Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (24 page)

Chapter Thirty-Four

It was Saturday, around five a.m. Major General Qasem Soleimani of the Revolutionary Guard, acting commander of Quds Force, had never hated any place on earth as much as the Green Zone in Baghdad. It didn’t matter that he came back more powerful every time he returned, or that with every return, he crushed more of Iraq beneath an Iranian boot heel. The walled neo-fortress of first Saddam Hussein, then the Americans, and now the sham-government of Nuri al-Maliki was a cesspool full of human shit wearing ties and military dress uniforms. It was the lowest point in hell, the lake that all sleaze eventually oozed into. It was everything he fought to keep Iran from becoming.

He thought that as he walked through the monstrous pink marble foyer of the “People’s Palace” that Saddam had erected with black market oil money that would have been better spent on fake IDs, reconstructive surgery, and one-way plane tickets to Cuba for himself and his sons. Tinkling crystal chandeliers above his head sighed as the breeze of early morning swept through an open window somewhere else on the ground floor. It was a musical sound that he cut apart with the guillotine
clack
of his shiny black dress shoes striking the marble floor.

The shoes matched his grey slacks and charcoal blazer with its white tieless shirt beneath. Some hardliners in the Supreme Leader’s inner circle thought that men like Soleimani should start wearing full dress uniforms when they visited Iraqi officials in the Green Zone, just to embarrass the Americans. Soleimani disagreed. He thought it was more disrespectful to wear his current ensemble, and meet Iraq’s leaders dressed like a man visiting a used car lot. Then again, Iraq greatly resembled a used car lot, especially a dodgy one without any return policy.

Bleary-eyed Arabs with titles and long Arab compound names greeted him one by one as he made his way into the center of the compound, where the prime minister kept his most discreet offices. They tried to be polite as they offered him tea and coffee, but they kept stumbling over their own words, so Soleimani clicked his tongue and shook his silver head a bit with each offer, plunging ever further into the complex toward Nuri al-Maliki’s fortified offices. For a man like Soleimani who enjoyed waking up at 4 a.m., there was real pleasure to be had in watching men bumble about half asleep before dawn, looking like they’d dressed with the lights out.

Nuri al-Maliki, the balding, bespectacled, mustachioed Shiite prime minister whom Qasem Soleimani had personally chosen to govern Iraq, looked little better off when Soleimani confronted him behind his surprisingly small wooden desk, sipping his first cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette.

Soleimani finally accepted coffee when the prime minister himself offered it. He also accepted one of al-Maliki’s cigarettes. The prime minister smoked genuine Marlboros, full of whatever North Carolina tasted like. The general couldn’t get them in Iran, so he enjoyed them where he could and ignored the “made in America” stamp hidden somewhere along their packaging.

They exchanged pleasantries for a while, then Soleimani crossed his leg wide, cowboy style, so the prime minister could see the sole of his shiny black shoe. Arabs hated that.

“Why did you call me here, Prime Minister? You knew I was in Baghdad last week, yet you couldn’t make time to speak with me.” Soleimani looked al-Maliki straight in the tired eyes that hid behind his schoolteacher’s glasses.

The prime minister cleared his throat and broke eye contact. “I’m sorry about last week, General. You know how busy things get around here,” he said lamely.

“Yes.”

Prime Minister al-Maliki cleared his throat again. “Yesterday I received an unexpected phone call from the American vice president himself.”

“Oh my.” Soleimani raised his curved eyebrows politely.

Al-Maliki frowned and responded, “As you say. The call lasted some time, and that man does go around and around once he gets talking on an issue where he feels knowledgeable.”

General Soleimani smiled with his lips pressed together, then asked, “What did Joe Biden want, Nuri?”

Al-Maliki rubbed his hands together. “Right. Well, he mentioned Quds Force, meaning…he mentioned you. By name. In particular.”

The general leaned forward indulgently, like a psychotherapist. “And?”

The prime minister slumped back in his leather swivel chair and threw his hands onto the desk, palms up. “And he said, verbatim, ‘Prime Minister, you need to stop letting that son of a bitch Qasem Soleimani use Iraqi airspace to resupply Assad’s army from Iran.’”

“So are you?” Soleimani leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped.

Al-Maliki took a sip from the blue porcelain coffee cup in front of him that had been empty for ten minutes. He licked his lips and cast his eye downwards as he said, “The vice president has the ability to make things very difficult for me, General Soleimani. He is still a very powerful man in America’s congress, and that means he can squeeze me when it comes to things that Iraq still needs. I can’t rule this country without that American aid flowing through Baghdad to the provinces. My Shiite constituency won’t support me if I make this country destitute, and that’s not even to speak of the Sunni sheikhs that I have to outright bribe to keep from throwing in their lot with al-Qaida to stop a Shiite like me from ruling in Baghdad.”

“So are you?” Soleimani repeated.

The prime minister rubbed his eyes. “Obama was sending a message by having Joe Biden call, you know. Ever since America invaded, he’s been the main person calling for this country to be split into three pieces: one for the Kurds, another for Sunnis, and a rump for us Shiites.”

Al-Maliki tried to take another nervous sip from the empty blue porcelain cup. As he did so, Soleimani reached forward and gripped the cup’s equally blue saucer between thumb and forefinger. Then he gingerly pulled it back towards him, so the prime minister had nothing to hide behind. The saucer scraped across the table like a cheap ashtray on a bar top.

“Four hundred and fifty million dollars U.S., Nuri. That’s how much you’re worth to me alive. That’s how much I paid to have you elected to your position, counting the bribes, threats, and military hardware I needed to fritter away on your rivals so that no one opened your throat at night. Do you know why I did that? Do you know why my Supreme Leader would authorize those kind of expenditures on a venal, balding has-been like you?”

Al-Maliki looked at Soleimani, trying to play it cool as he rehashed a line he’d said behind closed doors a dozen times. He answered, “Master Khamenei spent that money because Iran lived in terror of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni dictatorship for thirty years. With American troops on Iran’s eastern doorstep in Afghanistan, you needed to secure Iraq by installing someone you trusted. You needed a Shiite politician who can work a local pro-Iranian constituency, and you realized I’m the best at all of those things, whether you want to insult me or not.”

Soleimani pushed the blue china onto the floor. It broke with the tinkling clang of a falling wind chime.

Soleimani continued, “I paid that much for you because I can read a map. If Iraq is sympathetic to Iran’s interests, then Iran can supply Assad while he wins the Syrian civil war. If Syria is secure, that means Iran can continue to supply Hezbollah in Lebanon. If Hezbollah is well-supplied, Iran can continue to threaten Israel. If Israel is threatened, Iran still has leverage over America. That’s it,” he shrugged and waved one hand towards the shards of blue porcelain on the ground, “So long as I can still read that map, the makeup of Iraqi government is incidental to us. You were the easiest Shiite politician in Baghdad to sell on the mass market. If this conversation keeps going the way it is now, I’ll make some calls and find out which of you is the second easiest.”

Al-Maliki lit another cigarette and collected his thoughts before responding, “Am I speaking with the Revolutionary Guard, or with Master Khamenei right now?”

Soleimani’s eyes narrowed. “You’re speaking with
me
. If that ever changes, it means your bald ass is about to be hanged then dragged through the streets like Saddam Hussein.”

Soleimani reached into his pocket and took out a black clamshell mobile phone. He flipped it open and scanned through the directory. Every name and number would have been worth a fortune in Langley. He stopped towards the bottom of the alphabet and put his thumb on the green “call” button before holding it up to the prime minister.

Al-Maliki said, “You can’t be serious. You’re going to replace me with
Muqtada al-Sadr
? That doughy little bastard who thinks he’s a king because his Mahdi Army conquered a slum in Baghdad then renamed it ‘Sadr City?!’”

Soleimani offered a muffled laugh, “He is an insufferable little shit, but he has three edges you lack. First, as you noticed, he has a private standing army. Second, he’s ruthless enough to put his predecessor on a meat hook. Once I tell him to kill you, street dogs will be eating your carcass within an hour. Third, he’s an insufferable little shit with enough common sense to understand the principle of being
bought
, whereas you…” Soleimani shrugged and left it at that.

He held the phone to his ear and prepared to make the call, because Qasem Soleimani never bluffed. But he did almost drop the phone when it rang on its own accord. He didn’t recognize the number, but with the flip-top of his phone open, he’d already answered the call automatically.

Old habits die hard, so Soleimani answered the anonymous phone call by breaking into thickly accented Afghani Pashtun to give away nothing about himself. He said, “Identify yourself.”

“Qasem, Sir—it’s Jamsheed. They did it to me again. They put me in a room with a video camera, they beat me, and they make me give a false confession before killing me. Were you part of it?”

Soleimani’s eyes widened. His normally icy veins throbbed at his temples. The man on the other end of the phone sounded broken and insane. That wasn’t the voice of Jamsheed Mashhadi. Something had happened in Syria, and for once, Qasem Soleimani knew nothing about it.

He replied, “Jamsheed, what happened? Speak slowly and collect your thoughts.”

“
Were you or weren’t you a fucking part of it, Qasem
?!”

Soleimani looked at Nuri al-Maliki, who understood enough Farsi to enjoy the show. Soleimani threw the Iraqi a look that could have set stone on fire, and replied, “I sent you to Syria at the personal request of the Supreme Leader, Colonel Mashhadi. That’s all I know. Now tell me: what has happened?”

“You promised me, Qasem. You promised me that if I fought for you, those fucking parasites in their black robes would never get another chance to betray me. You lied.”

The general stood up. Soleimani had less than a high school education, but he knew how to read men by their eyes, their faces, and the slightest timbre in their voices. Something had happened in Syria, and it had left his deadliest agent insane. Soleimani needed to stop him immediately.

He said, “Colonel Mashhadi—Jamsheed—are you someplace with internet access? I’d like to video conference you for a moment so I can see what those bastards did to you, and we can work on getting you out of there.”

“I’m in a truck heading north out of Damascus, Qasem. I killed the ayatollahs’ ambassador and blew up their embassy.”

Soleimani replied, “
Our
embassy, Jamsheed. What did you do to
our
embassy?”

“I knew you would side with them in the end. All you need now is a turban and a black bathrobe, you fucking traitor,” Jamsheed intoned venomously.

Soleimani could read the man’s voice. There was nothing left inside Jamsheed Mashhadi to be reasoned with.

The general said, “Jamsheed…you need to tell me what happened to you. That’s the only way I can make things right.”

“You can’t make things right. All you can do is watch.”

The call ended. Qasem Soleimani didn’t bother trying to call Jamsheed Mashhadi back. The man wasn’t going to answer. Instead, he searched through his numbers for a particular officer who commanded Vahdati Airbase outside Dezful, Iran. Vahdati Airbase was the closest Iranian air base to Iraq, and therefore the closest Iranian airbase to northwestern Syria.

Orders were given.

Qasem Soleimani ended the phone call and felt eyes on his back. Nuri al-Maliki was leaning back in his leather chair, smoking a cigarette. Little lines on the side of the Iraqi’s eyes told Soleimani that the prime minister was enjoying himself.

“I need to ask you for something, Prime Minister.”

Al-Maliki nodded his head in mock gravity, like a funeral attendee mourning a distant relative. “Of course, General. As long as I hold this office, I will always be a staunch friend of Iran and the Revolutionary Guard.”

Soleimani picked up his cheap chair and threw it across al-Maliki’s desk before the prime minister knew what was happening. It shattered into pieces of compressed wood when it hit the balding man, who fell out of his chair with a groan.

Nuri al-Maliki theoretically commanded an army of one million American-trained soldiers. Iraq was a country of twenty-five million people sitting on the world’s second largest oil reserves. None of that mattered to Soleimani as he walked around Nuri al-Maliki’s desk and put one of his black wingtip shoes under the Iraqi’s jaw. Soleimani ignored the blood on al-Maliki’s head and the starry, concussed look in the man’s eyes that probably kept him from understanding the gravity of his situation. Soleimani just cocked his ankle back, so the tip of his shoe forced al-Maliki to look upward.

Soleimani told him calmly, “Keep Iraqi airspace open for me, Nuri. I’ll have jets crossing it soon. Now go clean yourself up and tell people you fell down the stairs drinking last night. And never look at me that way again, or I’ll take out your eyes.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Ambrose parked their open-top truck on a hill two miles east of the city of Qusair, about fifteen minutes before dawn. Qusair sat in the bottomland of a semiarid valley just a few miles from the Lebanese border, where a chain of foothills on the horizon indicated the starting line of Hezbollah’s hidden labyrinth of bunkers. The city beneath them was a graveyard of buildings that were either toppled entirely or left standing with their guts blown out and pillars of smoke rising from within them. War had bleached them all the whitish grey color of campfire ash. It reminded Ambrose of his boyhood in Oregon, where he’d seen the chalky remnants of an old growth forest on the California border right after the biggest forest fire of the decade.

“You agreed to take a child into that,” Celestine murmured in English.

Ambrose had only slept for a few hours in the mineshaft before they got on the road. He didn’t have the energy to argue, so he just said, “We’d be going there with or without him. Remember it’s
your
boss who told us we’d get information about Tuva from Hezbollah in Qusair.”

She looked at the boy, who slept in the back with his arms cradled around his rifle. “According to you, Gideon only said that because you’d already decided we were
all
going to Qusair,” Celestine replied.

He grunted and looked through a set of field glasses they’d found in the glove box, which was the only piece of useable military equipment al-Qaida hadn’t stripped from the rig. Beneath him in the valley, the morning light revealed a strange line of dust-covered shapes trickling towards the city from the hills all around them. They were armed men wearing every type of clothing imaginable, so long as it was tattered: suits, military uniforms, jeans and T-shirts, even the flowing robes favored by Saudis and other Gulf Arabs. Many of them had headbands reading “God Is Great” in Arabic lettering, while others showed their piety by counting on prayer beads and murmuring Quranic verses as they trudged into the burning city. One of them carried a black, green, and white banner indicating they fought for the Free Syrian Army, the largest militia opposing Assad. The rising sun kept revealing more of them, until Ambrose realized that hundreds of rebel fighters were converging on Qusair with pistols, rifles, rockets, and swords.

“Nah, I agreed to take us
all
into that,” Ambrose said. He turned to the back seat and spoke in Arabic, “Hey kid, wake up. You’re home.”

The boy responded with the calm voice of a person who had learned to wake up and function instantly. “Good.” He pointed a finger down into the valley, where his young eyes could clearly make out some of the men beneath them, despite the fact Ambrose had needed binoculars to do the same. “Take me towards the one with the banner. I fought for Abu Mansur’s brigade, and he had friends in the Free Syrian Army.”

Celestine gingerly cleaned her cracked glasses, taking care not to hurt the things further. “And how do you propose we do that without getting shot up in the process? This still looks like a Syrian Army truck, boy,” she observed.

He made that skeptical Syrian clicking sound then said, “Actually it looks like an al-Qaida truck. That’s what the black stripes along the side mean.”

Celestine muttered something in French then started talking to the kid, but Ambrose sat with his fingers crossed, tapping on his lips and thinking. Then he broke in, saying, “That’s a bunch of devout Muslims down there, isn’t it kid? A pretty manly, pious bunch?”

The boy hummed in a thoughtful, preternaturally adult way before responding, “Many of them, but not all. Abu Mansur was, but the Free Syrian Army is supposed to welcome every man who wants to fight.”

Ambrose chuckled for a second, even though his sternum and ribs hated him for it. “Every man who wants to fight. Perfect,” he turned to Celestine and said, “Alright, Mademoiselle Lemark; time to climb on the hood.”

She’d been midway through lighting one of his cigarettes with the sterling Zippo, but she took her finger off the fire and snapped at him from the side of her mouth. “Come again?”

Ambrose motioned for her to finish lighting the thing so he could also have a drag. The cigarette situation had reached the point that sensible rationing was required. “Think about it: we’re driving an open-topped jihadist jeep through the middle of a civil war that’s drowning in homoeroticism. The absolute last thing you’d see on an actual al-Qaida jeep is a woman sitting on the hood like it was a Def Leppard video,” he said with a smile.

“What in the fu—“

The boy broke in with his tyrannical young voice, “No, he’s right—he only made it
sound
stupid. If I was on lookout and saw a truck driving towards me with a woman on its hood, I’d only take out the tires or put a hole in the engine block. I wouldn’t kill them until after Abu Mansur interrogated them.”

It was a lousy endorsement, but Ambrose would work with what he had. He raised his eyebrows to show off both big blue eyes and shrugged innocently. Celestine cursed them both as she climbed onto the passenger’s side of the hood, gripping the manifold tightly with both hands. Ambrose tried to hide his smirk as he thought of how shitty a time she’d have as their jeep rumbled over those shattered roads. The boy didn’t make a sound. He just wrapped his hands tighter around the stock of his rifle.

* * *

Ambrose didn’t mind frontal assaults against long odds—he’d done it twice in two days, if getting arrested in Latakia counted—but he could admit to himself that their present course of action wasn’t exactly sound. He had a French-Israeli spy being jostled six ways from hell across the hood of his truck, a child soldier in the back seat eager to get back to killing people, and he was driving into a herd of pious militants as they marched towards a burning warzone, all on the assumption that somewhere on the
other
side of that warzone, there would be an enemy commander capable of telling him where Ambrose could find the deadliest man in Syria. But that slice of madness would come later. First, there were his new best friends in the so-called Free Syrian Army.

He wasn’t taking any chances. Once Ambrose started driving, he realized that the kid was right; they were such an odd scene that no one had opened fire on them yet. After crossing the no man’s land between the crest of the hill and the flatland where the militants marched, he slowed the truck to a crawl and they approached the middle ranks of the gunmen in a slow-motion cloud of dust. He stopped in front of the most respectable-looking guerrilla he could find—a man of forty, or maybe twenty-five plus three years of civil war. He wore green fatigues with holes where Syrian army badges of rank should have been. There were enough to indicate he’d been an officer, and the other soldiers left him a big enough space bubble to indicate he still had an officer’s aura of command around him.

The ex-officer spared a cursory look at Celestine on the hood before walking over to the driver’s side. He had thick stubble, and the hairless parts of his face were grimy with sweat and smoke to the point that it might have taken a decade to scrub him clean. He had the sad, tired eyes of a graveyard shift hospice worker standing vigil without coffee. He took in Ambrose just as nonchalantly, then he spoke to the boy.

He said, “You were with Abu Mansur. You’re the sniper who covered his retreat from Homs. Where are the rest of them? Why is there a woman on your hood?”

The boy replied, “Dead from gas. We made it to a bunker, but everyone else died by yesterday. Abu Mansur was the last to go.” He pointed towards Celestine, who had freed her hands from under the manifold and was painfully flexing her grimy fingers. “She’s alright. We made her ride on the hood so you wouldn’t shoot us. She tried to help Abu Mansur, but it was too late.”

Ambrose was proud of the kid for cutting through the bullshit and letting himself acknowledge what had really happened back in that bunker. Ambrose added, “By the time we got there, most of them were dead. Abu Mansur and another man had suffered serious lung damage, we think from chlorine gas. He died of shock when she tried to operate on his gunshot wound.” The man made no response, so Ambrose continued, “Before he died, Abu Mansur asked us to reunite the boy with the rest of his militia here in Qusair.”

The soldier didn’t comment on Ambrose’s Iraqi Arabic accent, or ask about their nationalities. “Abu Mansur’s brigade might be somewhere in the city. We evacuated Homs together, but I haven’t heard from them since. They were marching here directly, but I got sidetracked trying to gather more men. Hezbollah is making its stand here, and so must we.”

The boy chimed in, “If there’s fighting, the Abu Mansur Brigade will be in the middle of it. If no one has seen them, that’s because no one else has the courage to go where the fighting is thickest.”

The soldier looked at the kid and paused before responding, “The fighting is thickest right underneath the medium range of Hezbollah’s artillery. If that’s where they went, then that’s where they died.” There was nothing patronizing in his voice, nothing to indicate he was talking with a child. They were soldiers, brothers in arms talking through the best way for both of them to die.

Celestine said, “If the boy’s allies are dead, we’re going to get him somewhere else safe. Does the Free Syrian Army have a refugee center in the area? Where have the civilians from Qusair and Homs been fleeing?”

The ex-officer turned to face her. Ambrose wondered when the man had last seen a woman who wasn’t crying or running for her life. The soldier said, “Nowhere is safe. The civilians flee wherever they can, and it is never enough. Sometimes we fight just to give them a chance to run an extra kilometer on foot. God alone knows whether we’re ever successful.” He looked back at the boy. “I’m here to command the Free Syrian Army, Third Homs Brigade. We are setting up positions on the eastern edge of Qusair. The goal is to bleed Hezbollah until they’re desperate to negotiate. If we threaten to close off their prime transport route from Syria into Lebanon they might withdraw from the war entirely. We can always use snipers, boy.”

The boy replied, “I fight for the Abu Mansur Brigade.”

“By your own account, Abu Mansur is dead and martyred. So are any of his men who fought in Qusair. Help us save some civilians before God calls you home,” the officer suggested.

Ambrose interrupted, “You’re not sure that all of the kid’s brigade is dead, right? How can we find that out?”

The kid responded, “We have radio codes. I can contact them if you give me something with access to military bandwidths.”

Ambrose and Celestine shared another mutual frown, as both of them seemed to wonder why the kid hadn’t mentioned that earlier. Celestine shook her head and said to Ambrose in English, “I’ve been searching through this truck for hours, looking for anything we could use, and there wasn’t much. Those binoculars, the pistol you’ve carried in your belt, that’s it,” she pointed down at the hole in the truck’s dashboard, “Those al-Qaida bastards stripped the truck’s radio equipment, and I haven’t found any handheld units in here. We’re deaf and dumb.”

He nodded, then spoke to the group in Arabic, “We don’t have any way of contacting your people, kid. If the Free Syrian Army has equipment, do you think you can use it?”

The kid nodded, gripping the neck of his rifle.

The soldier looked at the lot of them then ran his tongue under his lip like he had food in his teeth. He said, “Give me a ride to our position in Qusair and the boy may use our radio to contact his brigade. If they don’t respond, he stays to help us.”

Ambrose said nothing. He motioned for the soldier to hop into the truck then he drove them into the grey stillness of east Qusair.

As they drove, he looked back at the silent soldier and asked, “You didn’t mention what happens to two suspicious foreigners once we get to your base.”

The soldier shrugged. “You’re white but you don’t seem Russian, which means you’re not working for Assad, she’s just a woman, and neither of you have enough weaponry to help us. I don’t care who you are or what you do.”

* * *

Based on the looks they received as Ambrose drove their truck up to the Free Syrian Army’s base, he thought the rebel commander had slightly misstated things. There were forty armed men flanking the scorched marble facade of what looked like a French colonial era courthouse, and all of them were eyeballing Ambrose and Celestine. Those were hard brown eyes, sunk deep in the heads of hard-looking men. It reminded Ambrose of his second diplomatic posting, in Tajikistan, where he’d met men who fought during the Afghan-Soviet war. Whether they were blue-eyed Russians or green-eyed Afghans, both types of veteran had eyes that told you how easy it was to kill another human, once you’d done it a few times. Practice made perfect, just like with shoelaces. He wondered whether people saw that in his eyes, too.

As the men on the steps stood up with rifles cocked, their commander held up his hands to show that the truck wasn’t about to suicide bomb them or erupt with Assad’s soldiers. Despite his reassurances, armed men soon flanked the truck, with ten of them shouting at once. One demanded to know who they were, another screamed
where you come from
in broken English, and the rest harangued the sad-eyed commander with similar questions.

The commander’s voice ripped through the commotion like a fire eating oil. “They’re harmless. The boy fought with Abu Mansur, and I’m letting him use our radio to find out whether any of his comrades are alive,” he stood up and climbed over the side of the truck, hopping down with a puff of powdered rock, “I’ll take the boy inside. In the meantime do your jobs: ignore the foreigners and watch out for shells or Hezbollah scouts.”

As the commander and the sniper boy walked under the lintel of that cavernous building, Celestine picked up Ambrose’s red bag from the floor of the truck. He marked how itchy that made a lot of Syrian trigger fingers, but she yelled
cigarettes
and the men stood down. Soon she and Ambrose were leaning against the driver’s side of the truck, taking in the moonscape of wartime Qusair.