Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (4 page)

Chapter Seven

It was early 2006. Hayes sat at the bar of the al-Rasheed hotel on the north end of the Green Zone, spending his per diem on overpriced whiskey poured over ice that the staff charged you for separately. Ever since the man with the throbbing temple had told him to slink back to his villa for some solitary day drinking, Ambrose had started getting drunk in public. In his defiance, he sat at the bar each night and tried to meet new friends. On this particular night he met Adam Malik.

Adam was a sharp featured Iraqi-American from Dearborn, Michigan. His parents had risen up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 when the senior Bush tricked Shiites and Kurds into launching a revolution following what CNN’s mongoloids had called “The Gulf War.” Like most Middle East specialists, Ambrose knew that the real “Gulf War” had been the brutal eight year struggle between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which killed a million people through Hussein’s poison gas and American-supplied weaponry between 1980 and 1988. For his part, Malik had adjusted to refugeedom well; he didn’t have an accent, he drank, unlike his parents, and his nose had a distinctive bulge where it had been broken in a good old-fashioned Detroit mugging.

Adam Malik sat down next to Ambrose, and the two poorly-shaven men spent three minutes bitching about what kind of hellhole would charge a man for ice in his drink. Finally, Ambrose reached his hand over and said, “Ambrose R. Hayes, State.”

Malik shook his hand back, revealing calluses that made Ambrose feel twice as dandified in his white linen suit. The man said, “My name’s Adam Malik. Marine corporal. I was assigned to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Arbil, then to embassy security detail here in the Green Zone, then to I don’t know.”

“Which unit is that? What are your responsibilities?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many more people around here have that job description?”

“Enough to crew a Humvee and rob some banks if we decided to go Viking on this place.”

Ambrose lit a cigarette and smiled. “Sounds tempting. Need an Arabic interpreter to threaten the tellers for you, assuming you can even find a bank in Baghdad with enough cash to rob?”

“Motherfucker, look at this face,” Malik pointed at his broken beak of a nose, “I
am
the Arabic interpreter around these parts.”

Ambrose smiled again. He liked this guy. He said in good literary Arabic, “Sorry, I forgot that you fresh-off-the-boat types cheat and are born speaking a language it takes us white boys a decade to master.”

Malik replied in thick Iraqi Arabic that Ambrose was only beginning to understand, even a year into his appointment, “You sound like an Arab BBC announcer. Have you and your white suits ever even been out of the Green Zone, Statey?”

That struck a nerve, and Ambrose’s face darkened with maudlin frustration that the whiskey hadn’t helped. “I fucking tried,” he whispered, “Then I showed my hand too early, and now they’ll never let me out.” He took a drag off his cigarette, crushed it, then immediately lit another one. “I was a fucking idiot, and I got slapped for it.”

Malik bummed a cigarette and used Ambrose’s Halliburton-issued Zippo to light it. He squinted as a tendril of smoke went into his eye, asking, “What in the hell is out there in Baghdad that you were dying to go see? I can
tell
you what’s in Baghdad, man, and it’s nothing that a guy in a white suit should actively be looking for.”

Ambrose looked into his whiskey as he tumbled the glass, watching the overpriced Old Granddad swirl over ice he’d paid for separately. Ambrose had once been trusting by nature, but the Foreign Service had broken him of that habit. It took everything he had left to give the universe one more shot at disappointing him.

Ambrose said, “Heh. Alright, here’s what’s what: I’m looking for a high-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer who is some kind of elite bomb maker. He’s been in Baghdad approximately two years, and his movements correlate strongly with some of the deadliest IED types that we’ve found in-country. His particular specialty is what they’re calling ‘EFPs.’ Explosively formed projectiles. They’re inert lumps of copper or some other metal with a low melting point that damn near becomes plasma upon detonation.”

Ambrose held up two fingers like a spear, then stabbed them into the palm of his hand. He added, “The plasma goes through the undersides of vehicle armor like a spear of fire. There’s no way to defend against them. It would’ve taken a guerrilla genius to envision them in the first place.” Ambrose was getting more animated. Probably too animated for public. “I think he’s the key to it all, and I wanted someone to go get him. I even have a home address or two. All it takes is someone heading out and ringing the fucking doorbell.” Ambrose looked side-eyed at Malik, searching for some sign that he’d fucked up and blabbed yet again to an unsympathetic ear.

Malik grunted back, “No shit.”

Ambrose took a swig of whiskey and grimaced as he responded, “No shit.”

The marine corporal looked around the al-Rasheed bar, marking the people around them with his deep-set dark eyes. He turned back to Ambrose and asked, “How many other people have you told this to, when they sit down next to you and start talking about ice cubes?”

“Just you,” Ambrose replied.

Malik rose his glass in a mock toast. “Here’s to me, then.”

“Yeah, right,” Ambrose said as he crushed his cigarette only half-smoked. “Sorry for mentioning it. Go ahead and call me an idiot, I know I deserve it.”

“You’re not gonna meet a marine in Baghdad who thinks you’re an idiot.” Malik looked up and down Ambrose’s white linen suit again. “At least not when it comes to this high-ranking Iranian.”

Ambrose regarded the soldier with a blank expression. He still thought he was halfway to the end of a joke where he himself would be the punchline. “What makes you say that, Corporal?” he asked.

Malik shrugged and looked at his drink as he muttered, “You see things out in the field that never make it into Green Zone reports for assholes in white suits. When I was with the Fifteenth, we saw a lot of little fights in the wilderness.” He finished his drink with a long pull, then put it down on the bar hard. “Not everyone out there fighting is an Iraqi…and that’s not something we’re ever supposed to put in reports for our commanders.”

Ambrose ordered them two more whiskeys, sans ice this time, and moved his stool closer to Malik’s. “You’re telling me,” he looked around, aware that he’d been speaking too loudly, “You’re telling me that marines are out there fighting Iranians, and everyone knows it, and they’re just not fucking reporting it?”

“No, no. That’s not what I’m saying. There are plenty of Iraqis who hate us, and I’d bet they do ninety percent of the fighting.” Malik waved his hand while he sought the right phrase. “As for the rest, it’s not a daily occurrence or anything, but sometimes, in the aftermath of a firefight…”

“It turns out you weren’t shooting at Arabs.”

Malik nodded slowly, like he was a dying piece of animatronics. He said, “It only takes finding a couple of blonde haired, blue eyed Chechen corpses before you realize that this is a pretty crowded insurgency.”

Ambrose asked: “So that makes you think this guy could be out there? Please don’t screw with me after I just bought you a drink.”

Malik didn’t smile. He just looked Ambrose in the eye and posed a question, “For every skill, there has to be somebody who’s best at it. Why wouldn’t that include bomb making?”

“No offense,” Ambrose said between cigarette drags, “but aren’t you a bit freethinking for a marine? Don’t they beat that out of you robots?”

The corporal smiled and replied, “People think that because they don’t bother asking marines the right fucking questions. So how are you planning on catching this guy?”

“Sorcerer.” Ambrose ground out his latest cigarette with a violent stab, “For now, we call him Sorcerer. We get at him through a series of warehouses I’ve found.”

Malik responded, “Where are these warehouses, Hayes? If we’re talking Iranians that means Shiites, and Shiites mean Sadr City.”

Ambrose got a pen and a napkin from the bartender, then divided the napkin into a rough grid, five-by-five. He drew three dots on the map in disparate locations along the grid and labeled them “1,” “4,” and “17.” He explained, “These are warehouses. Sorcerer gives each one a number and an address. He also refers to ‘9’ and ‘20,’ but doesn’t give them an address so I couldn’t tell you where they are. As for the rest, they’re all deep in Sadr City, and if he’s bothering to number them, I think there are more than just these five. If he’s got a ‘17’ and a ‘20,’ that makes me think there’s a warehouse 18, 19, you get the picture. Between all of them, we’re going to find this son of a bitch, I know it.”

Malik shook his head and said under his breath, “Even if you weren’t planning on barging into a war zone, you can’t just start raiding warehouses. He’ll see the pattern and stop using them. Plus, you don’t know where the others are located.”

Ambrose lit another cigarette, then started making the pen twirl around his thumb in agitation. “I don’t think so. He mentions warehouses 9 and 20 in documents from early 2005, but he’s coy about it. Then he mentions warehouse 1 and 4, together with addresses, in September 2005. Then last December, he mentions warehouse 19, also with an address.” He used the pen to tap the dot of warehouse 19. “I think he expected us to track him, so he was cautious in the beginning. Now that Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have made Sadr City practically impregnable for Shiite militants, Sorcerer can give more direct orders, which probably also means larger shipments of weapon components from Iran. He’s getting
more
dangerous, not less.”

Ambrose kept going, “But you’re right, we need to start moving fast. Some of my intel is almost a year old, which means it’s a year cold.”

The marine finished his drink, then reached over and took the marked-up napkin. He folded the thing twice, then stuck it in his pocket. “I see what you’re trying to do, Statey, and it’s working. But I need to get a better sense of what you’ve got planned, before I take this thing any further. Do you have any actual maps I can look at?” Malik asked.

“That depends. Do you have any actual marines?”

Chapter Eight

It was still early 2006 when Ambrose Hayes shot his first man. He and Malik, along with three of Malik’s marine friends who had also fallen into the bureaucratic black hole of Unit “I-don’t-know” decided to tackle Sorcerer’s warehouse 4 before trying any of the others. It was closest to the edge of Sadr City, making it the safest for outsiders to get in and out of. For that mission they’d acquired a 1992 Peugeot four-door sedan the color of old brick. Private Michael Tesoro was the best driver out of the four marines, so he’d picked the car based on its ratio of handling-to-anonymity. Malik had supplied their wardrobes by going out into Baghdad by himself, dressed as a local, and buying five sets of the drab fatigues sold in every Baghdad market that indicated a man had allied himself with one of Iraq’s ten thousand new armed tribes.

Ambrose did nothing to help them prepare, other than suggest everyone grow beards to ward off cursory glances from suspicious Sadr City locals. Tesoro the Italian and Malik the Dearborn Arab had no trouble with the assignment. John Young and Emmanuel Laurence, two tall, corn-fed Midwesterners, had no such luck. Neither did Ambrose, whose rakish perpetual scruff transmogrified into dog mange once it got longer than clipper level “2” on his beard trimmer.

They’d rolled into Sadr City with the lights off around 1:45 in the morning, aware that prying eyes from dozens of windows in dilapidated, identical concrete towers shone down at them. It was a gamble, but one that all five men knew they had to take; getting into Sadr City meant running the gauntlet, and that meant sucking your balls up into your throat and diving in.

But the gauntlet wasn’t impenetrable. By Ambrose’s calculations even the Mahdi Army, the most powerful force in Sadr City, couldn’t be everywhere in the sprawling slum at once. Moreover, even if they were nearby, they wouldn’t risk pulling over every car they saw; checkpoints were bad form for a militia trying to win local hearts and minds. So he calculated there was only a fifty-fifty chance they’d be captured. Whatever the numbers, his hunch was correct, and soon they made it to the coordinates of warehouse 4 unchallenged.

It was a nondescript cube occupying a city block, plastered with pale blow-on stucco. There were two portals along the north wall marked “loading” and “unloading” in Arabic, each of which was open despite the hour. A mixture of red and white light glowed out the door, looking like fire reflected over snow. There were no cars anywhere on the grounds except theirs, which they pulled up tight to the western edge of the warehouse. Then, wearing dark fatigues that stood out against the pale stucco, they slunk around the building into the loading gate.

They entered a world of red loading dock lights and high, bone-white fluorescent tube lighting far overhead. The place hummed with the bulbs of that soulless lighting but was otherwise quiet. The marines didn’t disturb the hush—they were cat-light on their feet even in boots. Ambrose just tried to give them a wide berth and “guard the rear,” as Malik had politely suggested when he first started training Ambrose in urban warfare tactics a few weeks beforehand.

There was a pile of boxes in the center of the space stamped with black-stenciled Farsi: “Product of Iran, store in a cool, dry place.” There were maybe twenty crates in all. The place wasn’t even one tenth full, which struck Ambrose as odd. But he snapped out of it when private Young went over to one of the crates with his knife out, ready to open to it.

“No,” Ambrose said loudly enough to be heard across half the warehouse, “We’re here for people and documents, not materiel.”

Young looked frustrated but didn’t argue. He put away his knife and unslung the AK-47 over his shoulder. All of them carried AKs. That way, if they did get into trouble, there weren’t any American bullets to tie them to the scene. Young walked over to the edge of the warehouse, mimicking Malik, Tesoro, and Laurence as they scoped the outer edges of the room for more people.

Then “more people” found Ambrose. A man’s voice behind him barked out in Arabic, “Who in the hell are you? What are you doing here?”

Ambrose thought he heard the cold click of a gun being drawn, so he pulled the .44 that Malik had given him and turned to fire. It was a middle aged man with a mustache standing in the door of the warehouse, half obscured by the shadows outside. Maybe he had a gun, maybe he didn’t.

Ambrose dropped him with two shots to his center of mass. The man dropped a metal thermos.

“Oh shit,” Ambrose said.

Malik and the others were over to him in seconds with their rifles drawn. Laurence was the best field medic, so he leaned down to check the man out.

Malik didn’t bother asking what had happened. He just looked out into the Baghdad night with a tight jaw, scanning for enemies, before saying, “We’ll check him out. There’s a file cabinet in the side office attached to this place, and nobody bothered locking it. Go take a look.”

Ambrose did as he was told. The side office was a sparse little cubby with a card table desk, a framed portrait of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric-warlord of Sadr City, and a beaten up file cabinet with two drawers, both of which turned out to be nearly empty.

The contents were either written in code or painfully banal, and they probably just described legitimate shipments that the place took on as part of its cover. Hell, if Sorcerer was working anonymously, for all Ambrose knew ninety-nine percent of the warehouse’s business might have been legitimate.

Then he noticed the dates on one of the agonizingly tedious cargo manifests: February 2002, thirteen months before the invasion. That one had an eagle-and-sword logo stamped across its letterhead. On second glance, the other documents predating the invasion had the same logo, and those post-invasion didn’t.

“New management, old management,” Ambrose whispered to himself.

He didn’t find anything with Sorcerer’s handwriting on it, so he only took a single pre-invasion cargo manifest bearing the eagle-and-sword letterhead. Then he carefully rearranged the files as best he could remember. Ambrose was confident they would look undisturbed, because he was good at this sort of thing: if you pay close attention to how things are arranged before you paw through them, it’s possible to go through a person’s things with impunity.

Unless you try to take something
. Ambrose did another risk calculation, then folded up the manifest and went out into the warehouse.

Malik crouched by the loading dock, picking up Ambrose’s spent shell casings.

“Where’s the Iraqi?” Ambrose asked.

Malik answered, shoving the empty shells into his pocket, “Dead. We put him in the Peugeot trunk. We’ll dump him somewhere outside Sadr City once we’re clear of this place. Not much we can do about the blood stains, though. There’s probably cleaning supplies somewhere around here, but I’m not letting anybody screw around finding the janitor’s supply closet. C’mon, we’re leaving.”

Tesoro already had the Peugeot revving by the time Ambrose and Malik squeezed into it. They rolled out of the parking lot with their lights off, and everyone held their breaths until they were clear of Sadr City’s black labyrinth.

As they cruised back toward the Green Zone Malik asked, “Did you really hit that guy with two shots to his center of mass, after he had the drop on you? Fuck, you learn quick.”

Ambrose looked out at Baghdad, trying to imagine the city beneath the rubble and scorched billboards, the one that had inspired Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights and made Baghdad the center of the civilized world. He muttered, “No. I think this is just bringing out my mean streak.”

Laurence was sitting in the back with them. He snorted and asked, “Would you rather that guy saw what we were doing and got away? Wouldn’t that tell your Sorcerer to get the hell out of town?”

Ambrose was quiet. A couple seconds later he tapped Tesoro on the shoulder, saying, “That alley over there—that’ll be fine for the body. I’ll drag it out and do the dumping.”

Tesoro looked back towards Malik, who nodded his assent.