Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ambrose and Celestine should have moved. They shouldn’t have sat for twenty minutes in that truck arguing about whether to turn around and kill Jamsheed Mashhadi. Ambrose would think these things later.

Celestine took another one of his Indonesian clove cigarettes. The argument had reached the point where nicotine was communal property. “So you’re going to walk back into the camp and tell them ‘surprise, now I want your other prisoner too!’ Then hope that they still believe your idiotic drone story?” She challenged.

Ambrose lit his own cigarette and answered, “No. I have a new trick planned this time.”

She blew smoke in his face. “Yes?”

He pantomimed a gun in his hand. He felt like drawing the real .44 tucked in his belt, but that might’ve made him look unbalanced, given the circumstances. “I’m going to walk into the camp with my gun drawn, find Mashhadi, and shoot him in the fucking head. Then I’m going to tell al-Qaida that he was an Iranian bomb maker who killed their Sunni buddies in Iraq, and wish them a good day.”

“You think they don’t know who he is?”

“They didn’t know who you were.”

Celestine replied, “That’s because I’m good, and even then I think they were getting close. Thank god I kept my father’s last name,” she frowned, big eyes considering something, “No, it was different with him. They looked at him oddly, and talked about him in quieter voices that I couldn’t make out. With Michael and I, they gloated—especially once they realized Mikey was American. Not with this Mashhadi. They brought him into my pen beaten within an inch of him life, but then they muttered on the other side of the door for a long time, like there was something special about him. There weren’t any more beatings after that.”

Ambrose felt his ribs throb. “Yeah, that would be different.” He wondered which of the bastards had broken her glasses and punched her in the mouth. “But none of that explains why they would be
more
likely to leave him alive.”

Celestine said, “None of it explains why our plan should change just because you found out that our co-prisoner was Iranian and not Turkish.”

“Because I’m here to find him.”

“You’re here to find
me
, and ensure that Hezbollah doesn’t get a chemical weapons arsenal. Jamsheed Mashhadi is a sideshow,” she said.

“If I kill him before he does his job, Hezbollah won’t be able to use those weapons regardless,” Ambrose retorted.

“As long as those weapons still exist, the danger is real: the Iranians will send someone else. They’ve got fifty Jamsheeds.”

Ambrose slammed his left hand down on the wheel, setting off the horn. He looked at his trembling fist with wild eyes. The horn’s wail echoed and boomed over the yellow rocks of the desert. Celestine’s eyes darted from him to the hills and back again, like she wasn’t sure which was more dangerous—al-Qaida pursuers or the madman next to her.

Over a minute later, he took his fist off the horn and looked at her. The horn blast kept echoing through the scrub and stone. “You need to get this: there is no other Jamsheed. There’s only him. He’s the one: the angel of death, the prince of darkness. My boss didn’t send me here to do behind-enemy-lines sabotage shit. I don’t like Israelis and I’ve never dealt with Hezbollah. If Wayne Shenzo had tried to sell me on either of those things individually, I would’ve been right back on a plane to Jakarta.”

She looked down at his bad left hand and watched his fingers tremble like rattlesnake tails. “So why are you here, Mister Hayes?”

He balled up his left hand in an attempt to make it stop. “Because Jamsheed is a dragon, and I’m his dragon slayer.”

“He’s just a man. Like you. Speaking of which, I noticed something else.”

“Woman, don’t make me hit that horn again. As long as Jamsheed is behind us and I have the element of surpri—“

“We don’t have any water.”

He stopped talking and gripped the wheel with both hands, nonplussed. “What?”

She pointed her cigarette all around them, showcasing the barren yellow hills as she elaborated, “We call this a desert, and deserts like killing people. Guess what stops them? That’s right, water. And we’re out. We never had any, in fact. I checked while you were minding the road, back before you went insane,” she blew smoke in his face again, “So there’s my whole suggestion: let’s find some water.”

Ambrose tapped on the wheel with a single callused fingertip. “Water. Fuck…that’s not the only problem. Did you find any communications equipment in this thing when you were rummaging?”

“No.”

He lit another cigarette, dimly aware that fate might soon force him to start smoking hellacious Russian Marlboro knockoffs. He continued, “Right. That means we’re completely dark. I don’t have any comm equipment with me in Old Red,” he nodded at the bag, “And as you noticed, the jihadists traveled light. That means Wayne and your man Gideon haven’t heard from me since I left Cyprus yesterday morning. They don’t know that I’m alive, and they sure as hell don’t know that you’re alive.”

The more he spoke, the more her expressive eyes darted back and forth doing some kind of calculations in that French-Israeli spy brain of hers.

“Celestine,” he caught her big brown eyes with his bloodshot blue ones, “What’s gonna happen if Gideon Patai doesn’t hear from you soon?”

She didn’t look at him. Instead she crushed out her butt on the side of the truck then pointed down the road. “I’d suggest a new order of operations: radio, water, Tuva canisters, Jamsheed Mashhadi.”

“Find me some water and we’ll talk about it. Wayne and Gideon are monitoring a couple of powerful international signals, but they’re still all the way over on Cyprus. If we’re going to reach them, we’ll need a military-grade transceiver. So we’ve got to find a Syrian army depot or something. Does Assad still have arms depots in western Syria, or will we need to infiltrate an active milita—”

A crack appeared in the glass of the windshield, surrounding a round hole. Another appeared in rapid succession, accompanied by a quick
chuff
sound as something annihilated the glass.

“
Sniper
!” Celestine gasped, and they both dove out of the truck, not knowing whether either side was even safe to use as cover.

They landed on different sides of the vehicle and met on their bellies beneath the middle of the chassis. The friction of belly crawling was agony on Ambrose’s ribs and sternum. If no one were watching him or shooting at him or watching him be shot at, it would have been worth some whimpering. Now, his heart was racing but his senses were sharp. It was a talent he’d never noticed before his disastrous tour in Iraq: the worse things got, the sharper his eyes and ears became.

The silence screamed at him. No one yelling, nothing mechanized. Just a slight breeze rusting the scrub around them. Then it brought a faint
click-clack
sound from the north side of the road, where hills looked down on the road as it ran due west towards Homs. The audible
click-clack
of reloading also worked in their favor, though: the sniper was close enough to hear, which meant he was either too inexperienced to fully utilize the potential high ground or his weapon wasn’t powerful enough to cover any more distance. Based on the holes that went through the truck’s windshield, Ambrose guessed it was the former—two shots within inches of his head was pretty good aim, but real snipers didn’t train to be ‘pretty good’ any more than surgeons did. Perfection was the minimum standard in both professions. So they were dealing with some novice who had acquired a sniper’s rifle. That still didn’t help them get out from under the truck.

She looked at him and mouthed, “Stopped?”

Ambrose shook his head, whispering an educated guess, “Changing position. Reloading.”

“Waiting for us to come out,” she added.

Ambrose heard something else, holding up his hand for silence. Celestine looked at him with disbelief, clearly unsure whether his ears were good enough to pick up anything that remote. She
really
wouldn’t have believed him if she knew that his fillings weren’t picking up the sensation of radio waves, and that made Ambrose believe the shooter was operating alone.

Riding on the breeze came a faint sound of grit and stone shifting. Someone was walking towards them taking short, awkward steps. Snipers weren’t awkward, so that supported his amateur theory even further. The shortness of the strides meant that the hiker was weighed down or short. Based on what he’d seen, he doubted any fighter out in this wilderness was loaded with anything more than ammo and hardware. As the sounds became closer he also decided that the legs weren’t just short—they were really, really short. That meant he was dealing with a dwarf, or…

He said, “It’s a goddamned kid.”

The footsteps stopped. Ambrose heard another
click-clack
, and the dirt at the edge of the truck chassis nearest to him exploded in a yellow puff that sent dust into the open cuts on his face.

He spit out some of the grit and decided it was time to yell. “Kid! Put down the gun and let us come out—we’re not Syrian and we’re not in a militia. We’re doctors! Doctors!”

In the silence that followed, Ambrose and Celestine had no way of knowing whether revealing themselves would amount to suicide or détente.

They locked eyes, shrugged, and skirted out from under the truck. A hundred feet away, crouched next to a yellow boulder, was a pre-teen boy wearing a green checkered bandanna and holding a military-grade rifle topped by a massive rangefinder scope. Someone had painted its shiny barrel a dull color to match the landscape, although it still had a black composite stock and a tripod mount that would flip down from beneath the barrel to allow for fixed-position shooting.

It was almost his size, and his hands trembled as he cradled it. Ambrose knew the feeling, and his own hands with their damaged nerves did a little dance as he held up his palms. He didn’t like that his right hand was also acting up. Celestine did likewise, and the two of them slowly approached their pint-sized executioner.

The boy held the rifle up to his shoulder and looked through the scope. Half his size or not, he held the thing deliberately, and Ambrose suspected the kid had learned how to take the recoil as well as his little body would allow. Either way, Ambrose did the courtesy of assuming the boy would have no problem pulling the trigger and killing them.

But that didn’t stop him from moving forward and saying in Arabic, “Boy, look at me. Look at us. Have you ever seen a fighter dressed like this?” He gestured downward at his dust-covered blue Thai beer t-shirt. “Like I said, we’re foreigners. We’ve got no part in this, and we’re not going to hurt you.”

The boy didn’t lower the gun. He asked out of the corner of his mouth, “You said you are doctors. Are you doctors? Do you have medicine?”

Ambrose looked at Celestine and asked in English: “Are we doctors, Doctor? How much of yours and dear Michael’s cover was bullshit?”

Celestine didn’t take her eyes off the kid. “Most of it, except for two weeks of first aid training I got in IDF boot camp.” She turned to the boy and spoke in Arabic, “I’m a doctor, boy. But al-Qaida stole my medicine when they captured me,” she pointed at the blackening bruises around her mouth, “But I can still look at whoever’s sick, and do some things to help. Will you let me help?”

“If you’re a doctor, what’s he?” The boy gestured with his gun barrel towards Ambrose.

She nodded toward him contemptuously. “He drives and lights my cigarettes. Is your injured friend far? We should get walking before it’s completely dark. You see how thick my glasses are? If I try to walk at night, I’ll probably fall and break my neck.”

The boy lowered his rifle, regarding both of them cautiously. “We’re close. Can you remove bullets? We need someone who can remove bullets,” he said.

“Sure, if you give me a hot knife. Do you have any field dressings? What about antiseptic?”

“I don’t know what those things are. If they’re medicine, then no we don’t. If we had medicine, I wouldn’t be out here looking for a doctor.”

Ambrose snorted. “Boy, you weren’t out here looking for a doctor anyway. You were going to snipe us then search our vehicle for a first aid pack. Then you really would’ve looked like an asshole when you found two headless foreigners in an empty truck.”

The boy looked at the truck’s serial number, stenciled on the door in black spray paint and asked, “That trucks was stolen from a Homs depot two weeks ago by jihadists. What are you doing in it?”

“We’re borrowing it. You got a name?”

“Not anymore.” He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pointed at the truck. “Drive that behind these boulders so road patrols won’t find it. We don’t need to worry about flyovers here—Assad’s air force declared the area low priority for elimination.”

They did as he commanded, then followed him on foot into the hills. Ambrose got more than a creeping sense of déjà vu, and he had no particular faith that this stroll through the Syrian desert would work out any better than his last one had. But the kid kept up a brisk pace as he clambered over rocks like a mountain goat, so at least Ambrose felt the infectious sense of progress that came out of going
somewhere
, even if his throbbing sternum and smoker’s lungs disagreed with him.

When they stopped to rest beneath the purple twilit sky, he wheezed and asked the boy, “Kid, how did you know those things back there?”

The boy took a swig off his water canteen and laughed coldly, “You talk funny. Are you asking about the truck and the air force strategy?”

“Yeah.”

“Because we spend a lot of time monitoring military radio channels, of course. What do
you
think soldiers do?” the boy asked.

Celestine exchanged a look with Ambrose. He nodded, and they kept following the boy with the sniper rifle back to his military-grade radio transceiver.

Chapter Thirty

The boy didn’t lead them far; the three of them stepped between two fallen rocks and they were inside the threshold of a mineshaft. As far as hideouts went, a mineshaft had definite advantages, not least of which would be the fact they came equipped with power sources and electrical wiring. As long as that power source remained in place, forgotten mineshafts made ideal guerrilla bases, as the Soviets and Americans had both learned in Afghanistan. It didn’t surprise him that the same tactics were on display in Syria, since some of the leading Syrian rebels were men who might have fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, doing their part to expel the godless communists from what Muslim clerics worldwide had called part of Islam’s holy empire. The same men might have returned to the same godforsaken mountains when America brought superpower war back to Afghanistan. Now some of those survivors were in Syria, convinced they heard God’s call to arms once more. After thirty years of traveling the world for jihad, God had whittled them down to nothing more than leaves flittering on a whirlwind blown straight out of hell.

The nameless boy hit a switch as they entered and a groan emerged from far down the mineshaft, burping up the sound of ancient gears grinding against one another while diesel burned. As the sound stabilized, stained electric lamps flickered to life on both sides of the shaft. Grime on the bulbs made the tunnel more orange than white.

There were dead men all down the hallway. Celestine hissed when the lights came on and she saw them, but Ambrose was quiet. He knelt down to inspect the closest one. There was no scent of decay; they were fresh, and the cool subterranean air mixed with the lack of moisture had helped to stave off the rot. They lay feet to head with their arms crossed over their chests. Dry blood covered their face in black rivulets that started at the tear ducts and had then flowed outward aimlessly until they froze into place like tributaries of a polluted river They were stripped of weaponry, but each man still wore a makeshift military uniform, including checkered green scarves that matched the boy’s. Ambrose counted nineteen of them running down the hallway on both sides.

The boy was staring at Ambrose like he wanted some kind of reaction from the foreigners. Ambrose met his stare with a blank face. Then he lit a cigarette and motioned for the boy to lead them onward. The boy did, and Ambrose followed. The American heard a distinct lack of footsteps behind them, and assumed that Celestine had paused for a closer look at the corpses. Israelis tended to have a problem ignoring dead bodies. Ambrose didn’t.

“Better hurry, kid.”

* * *

By the time Celestine caught up with them, Ambrose and the boy were five hundred feet away, in a large open area that fighters had converted into a barracks full of cots. Most of them were empty, but their previous occupants had left red stains on the mattresses where they’d been lying. Ambrose knelt down to look at one of the beds, cigarette smoke curling into his eyes as he touched the red stain with his trembling left hand and saw his fingers come away clean. The blood was old.

She grabbed him by the elbow and spoke in English so the boy couldn’t follow. “Hayes, don’t touch that. Don’t touch any of the blood stains.”

He blew smoke out his nose and said out of the side of his mouth, “Maybe sex ed is different in France or that other country of yours, but in America, we don’t think you can get AIDS via osmosis. I’m trying to figure out when those guys in the hallway died, and that means investigating the blood stains.”

Her voice was sharp. “And in America, can you get chlorine poisoning through osmosis?”

He looked at the stain, then his fingers, then back up at her. “I have no idea. Here’s hoping the answer is ‘no.’” He looked down again and asked, “What makes you say chlorine? The kid just wanted us to remove some bullets.”

Celestine hunched down next to him and stole the cigarette from his hand. He grunted disapprovingly, and she continued with the cigarette between her lips, “Because there are signs of bleeding from the facial orifices that don’t match associated trauma from gunshot wounds, and because most of their uniforms aren’t bloody. They didn’t take kill shots to the torso, yet they still had all of that blood on their faces…and at other points where a contact agent like chlorine will make you leak.”

Ambrose responded, “You said ‘most of’ their uniforms. That means some of them were just shot, right?” he took back the cigarette, “Gunshot wounds can cause bleeding from the mouth and eyes.”

She crossed her arms. “Mister Hayes, please do me a favor and pretend I’m a weapons engineer with a background in chemical armaments.”

“Fair enough, if you pretend I’ve survived a sarin attack and been a keen student of the subject ever since.”

Her eyes went wide. “What?”

Ambrose waved his hand and said, “Never mind. Tell me about the chlorine. It was a government attack, you think? Why would they use something that primitive when they have nerve gas?”

“It’s easier to deploy, and easier to adulterate. You can cut chlorine down to half its bottled strength and still incapacitate enemy soldiers with organ failure. It’s also heavier than air, so you can drop it into a battlefield and count on it to linger. Since it’s semi-visible, it also encourages the victims to run,” she breathed out demonstratively, letting Ambrose see every silver tendril of smoke, “Running makes the lungs’ capillaries open in response to aerobic activity, and they take in more of the gas. Then the gas catalyzes with moist lung tissue into hydrochloric acid and burns you from the inside out. Nerve gas is trickier. It requires someone much more skilled to put the apparatus together.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” he agreed.

She continued, “But chlorine is easy. My people think that Assad has been using it since at least 2011, in small enough engagements that the world wouldn’t notice. Whetting his appetite for larger deployments, maybe.”

Ambrose sniffed at his fingers, wondering what chlorine smelled like. Had he known and forgotten? It was impossible to tell. Sometimes parts of his life before that warehouse in Baghdad got…blurry…if he tried to remember them quickly. “If you diluted it a bunch, then used it against armed opponents, what would it look like?” he asked.

She cocked her head toward the cot. “The survivors would look like a lot of people with internal bleeding.”

The boy interrupted them. “Hey—over here. Stop talking about the dead people. The rest of them need you.” He couldn’t have understood a word they said, but the boy had nonetheless followed the gist of their conversation. He was smart, and reminded Ambrose of another young soldier who came of age in a warzone beneath clouds of toxic gas.

“The rest of them” were hiding out in the back of that room, where the dying incandescent track lighting barely reached. There were two of them, both middle-aged men lying on cots with dark puddles forming on the ground beneath them. The boy walked up to them and spoke quietly. The first man shivered and attempted to roll over, but couldn’t manage even that much movement. The second man nodded and said something back, beckoning to the foreigners.

The boy waved them forward saying, “Come on, these are the two. They’ve both been shot and they need help.” He looked up at Celestine, then pointed at the man who was awake. “I’ll go light a propane fire and heat the knife. You said all you needed was a hot knife, right?”

She raised an eyebrow and stared at him, playing along. “…and boiled cloth. Field dressings. Boil the water first, then use the fire to sterilize the knife. I can’t use the knife until I know there are clean dressings to hold the wounds closed.”

“Field dressings. Cloth. Right. I’ll be back.” He ran down the hallway towards the entrance, leaving the adults in the room.

Ambrose approached the conscious man and touched his hand to his heart as he said in Arabic, “Peace be upon you, friend.”

The man wheezed, showing crimson stains on the grey mustache beneath his nose, “And upon you, friend.” He looked at both of them with the dark glassy stare of a man who knew he was dead. “You’re speaking Iraqi Arabic and you’re white. Are you CIA?”

“No,” he shook his head, “Not really. But I’m not much better than that. Her neither.”

The man could only keep one eye open. “He said you’re a doctor, woman. From where?”

She answered, “France. I’m part of a humanitarian mission that got ambushed by al-Qaida.”

The man chuckled, but couldn’t squeeze any sound out. New flakes of red appeared on his lips instead. He answered her in fluid French that Ambrose couldn’t entirely follow, “I studied economics in Paris for five years before coming home to work for Hafez al-Assad. Either you’re not French, or you haven’t lived there for a long time.”

She leaned down and put a hand on his torso, making him wheeze as she made a point of answering in Arabic, “Where I’m from doesn’t matter. Does that hurt?”

“Of course it hurts. You’re crushing one of his lungs,” Ambrose muttered, lighting the second-to-last cigarette in his third-to-last pack.

She looked at the pink stains of dried blood across the Syrian’s face. “Were you even shot, or is all of this damage from the chlorine?”

He kept speaking in French, “Yes…in the bicep. It happened while I was pulling that boy out of the battle. God be praised, somehow he alone missed breathing in that gas.”

Ambrose was skeptical. “Nineteen dead men, two more dying, and you’re saying the kid missed it entirely? Even for god, those are pretty long odds.”

“Odds don’t matter. God doesn’t play at dice.”

Celestine actually smiled, showing those crooked lines at the side of her mouth. “A Syrian economist quoting Einstein in French.”

Ambrose cut her off. “Does the boy even know what’s going on? He seems pretty smart.”

The man tried to sit up, gritting his pink teeth before he fell back onto his cot. “That boy was fighting the war before I even left my desk job to pick up a stolen rifle. He’s seen gas attacks. He’s also spent a week taking care of twenty-one dying men choking on their own blood.” The man turned and coughed black spittle towards the floor. He couldn’t move his head far enough to clear the cot, so it just hit his shoulder and dripped slowly off the metal frame like cold molasses. “The boy knows what’s happening. Of course he knows. But—“

“But we’ve all got our limits, and sometimes the brain is what gives,” Ambrose said right before he picked up a rag and wiped down the man’s shoulder. “Do you want us to tell him?”

The Syrian nodded appreciatively as Ambrose cleaned him. “As I said, he knows. Let him believe I’m dying of my gunshot for now. Even operate on me, if you think it will look convincing.”

“It will,” Celestine said as she rolled up the Syrian man’s sleeve and investigated the gunshot wound on his arm. It was a dark tangle of exploded meat, but there were no blackened veins on his arm indicating full-scale blood poisoning. She wrinkled her nose. “This is going to be disgusting once we get started, and I have nothing for pain. There isn’t any alcohol around here, is there?”

“Stupid question,” Ambrose said in English.

The Syrian shook his head, whispering, “No. We are…were…the Muslims you see on TV; no drinking, lots of praying, waging godly war against a godless government,” he seized up for a moment, but then a fire crackled in his voice, “No peace with a man like Assad, who hides behind Shiite butchers like Hezbollah and Iran. No peace with a man who does not fear God enough to show mercy on his own people.”

Ambrose breathed in his cigarette and scratched at his neck stubble. He’d heard worked-up Muslim partisans start the same rant in half a dozen countries, and generally knew to keep his mouth shut when it happened. They weren’t going to change their minds, and he was content to file it away as in-house Sunni versus Shiite political bullshit that nonbelievers could stay out of. But in this case, Ambrose agreed with the dying Sunni: it took take an especially classless kind of evil to pray in public like Assad did while sending out his military to exterminate people who were allegedly still loyal Syrians. Whatever would stop somebody from doing that, fear of god was probably an apt descriptor for it.

The boy came back with a propane camp stove and a cooking pot. Draped over his shoulder were strips of ripped cloth, and a big knife handle stuck out from his belt. He marched over to Celestine and started giving her orders. She played along, which gave Ambrose a brief moment to further their mission.

He leaned over the dying Syrian. “Friend, the boy says you have a military radio transceiver here. I need you to let me use it for a moment,” he asked.

Celestine and the boy had hunkered over the camp stove and were boiling some water that the boy poured from a five-liter jug. They didn’t hear Ambrose’s request, nor the Syrian’s reply. “It’s in the next room. After you use it to call your allies, you need to do something for me,” he rasped.

“If that machine works, you can assume I owe you something.”

“It works.” The man closed his eyes and didn’t open them again. Fresh redness seeped from his tear ducts and down the care lines at the side of his eyes. When he spoke again, it was barely audible, “I’ll probably die of shock when your woman starts cutting into me. There isn’t much left inside here, trust me. Whatever I have left, God will squeeze it out once that hot knife hits my skin.”

Ambrose said, “Yeah.”

“So that means you must take the boy. He’ll never leave us otherwise. He’ll stay here and try to bury every body himself, facing south towards Mecca the way God demands. He’ll die of heatstroke, or thirst, or just get bitten by some damned snake out in the rock. Even if he manages to get us buried, there’s no way one boy is making it out of these hills alive. Not without being spotted by a rival militia.” The man tried to wipe the drying blood from his eyelids, but his bicep wouldn’t flex, so the arm stopped halfway up like a broken toy. He dropped it and let out another shuddering sigh. “Just…get him out of here. Get him somewhere that he might have a chance.”

Ambrose took the rag and dabbed it over the Syrian’s eyes. He got most of the blood, but the eyelids were stained pink like the makeup on a cheap whore. “We’re probably going west from here,” he said, cigarette drooping out of his mouth, “Are his people west of here? Some village away from the fighting where we can leave him?”