Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (7 page)

“He wants to surrender,” Ambrose half-answered, watching Sorcerer to see whether the man could follow English. That calm stubbly face didn’t give away the answer.

Laurence muttered, “Nobody talked about a goddamned surrender plan.”

“Problems?” Sorcerer asked in Farsi.

Ambrose ignored the marines and responded in Farsi, “We accept your surrender. Keep both of your hands up. No, wait,” Ambrose tried to remember what Occupation soldiers did on the armed nighttime abductions they called “renditions.” Did they make the guy walk towards them? It seemed risky, especially when the potential captive had to pass all of those rows of shelving, bristling with hiding spots for weapons that could wreak havoc at close range. He said, “Lace your fingers together on top of your head, then get down on your knees.”

Malik’s voice suggested he was close to an embolism, but he was too smart to drop his bead on Sorcerer. He just snapped at Ambrose acidly, saying, “Hayes you are compromising this whole fucking mission. Tell me,
is this Sorcerer
?!”

Sorcerer ignored the marine and spoke to Ambrose in his musical Farsi, saying, “No, that all sounds unbefitting someone of my rank. But I will do this,” Sorcerer lowered his arms but kept his palms outstretched, then rotated his wrists and elbows so that his arms stretched in front of him at a supine angle, like invisible shackles bound him, “And I will stay like this, unmoving, until I am seized and escorted out.”

“We’re taking him alive,” Ambrose said in English. All four marines said something in protest or surprise, but not even Malik tried to dissuade him. Something in Ambrose’s voice sounded productively crazy.

Malik spoke quietly, the verbal equivalent of a man moving his hand incrementally forward so as not to disturb a fly before he swatted it, “Tesoro, get the jeep moving and put it right in front of the loading dock, ready to receive five passengers. Young, cover me while I put zip ties on this asshole. You other two, follow behind us with your guns ready, and if things go south, take whatever shot you have.”

All four of them agreed to Malik’s orders. While Tesoro loped away to get the car, the others proceeded toward the center aisle of shelves. Sorcerer was thirty feet away.

Ambrose barked a last order in Farsi, his voice cracking with anticipation, “Two of them will collect you now. If you try anything, we’ll cut you down.”

Sorcerer didn’t respond. Instead, he took a deep inhalation. Ambrose thought it might have been resignation showing itself, but that didn’t jive with the rest of Sorcerer’s demeanor. It reminded him more of the gasp a diver took before descending.

“No, wait—” Ambrose said, too quietly to do any good.

Something taut and artificial went
snap
at Young’s feet, and all of the team stopped as they heard a sound like aerosol hairspray going off. Now the air smelled like almonds.

“What…” Young said before dropping to his knees. Froth formed on his chin as he tried to keep speaking, but nothing came out except a strangled sound like a balloon deflating from a pinprick.

Laurence had the presence of mind to raise his rifle and aim at Sorcerer, but the man had almost vanished into the darkness at the end of the shelving where the red light ended. Laurence pulled his trigger with a limp hand guided by eyes that looked incapable of focusing. Ambrose watched one round clip Young in the side of his head, while another blew apart Malik’s shoulder. The third round of his three-round burst was a tracer shell that shot down the aisle to be eaten by shadow. Then Laurence fell next to Young, with his feet doing a little dance like a hanged man.

Malik didn’t seem to notice the hole where his shoulder had been, or the related fact that negative space now kept his left arm connected to his torso purely via exposed sinews. He held himself up against the shelves with his right arm wrapped around an upright metal support beam. Malik’s eyelids fluttered like moth wings while the muscles at the sides of his face repeatedly pulled back his lips into a manic smile made of nothing but teeth and gums. Then his feet gave out. He couldn’t unwrap his arm from its support pillar, so the fall dislocated his remaining shoulder and left him dangling like a scarecrow only half-crucified. He made a little sound like
gah-gah-gah
as his brain tried to process why it was dying.

Ambrose was furthest from the entrance to the aisle, and had time to throw himself away from the carnage, making it almost to the loading dock before his legs crumpled under him. He hit the concrete floor chin-first, certain that those were his own teeth he heard rattling on the floor beside him. He intended to make it further, to find clean air instead of being locked in a concrete box with whatever had been in that aerosol they heard. The faint warm breeze that trickled in through the loading door told him that he’d found the air he needed, but his legs reminded him that he’d only found the breeze after wading through a sea of gas.

Ambrose knew he was going to die with a broken chin, missing most of his teeth. He was also missing four marines and a sorcerer.

Chapter Eleven

Ambrose woke up in a hospital bed with tubes in his nose and something down his throat. Machines sighed quietly around him like the lapping of waves at the seashore. He closed his eyes and felt tears gush down his face until he passed out again.

* * *

“So you’re telling me he’s awake but he’s not talking to anyone?” Ambrose heard a gruff, predatory voice say out of the darkness that surrounded his head.

Another voice, feminine, answered, “He talks a bit, but nothing useful yet. Unless this is a rank issue, Sir, I’m not comfortable with you being here while the patient is processing the trauma he’s endured.”

The gruff voice hummed thoughtfully before answering, “That’s reasonable, but what I have is time-sensitive, so yeah doctor, let’s make this a rank issue for fifteen minutes, then I’ll leave him alone. Please close the door behind you.”

The doctor’s voice assented, and hard-soled shoes clacked away from Ambrose until they disappeared behind the metal-on-metal sound of a door being shut.

“Hayes,” The gruff voice said to him, “I need five minutes of your time.”

Ambrose opened one puffy eye and saw a silhouette half-blocking the overhead fluorescent lights. It materialized into a man with a round face and dark features who also wore a hospital gown. He was on crutches.

“You told the doctor fifteen minutes, not five,” Ambrose replied.

The man smiled and answered, “Let’s start with five and see where this goes. Now let me put your bed up.”

Ambrose heard the whirr of his reclining bed bending upright, which always reminded him of being pushed by the flat palm of a giant metal hand. When he was upright, he saw that his intruder was a short, extremely broad man who looked equal parts East Asian and Hispanic, probably fifty-something years old with grey hair and a thin van dyke beard. He was wearing a hospital robe, and he was on crutches. Ambrose saw the bottom part of a cast protruding from his right leg.

The man said, “Good. Now that you’re upright I can sit the hell down.” He grunted as he hopped backwards into a generic vinyl reclining chair that looked like every other lounge chair ever put in a hospital to try and convince patients that they weren’t in a hospital. The man pressed a button and the foot of the chair extended, allowing him to elevate his right leg.

He nodded at his leg and said, “I was in Fallujah on a fact-finding mission when shooting broke out. A shard of something or other went right through my kneecap. It was so hot that it cauterized the tendons immediately after severing them. Virtually impossible to operate on with so much of the wounded material simply annihilated,” He shrugged and continued, “The VA could do a knee replacement stateside, but that means some fucker will try to make me go to Washington. I’ll take a hardened knee brace and a cane over Washington any day.”

“I wouldn’t.” Ambrose said.

The man smirked. “Mister Hayes, why were you and four marines in Sadr City three nights ago? How did you come in contact with a nerve agent?”

“You already talked to Tesoro. He remembers better than I do.”

“Corporal Tesoro killed himself last night, hours before I was scheduled to debrief him. His bunkmate says he’d been talking to someone, apologizing over and over. Then he snuck out of bed and stepped in front of a Humvee as it passed the Green Zone entrance gate. His bunkmate says he’d been sneaking out a lot after lights-out. Seven or eight times in the last few months, by his count. He still thinks this is all about a girl, and I didn’t tell him any differently, not that there are enough women in the Green Zone to fuel that kind of mystery for long.”

Ambrose didn’t like crying in front of other people any more than anyone else did, but the muscles around his eyes weren’t giving him much choice. He felt water pouring over his high cheekbones again, then following his jawline all the way down his stubbly chin. Wait, there was something wrong with his chin, too. He whispered, “Jesus Christ, man…”

The older man didn’t give him enough wallowing time to crumble. He pressed onward, saying, “I’m Colonel Wayne Shenzo, Army. I’m attached to a special joint civilian-military unit that performs high-end analysis of evolving threats. We’re small, but that means we can pinpoint and address these threats very quickly when we have to. Based on what I’ve been told about your interests in Sadr City, combined with this nerve gas cache it sounds like you ran across, you’re firmly in my fucking orbit right now, Mister Hayes.”

Ambrose ground his teeth together, realizing that they were all intact, despite what he was sure he’d felt when he collapsed in that warehouse. “Carlisle. I knew that fucker wasn’t what he seemed.”

“Then you were an idiot for trusting him with so much information.”

“I didn’t tell him enough so he could stop me, did I?”

“And right now that’s something you’re proud of?”

Ambrose felt something hit his stomach and he looked down. It was a manila folder with papers sticking partway out of it. He opened the thing up. It was full of his own notes, taken from his villa, where he’d kept translations of Sorcerer’s messages along with his rambling speculations about the man’s goals and methodology. Ambrose grimly noted that he’d never mentioned “chemical warfare” in his notes.

Ambrose asked, “I know all of this. I wrote it. Why are you showing me this?”

Wayne Shenzo shook his head and replied, “Those aren’t notes. That’s the portfolio you submitted to me as part of your job application. I hire the person, not the skillset. I’ll
give
you the skillset if I need it and you don’t have it. I told you we observe emerging threats. It looks like you independently discovered, tracked, and almost eliminated such a threat, Mister Hayes. You’re what I’ve been looking for, so I’m hiring you.”

“I have a job.”

“No you don’t. State fired you immediately upon hearing you were admitted to the Green Zone hospital by a marine who was raving about chemical weapons in Sadr City at three in the morning. That means you’re mine. Do you accept?”

For the first time since Shenzo entered, Ambrose looked in the mirror across the bed from him. The tubes were gone from his nose and mouth, which revealed heavy bandaging around his chin. His eyebrows were animated and twitching wildly. When he opened his mouth, he saw that half his teeth were a uniform, artificial off-white. He raised his left hand to touch his chin, and noticed that the tendons in his forearm leading down into his hand pulled jerkily back and forth like pistons in an engine gone haywire.

“What happened to me?” Ambrose breathed.

Shenzo’s voice was flat and cold. He knew how to deliver bad news without wasting a person’s time. “At this point only you know, and the doctors said that your short term memory is probably crap right now. Based on your notes and the other limited evidence at my disposal, I think you found your Sorcerer and he hit your team with some kind of nerve agent. Tesoro saw that you were alive and drove like hell to get you back here. You were technically dead, but the doctors brought you back with a massive dose of atropine, then did reconstructive surgery on your mouth and jaw. Then you were fired, and now you’re speaking with me. Do you accept the job? I might add that you’re looking at one hell of a hospital bill if you don’t.”

Ambrose looked his mirror-self in the eye. Yeah, his eyes were still fine, despite the eyebrows. They still glittered with blue intelligence that he almost recognized as his own. Those cold blue eyes told him that he was still in the game. Sorcerer had failed, not only by leaving Ambrose alive, but by giving him a reason for revenge. He’d nurse himself back to health with Sorcerer’s gift, then when he was healthy again…

Ambrose said, “I won’t work with a team again, because I can’t have that on my conscience. Right now I think I’m keeping it together because my pain meds made me half-stupid. Second, no more Middle East, ever. I don’t care if I’m the only person in your entire fucking rolodex who speaks Arabic and Farsi, I’m sick of this place and I’m not giving it another chance to kill me. Last, we need to go get those bodies out of Sadr City. Malik, Laurence, and Young need to go home.”

Wayne Shenzo stood up and reassembled the file of documents taken from Ambrose’s villa. He said, “My people work alone for security purposes, so the team thing is fine. I can guarantee the Middle East thing, too. I cut my teeth in Vietnam, so I agree that no particular place should get too many chances to kill a person. One question, though: what if Sorcerer reappears? Where are you willing to follow him?”

“To the ends of the fucking earth. Now what about those bodies?”

Shenzo shook his head, replying, “You put those bodies in Sadr City. They’re gonna stay in Sadr City.”

Chapter Twelve

It was Christmas 2007. Ambrose had just arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia, ready to start his first assignment for whatever outfit Wayne Shenzo actually represented. He’d spent eight months at the U.S. naval hospital in Qatar prior to taking the assignment, stumping every medical professional on the base over how to rehabilitate a man who took nerve damage from what they’d concluded was sarin gas. Ambrose appreciated the irony of their predicament: thanks to Saddam Hussein’s warmongering, the only country on earth with a lot of experience treating sarin victims was the Islamic Republic of Iran. So Ambrose went online and translated Iranian medical articles as best he could without access to one of the ten-pound technical dictionaries of Farsi—English that normally held his desk down. The results were uninspiring, and the doctors warned him that no amount of rehabilitation would totally undo what had been done to him. He told them it was a shame he hadn’t been flown to a hospital in Tehran, but again, those weren’t men who had much time for irony. At least Wayne had finally facilitated his release and bought him a one-way plane ticket to a place thousands of miles away from Iraq and Iran.

Ambrose whispered, “Happy Christmas to you, Mister Hayes,” as he lifted a green bottle of Indonesian lager called “Bintang” to his mouth. The combination of tropical heat and his still-trembling hand made the simple task a challenge, and he felt a sliver of genuine pride when the rim of the sweating bottle made contact with his lips. The stuff inside it tasted like water. He’d been warned that Indonesian beer was piss, but somehow no amount of warning every really makes the worst parts of reality less biting.

He was sitting in a West African soccer bar that happened to be close to the hotel where his taxi had dropped him off after his midnight arrival in Jakarta. All around him, dark skinned men in bright short sleeve shirts sat staring at a projector screen with quiet intensity, watching Cameroon’s national indoor soccer team tear apart their hated rivals from Ghana. Ambrose had zero appreciation for indoor soccer, and he found himself looking all around the room in disbelief at dark, intense faces that seemed ready to fight if things went sideways on that small ovular court where men were playing a sport that looked like hockey twice-melted. Then again, so long as the game stayed intense, the regulars seemed less inclined to notice the trembling white man sitting in the bar behind them with the confused, troubled look on his face who needed a few beers before sleep would even think of slinking his way.

In retrospect, Ambrose would realize he’d entered the downward spiral of White American pseudo-racism, which meant being a white man trying to convince himself he wasn’t uncomfortable being in a room full of black people while inadvertently wearing an expression of blatant discomfort, thus creating a situation where his white ass
should
have felt uncomfortable in a room full of black people.

Ambrose made the next swig count. He planned on finishing the beer and leaving swiftly, before anyone had the chance to ask themselves whether or not they cared that he’d ever been in the room. Then the projector TV switched channels, and the yelling started. A big guy with a powerful voice bellowed in West African French for the bartender to change the goddamned channel back, someone else suggested that the fucking satellite needed fucking fixing, and the bartender retorted that someone of the asshole persuasion must have hit a button. In the meantime, the TV cut to the French equivalent of CSPAN, where a dusky-skinned man in a black suit sat onstage next to a white baby grand piano taking questions from a concert hall audience. Ambrose spoke bad French, so it relieved him to see English subtitles:

[W
OMAN INTERVIEWER]

I
UNDERSTAND THAT YOU FOUGHT IN THE WAR BETWEEN
I
RAQ AND
I
RAN,
M
ONSIEUR
M
ASHHADI?

[J
AMSHEED CHUCKLES]

R
EGRETTABLY, YES.
K
HOMEINI'S GOVERNMENT PROCLAIMED THAT
I
RAN FACED A WAR OF TOTAL ANNIHILATION, SO THEY INSTITUTED A TOTAL DRAFT.
I
WAS FIRST DRAFTED IN 1984, WHEN
I
WAS ONLY TWELVE YEARS OLD.
I
SERVED UNTIL THE END OF THE CONFLICT IN 1988.

[W
OMAN INTERVIEWER]

W
HAT DID THAT ENTAIL, IF YOU DON'T MIND TELLING US?

[J
AMSHEED]

I
WAS A FOOT SOLDIER ATTACHED TO WHAT WE
I
RANIAN SOLDIERS CALLED
S
OUTHERN
C
OMMAND.
I
SPENT THREE YEARS FIGHTING IN AND AROUND THE CITY OF
B
ASRA, TRYING TO SECURE THE
I
RAQI PORT.
M
Y COMMANDERS MADE NO EXCEPTIONS FOR AGE.

[W
OMAN INTERVIEWER]

T
HAT IS APPALLING,
M
ONSIEUR.
O
N BEHALF OF THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE, LET ME EXPRESS MY SYMPATHIES FOR WHAT WAS DONE TO YOU, BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR.

[J
AMSHEED CLEARS THROAT]

T
HANK YOU.
I
T IS NOT SOMETHING
I
WOULD WISH ON ANYONE, EVEN MY WORST ENEMY.
S
OMETIMES
I
THINK THAT THE ILLEGITIMATE
I
RANIAN GOVERNMENT'S WORST CRIME HAS BEEN MURDERING THE INNOCENCE OF ITS OWN CHILDREN.
I
THANK
G
OD THAT OTHERS OF MY GENERATION HAVE BEEN BRAVE ENOUGH TO RAISE CHILDREN AT ALL, AFTER ENDURING THE HORRORS THAT WE DID WHILE FIGHTING THE
I
RAQIS.

[M
ALE QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE]

M
ONSIEUR
M
ASHHADI, YOU'VE MENTIONED
I
RAQ SEVERAL TIMES IN THE CONTEXT OF WAR WITH
I
RAN.
M
Y FATHER FOUGHT IN
A
LGERIA, SO
I
KNOW THAT MANY SOLDIERS HAVE A HARD TIME OF LETTING THOSE THINGS GO, AFTER A WAR.
D
O YOU STILL BEAR ANIMOSITY TOWARDS
I
RAQIS FOR WHAT
S
ADDAM
H
USSEIN DID TO
I
RAN DURING THE 1980S, PARTICULARLY WITH HIS USE OF POISON GAS AND CRIMES AGAINST CIVILIANS?

[J
AMSHEED LAUGHS]

S
ADDAM
H
USSEIN WAS
I
RAQI
? F
UNNY, THE RECEIPTS ON HIS WEAPONS PURCHASES MADE US ALL ASSUME HE WAS
A
MERICAN.

[laughter]

[J
AMSHEED]

B
UT IN ALL SERIOUSNESS
, M
ONSIEUR, WITH RESPECT TO YOUR QUESTION:
M
Y EXPERIENCES IN
I
RAN HAVE TAUGHT ME THAT MOST PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD ARE AT THE MERCY OF ONLY A FEW GOVERNMENTS, AND THOSE MASTER-GOVERNMENTS USE THEIR POWER TO CONVINCE LESSER GOVERNMENTS TO ENSLAVE THEIR OWN PEOPLE.
A
S LONG AS THOSE CONDITIONS EXISTS, AND
I
PRAY TO
G
OD THEY DO NOT FOREVER, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE THUGS WHO ACT IN THE NAME OF A COUNTRY, BUT REALLY SERVE THEIR OWN WICKED ENDS
. T
HAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO
I
RAQ UNDER
S
ADDAM
H
USSEIN…

S
O NO
, I
DO NOT BEAR ANY HATRED TOWARDS THE POOR PEOPLE OF
I
RAQ, WHO WE ALL KNOW ARE SUFFERING YET AGAIN AT THE HANDS OF THOSE MASTER-GOVERNMENTS
I
JUST MENTIONED
. I
N FACT, OVER THE YEARS
I
'VE MADE SEVERAL GOOD FRIENDS IN
B
AGHDAD, AND
I
TRY TO VISIT WHENEVER I CAN.
O
F COURSE, THANKS TO THE
A
MERICANS
I
NEED TO WEAR
G
ROUCHO
M
ARX GLASSES AND WAVE A
T
URKISH PASSPORT WHENEVER
I
SHOW UP AT THE
B
AGHDAD AIRPORT
."

[laughter]

The soccer came back on the television. Cameroon had scored in the meantime, and the bar came alive. Ambrose looked for his own beer, but realized it had fallen out of his trembling hand and shattered on the floor beneath him. He ordered another one and drank in silence. The bar full of drunk Cameroonians might have been a godsend in that moment, because they kept Ambrose from destroying every inanimate object within reach.

When that beer was done, he pulled out the black cellphone with the unregistered international sim card that Wayne had given him, and he texted the following: S
ORCERER IS A PIANO PLAYER NAMED
J
AMSHEED
M
ASHHADI.
B
ASED IN
F
RANCE
(?). S
END ME NOW.

He ordered a third beer and waited for a response. He had no clue where on earth Wayne Shenzo was, so waiting for him to answer his phone at god-knows-what-hour amounted to an act of faith. When the response came forty-five minutes later, it was terse: P
ATIENT.
N
OT YOUR JOB.

Ambrose drank three more beers in silence, forgetting every African in the room.