Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  His captor squeezed the mp3 player hard, seeming not to notice. “You’ve been here two hours, maybe less. We had you in a goat pen where prisoners go, then we brought you in here for questioning.”

  “Under two hours? That’s good, very good. Any longer and I don’t think we’d both be sitting here,” he leaned forward as far as his bound hands would let him, and whispered conspiratorially, “A Reaper also carries a full sensor suite—audio, visual, radio, hypersonic, everything,” Ambrose lied, “And that transponder in your hand is part of it. The drone operator fixes on that signal and uses it to track the field operative who carries the transponder. If the signal goes dark, drone pilots assume the field operative and his gear are destroyed. Then the drone unleashes its full payload on the area. But the Reaper also has a camera, and can do the whole thing low-tech. What do you suppose happens if it loses visual contact with the field operative for too long?”

  “The drone pilot assumes the agent is dead—“

  “And unleashes its full payload on the area.” Ambrose looked around the dark room, hearing hidden men shuffle as his eyes passed over them. “How big is this camp—does it extend past the little village we saw, or is that all of you? A Reaper carries twenty Hellfire rockets, each with a standard blast radius of twenty meters. Multiply that by twenty, and how many men do you think you’ll have left? Enough that you can write off the rest as acceptable losses in the name of global jihad?” He’d heard that Reapers carry hellfire missiles. Maybe. Didn’t they?

  The man’s face said that he couldn’t write that many men off. He said, “I…will need to discuss this with my commander.” He stood, clutching the mp3 player like it was the last dying flashlight in a cave six miles deep.

  Ambrose snarled, “No. You told me in the hills that I could deal with you. You said that your commander is busy right now. Trust me, friend, you’re the one who’s busy now, and about to get a lot busier once that Reaper comes calling.”

  The scarred man stopped in the door and spoke through gritted teeth, “What do you want, American?”

  All of the intensity drained out of Ambrose’s face. Now he was made of ice, with a voice to match. “You have another prisoner here. A woman.”

  “We have two prisoners here—there’s a man also. My commander is with him right now.”

  Ambrose’s voice went low as he said, “I’m not here for the man. I’m here for the woman doctor. I heard her in the goat pen when I was semiconscious after your beating. Can she move?”

  The jihadist frowned and nodded his head, saying, “Yes. We interrogated her when she was captured—a stupid little Frenchwoman who wants to play doctor in the middle of a warzone,” he dropped the mp3 player back in Ambrose’s red bag, “She’s nothing to us. We were going to film a ransom video, then swap her back to her government unharmed in return for some submachine gun ammunition.”

  Ambrose grunted. “You’ll have to go without the ammo, and say goodbye to a truck.”

  His captor clicked his tongue dismissively and said, “That I can’t do. We need all of our trucks to shuttle fighters.”

  Ambrose said, “Unless you give me a truck, the Reaper will reduce all of your fighters to something you can shuttle in a wheelbarrow. Give me the woman, give me a truck, and you’ll never hear from either of us again. You can even say that you bargained me down, if you like. Maybe my first plan was to kill you all, and you got me to settle for taking the woman and a truck. You won’t look very brave, but I’m sure a couple of attacks on defenseless villages will rehabilitate your reputation.” He cleared his throat again. Less blood this time. “Now untie me. Let’s not keep my Reaper waiting.”

  They untied his hands, and Ambrose flexed them into fists to jump-start his circulation. It also made the cuts on his wrists starts trickling again, where the wire had bitten deep. It wasn’t too bad, though, considering the day he’d been having. The cuts would stop leaking sooner or later, and one nice thing about deserts was the reduced risk of wounds getting infected.

  He stood up, wiped his hands on his jeans, then he picked up the red bag and took out a .44 pistol he’d gotten from Zubair. He put it in his belt, then rifled through the bag until he found one of the two T-shirts he’d brought with him. He sloughed off his filthy red button-up shirt and pulled on a blue T-shirt with a faded Thai beer logo—the one he’d previously worn soaking wet on his head as poor man’s air conditioning. He paused a second and took the photos of Celestine and Jamsheed out of the red shirt’s front pocket, folding them to fit within the front of his moleskin notebook. Bag in one hand, pistol in the other, he nodded for the door, and both of them walked out into the town square. Above them, a Reaper drone would have reflected the last pink slivers of evening sunlight.

  The scarred man walked quickly across the square, which was dominated by a small well and that tall flagpole flying the black banner of jihad. Men sat in the shade of houses cleaning their guns and reading well-worn copies of the Quran. As Ambrose had noted in several of his reports from Indonesia, jihadists were first and foremost pretty boring people. He walked several steps behind the scarred man to ensure that he still looked like a captive. No one noticed one way or the other; they must have assumed he’d been broken, and was gladly slinking back to his goat pen. Ambrose choked down a whimper as he drew a breath and acknowledged that, medically speaking, they had broken him.

  Instead, he said to the scarred man, “This is the best al-Qaida can manage in Syria? Fuck, you people have fallen on hard times.”

  The scarred man muttered, “We are not al-Qaida. We fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This is only a forward base for western Syria. You would not laugh if you saw our strongholds on the Iraqi-Syrian border. That is where our caliphate will begin. Even Mecca was humble in the beginning. Then it toppled Rome and Persia.”

  “Speaking on behalf of the Romans, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  The goat pen was closer than he’d thought, and sat sealed with a verdigris-covered padlock that made him feel guilty for not trying to kick it into oblivion. After the scarred man produced a key, it opened with a clack like two shine bones struck together. In front of him was a small woman with short oily hair that looked like a headdress of crow feathers. She squinted up at him through cracked glasses whose frames were miraculously holding together. Purple and yellow bruises surrounded her mouth area, but otherwise she seemed healthy enough to move. She hopped backward like a cat when Ambrose walked into the pen.

  He extended a hand out to her and spoke in English, “My name is Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you. Please don’t make me speak French.”

  She squinted up at him, trying to see through the gloom, then settled on a groan. “Fuck. They sent an American.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The door flung open, and men in dirty robes dragged Jamsheed out of the goat pen. Marie muttered something in French behind him, but Jamsheed didn’t catch it. His robed jailors had the faces of men that war had hollowed out. Their grips were strong but mechanical, dragging him forward with no attempt to look at Jamsheed’s face or say anything in his direction. They had bloodshot eyes that darted unthinkingly back and forth even amidst a secure village full of armed compatriots. Jamsheed saw terror in those eyes. Too much time staring into the sun, too much time praying to God.

  The wild-eyed silent men dragged him across a dusty lane covered with the tire tracks of military vehicles and threw him into another dark room. It was in some kind of mud-brick house that reminded Jamsheed of the doomed little village where he’d rendezvoused with Hezbollah. Al-Qaida had converted it into a grungy command center, with hand-drawn maps of what he assumed was western Syria covering the walls. All of the light in the room came from a single exposed light bulb hanging from a frayed stem. There was a pile of rolled up Muslim prayer rugs in the corner, next to a low table that held half a dozen copies of the Quran. Above the Qurans, a framed picture of that dead fool Osama bin Laden beamed downward at his followers. Ja
msheed had never met him or even given him much thought, because at the end of the day Osama bin Laden was just another rich boy playing soldier, the same as Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein.

  Other than the flickering light bulb, there was only one electrical device in the entire room: a shiny tripod-mounted video camera with a little red light blinking next to its lens. The hollow men took him by the shoulders and shoved him down into a metal folding chair right in front of the camera. Then he heard them leave, and another man entered. Jamsheed didn’t bother looking backwards. He knew from personal experience that a nervous prisoner only made for a hungrier torturer.

  The man walked around him with heavy boot stomps, like a dozen sandbags being dropped onto concrete. Halfway around Jamsheed, somewhere behind his left ear, the man’s voice boomed out at him.

  “Look at me,” the Emir commanded.

  Jamsheed turned to the left and saw the stone-faced monster right beside him. “Hello, Emir. I never got the opportunity to praise you for how well that ambush went this afternoon. Fine work, especially given the caliber of recruit you people tend to attract,” Jamsheed offered.

  The Emir sat down in a chair across from him with his back to the video camera. He had two rolled-up pieces of paper in his hand, white sheets that looked incongruously pure as they were clenched between those giant fingers with their hairy knuckles.

  The Emir replied, “Good. You like to talk. That will make this quicker.”

  Jamsheed held up his maimed left hand. “Whatever this is, it might take longer than you’d think. People tell me I’m stubborn.”

  The Emir grunted in acknowledgment as he shoved one of the papers at Jamsheed’s chest. “They said that. That’s why I’ll start off lower than your fingernails, if you test me.”

  Jamsheed glanced at the paper and saw the same speech broken into two columns, one side in Arabic and the other in Farsi. Both used the Arabic alphabet, but they were different languages with different rules, and even similar words were pronounced differently.

  He grimaced while looking at the video camera. “Do I start with the Arabic then read the Farsi, or vice-versa?”

  “You read the Farsi. The Arabic is for me, to follow along,” the Emir said. He raised up his sheet of paper, showing a similar copy of the speech in both languages. “My version also has your Farsi marked up phonetically, so I can sound out the words and tell if you’re cheating.”

  There went another one of Jamsheed’s ideas, although he was impressed that the Emir knew the word “phonetically.”

  Jamsheed said, “So someone gave you a Farsi speech, translated it into Arabic so you got the gist of it, then took the time to mark up the Farsi so you could ensure I was reading what’s written down. Very thorough. May I go on?”

  The Emir nodded, his dull eyes betraying nothing.

  “Someone paid you off. You won’t tell me who, you won’t tell me how much, and you don’t care why they did it. But they’re someone fluent in both languages, who knows me well enough to take precautions,” Jamsheed pointed to the Arabic, “To ensure that I didn’t mangle the speech. And they want me to give that speech in Farsi, because this video is meant for Iran.” Jamsheed crossed one of his legs, like he was sitting in a Parisian café with espresso in front of him. “So you weren’t just paid to execute me—you could have done that back on the road. You took money to help someone in Iran eliminate a political rival.”

  The bearded man spoke, “We don’t care why Persians want to kill Persians. We’ll kill you all for free, but a bit of funding makes things even easier.”

  “No matter whether it’s from inhuman Persian Shiite heretics?” Jamsheed inquired.

  The Emir said, “If you want to behead the devil, you need a sword. If the devil buys the sword for you, that’s his mistake.”

  Jamsheed hummed as he perused the contents of his falsified confession. “Homosexuality, American sympathies, spying for the French...” he lowered the paper, “The ‘homosexuality’ charge seems a little unnecessary, don’t you think? It’s just so damned petty.”

  That actually got a chuckle out of his captor. Then the Emir asked, “So you are ready?”

  Jamsheed ignored the question and said, “You should know, I’ve been in this situation before. The man with the script and the camera couldn’t break me then, either. They just kept talking, and threatening, and giving me childish temper tantrum beatings, until God intervened and set me free.”

  “Not today, Persian. The only god in Syria is mine.”

  Jamsheed cracked his neck on both sides then sat upright in his chair, clearing his throat. “Very well. Just make sure to film from my chest up and use a dull focus so my bruises don’t show up too clearly. I’ll try to do my part and act terrified. We want this to look natural, after all.”

  The bearded man stood up and turned the camera ‘on’ from sleep mode. He checked the zoom screen to make sure the recording was in focus, then sat back down to read along with his copy of the speech. Jamsheed almost cackled when the bearded monster took out a dainty pair of reading glasses that barely fit around the ruined crag of his nose.

  There were maybe three feet between them. Jamsheed wasn’t shackled, and each of his legs was much longer than three feet.

  He cleared his throat again and began, “My name is Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi, son of Javad and Maryam Mashhadi. I hold the rank of full colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, assigned to the Quds Force as a foreign intelligence agent. I have personally overseen revolutionary activities in fourteen countries. For eleven years, I have conducted these missions while secretly working for French military intelligence. I was recruited by the French through an American CIA agent whom I met in a homosexual nightclub in Paris during one of my pleasure-trips abroad. I was weak, and could not resist his temptations. Since then, I have ensured that every Revolutionary mission under my charge has been compromised. Even missions under my command which appear to succeed are deceptions: in every instance, I have alerted the French to our plans, and they have passed this on to the Americans, who have reacted by killing many brave and gifted martyrs who were living deep undercover in their target countries. I am a serial killer of Muslims, whom I gladly butcher in the name of Jesus the Christ, Son of God and true savior of the world.”

  The bearded man clenched his fist until two of his knuckles popped. “That is not written here. Was that ‘Jesus’ you said? What are you doing?” The Emir barked.

  Jamsheed shot back in Arabic, “I just said I worship Jesus, Son of God, and I kill Muslims in his name. Good addition, eh? Now let me continue before we have to restart this whole thing.”

  The man stabbed his mammoth index finger at the final paragraph and commanded, “Here. Start here and then just read through the final paragraph. The speech is meant to be simple.”

  Jamsheed nodded, then looked back at the camera with big soulful eyes. “Pro-Revolutionary Shiites in Baghdad captured me while I was meeting with my French contacts in the Green Zone. They have pronounced a death sentence on me, but not before I admitted to my crimes and begged to God for mercy. But hear me now: I refuse to do so, for Allah is a lie. Only Jesus Christ is God, and Allah must bow before him, or—”

  “You are saying something about Jesus again, and Allah. Do not make me break your neck.”

  Jamsheed leaned forward towards the camera and continued with a cruel smile, “Just as you will bow before me, O slave of the ayatollahs, in the moment before I end you. I am going to kill the Arab dogs you sent to fetch this sham confession, then I am going to hunt you down. The last things you will feel are my left hand, the hand you maimed, closing your mouth shut while my right hand slides through your ribs to stop your heart. Then Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi will scatter your bones into shards, so that on the Day of Resurrection God will call to your spirit, and nothing shall be left to rise from the dus—“

  It didn’t matter that he was sitting down, because Jamsheed saw the Emir’s punch coming. He threw his weight
forward to duck under the big man’s swing and came up inches from the Emir’s face while the man’s outstretched limbs left his body undefended. With the linear brutality of a lathe punching sheet metal, Jamsheed drove each of his thumbs into one of the Emir’s eyes. Once each thumb had stabbed inward to full extension, Jamsheed made identical wrist flicks to mangle the sockets before he retracted both thumbs with a scooping motion that took out whatever was left of the Emir’s eyes.

  The man hadn’t even gasped. Part of that was just shock, but Jamsheed attributed the rest to pure grit on the Emir’s part; he was a genuine warrior, standing there noiselessly as his brain processed the fact that his eyeballs were ripped out. Jamsheed appreciated such fortitude, even as he picked up the metal folding chair and took the Emir apart.

  Wiping off his gory hands on the dead man’s robes, Jamsheed played out the remainder of the scenario in his mind. He noted three distinct advantages: training, surprise, and Hezbollah. His training would take him most of the way. Once he had a rifle and a sidearm, Jamsheed would go through the al-Qaida trash like a scythe through wheat. Surprise would help that. Jamsheed would kill the wild-eyed men when they in came to check on the Emir. He’d do it noiselessly, then take their weapons and steal off on foot through the wilderness, if need be. The gleaming salt deserts of Iran made the Syrian scrubland look like a jungle by comparison. And if they tried to chase him, they would most likely be cut off by a Hezbollah counteroffensive. The Lebanese were no fools—Jamsheed was a jewel in the Revolution’s crown, and the results for their organization would be dire if al-Qaida hunted him down like a dog in the Syrian wilderness.

  He crouched in the shadows of the hut, right beneath the smiling picture of Bin Laden, ready to grab the first fool who stumbled through the door.