Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  Based on Ambrose’s reconstructed chronology, that meant Jamsheed gassed Ambrose in mid-2006, escaped to Iran unscathed, and within eighteen months he was back on the international concert circuit. From Paris, Jamsheed left on a plane bound for Algiers. He wasn’t seen again until March 2008, sitting in a Nigerian café with known Hezbollah affiliates in broad daylight. CIA hadn’t caught it, and neither had Mossad. Ambrose only saw the photos in connection with some unrelated Arabic translating he’d done for Wayne as a side project.

  To anyone other than Ambrose, the fuzzy photo of a handsome Middle Eastern man sitting in a café with a hard-looking bearded counterpart must have looked as conclusive as a Bigfoot sighting. To Ambrose, it reinforced just how good Jamsheed’s cover really was. He played on the institutional fears that discouraged intelligence agents everywhere from casting their nets too widely when hunting for enemies: be paranoid, but don’t be paranoid schizophrenic. If anyone had suggested that a human rights activist and adult contemporary piano player was actually a high ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard weapons engineer, they would’ve been canned immediately. Jamsheed thrived on the improbable.

  The other photo that caught his eye was Jamsheed Mashhadi, fourteen year old child soldier, standing atop the body of a dead Iraqi in 1986. Even though Ambrose had wheedled the photo out of Oman’s ambassador to Thailand with no illusions that it would amount to anything more than a footnote in his file on Sorcerer, it was precious to him. It was the only photo of Jamsheed in military uniform, and that made it the only proof that Ambrose wasn’t insane. There was nothing else like it in existence—nothing to prove Jamsheed was affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, other than some innuendos from Iranian military defectors that Ambrose had collected over the years. Those rumors and innuendos confirmed that “Sorcerer” was indeed a field agent, but none of them could place his identity. Only Ambrose and his file had made that connection, and Ambrose had grown too jaded to trust anyone other than Wayne Shenzo with the information. To his knowledge, Wayne had never acted on it.

  Ambrose knew Wayne was looking at him, but he couldn’t reciprocate. “Wayne, you know how bad I’ve wanted this, but now that you’re actually giving me the chance…I died the last time I met this guy. He lured me into a trap, then he killed me with nerve gas. My heart stopped. I still don’t remember the doctors injecting me with atropine. I don’t know why I’m alive, but I know I shouldn’t be,” Ambrose said wearily.

  “You look alive enough to me, Ambrose,” Wayne said.

  Ambrose held up his twitching left hand and sneered, “Yeah, look at me, the picture of health. We both know Mashhadi left me a fucking shell. I wasn’t good enough to stop him then, I’m sure as hell not good enough to face him now.”

  Wayne poured himself another glass of whiskey and grunted. “That’s why you’ve spent most of a decade learning martial arts and getting firearm training wherever it’s available?” Wayne shook his head as though he didn’t like his own argument, then resumed with a hearty swig of whiskey, “You know the best part about this job, Ambrose?”

  “It makes my skin crawl when you use my first name.”

  “The best part about my job is that, ultimately,” he downed the whiskey, “I don’t have to give a shit about my underlings’ opinions. You’re the guy. You’re ready. If you weren’t, you never would have gotten on that plane in Jakarta.”

  Ambrose poured some Dewar’s into his glass and downed it before responding, “Wasn’t I doing good work for you in Indonesia, Wayne? Didn’t you call my intel on Southeast Asian jihadists the best you’ve ever seen? Didn’t you promise me that I’d never have to come back to the Middle East? That I’d earned some relief?”

  Wayne refilled Ambrose’s empty glass and slid it into his calm right hand. Then he said, just as calmly, “Hayes, what do you do in Indonesia each day? You wake up hungover at noon, then you study kung fu for three hours at a dingy gym, then you go out with that ridiculous cover-story about being a travel writer, and you root out low-grade American-hating Muslims for me. That isn’t value added, and that sure as hell isn’t what you were made for.”

  Ambrose stabbed a finger towards his boss and replied, “It’s not ‘kung fu,’ it’s Pencak Silat. Kung fu is Chinese, Silat is Indonesian. Huge difference, and since you’ve obviously had me followed, you already knew that. And since you’ve been following me, maybe you’ve noticed that I was made for sleazing around an Asian megalopolis, drinking shitty beer and following dumbass kids with Bin Laden fantasies.”

  Wayne slammed down his empty glass, leaving a big wet ring across central Syria. “When you were a thirty year old kid in a white suit, you covertly assembled a death squad and hunted an undercover Revolutionary Guard commander across the world’s hottest urban warzone. You tracked down and nearly captured a man who the international intelligence community didn’t even believe existed. That’s who you are: a man who vowed to hunt his enemy to the ends of the fucking earth. Now I’m telling you that for the first time in seven years we know exactly where he is, and you’re babbling about fucking atropine?!” Wayne leaned his face in close, daring Ambrose to make contact with that pointing fingertip of his.

  Ambrose’s electric blue eyes scanned Wayne Shenzo’s face. “You’re not telling me something, Wayne. Me or somebody else like me could have tried for Mashhadi a hundred times before now, whether we knew exactly where he was or not. You didn’t care enough to do that before now, and I doubt you’ve had a change of heart. That means you’ve given me half a mission, and you’re dancing around the part of it that involves why you told me about the chemical weapons. I may find the Iranian, and I may kill the Iranian,” he instinctively took a pointless drag off his unlit cigarette, “But that doesn’t take care of your weapons. I’ve studied the hell out of chemical weapons, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about how to destroy them.”

  “Agreed,” Gideon said. He had snuck back into the room and within three yards of them without either Wayne or Ambrose noticing. His black eye searched Ambrose up and down, seeming to read every crack in his face and red vein in his exhausted eyes. “That’s why we’re giving you a partner who does.”

  Wayne talked over Ambrose just as the man got out the first syllables of what would have become an ill-advised anti-Mossad tirade. Wayne said, “But rendezvousing with her is going to take a bit of doing, on your part. She’s the one who gave us our last twenty on Tuva, based on intel she received as part of an undercover team traveling with UN doctors in northern Syria near the Turkish border—“

  Gideon cut in “—And the last part of that radio message read: ‘Under attack. Trucks have black flag, white writing. JAN.’”

  “J-A-N. Jabhat al-Nusra, the Support Front.” Ambrose said as he flexed and released his left hand. Sometimes it helped stop the twitching. He actually laughed a bit as he said, “Your agent got kidnapped by the Syrian branch of al-Qaida.”

  “So it seems. But all isn’t lost,” Gideon said.

  “Yes it is. They killed her the moment they discovered she was Israeli.”

  Gideon shook his bald head, never unfixing his single black eye from Ambrose’s haggard face. He elaborated, “That would be difficult to do. Her mother was an Algerian Sephardi, and her father is straight French, with some North African ancestry on his side as well. She speaks Algerian Arabic fluently, her name isn’t a giveaway, and she doesn’t look Israeli.” He tossed a dossier onto the table. In it was a picture of a handsome, sharp featured young woman with unruly crow feathers for hair and piercing eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Her eyes were fixed on some point right out of the picture field. Whatever she saw, it had given her a feral, defiant look that Ambrose didn’t ever want to see staring in his direction. The name written under the picture was “Celestine Lemark,” which didn’t have a drop of Hebrew in it. She didn’t look Israeli, either—Gideon was right, she could have passed as French North African.

  He nodded, doing some calculations in his head. “Alright…alri
ght, there could be something to work with here. Jabhat al-Nusra might ransom off a captive if they thought she was low value, especially since France is staying neutral in Syria.”

  Wayne shook his head. “Maybe, but we’re not operating on that type of time frame. You’re going to go get her, with no ransom in hand.”

  Ambrose jerked his thumb towards the Israeli and asked, “Is that my mission talking, or the Israeli?”

  Wayne answered, “That’s your mission. Let’s spare the banter and cut to it: Jamsheed Mashhadi is the stuff of nightmares, but first and foremost he’s a weapons engineer. Regardless of whether you can outthink him, outfight him, and kill him—which I think you can—this whole threat comes down to a bunch of weapons components being shuttled from one group of assholes to an even worse group of assholes,” he shrugged his broad shoulders, “So my field agent—you, motherfucker—are gonna take your own engineer along with you.”

  “And Celestine Lemark is a trained explosives engineer who is already in western Syria,” Gideon added quietly. Ambrose pegged him as one of those guys whose voice got quieter and more treacherous the more you pissed him off. Gideon continued, “We won’t be able to sneak two people into the country, so your ability to neutralize the chemical weapons threat will depend on freeing Lemark and getting her access to the Tuva canisters. She’ll be able to destroy them and whatever rocket components are being shuttled along with them as a delivery mechanism.”

  Ambrose curled his lip a bit. “And maybe it also just so happens that somebody,” he looked at Wayne, “Owes somebody,” he looked at Gideon, “a favor from the Jurassic days of super spying, and now that favor is being called in when a field agent has gone missing.”

  Wayne seemed to pick up on Gideon’s quiet menace, and gave a crisp hand wave that cut Ambrose off like he was doing his agent a favor. “Call it however you want; you know it makes sense. So you’re gonna get the girl, then you’re going to intercept Mashhadi and deal with him so Lemark can neutralize the weaponry.”

  “You said she’s in western Syria,” Ambrose looked at Gideon, “care to be any more specific?”

  Gideon answered, “There is a fixer in the Syrian port of Latakia named Muhammad Zubair. He works for Assad, but he has no love for Hezbollah or Iran, and very little happens in western Syria without his knowledge. My agents say he had proven trustworthy in the past, so long as information is all you need.”

  “And if your sparkling personality doesn’t work, I’ve given you the wiring number for a fifty thousand Euro credit line. That should move a guy like Zubair just enough to keep from putting a bullet in your head,” Wayne said. Then he held up a thick file. “Here’s your radio frequencies, the account number, pertinent information on Zubair, Mashhadi, Lemark, and Tuva, along with a grid map of Syria that we’ll be using when we communicate. Commit the big stuff to memory and write down everything else in that adorable red notebook of yours. You’re on a Cypriot civilian ferry bound for Latakia in three hours. That’ll put you in the Syrian port by sunset.”

  * * *

  Wayne led Ambrose to a small bedroom and ordered him to get some sleep, like he was a kid up past his bedtime. Sunlight crept through the windows, but Ambrose was exhausted from his sleepless transoceanic cargo flight, so he didn’t argue. He just fell face first onto the bed like a drunk who had been tazed.

  As his eyes shut, Ambrose whispered, “Really Wayne, why me?”

  “Because you don’t just hate the enemy; you love the game. Gideon’s men might find the Iranian, but they would only kill him, and maybe start a war in the process. You won’t just kill him: you’re going to beat him. You’re going to humble him. Why you? Because you’re our Jamsheed Mashhadi, and you’re better than he is, and I want the ayatollahs to know that. Even if they win in Syria, I want them to lie awake knowing that you exist, and you’re ours. That’s why you. So get some sleep and dream in Arabic.”

  His hand twitched like a half-crushed bug as he tried to fall asleep. When darkness finally swallowed him, Ambrose dreamed in Farsi.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Latakia was the kind of city that deserved to be part of a better country than Assad’s Syria. It had the same turquoise waters and electric, wholesome vibe as the other great port cities of the eastern Mediterranean, where you could imagine striding off a boat like Odysseus, with adventure just waiting to fall into your lap. White colonial villas with red tile roofs overlooked the port from green hills that stretched further back inland, hinting that Syria wasn’t some Arab-infested desert hellhole. It was actually an ancient, semi-arid farmer country infested by Assads. And Latakia was damn near the heart of their homeland.

  The Assad clan hailed from northwest Syria, in the mountains above Latakia. They were Alawites: not Shiites, not Sunnis, but something entirely different. Mainstream Muslims had never trusted them, so they hid up in the hills with their secret faith, right up until a young Alawite air force commander named Hafez al-Assad seized his moment and toppled the basket-case Syrian government in the 1960s. Hafez and his clan ruled for thirty years, making Syria into a formidable military dictatorship by simultaneously allying with the godless Soviets and revolutionary Iran. Hafez’s tangled alliances lay at the heart of Ambrose’s unusual mission: stop a zealous Iranian bomb maker from delivering the weapons of Soviet atheists to a Shiite Lebanese militia dedicated to destroying Jewish Israel.

  All of this history went through the back of Ambrose’s mind as he stood in a line full of Turks and Greeks at the Latakia port’s ramshackle international customs house. He had dumped Wayne’s dossier folders in the green Mediterranean hours beforehand, so even in a worst-case scenario, his mission wouldn’t be immediately apparent. The important parts were either in his head or written in code within his red moleskin notebook. Only two pieces of that file survived; the picture of Jamsheed as a child soldier and the picture of Celestine Lemark staring into the distance with her penetrating eyes. He’d folded them both up and put them in his lapel pocket; close to his heart, where unrequited loves belong.

  The line was grinding to a halt, which made him consider slipping into the water and trying to swim past the border post, but he thought better of it. The Assads ruled Syria through the dreaded Mukhabarat secret police, and only one rule really counted in police states: thou shall not get noticed. A white guy in a bright red linen shirt dripping with sea water would break that commandment pretty damned quickly once he hit land. That only left him with the direct approach.

  The customs agent, a military man with tobacco-yellowed fingers and the bored look of customs agents everywhere, snapped his fingers and motioned Ambrose forward. Ambrose produced the midnight blue Canadian passport Wayne had slipped inside his dossier.

  The customs agent looked at him with the dark eyes of a man who lived in uncertain times. “You come for business?” he asked in thick English.

  “Yes, friend,” Ambrose answered in crisp Iraqi-accented Arabic, “I’m an import-exporter with offices in London and Tel Aviv. I’m here to buy looted archaeological artifacts. The dealer’s name is Muhammad Zubair.”

  The agent’s eyes widened cartoonishly, almost hitting his receding hairline. “What?”

  Ambrose smiled and continued cheerily, “Zubair is based here in Latakia. He sent me a price list in London and it seemed reasonable. Greek statues, Roman friezes, the kind of things collectors go crazy over in Europe and Israel.” Ambrose lit a cigarette. “Oh, and something about a bunch of ivory. That’s legal here in Syria, right?”

  The officer drew his tarnished pistol, indicating that it was not.

  * * *

  Ambrose woke up on the floor, surprised to see daylight. When Third World soldiers knocked you out, you were supposed to awaken under a single swinging light bulb that flickered as it threatened to die. Instead, he was in a small cell with a sliding jailhouse barred door, and a window view of the setting Mediterranean sun. That meant he’d been tossed into a normal jail, probably where drunk Russian sailors on sh
ore leave sobered up before they could stumble back to their naval base and help Vladimir Putin offload more weapons to Assad’s armies.

  In any event, the cell wasn’t a Mukhabarat interrogation room; despite the public beating that the customs agents had given him in broad daylight, no one had called the secret police. That meant the local authorities were answering to someone else, as Wayne’s instructions had predicted, and Ambrose’s shenanigans had gotten that someone’s attention. Hopefully his name was Muhammad Zubair.

  Dried blood surrounded a cut above his left eye, telling him some bastard had been wearing a ring when he punched. His ribs also hurt where he’d taken a single judicious kick from the lead goon. But nothing seemed broken, so all in all it could’ve been worse. Now he just had to wait and see whether Wayne’s dossier was worth a damn.

  His bag was missing, so Ambrose passed the time by humming a half-forgotten tune to himself. Tom Waits, maybe, or the Pogues. As he hummed, Ambrose thought of all the Silat techniques he’d learned, spending those hundreds of hours in a sweat-covered Jakarta gym. Once, his leathery old teacher had described an impossible maneuver allegedly developed in Borneo, and probably considered bullshit even on Borneo: when a superior foe had beaten a warrior down, the Silat master let his opponent joke, mocking the master’s weakness. Then the master lunged up, shoved his hand down the taunter’s mouth, and ripped out his jaw. No one could see it coming, so no one could properly defend against it. Then again, if you timed it wrong, the opponent bit your fucking fingers off down to the stump.