Qusair with plenty of time left to work.”

Salman drove.

* * *

Salman monitored military-band radio as they trundled along a crumbling track of bleached gravel, and the chatter indicated that they needed to stop at a village west of Qusair itself. That’s where Hezbollah was at the moment.

The village in question was a pretty little thing set amongst apple orchards and made of low, whitewashed clay houses that defied the yellow grit blowing all around them.

They stopped on the edge of an orchard and got out. The second Jamsheed’s feet hit solid earth, the illusion of peacefulness created by those little white bungalows disappeared. When gunmen fought in an urban area it created a strange collection of sounds. Gunshots would seem to ring out in every direction, as sound waves bounced off of walls and glass windowpanes, until the shooting couldn’t be localized at all. Usually, there was also a ghostly wailing made by the human fighters, either coordinating with one another or shrieking with the shocked banshee-cries of young men who had suddenly been punctured by an unseen piece of hot lead. He heard both in the city, but only sporadically; that meant things had entered the mopping-up phase, when the exuberant winner rooted out remaining enemy fighters like a gardener plowing molehills. And he had no doubt who had won.

He and Salman each grabbed a Kalashnikov then entered the village through a narrow alley worming its way between two of the white houses. Even though these outer houses formed the equivalent of a defensive wall around the village, Jamsheed noticed few bullet holes and just as little scorching from explosive rounds; that meant the attack had come suddenly, and rapidly entered close quarters combat. Only a supremely confident or deeply crazy soldier would charge an enemy position like that. Since a good Hezbollah fighter had Iranian paramilitary training and believed God fought alongside him, Jamsheed figured both descriptions applied.

As they snuck further into the maze of alleys between the white houses, the warzone told Jamsheed a more unusual story. There were still only a few bullet holes in the little houses, normally at an angle indicating they were shot by someone running from the outside inward. Then he noticed the red drag marks leading away from some of those spatters, all pointed inward, toward the village center. As they walked, Jamsheed counted a total of eleven separate drag-marks that converged on their alley, leaving behind enough blood that now the men who had dragged the bodies were making bloody red footprints in the dirt. The draggers wore standard issue Chinese paratrooper combat boots, available to every army in the Third World. That made sense, but the dragging did not. Iranian trainers like Jamsheed had ensured that Hezbollah were professional—not the kind of idiots who would drag corpses through the streets after a battle.

He found his answer in the town square, which was a cute little space of white cobblestone where the dirt paths converged like spokes at the hub of a wheel. There was a dusty fountain with weeds growing from it, and an old colonial era clock tower that must have been the darling of some French architect, back when Europeans ruled Syria. Next to the clock tower there was a high flagpole, waving the Syrian flag with its black, red, and white stripes offset by two green stars. But the flag that flew above the Syrian flag told him the real story: brilliant golden yellow, with green Arabic letters proclaiming “Party of God,” or “Hezbollah,” in Arabic. The ‘L’ in Hezbollah stretched upward into a stylized fist that held an AK-47. It might have been a Syrian city, but Hezbollah wanted everyone—including the Syrian army—to see that it had been a Hezbollah victory.

At the base of the clock tower the blood trails converged on a pile of corpses. Most were elderly, the rest were women and children; there might have also been men under that pile, but they were hidden under a giant canvas banner depicting Syria’s beleaguered president. As with every image of Bashar al-Assad, this banner tried to show him at a slight angle but couldn’t hide the truth: he was a gangly, pale man with beady eyes, a thin mustache, and a head too small for his giraffe-like neck. He hadn’t wanted to be president, and it showed in every photo ever taken of him. Even amongst paid crowds of well-wishers, he seemed to be on constant lookout for some way back to his previous life as a doctor in Switzerland, before his fearsome father, Hafez al-Assad, died and left the family needing a new dictator for the family business. Jamsheed had met him once, when he traveled as a secret member of Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s entourage to Syria in the early 2000s. Assad had sweaty palms, and that was about all Jamsheed remembered about him.

Syrian soldiers loitered around the corpse pile, posing next to their president’s massive pale head, attempting to make sure that both Bashar and an adequate number of corpses appeared in each shot. They laughed and joked like children in drab fatigues who had stolen their parents' guns.

He curled his lip and walked away, towards a house at the other end of the square where he saw men in black fatigues milling about. These men weren’t joking, because Hezbollah wasn’t in Syria to play a game. Fighters were checking a portable communications relay and field stripping their weapons, ensuring that not a speck of dust had entered their firing mechanisms while they took the city. The Syrians had been too busy playing around to notice a strange man in unmarked fatigues walk into the middle of the square with an assault rifle, but not Hezbollah. The second he and Salman approached, men pulled their sidearms.

Jamsheed slung the gun around his back and walked forward with his hands up. A Hezbollah fighter stood up to meet him, holding up what looked like an off-brand nine-millimeter pistol trained on Jamsheed’s center of mass.

“Come and die, stranger!” the man yelled. He was young, with a prominent gold tooth.

Salman spoke for them, “This is Colonel Jamsheed Mashhadi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Your commander is expecting him. Lower your weapons, or there will be consequences.”

The man with the gold tooth lowered his pistol a little, but not much. The men behind him looked equally unconvinced.

Jamsheed kept walking forward, speaking Arabic in his soothing musician’s voice, “Boy, listen to me; I’m not Syrian, I’m not Lebanese, I’m not Israeli. That’s a Farsi accent you’re hearing, which makes me Iranian, and if your superiors find out you’ve drawn a weapon on an Iranian military advisor, you’ll be lucky if they only put a bullet in your head. Now where is your commander?”

“Wading through a sea of idiots, wishing he were back in Beirut drinking good coffee,” a hard voice barked behind him in surprisingly good Farsi peppered by an Arabic speaker’s guttural accent.

Jamsheed turned to see a man half his size and made of nothing but sinew stalk forward from the throng of gloating Syrians. He had big wolf eyes and a perfectly kept short silver beard, like a man perpetually covered in ice.

The wolf-eyed man reached Jamsheed and shook his hand crisply, saying, “But this boy isn’t one of those idiots, Persian. You can’t fault a man for being well-trained, or for distrusting strangers in a warzone.” The man’s solid Farsi told Jamsheed that he was dealing with someone trained in Iran, and that meant a senior Hezbollah commander.

“Fair enough, Commander. You heard my name and rank. Please return the favor,” Jamsheed said.

“Jafar Haddad, Battalion Commander, Syrian Brigade.”

Jamsheed grunted at Haddad’s title. Hezbollah never had a “Syrian Brigade” before; that meant they’d been sucked even deeper into Assad’s civil war than he’d thought. He replied, “Very good. I was told you’d meet me at Qusair. Why did you deviate from the plan?”

Haddad jerked a thumb towards the Syrians and said, “Because of those animals. Rebels launched a successful night attack on one of the Syrian positions at Qusair, because Assad’s cannon fodder didn’t set up the defensive perimeter I recommended. Three Syrian officers died and the rest of their commanders went insane with vengeance. I reminded them that wartime enemies
do
have the right to strike back from time to time, but they didn’t appreciate the humor. So they threatened to abandon the Qusair siege and send all their men on punitive raids against these poor little villages,” he waved a hand resignedly across the sorry spectacle around them, “And the Qusair border crossing is too important for Hezbollah to abandon, so I told the Syrians that Hezbollah would deal with the rebel villages if they kept up the siege of Qusair itself. They sent along those dogs over there to ensure that the army can take credit for any Hezbollah victories.”