Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Haddad saw the American and the Iranian off in the armored Humvee that his troops had commandeered for prisoner transport. There was a chance those two mean would get weapons and turn the vehicle into a bloodbath, but he decided he’d rather risk that carnage than let them travel in separate vehicles and potentially escape. More importantly, he needed to talk with the Israeli bitch alone. He’d heard Mashhadi speak to her in French. Haddad hadn’t studied the language since secondary school in Lebanon, where the ex-colonial language was still mandatory, in some schools, but he could try to dredge it up, given the stakes of inaction. It was the only way he could communicate without his men hearing him. They were loyal to a fault, but Hezbollah loyalty stopped well short of overlooking Israeli collaborators, which is just what Haddad felt like he was about to become.

He put on a good show of shoving her into the back seat of his open-topped truck with his left hand. His right hand was numb, but at least it had stopped bleeding since he wrapped it in a field dressing. Once they were moving, the Israeli barely acknowledged him. She was lost in her own mind, calmly meditating on the hot scrubland around them. Those thick glasses (what was left of them) and unkempt hair made him think of a demented librarian, but he knew better; Mossad agents were Israeli military, first and foremost. If he rubbed her the wrong way, he didn’t put it past the little woman to kill him where he sat.

So he leaned in cautiously and said in French, “We need to talk.”

She looked at him peripherally. Her eyes were smaller when seen from the side, where her lenses couldn’t magnify them. Without the obstruction they also lost their befuddled librarian’s ignorance, and he saw someone with dark and hungry eyes belonging to a bird of prey.

“In French, no less,” she nodded at the backs of the men in the front seat, “This should be good.”

“It is. Keep speaking French, please.”

She turned to face Haddad, raking her brown eyes across his face. “If you annoy me, I repeat this whole conversation in Arabic. Loudly.”

Haddad had several race-specific comments to make, but the Jewish bitch had him, for the moment, and somehow she knew it. He choked it down, saying, “Simple question: is the American good enough to kill…the other one?”

She pursed her lips like a gambler who wouldn’t back down, shaking her head. “No. Iran bought Hezbollah decades ago, and the ‘Supreme Leader’ isn’t going to let Lebanese cannon fodder like you spoil his plans now.”

“Iran never sent someone like him before.”

“They’ve sent him or someone like him to Lebanon a thousand times, and you never cared because they came with guns and money. You could overlook the insanity for guns and money. Now you’re actually dealing with an honest-to-god child of Khomeini, and you don’t know how to handle seeing the real fucking face of your masters,” she sneered.

“Enough,” he hissed, holding up his wounded hand to show a bandage soaked through with blood. “This is where we’re at, and I have zero faith in what Mashhadi will do once he puts those canisters into warheads. He’s using me to get there, and once he’s there, we’re all dead.”

“So you want us to kill him.”

“I
need
you to kill him.” Haddad looked around the car, around the scrubland, around the whole damned country desperately as he formulated an answer, before adding: “To save Hezbollah lives, I’ll kill any Iranian. But that doesn’t mean my men will understand why I did it, or help me with the deed.”

She
tsk-tsked.
“A convoy of the Hidden Imam’s bravest warriors, the saviors of Lebanon, and your only option is cutting a deal with a CIA agent and a Mossad operative. How’s it feel to be the laziest idiot in the history of Arab terrorism?”

Haddad clicked his tongue, doing the Lebanese
“no”
thing as he channeled the composure not to strangle her. “You Israelis love getting Hezbollah wrong. That’s why we’re the only movement you’ve never broken. You don’t understand why I need you both alive for this to work.”

“Bullshitting, that’s why,” she smiled. “If he dies, everyone will know it. But if he dies because we killed him while in Hezbollah custody, it’s too embarrassing to ever mention to
anyone
.”

“As you say. But if
you
die in the attempt, then someone will brag about killing you, and then the other death comes out as well.”

Her smile was pitiless. “So we need to escape intact, and that’s your part of this scheme. You haven’t asked my price yet.”

“You’re in no position to bargain, woman.”

“Neither are you, you son of a bitch. So I want the weapons. All of them. Hezbollah gets
nothing
out of this, do you understand? Nothing but your lives, and I’m going to make sure that’s a short term arrangement also, once I’m back at Mossad.”

He ignored the threat and actually laughed at the absurdity of his situation. His men noticed. He needed to end things soon.

“God, woman—I was going to
give
you the weapons. Fuck Russia for building them, fuck Assad for buying them, and fuck us for wanting them.”

“And fuck you for betraying your own organization to help some Hebrew bitch destroy them, right?” She looked Haddad right in the eye. He’d never had a Jew look him in the eye before. It was…unsettling.

“Woman,” he frowned, “I think I was fucked the second I entered Syria. How are you going to kill our target?”

She looked northwest towards a while limestone shape sitting on a hilltop, ablaze in the evening sunlight. Even from a distance,
Krak des Chevaliers
was one hell of a castle.

“There will be some type of rocketry on site, won’t there? Give me ten minutes with their fuel reserves and the Iranian will be in hell before he even knows he died.”

There wasn’t a shred of arrogance in her voice, because she was no longer a little woman with cracked glasses and a bad haircut. It was Mossad talking, and the cold surety of Mossad’s voice sent a shiver up Haddad’s spine.

“And what…what about the other one? What part will he be playing in this?”

The Mossad woman’s face flattened into a smooth, cruel mask. “You let him loose to distract Mashhadi near the rocketry, and my device tears them both apart.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The greatest medieval castle on earth isn’t in Europe; it’s on a hill in western Syria, surrounded by small villages and the nighttime yowling of wildcats. The local Arab villagers called it the “Fortress of Homs,” among other names, but to the French crusaders who built it during the crusades of the eleventh century it was
Krak des Chevaliers
: Fortress of the Knights. They built it from Syria’s yellow-white limestone, forcing Arab serfs to quarry thousands of huge bricks and pile them into a castle stronger than anything in Europe. Because unlike in Europe, where even the best castle was built partly for show, the crusader kings who conquered a sliver of the Islamic heartland knew that they were living on borrowed time. So they built up a monster of stone with a moat, thirteen towers, an entire castle-within-a-castle, and a barracks big enough to house a thousand knights with their warhorses. To modern Syrians it was a shameful reminder of European domination, so they’d let the place fall into ruin. Nevertheless, it was awesome in its decrepitude.

Ambrose was furious with himself for not thinking of the place earlier. He’d studied the Middle East for twenty years and knew all about Krak and the other ancient crusader fortresses spread across Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, but he’d never thought that Syrians would refer to it as the “Fortress of Homs,” even though it was a fortress only thirty damned miles from Homs. Frowning, he thought about how he’d seen those crates full of anti-aircraft weaponry bound for the castle back in Zubair’s smuggling den. He’d known about the place for three days, and hadn’t put the information together until he and Celestine had driven across half of western Syria. In the meantime, who knew how many defenses Hezbollah and Assad’s army had installed in the complex? Hell, if Ambrose got himself killed, who knew whether an Israeli airstrike could even take the place out? The IAF had plenty of advanced bunker busters, bought mainly to destroy Iran’s hardened nuclear sites, but he wasn’t sure whether the IAF could use them without starting a war in the process.

“Such an incredible thing,” Jamsheed said, snapping Ambrose out of his meditations and making him feel even more furious with himself. For six years Ambrose had dreamt of what he’d do with even ten seconds in front of Jamsheed Mashhadi and now, after a few quiet hours spent in a Humvee together, he’d softened to the point of daydreaming. Idiot.

“Yeah, it’s worth a postcard,” Ambrose answered. “Tell me one more thing, Jamsheed—how in the hell were you planning to hit Israel with those weapons? I saw the artillery they shipped here, and it didn’t include long-range rockets.”

“Not to worry; my Syrian attaché and I have covered that contingency. Now let me ask you a question: Americans can’t study in Iran, so white CIA agents don’t speak Farsi. Why do you?”

Ambrose shrugged. “If you’re an asshole to enough Persian girlfriends, you get to hear a lot of people speak in loud Farsi.”

“That’s sad.”

The American nodded. “Yeah, a couple times, at least. Now I have a serious question for you, and I don’t think I’ll get another chance, so please, please, please answer me: what in the fuck actually happened to your fingernails?”

Jamsheed’s lips thinned and his glassy eyes froze hard. “I suppose it was a misunderstanding.”

Ambrose cracked a crooked smile Celestine would’ve been proud of. “But now that you’re back in the fold killing Israelis and Americans, all’s been forgiven?”

“Evidently not.”

Ambrose didn’t respond and Jamsheed didn’t elaborate. Instead they just peeked out the same narrow window slit, watching the castle grow bigger on the hill above them. The sun was sinking low in the west, making the castle’s reflective white-yellow blocks glow orange and red like the gates of hell.

Their Humvee stopped at the edge of the outer wall, on the eastern end of the fortress. There might have been a guardhouse there, once, but someone had blown it apart with a controlled demolition that left behind a scorched pile of rubble that workers with machinery had pushed aside to form an entrance. The original medieval gate might have been large enough for wagons to pass through side by side. The new hole was big enough to accommodate a military truck, and anything it carried on it.

They parked next to the three trucks driven by Haddad’s crew, and to his relief Ambrose finally saw Celestine, standing unscathed next to Haddad.

She looked at him and flashed the ghost of a smile. For just a second he ignored the twelve Hezbollah men, ignored Jamsheed, and ignored Jamsheed’s weird little Syrian driver (or “attaché,” as Jamsheed had called him) that was getting out of the third truck. All he saw was Celestine, smiling at him with her cracked glasses, wild hair, and thin, saturnine face. And he thought it would all turn out okay.

But he was daydreaming again. He knew it when Haddad’s voice cut through his bullshit fantasy with a crisp command of “Get them into the castle.”

Hezbollah complied, and made sure that all sixteen of them marched across the parade grounds separating the inner castle from the outer wall. They walked through the tracks of heavy wheeled vehicles that had torn up the ground as they rolled inward, towards another hole Ambrose could see in the wall of the inner castle.

Ambrose beheld what the Syrians had been doing inside the castle with Zubair’s armaments, and wished the “Fortress of Homs” had stayed in those crates. He counted three separate anti-aircraft batteries in the yard and a fourth one that the Syrians had somehow gotten atop a west-facing tower. That emplacement was smart: one battery on the tower would draw the attention of enemy planes, and the three batteries inside the castle itself could then light up the attackers that closed in to take out the tower’s defenses. Each battery must have contained half a dozen rockets that looked like shiny white spear, eight feet long, stamped with launching operations in red Russian letters. Now he
really
wasn’t sure whether Gideon’s airstrike could penetrate the place if Ambrose failed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Jamsheed standing in the ruined entrance of the castle’s inner keep, taking in the sight of all those rockets with his bright, doomed eyes. As the other Hezbollah fighters dispersed to service the rocket batteries, Ambrose took a chance and slid in close to Haddad, who walked slowly with his good hand wrapped around the back of Celestine’s neck.

“Commander,” he whispered, “we need to talk.”

The closest Hezbollah men raised their weapons to kill him, but Haddad waved them off with a flick of his head. “Yes,” he said, not showing a shred of interest in whatever might come next.

Ambrose looked furtively back at Jamsheed, fifteen feet away, and whispered, “You can’t let the Iranian get his hands on those weapons.”

“Can’t I?”

Ambrose responded, “If you show him any of the rocketry, he’s going to arm it with the nerve gas—then fire it at Israel.”

The Hezbollah commander clicked his tongue “Nothing here can hit Israel. He’d be lucky if these anti-aircraft rockets flew twenty miles to the Lebanese border.”

“How about those?” Ambrose asked as he pointed across the yard, towards the shadows underneath the northern castle wall.

Haddad was about to respond, but stopped in mid-syllable. Instead, he let in a breath, then let it out through clenched teeth. “I…how those got here, I don’t…” he trailed off weakly.

“So I’m not imagining those, am I?” He looked at Celestine, who was quietly taking in the long, dark forms of three medium-range SCUD missiles on mobile launch trucks, parked in the far end of the yard.

“No, American, you’re not imagining that,” Haddad said in a whisper, his eyes flitting between the missiles, Ambrose, and Jamsheed, who was walking straight towards the SCUDs.

Ambrose grabbed Haddad by the arm and forced him to meet Ambrose’s bloodshot gaze. “You didn’t know that missiles would be here—but he did. How? Who else got involved in securing the castle?”

Haddad pierced Ambrose with his golden hunter’s eyes. There was something vacant to them. Something had been hollowed out of them by surprise. Or naked fear. “The Syrians established the site months ago in cooperation with Iran. I wasn’t even aware of this installation until my high command in Beirut told me about Mashhadi and the nerve gas stockpile. Mashhadi is Revolutionary Guard: he has contacts up and down the Syrian army, and it wouldn’t have taken much effort to call a counterpart and get details about this installation’s capabilities. He might have even ordered the SCUDs installed here himself.”

The American drew a quivering hand across his haggard face and said, “Jamsheed spent the entire Humvee ride acting like he didn’t know where we were going.”

Haddad ground his teeth in a way that made his silver beard ripple. “Then he was lying.”

“Then you just escorted an insane master bomb maker in a martyr’s headband to a fully equipped missile launch site stocked with a hundred warheads full of nerve gas,” Ambrose pulled Haddad closer, fully aware that his voice was cracking, “So
do what needs doing.
Get that second pistol out of your belt, walk up, and unload the clip into his fucking back.”

“Commander Haddad,” Jamsheed’s smooth voice cut through their argument and the ambient background clanging of armed men servicing heavy weaponry, “Please move these SCUDs into the middle of the yard. I will need better access to them.”

“They won’t work where they are, Colonel?” Haddad asked.

Jamsheed raised his eyebrows dismissively. “The Tuva canisters might not be sized to fit in something as large as a SCUD. I’ll need to try loading each missile, to see if they fit properly.”

“All three of them. Loaded.” Haddad wasn’t asking a question.

“
Get them to the yard
, Haddad. And find me men to help with Tuva. It’s time to get things operational,” Jamsheed snapped.

Ambrose had time for one last exchange with Haddad. “Your Hidden Imam’s not giving you another shot at this, Commander,” he said, sounding like a drunk man begging a tow truck driver not to take his car.

Haddad smacked Ambrose across the face with the butt of his automatic pistol. Ambrose fell to one knee with what felt like a partially-sunken cheekbone and pain that made his eyes water. Haddad had missed the eye itself, however, even though it would have been just as easy to blind him. He hadn’t hit Ambrose at full strength, either.

The Hezbollah commander looked at him and spoke urgently. “Sit there and shut up, Yankee.” Then he called over six of his men and said, “Make the American sit down and keep quiet.” He pointed at one of the men. “We don’t have anything to bind him with, so just put that Kalashnikov barrel on the back of his neck. If he tries to move, decapitate the rat.” He pointed at the other five men. “Go into the chapel and help Colonel Mashhadi move the chemical canisters out here. For God’s sake be careful when you do it.” He nodded his head towards Celestine. “I’ll take care of the Mossad bitch after I consult with Beirut by radio. Now everyone to their tasks, and we’ll be back in Lebanon by midnight.”

He grabbed Celestine by her wild hair and dragged her south, towards the main castle tower. She wasn’t struggling like she should have been, and it sickened Ambrose to think that she’d resigned herself to whatever Haddad had planned for her. Then his battered cheek reminded him of that weird look he’d seen in Haddad’s eyes a moment earlier, and an epiphany came to him: those two, Haddad and Celestine, had something going on, and he wasn’t privy to it. Ambrose also didn’t believe for a moment that Haddad couldn’t have restrained Ambrose if he’d wanted to, even if it just meant him knocking him unconscious with a rifle butt. That meant things were worse than he’d suspected: Celestine and Haddad had a plan that
did
include him, but his part didn’t require a knowing participant.

Jamsheed passed the SCUDs and went north towards the ruins of the crusaders’ chapel, accompanied by Haddad’s five men. Ambrose figured that meant two things: first, Tuva was in the chapel. Second, Jamsheed had known Tuva’s location since before Qusair. He’d picked a fight with Ambrose just to keep Haddad off balance so the commander would take him to Tuva without having the opportunity to step back and rethink his mission. Grimacing as he connected the dots, Ambrose flared his nostrils and embraced the pain radiating off every cut and bruise on his body. Whatever Haddad and Celestine had planned, they didn’t accept what he already knew in his marrow: it wasn’t going to work. Jamsheed had just proven that you can’t out-scheme a dragon. The only way to stop him was to confront him…and end him.

Only six Hezbollah remained in the yard. Five had gone with Jamsheed, Haddad had vanished along with Lemark, and five were immersed in the deafening mechanical bustle of moving the anti-aircraft batteries away from the SCUDs. That left only one watching Ambrose. One was his lucky number. Ambrose let out a slow exhalation and tried to pop his neck before he felt the cold rim of a gun barrel press against his brainstem.

“No moving, Yankee bastard,” The Hezbollah fighter whispered in an anxious voice that suggested he hoped Ambrose would try anyway.

“Yeah, guess not,” Ambrose said to himself in Indonesian.

“What in the hell did you just say to me?” The barrel pressed down harder on the back of his neck, until Ambrose actually felt the metal lip trying to squeeze into a spot between two of his vertebrae.

Ambrose smiled as he kept up the Indonesian. “I said come closer and find out, jerk-off.”