Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ambrose was driving fast; more than fast enough to blow out a tire or break an axel on the Russian Land Rover knockoff he could barely control. The rocky terrain beneath the truck used to be a road, maybe, but he doubted it was ever much of one. Now there were potholes half his height and rocks that stuck up like serrated shark teeth. Still, they were running out of daylight, and he doubted that the scarred man could sell his commander on the Reaper drone idea forever. Then al-Qaida would come for them, and they knew this stretch of desert a hell of a lot better than Ambrose did.

Those realties created two conflicting imperatives that pushed him onward: he couldn’t break down there, but he also feared traveling in the open at night, with nothing but a lonely pair of headlights and taillights shining out like a beacon in the desert night for anyone to see. Traveling with the lights off wasn’t much of an option either, because the road was too bad and only a sliver of moon shone on the horizon behind them.

Celestine, the French-Israeli spy who looked like a recently mugged grad student, wasn’t much help. Ambrose had put so much thought into his rescue bluff and immediate exit strategy that he hadn’t bothered to work on the endgame. He knew they had to find Mashhadi, and he’d trusted Wayne enough to believe that the Frenchwoman’s intel on the chemical weapons would lead them to him, but that plan still left a lot of holes for stuff to leak through, and talking to her wasn’t reassuring.

Ambrose spoke loudly over the rev of the engine and the milling sound of military tires crushing rock, “Let me get this straight: you never actually saw the chemical weapons convoy. You only heard about it.”

She yelled back, “Yes. We knew there was a convoy of Syrian army moving the weapons, that it was heading towards Hezbollah’s strongholds, and that they were stopping somewhere short of the Lebanese border to do some field maintenance on the delivery mechanisms.” She reached into his bag and pulled out one of his fast-dwindling Indonesian clove cigarettes, lighting it with the shiny Zippo Ambrose had taken from Zubair’s neutered goon. “I never heard of ‘Tuva or ‘Sorcerer’ before you told me.”

He breathed in hard, then asked, “So you have no goddamned idea where we’re going?”

She tried to blow smoke in his face, but it shot past her and out the open top of the truck. “Lebanon is west, so we keep going west. We’ll learn more as we move,” Celestine predicted.

“That was your whole goddamned plan? ‘Going west’ and hoping that you crashed into Hezbollah at a truck stop with mechanics crawling over their missiles? Does the Mossad use sub-sub-contractors these days?” Ambrose yelled.

Celestine took a long drag off her cigarette, wearing an expression like she regretted leaving al-Qaida’s stockade.

He swerved to miss an elephantine monster of a rock, almost putting the car on two wheels, then turned back to Celestine, who still wouldn’t look at him. “Christ, I’m sorry, alright? I’ve had a lousy few hours, my superiors sent me into this mission with almost no mission parameters, and I’ve got no underwear. I just…they made it seem like you’d know more about our next move,” he said.

“Michael would have known. We met up outside Aleppo, and were going to deal with the arms shipment together.”

He replied, “Michael—was he more of the classic Mossad kick-ass-and-kill-Arabs half of your operation?” He saw Celestine’s face go blank again, and he groaned, “Look, again, I’m sorry if this is pissing you off. But I’m not very diplomatic at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times. We’ve got a very well-armed and unfriendly militia behind us, and my mission—our mission, now—is basically to go lion hunting with a slingshot. I need you to get on my page and think of something more concrete.”

She furrowed her brow, accentuating a deep rage line above her nose. “You said you used to be a diplomat.”

He cracked a smile. “I never said I was a good one. Now seriously: maybe Michael’s dead, but he must have told you the score, even if you didn’t notice it at the time. You were smart enough to get recruited by Mossad as a weapons engineer, so don’t go selling your intuition short on me. Not now. Where were you planning to interdict those weapons?”

She screwed up her forehead, bright eyes moving behind her cracked glasses. She looked out into the dark and said, “I came in through the Turkish border, attached to a UN convoy doing humanitarian work. Michael was already in-country posing as a member of Medicins Sans Frontiers, and I was a civil engineer who specialized in water purification systems.” She tapped both of her index fingers on the dashboard, then added, “We were both in Syria on different missions, but he convinced me to link up with him outside Aleppo. He told me the Syrian army was moving a big weapons shipment to Hezbollah through Homs, and he needed an engineer to help him destroy the armaments. Then we split off from the main humanitarian convoy and headed west towards Homs.”

He pounded a fist on the top of the wheel and laughed, “Goddamned right, now we’re getting somewhere. Alright, so Michael knew a chemical weapons convoy was headed towards Lebanon, and he thought it would go through Homs. See? We just ruled out eighty percent of western Syria.”

She shook her head and took another drag, saying, “We didn’t know it was chemical weapons yet—we assumed it was rockets, or communications equipment, or something else more conventional. I didn’t hear about the chemical weapons angle until you mentioned it. Who knows what Michael would have done if he had that intelligence.”

He nodded. “Fair enough, but let’s not jump off the tracks yet.”

“What?”

Ambrose waved his hand. “Never mind. Just a stupid Americanism. It means we shouldn’t go crazy any sooner than we have to. So anyway, let’s stick to basics: I described what these Tuva canisters look like from the drawing, right?”

“Right.” She nodded her head down at his ugly red bag, where Gideon’s crumpled, dirt-covered drawings of the Tuva shells lay hidden in the front of Ambrose’s notebook.

“So we know they’re basically the size of a rocket warhead, right? And if it’s going to be a meaningful transfer of weapons, there’s gonna be a lot of them,” Ambrose guessed.

Celestine disagreed. “From what you said about their payloads, there might not need to be many of them. But yes, let’s assume the Syrians are transporting them in bulk. We’ll stay on your rails, or something.”

He motioned for a drag of her cigarette—
his
cigarette, rather. It’s often impossible to get good suction with wind blowing through a car, but he made do. Then he said, “So the shipment has to go through Homs, or close to it. It’ll be a big load to carry, and if Syria is anything like the other warzones I’ve stumbled into, that means the army has destroyed most of the smaller roads through tank deployment. But if there’s anything that a government keeps up during wartime, it’s supply routes to major cities.”

She took back the cigarette. “Right. That’s what I saw in Algeria and Su—“ Celestine shut up, reminding Ambrose that most secret agents were a helluva lot more secretive than he was, “I agree. Homs is still our most viable option. From there, we try to find out where Hezbollah’s main forces are deployed—“

“Qusair. Gideon said they’ve massed to take the town of Qusair.”

“Look at you, so well-informed for an American!” She flashed a smarmy smile, “So we’re going to Qusair via the main Homs road in the hope we get lucky.”

Ambrose looked at his blood-caked face in the mirror, then over at Celestine’s cracked glasses and bruised face. “We don’t look like lucky people,” he muttered.

Celestine felt her own bruised face. “No we do not. You’re electrocuted, I’ve been beaten, Michael is dead, and you should have seen the other prisoner they brought in before you. Someone had torn off his fingernails
before
al-Qaida even got to him.”

She barely had time to get her hands out in front of her when Ambrose put on the brakes. Her crow-haired head still whipped back and forth, knocking her glasses off. She opened her mouth to scream at him, but he cut her off, speaking through the cloud of yellow dust enveloping their truck.

“Where was this guy from?” he whispered.

She found her glasses, and by the look on her face she’d thought better of arguing with him as long as that low demonic timbre permeated his voice. “He said he was a Turkish military advisor kidnapped near the border. I don’t know Turkish and he wouldn’t speak in English, so we only communicated in Arabic,” she said cautiously.

He looked at her with bloodshot eyes glowing volcanic red. “Do you think he was Turkish?”

“No.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Jamsheed hid in the hut until all of the shooting stopped. Adrenaline had carried him earlier, but now that he was sitting down and more clearheaded, he felt terrible. The plain truth was that al-Qaida had battered him into meat—first right after they dragged him from under the truck, and then once or twice more while he was still comatose from the first beating. It was a miracle he had dodged that punch from the bearded giant, and an even bigger miracle that he’d run through mortar fire and made it to that field during the middle of Hezbollah’s assault. God really was looking out for him, albeit inconsistently.

Hezbollah fighters found him quickly, and ordered him onto his knees. He gave his name, nationality, and demanded to see their commander. The Shiite militiamen perked up when he declared himself Iranian—their money came from Iran, their leaders trained in Iran, and therefore men like Jamsheed had spent decades training Hezbollah like dogs to never forget who their masters were. They took him to Haddad, the wiry little commander with the trimmed silver beard who had met Jamsheed in the dead village outside Qusair. In what felt like déjà vu, he was once again standing in a town square, surrounding by corpses, watching flags being swapped on a flagpole. Two of his men were hoisting the yellow banner of Hezbollah, which burned like molten gold in the very last rays of the evening sun.

Haddad chuckled when he saw Jamsheed, although Jamsheed wasn’t sure if that was pleasure at seeing him alive, or at seeing him alive and beaten to a pulp. He said, “Colonel Mashhadi, thank God they
did
drag you here!” he shot out a wiry arm and shook Jamsheed’s hand before he could even react, “You can imagine the panic in our ranks when your man told us what had happened to that convoy of Syrian idiots.”

Jamsheed cocked his head and asked, “My man?”

Haddad answered, “The interpreter; the one who was riding with you. He escaped along with some other Syrians. They rallied behind a truck and shot their way out, then he drove straight for my camp outside Qusair,” he waved his hand, encompassing all of the burning village, “We deployed in force immediately. My orders are to guard Homs and conquer Qusair, not engage with the rural militia groups.” Haddad used his boot to prod a dead al-Qaida fighter with a hole in his neck and a puddle of blood beneath him. “But you can see we made an exception for you.”

Jamsheed looked down at the faceless man, remembering half a dozen other battlefields where he’d seen bodies mutilated to the point where he only thought of them as poorly-butchered meat “My undying thanks, Commander. Is that man of mine around? His name’s Salman. I need him immediately.”

Haddad knelt down rummaging for something as he answered, “He’s with my men, sweeping the perimeter before we settle in for some looting; these fools had some surprisingly good equipment on them. My fighters will be back soon enough, I’m sure.” He stood up, and tossed a black piece of cloth at Jamsheed. “A souvenir of your Syrian holiday.”

Jamsheed snorted. It was the black flag of al-Qaida, covered in blood and soot. “Maybe I need to become a mullah, so I can sew this into my cloak.”

The commander laughed and he nodded down at Jamsheed’s scarred left hand. “You don’t need any more distinguishing markers.”

Jamsheed tightened his face “Careful, Commander. Some men don’t like that type of joke, and you don’t know whether I’m one of them. Now where is Salman?”

“As I said, he’s out and he’ll doubtless return soon, so in the meantime you need to use this as a chance to rest. You’ve taken enough punishment in the last six hours to kill most people. Plus, it’s nightfall and we have a strong defensive position. Enjoy the calm while it lasts, and we’ll complete your mission tomorrow, when my drivers can spot an ambush coming.”

Jamsheed’s nostrils flared. “That mission is postponed until I say otherwise. There are new factors at play, and I need to confer with the Iranian ambassador in Damascus immediately. The sooner Salman and I reach Damascus, the sooner I’ll be back to complete the weapons transfer.”

Haddad’s voice was flat as he said, “That isn’t the plan, Colonel. Damascus is at least one hundred miles south of here through rebel terrain, and the Syrians told me the canisters are west of Homs, in the complete opposite direction: that means an overnight delay into Damascus pushes this mission back half a week, and neither the CIA nor Mossad will need half a week to determine what we’re planning. We do this
tomorrow
, then I’ll escort you to Damascus myself and you can confer with your ambassador for as long as you’d like.”

Jamsheed crumpled the black flag in his fist and stepped close to the much shorter Haddad. “These new developments will not wait, and you are not in command of this mission,” Jamsheed reminded him.

The Hezbollah commander met his gaze with hard golden eyes. “And you’re not in command of yourself. Your face is covered in blood, your voice is cracking, and you keep shifting your balance like a man who can barely stand. Whatever you think you need to do, it will wait. I don’t know what you’re hiding, but a colonel in Quds Force doesn’t take orders from any damned ambassador, and a man with your reputation would never back out of a mission against Israel unless his brain was battered into stupidity.”

Jamsheed cocked his right elbow and made his hand into a knife-edge palm that he intended to put through the commander’s throat. Haddad saw it and drew his pistol from its holster before Jamsheed’s bloodshot eyes even saw the motion coming.

“Don’t try it, Colonel. I’m not you’re enemy, and you sure as hell aren’t mine,” Haddad said as he cocked the hammer. “Your injuries have thrown you off, and I doubt your pride is in much better shape than your body. Your pride
is not
worth the lives of my men, and that’s what it will cost if you delay this mission long enough to let the enemy find us and call in an airstrike.”

Jamsheed lowered his hand. He let out a big breath and felt his insides shudder like a pile of leaves.

Haddad holstered his gun. “Find a bed, Colonel. I’ll send you Salman when he comes back from patrol,” he said delicately.

Jamsheed stumbled away from Haddad toward the untouched south end of the village, while the commander went the other way to assemble his men. Once out of eyeshot, Jamsheed leaned hard against an alleyway wall, unable to support his own weight. Part of the trembling weakness came from his wounds, but much of it stemmed from the psychic shock he still hadn’t been able to process.

Someone in the Islamic Republic, the dream he had fought his entire life to protect, had betrayed him, and he had no idea why. In the rare event that he attended political functions, Jamsheed was quiet and polite. When dealing with his military peers, he was professional. Moreover, he didn’t have enough damned
time
to really make enemies—he spent ninety percent of his life outside of Iran, training martyrs on the front lines of the worldwide Islamic Revolution. He was famous, but only in certain circles, and he rarely used that notoriety to edge out competitors or force his will on anyone. All he had ever wanted was to fight and die for Iran. Moreover, Jamsheed thought of himself as a pretty decent guy, if not always a nice one.

But someone disagreed, and they had tried to kill him. No—not
kill
him; the death of his body would have been incidental if he’d read that confession. Someone had tried to shame him, disgrace him, destroy him along with the lives of the precious few people he cared about. He began to compile a mental list of possible betrayers, based on what they would need to be capable of: they had to know about his mission, have their own agents in Syria to coordinate the kidnapping, and be so fundamentally amoral that they didn’t mind killing a hero of the Revolution.

The list of conspirators was short. They were all ayatollahs or lesser clerics who were threatened by the military. No matter which of the suspects he put atop the conspiracy, in the middle rung of every scenario there was that oily, jackal-looking ambassador Yazdi in Damascus. He had the money, he doubtless had a network of Syrian agents, and he was ambitious enough to take the job if a powerful enough fellow cleric had asked him. Jamsheed and Salman were taking that trip to Damascus, Haddad be damned.

Jamsheed found a quiet hut overlooking the field. Inside of it were a few lumpy mattresses, some children’s toys, and a surprisingly well-appointed bookshelf. It contained three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, roughly J through L, a worn atlas in French, and a number of works by Arab authors. There was also a thick, well-read book in a language he’d never seen. Passages were underlined in pencil, with annotations in the same bizarre writing. He thought it was a holy book, but he had no idea what it said. He doubted it had given its owner much solace at the end, especially if that owner had been a Christian in a village conquered by al-Qaida.

He took off his green army jacket, leaving him in a threadbare military tank top and similarly colorless fatigue pants. It also exposed the necklace he had worn since he was a boy; a golden key on a simple hemp string. He wrapped his intact right hand around the key and passed out like a dead man.

* * *

In his dreams, a dead man visited him. Once again, Jamsheed Mashhadi was twelve years old, standing nervously in a weed-strewn soccer field flanked by other boys who were being sent off to die.

Around his young neck he wore a golden key that glowed with molten heat. The thing was burning itself into his skin, and had already exposed bits of his sternum that would soon be slick with molten gold.

The wound didn’t frighten him, or even cause him any pain, but he still grabbed at the key more out of curiosity than anything else. He reached up with his young left hand and saw bleeding holes where his fingernails should have been. Jamsheed tried to grab the key, but blood made his hand slip, and he couldn’t get ahold of the thing. The boy on left laughed as he mockingly held up a set of pliers. The boy on Jamsheed’s right did likewise, and held up a blowtorch.

The molten heat was one thing. The maimed hand was something else. Being laughed at was something of an entirely different magnitude. He lunged at the boy on his left, intent on ripping out his windpipe.

He stopped halfway through the air like a marionette jerked backward by a bad puppeteer. It was the key. Something was attached to the key.

Jamsheed looked upward at what he’d thought was a pillar of black basalt. It was actually the base of a man’s robes. The robes trailed upward for a hundred feet, until they reached the ancient bearded face of Imam Khomeini. An iron chain trailed upward from the hempen key string around Jamsheed’s neck, and vanished into Khomeini’s clenched fist.

The Imam looked down at him, and Jamsheed felt the combined sensations of every battle he’d ever fought. The sight of mutilated corpses from Basra mixed with the smell of black mud from al-Majnoon Island. He heard Iraqi warplanes overhead, and he felt the dry wind of an Afghan valley where he’d watched the Northern Alliance line up two hundred women and children then shoot them for being related to Taliban. There were so many deaths and so much confusion that his own memories no longer made any sense to him. He couldn’t imagine the person whose destiny threaded through so much violence. There had to be a purpose to it.

“Will we win, Imam?”

Khomeini’s black eyes opened up like pits, each one bigger than a new moon. “Will we win? Take this to your grave, Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi: you were born to fight for God, and that fight will not end until you die a glorious martyr, no matter whether fools with their history books decide that you ‘won’ or ‘lost.’ Until the moment that death happens, you stand among the angels. Anyone who stands against you is a slave of Satan, and you will kill them all.”

* * *

Jamsheed jumped up, wide-awake as he felt a hand shaking him by the shoulder. A quiet voice said, “Colonel, it’s me, Salman. I got word of your argument with Haddad, and I know he won’t give you a truck. Are you alright?”

No, no Jamsheed wasn’t. “Definitely, Salman. Thank you for waking me. What is it?”

“I have a truck for us. One of the Hezbollah guards believed me when I said you were ordering Haddad to give you a vehicle.”

Jamsheed sat upright like a man resurrected. “Do you have your gear?”

Salman nodded, a faceless ghost in the dark hut. “And yours. We can leave immediately,” he said.

As they snuck away into the night, driving with the truck’s headlights off down a twisting back road, Jamsheed wondered what he would do when he got to Damascus. Then he thought back to his dream, and the Imam Khomeini answered the question for him. His enemies were slaves of Satan, and he would kill them all.