Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (17 page)

The scarred man sat quietly, examining the grit beneath his nails, as Ambrose collected himself enough to get out something good. He had to deal with the pain in his chest. He could never confront Mashhadi with a rib cage that felt liable to shatter with a single hit. He finally said, “Turn off the generator and save yourself some diesel. It’s time to take these clamps off me and get my little red bag out; otherwise, no deal.”

“Deal. Still you talk about this deal,” his torturer mused. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking nonplussed. Then he nodded, and a pair of disembodied hands emerged from the shadows to remove the clamps.

“Good. Now my little red bag,” Ambrose indicated. The clamps had been holding in the pain, somehow. Now Ambrose felt four screaming lines of second-degree burn where the clamps had been. He started crying again, but flared his nostrils and refused to let out as much as a whimper.

His bag appeared out of the same shadows that lurked beyond the reach of the dingy hanging light. The scarred man held it up so Ambrose could see it, then dropped the thing on the ground in front of Ambrose’s feet. It landed with a puff of dust.

Ambrose frowned. “My hands are tied.”

“Yes.”

“So I need you to open the bag for me and get something out. Or untie me and I’ll do it myself.” Ambrose cleared his throat and swallowed the mixture of blood and phlegm that had been dripping down the back of his esophagus.

The other man leaned forward with his arms on his knees, clicking his tongue a bit as he took in the American’s burns and bruises. “Whether I look in that bag or not, you’re lying to yourself if you think there is a deal. You have nothing we want. Nothing,” the torturer promised.

Ambrose cleared his throat again, tasting the tang of blood between his front teeth. “Your commander will disagree. When is he coming?”

“The commander is busy—you’re not the only rat we’ve trapped today.”

“Is the other rat also a CIA agent? Tell your commander to stop fucking around with whoever he’s caught and get in here—I’m going to liven up his whole year.”

The torturer snapped, “The other man doesn’t concern you: he’s an infidel and he’ll die, just as you will. He just volunteered to go first.”

Ambrose pictured some poor South Korean doctor captured from a refugee camp, nipples tied to his improvised torture-generator. Then the image drifted away, replaced by a photo of a small woman with glasses and sharp, dark features.
Don’t hold back—just let the pain wash over you,
she’d said.

“Fine,” Ambrose replied, “You and I can deal then. You
are
allowed to do that, right? Now pick up my goddamned bag.”

The scarred man growled and picked it up, holding it by the strap with a single thumb. “And now?

“And now you open it, and tell me what’s in there.”

“Everything that you left in it will be in there. Unlike you, we are not thieves,” the man said while unzipping the bag.

“Right. Do you see a piece of grey metal in there?” Ambrose tried to keep the eagerness out of his eyes.

The torturer looked into the bag, humming, “Metal. Metal. Yes, there’s something metal in here. A grey brick. Some kind of recording device? What is it?”

“Not for recording. It’s a small transceiver. It broadcasts out a message at regular intervals on an American military frequency. Want to know what that message is?” Ambrose asked.

“It doesn’t look like any kind of communications equipment—more like a cassette player.” The man turned Ambrose’s mp3 player over in his hand, looking for any clues that would reveal its function. There were few: Ambrose had the earbud headphones hidden in his front jeans pocket, which the Qaida fighters hadn’t searched. He’d also taken out the batteries: it wasn’t about to light up any time soon. He asked, “What is this little screen, here? How do I turn it on?”

Ambrose shook his head furiously. “Like I said, it
is
on. And you don’t want to touch that little screen, or the buttons next to it. That’ll bring up a manual override on the GPS reader’s coordinates, and then you risk disintegrating both of us.”

“What?” The torturer held the mp3 player back a bit further from his face, like it was an old grenade that he no longer assumed was a dud.

Ambrose raised his eyebrow like a condescending science teacher and repeated, “I said, don’t play with the buttons near the glass screen, because I don’t want to be disintegrated any more than you do.”

It was tough work, keeping the right combination of tension and confidence on his face as Ambrose made his pitch. The entire plan would fall apart if his scarred captor recognized the thing as an mp3 player, or if the man just didn’t care about dying. It was a hell of a gamble, but it was the game Ambrose had agreed to play when he hopped on that motorbike.

It all hinged on his pet theory that explained men who fought for groups like al-Qaida, or Jabhat al-Nusra, or whomever the hell his captor belong to: they weren’t dangerous because of their training or battlefield cunning. Those were the sorts of things that made disciplined armed groups like Hezbollah and the Taliban so formidable. What made al-Qaida, a group of international misfits worshipping a dead Saudi rich kid, dangerous was the exact opposite thing: they were backwards and ignorant to the point of being lethal. It’s easy to kill, and almost as easy to die, if you don’t know a goddamned thing about the world outside your village, and your entire perspective on the world depends on what a self-proclaimed holy man screams into your ears.

The question was whether Ambrose had gambled on them being
too
ignorant—after all, his mp3 player was a knockoff Indian piece of shit worth fifty dollars, tops. If his captor had ever been to the Indian Subcontinent, he’d probably seen one. But then again, he hadn’t immediately recognized it, and Ambrose wasn’t dead yet.

“Disintegrated?” The scarred man asked as he took a whiff of the mp3 player, maybe searching for the scent of explosives. “That was your plan, infiltrating our camp with this bomb? Perhaps you’ve heard that we’re good with bombs. This thing will be dismantled in five minutes,” he tapped an edge of the mp3 player across his chin, “Dismantling you will take longer.”

Ambrose faked a sigh. “I told you, it isn’t a bomb, it’s a transceiver programmed to broadcast GPS updates at regular intervals.” He cocked his bloodshot blue eyes upward, toward the sky beyond the roof of the hut. “Guess what picks up that broadcast.”

The scarred man ground his teeth together, thinking, before saying, “Some satellite, maybe a GPS relay. The type you use in Afghanistan.”

Ambrose coughed on some blood then answered, “Close.” He smiled, revealing teeth stained pink. “What else do we use in Afghanistan?”

The man was too leathery to turn pale, but Ambrose still thought he saw the man’s insides twisting into knots. The scarred man whispered his response, “A drone. You’ve got a Predator drone following you.”

Ambrose shook his head, never breaking eye contact. “Not a Predator; I brought a Reaper. Twice as long, five times the firepower, capable of circling in a fixed position for forty-eight hours before refueling. It’s only been following me for eight, plus however long I’ve been knocked out.” Ambrose had never served in Afghanistan or interacted with the Air Force’s drone corps, so calling his bluff “bullshit” would have been an insult to bullshit.

His captor squeezed the mp3 player hard, seeming not to notice. “You’ve been here two hours, maybe less. We had you in a goat pen where prisoners go, then we brought you in here for questioning.”

“Under two hours? That’s good, very good. Any longer and I don’t think we’d both be sitting here,” he leaned forward as far as his bound hands would let him, and whispered conspiratorially, “A Reaper also carries a full sensor suite—audio, visual, radio, hypersonic, everything,” Ambrose lied, “And that transponder in your hand is part of it. The drone operator fixes on that signal and uses it to track the field operative who carries the transponder. If the signal goes dark, drone pilots assume the field operative and his gear are destroyed. Then the drone unleashes its full payload on the area. But the Reaper also has a camera, and can do the whole thing low-tech. What do you suppose happens if it loses visual contact with the field operative for too long?”

“The drone pilot assumes the agent is dead—“

“And unleashes its full payload on the area.” Ambrose looked around the dark room, hearing hidden men shuffle as his eyes passed over them. “How big is this camp—does it extend past the little village we saw, or is that all of you? A Reaper carries twenty Hellfire rockets, each with a standard blast radius of twenty meters. Multiply that by twenty, and how many men do you think you’ll have left? Enough that you can write off the rest as acceptable losses in the name of global jihad?” He’d heard that Reapers carry hellfire missiles. Maybe. Didn’t they?

The man’s face said that he couldn’t write that many men off. He said, “I…will need to discuss this with my commander.” He stood, clutching the mp3 player like it was the last dying flashlight in a cave six miles deep.

Ambrose snarled, “
No
. You told me in the hills that I could deal with you. You said that your commander is busy right now. Trust me, friend,
you’re
the one who’s busy now, and about to get a lot busier once that Reaper comes calling.”

The scarred man stopped in the door and spoke through gritted teeth, “What do you want, American?”

All of the intensity drained out of Ambrose’s face. Now he was made of ice, with a voice to match. “You have another prisoner here. A woman.”

“We have two prisoners here—there’s a man also. My commander is with him right now.”

Ambrose’s voice went low as he said, “I’m not here for the man. I’m here for the woman doctor. I heard her in the goat pen when I was semiconscious after your beating. Can she move?”

The jihadist frowned and nodded his head, saying, “Yes. We interrogated her when she was captured—a stupid little Frenchwoman who wants to play doctor in the middle of a warzone,” he dropped the mp3 player back in Ambrose’s red bag, “She’s nothing to us. We were going to film a ransom video, then swap her back to her government unharmed in return for some submachine gun ammunition.”

Ambrose grunted. “You’ll have to go without the ammo, and say goodbye to a truck.”

His captor clicked his tongue dismissively and said, “That I can’t do. We need all of our trucks to shuttle fighters.”

Ambrose said, “Unless you give me a truck, the Reaper will reduce all of your fighters to something you can shuttle in a wheelbarrow. Give me the woman, give me a truck, and you’ll never hear from either of us again. You can even say that you bargained me down, if you like. Maybe my first plan was to kill you all, and you got me to settle for taking the woman and a truck. You won’t look very brave, but I’m sure a couple of attacks on defenseless villages will rehabilitate your reputation.” He cleared his throat again. Less blood this time. “Now untie me. Let’s not keep my Reaper waiting.”

They untied his hands, and Ambrose flexed them into fists to jump-start his circulation. It also made the cuts on his wrists starts trickling again, where the wire had bitten deep. It wasn’t too bad, though, considering the day he’d been having. The cuts would stop leaking sooner or later, and one nice thing about deserts was the reduced risk of wounds getting infected.

He stood up, wiped his hands on his jeans, then he picked up the red bag and took out a .44 pistol he’d gotten from Zubair. He put it in his belt, then rifled through the bag until he found one of the two T-shirts he’d brought with him. He sloughed off his filthy red button-up shirt and pulled on a blue T-shirt with a faded Thai beer logo—the one he’d previously worn soaking wet on his head as poor man’s air conditioning. He paused a second and took the photos of Celestine and Jamsheed out of the red shirt’s front pocket, folding them to fit within the front of his moleskin notebook. Bag in one hand, pistol in the other, he nodded for the door, and both of them walked out into the town square. Above them, a Reaper drone would have reflected the last pink slivers of evening sunlight.

The scarred man walked quickly across the square, which was dominated by a small well and that tall flagpole flying the black banner of jihad. Men sat in the shade of houses cleaning their guns and reading well-worn copies of the Quran. As Ambrose had noted in several of his reports from Indonesia, jihadists were first and foremost pretty boring people. He walked several steps behind the scarred man to ensure that he still looked like a captive. No one noticed one way or the other; they must have assumed he’d been broken, and was gladly slinking back to his goat pen. Ambrose choked down a whimper as he drew a breath and acknowledged that, medically speaking, they
had
broken him.

Instead, he said to the scarred man, “This is the best al-Qaida can manage in Syria? Fuck, you people have fallen on hard times.”

The scarred man muttered, “We are not al-Qaida. We fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This is only a forward base for western Syria. You would not laugh if you saw our strongholds on the Iraqi-Syrian border. That is where our caliphate will begin. Even Mecca was humble in the beginning. Then it toppled Rome and Persia.”

“Speaking on behalf of the Romans, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The goat pen was closer than he’d thought, and sat sealed with a verdigris-covered padlock that made him feel guilty for not trying to kick it into oblivion. After the scarred man produced a key, it opened with a
clack
like two shine bones struck together. In front of him was a small woman with short oily hair that looked like a headdress of crow feathers. She squinted up at him through cracked glasses whose frames were miraculously holding together. Purple and yellow bruises surrounded her mouth area, but otherwise she seemed healthy enough to move. She hopped backward like a cat when Ambrose walked into the pen.

He extended a hand out to her and spoke in English, “My name is Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you. Please don’t make me speak French.”