Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ambrose woke up in the sweltering heat of a closed train car. It had stopped several times during the night, but he barely opened an eye. Each time, some machinery groaned and the train shook a little as workers unloaded more of Zubair’s shadowy goods at God-Knows-Where Depot, Syria. Ambrose was the shadiest cargo of all, and like everything else on the train, they would only offload him at the proper time and place.

He reckoned he really woke up around dawn, or near enough. It was hot, but he could deal with heat. Jakarta averaged ninety degrees with ninety percent humidity; at least Syria had dry heat in the autumn. The train car was empty except for him, a jug of water, and a beaten old Honda motorbike. That meant plenty of room to practice, which was good: he hand’t thrown a punch in almost forty-eight hours, and his hands were getting itchy.

Wayne Shenzo had misrepresented plenty of things about Ambrose to get the man’s blood boiling, but Wayne hadn’t been lying when he talked about how much time Ambrose spent on martial arts. There were seventeen thousand islands in Indonesia, his adopted home, and almost every habitable one had created its own style of martial art, collectively called
Penjak Silat
. That was more styles than Japan and China combined. And unlike the lands of Kung Fu and Karate, Silat was still
used
. As late as 2002, mobs of Muslim and Christian Indonesians squared off on tiny islands armed with nothing but machetes and their bodies, fighting medieval-style gorefests that would give Jet Li and his fancy back flips nightmares. Ambrose specialized in a style that favored lightning-quick forearm and elbow movements. He was weak on kicks but strong on knees. As any true brawler could tell you, kicks were just a good way to get your leg ripped off. No, Ambrose didn’t do anything flashy. He couldn’t do backflips and spin kicks. Instead, he sweated and bruised and bled until every muscle in his body instinctively threw him
forward
like a cobra’s head, bypassing an enemy’s defenses and entering the kill zone: eyes, throat, diaphragm, groin. If an opponent gave up any one of those targets, he lost. If Ambrose hit two of them, the opponent died.

He moved in slow motion, feeling every muscle in his body contract and expand in alignment with one another. His master had beaten that smoothness into him. Train slowly until you perfect every movement, and then explode on the fool that challenges you. As the morning sun heated the train car around him, Ambrose ruptured scrotums, punctured lungs, and ripped eyes out of their sockets in slow motion. He barely felt his smoker’s lungs slow him down, or the implacable, broiling heat of the Syrian sun radiating through his train car.

He only stopped when the train did, because the door to his compartment finally slid open. The air outside his car was barely any cooler, which told him it was late morning or even early afternoon. His stomach quivered a little, like he’d drunk an entire two-liter of soda. There was no easy way to go into battle; the mind could fool itself into thinking otherwise, but the body was smarter. So his stomach bubbled and sweat poured down his temples in salty rivers as the train handlers fastened open the door to his container.

They didn’t speak to him or even really look at him. They only gestured and mumbled like he was garbage they’d just as soon be rid of. No, not garbage: radioactive waste. They wanted him gone because he was lethally toxic, and they were afraid to carry him any longer than absolutely necessary. He grunted in reply, then put on the same red button-up silk shirt he’d been wearing for two days. Ambrose wasn’t a dirty guy, but it was the brightest piece of clothing he owned, and his unfolding plan would require attracting a lot of attention to himself.

He made one of the porters help him unload the motorbike. Then he reached into his red bag and pulled out the other two things that ten thousand Euros had bought him: a detailed survey map of western Syria covered in Zubair’s annotations, along with a pair of dingy sunglasses. His two new friends closed the door again, leaving Ambrose alone on the tracks with the map in his hand. He’d pored over it enough times the previous evening to give him a sense of what he needed to look for, but he wanted once last look, since any cartographic fuck-up at that point would kill him. He needed to find three hills set in the middle of even more hills, but these three were taller and sharper, with bare white rock on top as opposed to scrub the whole way up. They were there, he knew—just a ways north of him over the scrubland. He’d find them, and he’d find the Frenchwoman, and he’d find Jamsheed Mashhadi.

The train’s rusted bulk rolled away with a slow, sick roar. He took his water bottle and poured some of it over one of his T-shirts, then wrapped it around his head like a soggy turban. Its coolness heightened his awareness of how much the Syrian sun tingled over the rest of his body, drying him out like a slug doused with salt. The desert killed people who tried what he was about to do, Ambrose thought. They wander into the wastes feeling like Laurence of Arabia, but instead of gruff, friendly Bedouins they find…nothing. No food, no water, no life; just the sun, which was killing him even as he stood there.

He revved the motorbike and took off across the brush.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jamsheed awoke in a dark room with his face in the dirt. Dried blood caked some of the grit to his face, and he felt it slough off his forehead as he winced. That giant leonine bastard “the Emir” almost caved in Jamsheed’s face with a single punch, but that wasn’t all that hurt. His ribs quivered like splintered bamboo when he tried to breath, which told him he’d taken a beating even after the initial punch that knocked him out. He doubted the Emir had done the kicking, though, since Jamsheed wasn’t dead.

He had naturally large pupils that compensated for most gloom with only a sliver of light. This room gave him more than enough to work with, thanks to a warped wooden door that leaked in sunlight through a dozen cracked planks. He was in some kind of roofed paddock—a goat pen, maybe. The walls were clay and plaster mortar with a base of large stones, windowless. There was musty old straw in the corners of the barn: Jamsheed guessed he’d found his bed, if he lived through the night.

The animal odors barely masked two other smells: shit and blood. Now that he knew what to look for, Jamsheed saw several dark stains across the dirt and straw. Something shone faintly in the dirt near him: a forty-five-caliber bullet casing. He might’ve noticed a .45 in the Emir’s utility belt.

A woman’s voice cut through the darkness, speaking strange Arabic, “How’s your face?”

Jamsheed was furious at himself for not having noticed her—she was right there, in the corner, where he should have immediately honed in on her breathing. The beating had rattled him more than he thought. “My face is…broken, I think,” he replied in good Iraqi Arabic.

“Good. I’m not a field medic, but I’ve been on enough humanitarian missions to do a basic check-up on someone when they’re injured. Your breathing is awful right now, and I had to roll you onto your side so you wouldn’t risk drowning on your own blood.”

As she spoke, Jamsheed wondered what type of agency would send a little woman like this anywhere that needed humanitarian assistance. She had a sharp face and big attentive eyes warped by cracked owlish glasses. There were creases around her mouth when she spoke, and Jamsheed couldn’t help imagining what a wicked smile the woman must have had, not that he imagined either of them smiling any time soon.

Jamsheed said, “Thank you. If some bastard is going to kill me, I’d prefer he at least waste a few bullets on it.”

Silence for a moment, then she added, “I don’t think the Emir will have a problem with that.”

He sat up uncomfortably, seeing whether his body would let him crouch on the balls of his feet; that would instantly tell him whether the beating had affected his coordination or actually cracked any ribs. The going was slow, but he once he reached the position, his muscles locked precisely as he’d intended. “I’m sorry, but I can’t place your Arabic. It’s good, but it will be a splinter in my eye until you tell me where you’re from,” Jamsheed pried.

“Sorry—people tell me I speak almost pure Algerian dialect, and that makes it hard for most Arabic speakers to understand,” she slid into something resembling Syrian Arabic, “I wasn’t here long before the uprising started, so you’ll have to forgive me for not making time for language classes.”

Jamsheed narrowed his eyes a bit: not only hadn’t she answered his question, but she hadn’t asked him where he was from in response. That would have been natural, in their situation. “Ah. Good Algerian Arabic and a penchant for humanitarian missions: you’re North African French, aren’t you?”

She nodded in the dim light. “On both sides; my family fled to Marseille in 1959, at the peak of the Algerian war for independence,” she flashed a bit of crooked smile, exactly as he’d imagined, “Three generations of Algerians attempting to become French, then my poor parents went and had a lone French daughter who could pass as Algerian,” she shrugged, “The World Health Organization didn’t seem to mind, so here I am, a brown little Frenchwoman who gets sent around the Mediterranean trying to give Arabs indoor plumbing.”

“There are worse reasons to travel.” There was something off about her, and he couldn’t place it.

Her smile was like a crescent moon biting through the night sky. “You always hope so. My name is Marie. Who are you?”

Maybe she wasn’t so cunning. “My name is Ahmet. I’m a military observer from the Turkish foreign ministry, here to monitor refugee camps along the Turkish-Syrian border.” He frowned, feeling the blood caked across his face. “At least I was, until these maniacs got me.” He hoped for her sake that she didn’t respond in Turkish and expect to get an answer from him.

Marie sighed, obviously sore herself, “Similar with me. Even during the war, Assad’s government allowed my team to work on a water purification system outside of Homs. Assad used to be a doctor, so he was an easy sell when my team pitched an anti-amoeba program for western Syria. Hell, he even gave us a military detail to protect our work.”

Jamsheed said, “But that made you a military target, not to mention—“

“An obvious foreign spy ring out to kill Muslims, yes.” She pushed back her bird’s nest of a haircut. “So a whole team of good people died because I won a fucking U.N. grant to help Syrians get potable water. My chief engineer, Michael, he was an American—“

“Bad luck,” Jamsheed said flatly.

The interjection threw her off balance, but she recovered, “Maybe. But he was a genius, I mean, a
real
genius with irrigation systems in arid climates. He turned down a position with the Harvard School of Public Health to stay out in the dirt with me, and that,” she pointed at the dark stains near Jamsheed, next to the bullet casing, “That’s what he is now.” She rubbed her eyes beneath the glasses. “He’s also why the pen smells like shit. They turned him into a piece of meat that leaked shit.”

Jamsheed had to pretend he cared what happened to an American, reminding himself that this silly little Frenchwoman didn’t know she’d almost certainly been working with a CIA mole. “No. No matter the war, that’s not how civilians should die.”

Jamsheed remembered an alpine field that smelled like almonds, a pretty little valley in Iraqi Kurdistan where an entire village of civilians lay dead from sarin, all for the crime of defying Saddam Hussein. Jamsheed knew who had sold Saddam those weapons: his name was Donald Rumsfeld, and he had gone to Baghdad on a mission for a man named Reagan.

She looked at him with those big owl eyes. “But you’re here alone. Did they already kill the rest of your team?”

Jamsheed waved with his left hand, forgetting about his scars, then hoping she wouldn’t notice with her weak eyes in the dim light. He answered, “God, that’s the worst part: I had fifty men with me in my convoy, including armored trucks, and these bastards with their black flag attacked the whole convoy with RPGs and a couple of trained snipers. Fifty men, gone in minutes,” he snapped his fingers, “I grabbed a rifle and hid beneath a truck. Six of them walked up and practically called me by name. Their leader—the animal with the grey beard—said ‘get up Turk, this road isn’t safe for spies.’”

Marie snorted. “Right. Assad has been killing journalists for years, so it’s an easy leap for rebels to start killing
all
of the foreigners.”

“Well,” he grimaced “I don’t think these particular rebels took Osama’s death well.”

She stood up quickly enough to surprise Jamsheed—another indicator that those giant glasses only told part of the story. She had strong legs with good fast-twitch muscles. That kind of movement developed through combat training, not sitting behind a computer at the World Health Organization.

Marie leaned against the door and orange sunlight illuminated half her face through the cracks. He’d focused on her smile and overlooked how battered she was. The big glasses were cracked to the point that she was probably useless past ten meters, and the eyes behind her glasses were swollen and bruised where the jihadist bastards had smacked her around. Her brown eyes smoldered as she looked through the crack. “Yeah, that’s the black jihadist flag alright,” she squinted one eye appraisingly, “Shit calligraphy, though. Someone has been learning their Quran through Muslim televangelists.”

Jamsheed cocked his head. “Televangelists?”

Marie looked back at him for an instant, then darted her eyes back to the doorframe. “Sorry. As a foreign ministry agent, I assumed you’d understand an American idiom. Doesn’t matter—everyone agrees I’m not funny,” she conceded.

She cursed low in French, wishing for a gun and parts of a male body to share it with. Jamsheed’s concert tours put him in France almost yearly, and he spoke French better than either English or Arabic. He feigned ignorance, wondering how many other WHO employees wanted to rape men with a pistol.

He replied, “Apologies. I claim to speak English, but it’s mainly British, so any kind of Americanism sneaks right by me.”

Marie’s eyes narrowed, glittering in what looked like setting sunlight. “No matter. Time for pain,” she turned back to him, “I…I imagine you’re the one they’re taking, since you’re new. Sorry.”

Jamsheed pulled himself to his feet, hearing the crunch of boots over concrete wreckage outside the barn. He popped his neck slowly on both sides. “I know how to talk with jihadists—I’ll just follow your example.”

The boots stopped at the door, followed by the ponderous groan of a big padlock being sprung.

She backed away into a corner and asked, “My example?”

Jamsheed smiled. “I’ll try not to be funny.”