Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (30 page)

Chapter Forty

Haddad had never been to the old French castle before, but Hezbollah had standard ways of maintaining forward positions, so it took him minimal effort to reckon that what he and the Israeli bitch needed would be in the great tower that dominated the southern end of the inner castle. The round hall in the base of the tower smelled like ancient secrets spiced with mildew, but was covered with modern battlefield electronics that he was certain the Mossad woman wanted to examine more closely. She tried not to look interested, but Haddad could read his enemy as surely as the Israeli thought she could read him. There was an intimacy to wanting someone dead. He showed her to a makeshift workbench made of plywood laid on a stack of empty cargo crates with “Fortress of Homs” written on them. Electrical wiring and receiver components covered the bench, providing everything a properly trained individual would need to make something go boom.

Grunting favorably, she picked up a bit of red wiring in her left hand and a walkie-talkie in a yellow rubber case in the other. She sat those on the table in front of her and then did likewise with black wiring and a little silver puck. The puck contained a small amount of high explosives called a booster charge, and had places to affix wiring that could lead to triggering mechanisms…like a walkie-talkie.

“These will work as a receiver and a blasting cap to ignite the semtex. How much semtex do you have on hand, anyway?” she asked.

Haddad an urban warfare tactician, not an explosives expert, but he knew enough about semtex to tell her, “My northern detachment took most of it to Aleppo last week, so they would have a way to eliminate sniper towers without wasting RPGs. We didn’t anticipate needing as much in Homs or Qusair, so there’s only a little on-hand.”

The Israeli pursed her brown lips as she looked at the detonator. “Alright. If the SCUDs are fueled, I won’t need much precursor explosive.” She held up the yellow walkie-talkie and began scanning ultra-high frequencies for something that would accept the signal she’d be sending from another handheld unit that matched the yellow one. “Give me a golf ball’s worth of semtex and let me get close to the middle SCUD. I’ll put this device right next to its fuel reservoirs and then we just have to wait for Mashhadi and the American to get close to it while they’re fighting. The ignited rocket fuel will do the rest.”

Haddad said, “Once Mashhadi is in the yard inspecting the weapons, I’ll let the American loose. I already hinted that there’s a plan in motion, so he’ll believe I’m maneuvering Mashhadi into a killing position. If the Iranian is really unloading those damned chemicals into the yard, that should put him close to the SCUDs.”

She grunted agreeably while tying a black wire into its red mate. She held part of the red wire gingerly between her incisors while she spoke, “In the meantime I’ll be standing in the archway of this building with this walkie-talkie detonator in hand. You’ll be in front of me. When the SCUDs explode, you’re going to scream that an airstrike is underway, and order your men to evacuate the castle.” She took the red wire out of her mouth and held the blasting cap towards him like some accursed talisman. “When you evacuate, you’ll leave me a truck. I’ll be here for another fifteen minutes, using the other implements in this room to destroy anything left of Tuva. Then you’ll never see or hear from me again.”

He assented. Five minutes later she was done, holding a yellow walkie-talkie wrapped in wire that led into a shiny blasting cap stuck halfway into a rust-colored glob of clay that was also shellacked onto the walkie-talkie. That claylike glob contained enough explosive power to cut a car in half.

“Now,” the Israeli said, “get me to that SCUD before Mashhadi is back in the yard.”

Haddad nodded, and summoned his nearby soldiers via radio. “All soldiers in the yard: meet me outside the command station. Except you, Hassan: maintain position and keep guarding the American.”

He and the Israeli shared a meaningful look. For a full second, their mutual anxiety and anticipation overshadowed the hate. Then it was back to business.

The five men from the yard converged on the tower entrance, and Haddad greeted them with his hands on his hips the way he customarily did when trying to take control of a situation. He cocked his head away from the SCUDs and said, “Walk with me. We need to check the perimeter defenses before all of us are up to our neck in those damned canisters, trying to arm the SCUDs.”

He stalked past the anti-aircraft rocket batteries that his men had moved to the south end of the yard in order to make room for the SCUDs. To the Israeli and American, it probably looked like Hezbollah had fortified the position. Haddad knew better: the Syrian military had transported those anti-aircraft batteries, and Syrians had assembled them very recently, probably on the orders of Jamsheed Mashhadi or his goddamned Syrian driver. Haddad had been completely outmaneuvered, and his only hope rested on two godless thugs from the most evil countries on earth.

The Hezbollah commanders led the fighters eastward, towards the gap in the castle wall where they’d entered. The Hezbollah men were following him, so he must have been masking his nervousness, at least for the moment.

Haddad thought he saw someone flit through the shadows at the edge of his vision, hugging the western castle wall.
Good
, he thought, the Israeli was doing her part. He had to keep buying her time to get the thing rigged, though. So he spent the next few minutes walking to and fro across the entrance of the yard, talking about potential points of attack, suggesting that the local remnants of al-Qaida might want revenge for what Hezbollah did to their encampment east of Homs. He made sure they discussed the motor pool of captured vehicles at the bottom of the ramp, making it clear that, in the event of an airstrike, all of them were to pile into the stolen Humvee and drive like hell, not attempt to get all of the slower trucks away from the castle. Assad could always give them more trucks.

For a man like Haddad that type of dissembling wasn’t a light matter, since guerrillas lived and died by trust in one another. He only hoped that ten minutes of lies was worth twelve of their lives, once things got underway.

They walked back to the southern half of the yard, where Haddad paused beside the three anti-aircraft emplacements and said: “I want all five of you manning these devices, starting now and lasting until I say otherwise.
Under no circumstances
are you to leave this post: while the Iranian works on those weapons we are at maximum exposure to a Zionist airstrike,” he clenched his intact fist and waved it under each of their noses, “And I will be damned if I let that happen, so you will stick to this post after Mashhadi comes back into this yard, or I’ll take the fillings out of your teeth with my field knife. You men could be all that stands between us and death under Jewish missiles.”
And from here you won’t be able to stop the American when he goes for Mashhadi, and you’ll be outside the primary blast radius of those SCUDs
, he thought.

The men nodded grimly in agreement. Now that Haddad had them accounted for, he needed to find Hassan, the one guarding the American, and order him to stand down from his post and join the others near the anti-aircraft battery.

But he scanned his eyes across the yard and saw nothing. Hassan and the American were gone.

Chapter Forty-One

Jamsheed stood smiling in a vaulted chamber supported by curved buttresses that made him feel like he stood in the belly of a whale. The cold white pulse of portable lights showcased faded European-style frescoes on the arches that told him this had been the crusaders’ church. The chamber was modest in its ruin, spanning about one hundred feet long and twenty feet high. There were a few windows, but otherwise it was a tight brick mass that hoarded stale air, cobwebs, and the hints of old memories.

The sound of his boots echoed heavily on the ground beneath him and made the whale’s belly grumble. Similar sounds gurgled up from behind him, telling Jamsheed that Haddad’s men had followed him. They would live a little while yet, he’d decided. That wouldn’t have been the case if all of the weapons had been in the yard like he’d hoped, but since some Arab genius had decided to stash the weapons in a stone tomb where even the slightest leak would be devastating, he still needed help actually getting the shells out into the yard. It would have been easier to tell the Syrians to put the cases in the yard along with the SCUDs he commanded them to deliver, but he couldn’t trust those pious nitwits with such precious cargo, or risk giving away the most sensitive part of his plan to a prickly local commander with a big mouth.

He knew that Hezbollah’s assistance might have to come without Haddad’s consent. The commander had sounded a sliver too interested in Jamsheed’s plan when he mentioned the SCUDs, and before that he’d been talking to Hayes, the man from Baghdad. He knew why: the American had gotten to Haddad’s ear and poisoned him, somehow, making Haddad forsake the cause of God and the Hidden Imam. Jamsheed had seen the Israeli woman begin staring off into space, resigned to her eventual death, but not so with the American; the Mossad were deadly, but the CIA were downright
venomous
, and it must have been child’s play for Hayes to sink his fangs deeply into a man as morally frail as Haddad.

Jamsheed wondered how many other Hezbollah fighters had been corrupted, but he already knew the answer: however many followed him into the chapel.

He would play along with their little game so long as Hezbollah helped him get those weapons out of the tunnel and into the SCUDs. Then he would kill Haddad last of all the Arabs. Jamsheed would break his legs and lay him face-up right beneath a Scud thruster. The force of the launching rocket would smash his skull into jelly and melt the flesh off his face like wax. Then the American and the Israeli would each get a bullet between the eyes, because they didn’t deserve anything more creative.

Beneath the main window of the chapel, next to the marble remnants of a medieval pulpit, sat a scene of beauty that cut through Jamsheed’s bloody calculations and forced him back to earth: a stack of metal cases, each the size of a child’s coffin, emblazoned with a fearsomely red hammer and sickle. All six crates were inscribed with volumes of stenciled warnings in Russian, a language that Jamsheed understood well enough where weapons were concerned.
Carry gently. Do not expose to extreme heat or cold. Do not store in unsecured premises. Transport only by air freight. Use only as directed. Caution—delicate medical supplies
.

“Indeed,” he whispered, creating the faintest trace of an echo against the old stone. The crates of Tuva canisters, bursting with sarin nerve gas, did not respond.

He took out a single canister and held it up to the nearest maggoty-white light. It was dull grey, about twenty inches long, as wide as a fire extinguisher, and weighed about twenty pounds, most of which was casing; Jamsheed knew the insides were virtually weightless. Like a bottled nightmare.

He savored every contour of the thing, from the tight-fitting bolt on its tail to the three coupling mechanisms on its sides and the delicate seam at the tip of its nose. He knew that every shell would have an identical seam, ensuring that they all broke under the exact same conditions of heat and impact. That was the only way to get out
all
of the gas, as the Soviets had discovered.

“Careful with that, Colonel. The manufacturers probably meant for those shells to be transported in their crates,” one of the Hezbollah men said from behind him.

Jamsheed couldn’t face him yet. Not until the smile disappeared from his face. He sucked in a big breath then set the shell down delicately on top of a closed crate, nose pointed outward. Composed, he turned around, saying, “Of course, Brother.” Then he tapped on the casing with his left hand, creating the basic rhythm of a DeBussy number he had played to a standing ovation on his first trip to Paris.

The vaulted chamber shook with gunfire, and the surprised Hezbollah fighter who’d spoken looked doubly shocked when a red hole of an exit wound shot bone and spongy chunks of lung out of his chest. Another crater opened in his stomach, and then he dropped. The man next to him absorbed twice as many shots before falling the same way. The other men collectively vaporized into a tangy red aerosol that smelled like meat left overnight in a broken refrigerator.

By that point Jamsheed had reflexively dropped onto his stomach to avoid the chest-high gunfire from the assault rifle. He knew from the gun’s particular roar that the shooter was using a Kalashnikov, which meant a Hezbollah fighter had gone rogue, or…

The shooting stopped and Jamsheed rose upright, knowing who he’d find staring at him.

Hayes dropped his Kalashnikov, pulled a handgun from his belt, and fired off a round before Jamsheed could even react. Jamsheed assumed he was dying, but instead felt the bullet whizz right by his head. Then he heard a pneumatic hiss that could have emerged from a hungry lizard, and Jamsheed tasted almonds in the back of his mouth. Hayes had shot open the single Tuva canister that Jamsheed left out of its crate, bathing the room in nerve gas.

“I told you we’re not done, Jamsheed,” said the man from Baghdad.

Chapter Forty-Two

While Haddad distracted his men on the eastern side of the castle yard, Celestine snuck through the shadows and planted her makeshift radio detonated bomb. Its mass of colored wires looked like a kid’s failed science experiment, but she knew better; she’d made dozens of similar devices across ten countries, and they always worked. That’s why she didn’t have an ounce of doubt about what would happen when she transmitted the detonator frequency from the walkie-talkie in her hand to its mate that she’d covered in wire and semtex: it would ignite a fuel reserve and create shrapnel that shredded men into tatters.

She crept back to the command center in the south tower just ahead of Haddad and the remaining Hezbollah thugs, all of whom were congregating around the nearby anti-aircraft batteries. She’d played nonchalant when she saw the things, but it was an act: those batteries were serious pieces of modern Russian hardware that could stop equally modern warplanes with stealth capabilities, which included the modified F-16s that formed the backbone of the Israeli Air Force.

Mossad trained its agents to engage every operation with at least one fallback plan, and Celestine was no exception: if they failed, she needed to make sure Gideon Patai’s airstrike could still succeed, and that was damned unlikely with those anti-aircraft batteries in place. She needed to get on Haddad’s comm system and warn Gideon about what his jets would be flying into, but she couldn’t do that until her targets were in position and she detonated the explosives. So she squeezed the walkie-talkie in her hand and mumbled the bomb maker’s prayer, which involved wishing the universe would hurry the hell up and put her victims into their proper positions.

She watched from the shadows of the tower entrance as Haddad ordered his men to take up position around the anti-aircraft batteries, just as he’d promised. Then he stopped commanding them mid-sentence, balled his good hand into a fist, and walked out into the middle of the yard, near the SCUDs. He swept his eyes across the scene, looking for something that wasn’t there. Celestine never put much faith in her eyes—they were lousy even when her glasses weren’t cracked to hell—but she still picked up on Haddad’s anxiety, because Ambrose Hayes and his guard were gone. She looked north across the yard, past the SCUDs towards the stone building he’d referred to as “the chapel.” That’s where Mashhadi had gone to retrieve the Tuva arsenal. That’s where Ambrose would be.

Celestine breathed in slowly, held it, and then breathed out just as deliberately. Stand or fall, she felt the calm of knowing that things were nearly finished.

Haddad might have felt that too, but for him the thought hadn’t been a calming one. He spun on his heels and walked towards the south tower at a fast trot, growling at his men to maintain their positions while promising that he wouldn’t be gone long.

Celestine stretched upward then popped her lower back, followed by her hips. Then she moved onto the balls of her feet to distribute her weight more evenly.

Haddad cleared the doorframe of the command center and raised his pistol up to her head, smiling a bit as he said, “Nice try, bitch. If you were stalling me so the American could get free and kill Mashhadi, that means I don’t need your little bomb anymore,” he clicked back the hammer, “Give my records to Satan once you’re swimming in hellfire.”

Celestine Lemark’s crooked smile could have frozen that hellfire. “Don’t you remember, Commander? I’m an Israeli. I
am
Satan.”

She pressed the transmit button on her walkie-talkie. The transmitted frequency hit its counterpart and activated an electrical charge. The electrical charge activated the blasting cap, which generated a tiny shockwave through its boosting charge. That shockwave stabbed all of its kinetic energy into the rust-colored glob of semtex plastic explosive, which reacted to the energy by detonating. Detonating right in the heart of the anti-aircraft battery where Haddad’s men were standing, far from the SCUDs.

Those eight gleaming white surface-to-air spears exploded nearly in unison, creating a fireball and storm of molten metal that tore the Hezbollah fighters into bits. The shockwave was too intense to merely deafen her, so Celestine’s world simply went white with a combined mind-body cacophony. But she expected the explosion and braced herself for the concussive force, so she controlled her collapse and rode out the shockwave, giving her brain time to unscramble its synapses while she tumbled artfully backward and braced herself against the nearest tower wall.

Haddad hadn’t been so prepared when the rockets erupted; he was standing with his back to the door, fully exposed to the blast right outside the tower. It threw him ten feet forward into the electronics benches at the end of the room. He bounced off them with a grunt as gravity drove his face right into the nine hundred year-old stone. As Celestine climbed to her feet, she found him shuddering and trying to rise while twin streams of blood dripped out of his mouth and nose.

Her balance was gone, but her coordination was good enough to pick up the gun that he’d dropped. She walked up behind him, cocked the hammer, and murmured, “I said you’d be an idiot not to kill me,” before emptying the clip into his back.

* * *

Haddad still moved for a long time after she shot him. He was dead, of course, but his limbs kept twitching. That made her think of Ambrose and his strange, sad hands. She wanted to run and help him, but she was mostly deaf, could barely stand, and her jangled nerve endings were giving her all sorts of bad information. Blood leaked from her nose and she’d suffered a cut to the back of her head when she hit the wall. Apparently bracing oneself for an explosion wasn’t the same thing as escaping its concussive force.

Cold sweat kept forming on her brow, which told her she’d gone into mild shock. The unforgiving mechanics of her Mossad training helped her to fight through it, but it couldn’t actually heal her. The only people who could do that were hundreds of miles away, and she didn’t have a plane to get to them.
Planes
…what the hell made her think of planes? For a good two minutes, all she could do was hold herself up against the work bench and watch little propane fires outside the tower reflected in Haddad’s pooling blood. She knew that two minutes was longer than Ambrose and Mashhadi would need to kill one another.

Planes. Warplanes.
Gideon
.

Celestine threw herself across the room, towards the big military radio looming at the other end of the command center. It was Russian-made, of course, but Mossad had trained her on equipment like this when she was still in her late teens, constantly telling her that behind enemy lines in an Arab country, knowing how to use Russian equipment would save her life. The smoking ruins in the yard were proof that she’d been a good student: knowing how to use something also meant knowing how to destroy it.

She forced her hand to slow down as she dialed in Gideon’s standard operating frequency. Celestine’s own voice sounded alien to her as she whispered: “Underworld…this is Cherub, reporting from Heaven.”

Gideon’s reply was immediate. “Cherub. Report.”

The rest poured out of her in a voice full of blood and phlegm. “Cherub here, Underworld, along with Seraph. We found Heaven as expected, neutralized the Mormons, and Seraph…Seraph has gone to engage Sorcerer.”

The American colonel broke in, “Cherub, what is Seraph’s disposition? What happened to Sorcerer?”

Her eyes hurt, and for some reason her eyelids were fluttering. Goddamned nerves. “Uncertain, God Almighty. Request that you send in an evacuation team immediately. I’ll find Seraph and deal with Heaven.”

Gideon respond “Cherub: give Underworld the precise coordinates for Heaven and I can direct my Plague to avoid your location.”

“Underworld: Heaven is located in the northeastern corner of the inner castle. But you can’t call down a Plague yet—Seraph is at ground zero, and I don’t know his condition.” God, why did her voice sound so fuzzy in her own ears?

Gideon didn’t answer right away. He’d taken his hand off the receiver on his end, leaving Celestine to hang in the dark for an eternity before he responded, “I called down a Plague thirteen minutes ago, Cherub, with orders to destroy the entire castle. I had no reason to assume you were alive. Find cover now, repeat:
now
, and I will attempt to direct the Plague toward the northeastern end of the castle and Heaven itself.”

Celestine screamed until her voice cracked, “
Goddamn you, Gideon!
Call off the strike!”

“No. Seraph’s life is not worth leaving Heaven intact. He knew the risks. But now you have a chance.”

A crackle and series of grunts came out of the other end of the handset before it went dead. It was at least thirty seconds before any response came from the two old men. “Lemark,” came the American colonel’s voice, “I’m in control, but be advised that Gideon will not stop the strike. That leaves you, soldier. Get Hayes out of there, then stay the hell away from the northern half of that castle until the airstrike is done. I’m sending a bird to your location immediately. Be alive to catch it.”

“I’ll save Hayes even if it means killing the Iranian myself, Colonel. Send that bird.”

She dropped the handset and gathered a head of steam as she sent her shaken body careening into the fiery yard, aiming for the stone chapel looming beyond the SCUDs, a million miles away.