Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (23 page)

The big handgun roared as Mashhadi shot the ambassador in his right shoulder. Yazdi gasped as a chunk came out of his bicep and the force of impact knocked him out of his chair. Mashhadi didn’t follow him around the desk. Instead, he just poured another glass of Johnny Walker and settled back into his chair.

“I told you not to move your hands in the direction of that .38. Now get back in your chair,” Mashhadi said.

Yazdi groaned, but complied as best he could. He dragged himself up by the table and then fell into his high-backed desk chair. He’d never been shot before. It felt like being on fire, like drowning in a sea of liquid pain. How could the hole in his arm burn when it also made him feel so cold?

Mashhadi tapped his handgun to his own temple, thinking. He looked through Yazdi like he was furniture.

Yazdi broke the silence with affected composure. “So now you’ve shot me, Colonel Mashhadi. What’s next? You kill me for following the commands of God’s earthly representative, the Leader of the Revolution?” Yazdi tried to sound confident, but he felt sweat on his forehead. He couldn’t keep the bluff up. He needed to distract Mashhadi, get those .38 bullets into his gun, and shoot the intruder dead.

Mashhadi raised an eyebrow, tapping a nail-less finger at the side of his scotch glass. “What’s next? Next you send a message back to Tehran,
then
I kill you.”

“Kill me for following orders, Colonel? How many times have you sent men off to die? Did the survivors deserve the chance to kill
you
for what you did to defend the Revolution?”

Yazdi decided he would try for the gun while Mashhadi made the phone calls. Mashhadi had been drinking, and he looked tired, and the phone would distract him.

The soldier looked upward, pondering Yazdi’s question. He answered, “I suppose they’d deserve a chance, if they were brave enough to take it. No one ever has, though; my soldiers understand what is at stake in our Revolution. Can you argue the same? No,
of
course
you’ll try to argue the same. Let’s just call Tehran instead.” He waved the big handgun towards Yazdi’s desk. “Now get out that satellite phone I called you on, and make a call for me.”

Yazdi nodded, pulling out his secured phone and opening the clamshell. “Who am I calling? He asked.

“Whoever would least like to hear me alive,” Mashhadi answered.

The ambassador had at least twenty numbers in that phone who would’ve liked nothing better than seeing an arrogant thug like Mashhadi dead, but he thought he caught the colonel’s drift. Yazdi sighed and chose a number, asking, “Will a mullah named Kareem Kermani do?”

Mashhadi looked him in the eye. “I don’t know, will he? Who is Kareem Kermani?”

Yazdi sighed again. He was about to be shot by a thug so politically ignorant that he didn’t even know who governed Iran. “Kermani is Supreme Leader Khamenei’s personal secretary.”

The thug chuckled. “Oh yes, I think he’ll do. Make the call.”

The ambassador complied, then Mashhadi motioned for the phone and took it in his bloody left hand. Mashhadi stood up and looked off towards the faux Rembrandt prints on the wall of Yazdi’s office, but never trained his gun off the ambassador.

“And hello to you as well.” Mashhadi’s voice was downright pleasant as he paced around the office. “Is this Kareem Kermani, by chance? I’m a colonel with the Revolutionary Guard, and Ambassador Yazdi in Damascus gave me this number,” he looked cockeyed at Yazdi, “Dead, you say? My condolences…may I assume that since you’ve got his number, you’ve also adopted his duties?” He leaned in to grab his drink and sat down his pistol on the table, barrel towards Yazdi. Mashhadi took a big sip without flinching as he listened intently to whatever the person on the other line had to tell him.

Finally, Mashhadi nodded. “Thank you, that’s all very sad, and please send my condolences to the widow Kermani. Now listen for a moment and I’ll let you go: my name is Jamsheed Mashhadi. Tell Ali Khamenei that I survived his scheme and just killed Gholamreza Yazdi for his part in it. Then, tell him that the mission is still on, with a slight modification: I’m not going to arm the warheads for Hezbollah. I’m going to arm those warheads then
use
them while they’re still in Syria.” He took another drink, humming while the man on the other end of the phone erupted. After waiting out a string of garbled curses, Mashhadi replied, “In that case, I was the wrong man to send on this mission. God keep you well, Sir.” He hung up.

Yazdi gaped at the madman standing on the opposite side of his desk. He stammered, “You’re going to start a war with Israel. You’re going to launch a chemical weapons attack on an enemy country with a nuclear arsenal. You’ve gone com—“

Mashhadi raised one finger to silence him, then said soothingly, “I’m starting a war with whatever is
left
of Israel after the chemical attack. Quds Force knows that Hezbollah and Syrian army units have stashed multiple SCUD missiles in the Homs area, which also seems to be where the Syrians have hidden these Tuva canisters. Once we’re on the road, I’ll have my driver contact his Syrian counterparts and ensure that some of those wayward SCUDs are onsite along with the Tuva arsenal. SCUDs fired from Homs are well within the range of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Be’er Sheva. That’s the majority of Israel’s population right there.”

Mashhadi continued, “I don’t presume that most of the rockets will get through…but enough will. Enough to knock Israel back on its heels and force it to take a kneejerk response to the attack. That will mean an all-out assault on Lebanon to root out Hezbollah and a massive conventional bombing of Iran while Israel and the Great Satan argue about whether Israel has a nuclear
casus belli
,” he took another drink, “And in the meantime, Israel will be losing planes to Iran’s air defenses and ground soldiers to Hezbollah’s positions around Beirut. Did you know that the first Israeli tank made it
ten feet
into Lebanon when they attacked Hezbollah in 2006?
Ten feet
, and it went down to some kind of improvised mine. I don’t imagine things will work out much better for them when they’re forced to march on the same positions without air cover. And meanwhile our ai—“

Yazdi banged the table with both fists, screaming, “You’re condemning millions of Iranians to die because you think I insulted you!”

The colonel began counting on his fingers. “First, you didn’t insult me, you betrayed me, on the orders of a one-handed old man who claims to speak for God. He’s obviously lost that title, which means we true fighters need to pick up where the Imam Khomeini left off. Second, Iran has seventy five million people spread across a country larger than Western Europe; we survived Genghis Khan, and we can survive a few Zionist missiles. Third, we are the people of God, starting the final war against Satan’s earthly slaves. We aren’t going to lose.”

The ambassador sucked in a breath and jumped for Mashhadi’s gun. The colonel was drunk, and reacted slower than Yazdi expected—Yazdi got his hand on the pistol first, and turned it on Mashhadi.

The safety was off. Yazdi pulled the trigger five times.

The eruption of that hand-cannon in close quarters made him close his eyes and grit his teeth while unloading. Yazdi didn’t open his eyes until the recoil had almost shaken the weapon loose from his hands. He saw nothing past the smoke trickling out of his gun: no body on the floor, no blood on the wall.

Because Mashhadi was standing next to him, holding the scotch bottle above his head.

A big white flash told Yazdi that someone had smashed in his skull.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jamsheed’s head spun as he left Yazdi’s study. He felt a sickening combination of scotch and adrenaline, combined with queasiness from killing Yazdi. The ambassador had been scum—opportunistic, vain, godless scum—but still, he had been
Iranian
, and in his long career, Jamsheed had killed very few Iranians. Each had deserved it; they were traitors and pawns of the enemy. But Yazdi was different: the others had committed treason by scheming against Iran, so Jamsheed killed them proudly. Yazdi, however, had putatively served Iran to the end, because he only meant to kill Jamsheed personally. Unless Jamsheed wanted to pretend that he was something special, he couldn’t help thinking that Yazdi’s scheme was a lesser offense.

He braced his right hand against the smooth black oak railing of the staircase as he walked down to the embassy foyer, where Salman waited for him.

Salman looked up the stairs past Jamsheed, then back at him with a worried expression on his face. “Is it done, Colonel? Have you executed the traitor?”

Jamsheed nodded.

Salman noted the blood-stained memo in Jamsheed’s left hand, but said nothing. Instead Salman pointed to the collection of items at his feet: a small tool box, three large canisters of gasoline, a spool of copper wire, a car battery, and a mechanical watch. “Everything you asked for, Colonel, except for the explosive agent itself. You said you could do that?”

Jamsheed had almost forgotten giving those orders to Salman; it had been a long time since he went into Yazdi’s study. He responded, “Yes, Salman. I’ll deal with isolating the explosives. Did you find the grenades I asked for?”

“Yes, Colonel.” Salman had paused for a second. Maybe he was noticing the glassiness of Jamsheed’s eyes, or the slight tremble that the scotch had put in his hands. Then he tapped a medium-sized box at his feet, brimming with matte-grey death in increments contoured like miniature pineapples.

Jamsheed looked at the tools approvingly. “These will do. Hand me a pair of needle-nosed pliers.”

Salman reached into the toolbox and came back with a set of pliers that had red rubber handles. Jamsheed thanked him distantly, then ripped the top off a grenade with one twist of his drunken hand. In the same motion he buried those pliers in the grenade’s guts with a metallic
snap
as the teeth of the pliers lodged between two moving parts.

Jamsheed carried the live, opened grenade into the light provided by one of the wall sconces next to a big grandfather clock, ignoring the drawn-out terrified gasp coming out of Salman’s mouth. Jamsheed held the grenade right up to the light and squinted down into its guts, past where he had lodged the pliers.

Jamsheed said, “We learned how to open them like this during the war with Iraq, using nothing more than pliers, then disabling the detonator to get at the powder inside,” he chuckled, “I didn’t think I’d ever need to show off this particular skill again. This is how you kill a Humvee or a tank, Salman: a pair of pliers, a couple cheap Russian grenades, and someone stupid enough to pop the grenades open.” He looked up. “Do we have a cup? I need to collect the powder in something. Try the kitchen, where we caught Yazdi’s butler. I’ll get to work on the next grenade.”

Salman squeaked again when Jamsheed pulled the pliers out of the open grenade’s trigger mechanism. The guts of the grenade gurgled like an angry watch, then…silence.

Jamsheed didn’t wait for Salman to ask a question. He babbled onward, “When I pull out the pliers, I give a quick twist to the stirrup they’re pinching. That warps the shape, and it can’t make a clean strike on the detonator’s depressor. Trite as it may sound, sometimes it really is all in the wrists.”

Jamsheed picked up another grenade and got his pliers ready. Salman was gone.

While he worked on that second grenade and three more after it, Jamsheed whistled to himself. He didn’t know the tune by name, but it was definitely a ‘70s rock number; English or American based on melody, with a kind of continental European sensibility to it. The Velvet Underground, maybe. He finished all five grenades before Salman returned with a suitable cup to collect all of the blasting powder.

Jamsheed stood up, sore but vital. After al-Qaida’s beating he’d recovered his balance and relearned his muscles to the point that moving no longer slowed him down. His near-shooting by Yazdi had proven that. In truth, Jamsheed had never tried to survive a bullet at that range, or even thought about whether it was possible. The shock of still being alive reminded him of how he felt after running through his first minefield during the Iraq war, with terror fleeing as his body trusted to its own instincts. That’s when he learned to love death. That’s when he learned that Imam Khomeini’s little golden key was real.

He looked around the empty foyer for electrical outlets. That would give him an idea of how the embassy was wired, which would tell him where the generator was located. He knew there was a generator because he had consulted the Iranian government on security protocols for the embassy facility shortly after the Syrian civil war broke out. One of his top recommendations had been an independent source of electricity for the compound, made as fool-proof as possible. There were few things more fool-proof than a couple of big diesel generators in a basement. That would be where he set his bombs.

The search for a basement door led him from the foyer, with its swooping dark wood staircase, into a large parlor on the first floor that reminded him of the salon upstairs where he and Yazdi had taken tea very recently, before Iran betrayed Jamsheed and he responded by beating Yazdi to death with a scotch bottle. There was one major difference between the main room and Yazdi’s upstairs salon, however: there was a display case on this level.

He walked slowly over to it, taking the thing in step by step. It was six feet wide and probably ten feet tall, hidden behind a big pane of Plexiglas framed by gilded fixtures. In the middle of it was the most famous picture of the Iran-Iraq War: a host of young men in green fatigues with red martyrs’ headbands, carrying guns and running into battle. Above that image was the famous black and white photograph of Khomeini where he gritted his jaw while looking forward and up, either beseeching God to answer him or daring Satan to face him.

Below those images there were accoutrements of the war: blood-soaked soldiers’ boots sat at the bottom of the case, flanked by captured cavalry sabers worn by Iraqi officers in dress uniform. And above those artifacts there was a set of faded black and white photographs showing the faces of children. Each of them looked straight through the camera, through the pane of the display case, through Jamsheed’s eyes and out the back of his skull. Of course they saw through him: they
were
him. They were boys in drab fatigues, wearing the headbands of martyrs, sitting for a final photograph before they rushed the minefields beneath clouds of poison gas.

Jamsheed remembered sitting for that photograph three times. After that, they stopped taking it. He had fidgeted each time, angry at the distraction when he’d been told to run out and die for God; did those idiots with their cameras think that God was
patient
when it came to things like that? No, it never crossed their minds, because they never cared about the boys, or their sacrifices. Those photographers weren’t working for men like Jamsheed, or Qasem Soleimani, or the Imam Khomeini. They worked for men like Yazdi, lesser clerics who never caught a whiff of the gas but would proudly display the pictures of brave child soldiers long after the children were dead in order to prop up their mockery of Khomeini’s vision.

Jamsheed looked at the boys’ faces and said to them, “We were so ferocious, then. We toppled a king with nothing but bloody fists and street fights. We fought the entire world for eight years, until even Saddam Hussein feared the glory of our martyrs. Now…” he looked around the room at the fine oiled wood and gilded fixtures holding hand-blown Italian glass lighting, “…Now we are finished, because the ayatollahs think that Iran already won.”

Jamsheed smiled and continued speaking to his mute black and white audience, “They think that the Great Satan disappeared in a puff of smoke because Ali Khamenei sneezed. They make little shrines like yours to honor us, but forget that the war with Saddam really came down to little boys with keys around their necks, keeping Iran safe because we were willing to charge through a minefield.”

He pressed his forehead against the cool Plexiglas and let his eyes relax until they unfocused. He was far away, remembering terrible things.

Jamsheed spoke, and his breath fogged up the Plexiglas beneath his nose, “One more minefield, Brothers. One more battle for the Hidden Imam.”

He reached into the display case and took out two things. The first was one of the martyr’s photos. The boy in that photo had high cheekbones and a long face dominated by big eyes that already had bags under them, even though the boy couldn’t have even seen puberty yet. His eyes were tired but unafraid: death suited him well. Jamsheed kissed the picture, muttering a prayer as he wished the boy blissful days in paradise.

The second thing that Jamsheed removed was the martyr’s headband that hung in the display case from a hook beside the boy’s photo. As Jamsheed took the blood-spattered red strip and tied it across his forehead, he could almost smell the reek of gas clinging to the cloth.