Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  Haddad chuckled when he saw Jamsheed, although Jamsheed wasn’t sure if that was pleasure at seeing him alive, or at seeing him alive and beaten to a pulp. He said, “Colonel Mashhadi, thank God they did drag you here!” he shot out a wiry arm and shook Jamsheed’s hand before he could even react, “You can imagine the panic in our ranks when your man told us what had happened to that convoy of Syrian idiots.”

  Jamsheed cocked his head and asked, “My man?”

  Haddad answered, “The interpreter; the one who was riding with you. He escaped along with some other Syrians. They rallied behind a truck and shot their way out, then he drove straight for my camp outside Qusair,” he waved his hand, encompassing all of the burning village, “We deployed in force immediately. My orders are to guard Homs and conquer Qusair, not engage with the rural militia groups.” Haddad used his boot to prod a dead al-Qaida fighter with a hole in his neck and a puddle of blood beneath him. “But you can see we made an exception for you.”

  Jamsheed looked down at the faceless man, remembering half a dozen other battlefields where he’d seen bodies mutilated to the point where he only thought of them as poorly-butchered meat “My undying thanks, Commander. Is that man of mine around? His name’s Salman. I need him immediately.”

  Haddad knelt down rummaging for something as he answered, “He’s with my men, sweeping the perimeter before we settle in for some looting; these fools had some surprisingly good equipment on them. My fighters will be back soon enough, I’m sure.” He stood up, and tossed a black piece of cloth at Jamsheed. “A souvenir of your Syrian holiday.”

  Jamsheed snorted. It was the black flag of al-Qaida, covered in blood and soot. “Maybe I need to become a mullah, so I can sew this into my cloak.”

  The commander laughed and he nodded down at Jamsheed’s scarred left hand. “You don’t need any more distinguishing markers.”

  Jamsheed tightened his face “Careful, Commander. Some men don’t like that type of joke, and you don’t know whether I’m one of them. Now where is Salman?”

  “As I said, he’s out and he’ll doubtless return soon, so in the meantime you need to use this as a chance to rest. You’ve taken enough punishment in the last six hours to kill most people. Plus, it’s nightfall and we have a strong defensive position. Enjoy the calm while it lasts, and we’ll complete your mission tomorrow, when my drivers can spot an ambush coming.”

  Jamsheed’s nostrils flared. “That mission is postponed until I say otherwise. There are new factors at play, and I need to confer with the Iranian ambassador in Damascus immediately. The sooner Salman and I reach Damascus, the sooner I’ll be back to complete the weapons transfer.”

  Haddad’s voice was flat as he said, “That isn’t the plan, Colonel. Damascus is at least one hundred miles south of here through rebel terrain, and the Syrians told me the canisters are west of Homs, in the complete opposite direction: that means an overnight delay into Damascus pushes this mission back half a week, and neither the CIA nor Mossad will need half a week to determine what we’re planning. We do this tomorrow, then I’ll escort you to Damascus myself and you can confer with your ambassador for as long as you’d like.”

  Jamsheed crumpled the black flag in his fist and stepped close to the much shorter Haddad. “These new developments will not wait, and you are not in command of this mission,” Jamsheed reminded him.

  The Hezbollah commander met his gaze with hard golden eyes. “And you’re not in command of yourself. Your face is covered in blood, your voice is cracking, and you keep shifting your balance like a man who can barely stand. Whatever you think you need to do, it will wait. I don’t know what you’re hiding, but a colonel in Quds Force doesn’t take orders from any damned ambassador, and a man with your reputation would never back out of a mission against Israel unless his brain was battered into stupidity.”

  Jamsheed cocked his right elbow and made his hand into a knife-edge palm that he intended to put through the commander’s throat. Haddad saw it and drew his pistol from its holster before Jamsheed’s bloodshot eyes even saw the motion coming.

  “Don’t try it, Colonel. I’m not you’re enemy, and you sure as hell aren’t mine,” Haddad said as he cocked the hammer. “Your injuries have thrown you off, and I doubt your pride is in much better shape than your body. Your pride is not worth the lives of my men, and that’s what it will cost if you delay this mission long enough to let the enemy find us and call in an airstrike.”

  Jamsheed lowered his hand. He let out a big breath and felt his insides shudder like a pile of leaves.

  Haddad holstered his gun. “Find a bed, Colonel. I’ll send you Salman when he comes back from patrol,” he said delicately.

  Jamsheed stumbled away from Haddad toward the untouched south end of the village, while the commander went the other way to assemble his men. Once out of eyeshot, Jamsheed leaned hard against an alleyway wall, unable to support his own weight. Part of the trembling weakness came from his wounds, but much of it stemmed from the psychic shock he still hadn’t been able to process.

  Someone in the Islamic Republic, the dream he had fought his entire life to protect, had betrayed him, and he had no idea why. In the rare event that he attended political functions, Jamsheed was quiet and polite. When dealing with his military peers, he was professional. Moreover, he didn’t have enough damned time to really make enemies—he spent ninety percent of his life outside of Iran, training martyrs on the front lines of the worldwide Islamic Revolution. He was famous, but only in certain circles, and he rarely used that notoriety to edge out competitors or force his will on anyone. All he had ever wanted was to fight and die for Iran. Moreover, Jamsheed thought of himself as a pretty decent guy, if not always a nice one.

  But someone disagreed, and they had tried to kill him. No—not kill him; the death of his body would have been incidental if he’d read that confession. Someone had tried to shame him, disgrace him, destroy him along with the lives of the precious few people he cared about. He began to compile a mental list of possible betrayers, based on what they would need to be capable of: they had to know about his mission, have their own agents in Syria to coordinate the kidnapping, and be so fundamentally amoral that they didn’t mind killing a hero of the Revolution.

  The list of conspirators was short. They were all ayatollahs or lesser clerics who were threatened by the military. No matter which of the suspects he put atop the conspiracy, in the middle rung of every scenario there was that oily, jackal-looking ambassador Yazdi in Damascus. He had the money, he doubtless had a network of Syrian agents, and he was ambitious enough to take the job if a powerful enough fellow cleric had asked him. Jamsheed and Salman were taking that trip to Damascus, Haddad be damned.

  Jamsheed found a quiet hut overlooking the field. Inside of it were a few lumpy mattresses, some children’s toys, and a surprisingly well-appointed bookshelf. It contained three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, roughly J through L, a worn atlas in French, and a number of works by Arab authors. There was also a thick, well-read book in a language he’d never seen. Passages were underlined in pencil, with annotations in the same bizarre writing. He thought it was a holy book, but he had no idea what it said. He doubted it had given its owner much solace at the end, especially if that owner had been a Christian in a village conquered by al-Qaida.

  He took off his green army jacket, leaving him in a threadbare military tank top and similarly colorless fatigue pants. It also exposed the necklace he had worn since he was a boy; a golden key on a simple hemp string. He wrapped his intact right hand around the key and passed out like a dead man.

  * * *

  In his dreams, a dead man visited him. Once again, Jamsheed Mashhadi was twelve years old, standing nervously in a weed-strewn soccer field flanked by other boys who were being sent off to die.

  Around his young neck he wore a golden key that glowed with molten heat. The thing was burning itself into his skin, and had already exposed bits of his sternum that would soon be sl
ick with molten gold.

  The wound didn’t frighten him, or even cause him any pain, but he still grabbed at the key more out of curiosity than anything else. He reached up with his young left hand and saw bleeding holes where his fingernails should have been. Jamsheed tried to grab the key, but blood made his hand slip, and he couldn’t get ahold of the thing. The boy on left laughed as he mockingly held up a set of pliers. The boy on Jamsheed’s right did likewise, and held up a blowtorch.

  The molten heat was one thing. The maimed hand was something else. Being laughed at was something of an entirely different magnitude. He lunged at the boy on his left, intent on ripping out his windpipe.

  He stopped halfway through the air like a marionette jerked backward by a bad puppeteer. It was the key. Something was attached to the key.

  Jamsheed looked upward at what he’d thought was a pillar of black basalt. It was actually the base of a man’s robes. The robes trailed upward for a hundred feet, until they reached the ancient bearded face of Imam Khomeini. An iron chain trailed upward from the hempen key string around Jamsheed’s neck, and vanished into Khomeini’s clenched fist.

  The Imam looked down at him, and Jamsheed felt the combined sensations of every battle he’d ever fought. The sight of mutilated corpses from Basra mixed with the smell of black mud from al-Majnoon Island. He heard Iraqi warplanes overhead, and he felt the dry wind of an Afghan valley where he’d watched the Northern Alliance line up two hundred women and children then shoot them for being related to Taliban. There were so many deaths and so much confusion that his own memories no longer made any sense to him. He couldn’t imagine the person whose destiny threaded through so much violence. There had to be a purpose to it.

  “Will we win, Imam?”

  Khomeini’s black eyes opened up like pits, each one bigger than a new moon. “Will we win? Take this to your grave, Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi: you were born to fight for God, and that fight will not end until you die a glorious martyr, no matter whether fools with their history books decide that you ‘won’ or ‘lost.’ Until the moment that death happens, you stand among the angels. Anyone who stands against you is a slave of Satan, and you will kill them all.”

  * * *

  Jamsheed jumped up, wide-awake as he felt a hand shaking him by the shoulder. A quiet voice said, “Colonel, it’s me, Salman. I got word of your argument with Haddad, and I know he won’t give you a truck. Are you alright?”

  No, no Jamsheed wasn’t. “Definitely, Salman. Thank you for waking me. What is it?”

  “I have a truck for us. One of the Hezbollah guards believed me when I said you were ordering Haddad to give you a vehicle.”

  Jamsheed sat upright like a man resurrected. “Do you have your gear?”

  Salman nodded, a faceless ghost in the dark hut. “And yours. We can leave immediately,” he said.

  As they snuck away into the night, driving with the truck’s headlights off down a twisting back road, Jamsheed wondered what he would do when he got to Damascus. Then he thought back to his dream, and the Imam Khomeini answered the question for him. His enemies were slaves of Satan, and he would kill them all.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ambrose and Celestine should have moved. They shouldn’t have sat for twenty minutes in that truck arguing about whether to turn around and kill Jamsheed Mashhadi. Ambrose would think these things later.

  Celestine took another one of his Indonesian clove cigarettes. The argument had reached the point where nicotine was communal property. “So you’re going to walk back into the camp and tell them ‘surprise, now I want your other prisoner too!’ Then hope that they still believe your idiotic drone story?” She challenged.

  Ambrose lit his own cigarette and answered, “No. I have a new trick planned this time.”

  She blew smoke in his face. “Yes?”

  He pantomimed a gun in his hand. He felt like drawing the real .44 tucked in his belt, but that might’ve made him look unbalanced, given the circumstances. “I’m going to walk into the camp with my gun drawn, find Mashhadi, and shoot him in the fucking head. Then I’m going to tell al-Qaida that he was an Iranian bomb maker who killed their Sunni buddies in Iraq, and wish them a good day.”

  “You think they don’t know who he is?”

  “They didn’t know who you were.”

  Celestine replied, “That’s because I’m good, and even then I think they were getting close. Thank god I kept my father’s last name,” she frowned, big eyes considering something, “No, it was different with him. They looked at him oddly, and talked about him in quieter voices that I couldn’t make out. With Michael and I, they gloated—especially once they realized Mikey was American. Not with this Mashhadi. They brought him into my pen beaten within an inch of him life, but then they muttered on the other side of the door for a long time, like there was something special about him. There weren’t any more beatings after that.”

  Ambrose felt his ribs throb. “Yeah, that would be different.” He wondered which of the bastards had broken her glasses and punched her in the mouth. “But none of that explains why they would be more likely to leave him alive.”

  Celestine said, “None of it explains why our plan should change just because you found out that our co-prisoner was Iranian and not Turkish.”

  “Because I’m here to find him.”

  “You’re here to find me, and ensure that Hezbollah doesn’t get a chemical weapons arsenal. Jamsheed Mashhadi is a sideshow,” she said.

  “If I kill him before he does his job, Hezbollah won’t be able to use those weapons regardless,” Ambrose retorted.

  “As long as those weapons still exist, the danger is real: the Iranians will send someone else. They’ve got fifty Jamsheeds.”

  Ambrose slammed his left hand down on the wheel, setting off the horn. He looked at his trembling fist with wild eyes. The horn’s wail echoed and boomed over the yellow rocks of the desert. Celestine’s eyes darted from him to the hills and back again, like she wasn’t sure which was more dangerous—al-Qaida pursuers or the madman next to her.

  Over a minute later, he took his fist off the horn and looked at her. The horn blast kept echoing through the scrub and stone. “You need to get this: there is no other Jamsheed. There’s only him. He’s the one: the angel of death, the prince of darkness. My boss didn’t send me here to do behind-enemy-lines sabotage shit. I don’t like Israelis and I’ve never dealt with Hezbollah. If Wayne Shenzo had tried to sell me on either of those things individually, I would’ve been right back on a plane to Jakarta.”

  She looked down at his bad left hand and watched his fingers tremble like rattlesnake tails. “So why are you here, Mister Hayes?”

  He balled up his left hand in an attempt to make it stop. “Because Jamsheed is a dragon, and I’m his dragon slayer.”

  “He’s just a man. Like you. Speaking of which, I noticed something else.”

  “Woman, don’t make me hit that horn again. As long as Jamsheed is behind us and I have the element of surpri—“

  “We don’t have any water.”

  He stopped talking and gripped the wheel with both hands, nonplussed. “What?”

  She pointed her cigarette all around them, showcasing the barren yellow hills as she elaborated, “We call this a desert, and deserts like killing people. Guess what stops them? That’s right, water. And we’re out. We never had any, in fact. I checked while you were minding the road, back before you went insane,” she blew smoke in his face again, “So there’s my whole suggestion: let’s find some water.”

  Ambrose tapped on the wheel with a single callused fingertip. “Water. Fuck…that’s not the only problem. Did you find any communications equipment in this thing when you were rummaging?”

  “No.”

  He lit another cigarette, dimly aware that fate might soon force him to start smoking hellacious Russian Marlboro knockoffs. He continued, “Right. That means we’re completely dark. I don’t have any comm equipment with me in Old Red,”
he nodded at the bag, “And as you noticed, the jihadists traveled light. That means Wayne and your man Gideon haven’t heard from me since I left Cyprus yesterday morning. They don’t know that I’m alive, and they sure as hell don’t know that you’re alive.”

  The more he spoke, the more her expressive eyes darted back and forth doing some kind of calculations in that French-Israeli spy brain of hers.

  “Celestine,” he caught her big brown eyes with his bloodshot blue ones, “What’s gonna happen if Gideon Patai doesn’t hear from you soon?”

  She didn’t look at him. Instead she crushed out her butt on the side of the truck then pointed down the road. “I’d suggest a new order of operations: radio, water, Tuva canisters, Jamsheed Mashhadi.”

  “Find me some water and we’ll talk about it. Wayne and Gideon are monitoring a couple of powerful international signals, but they’re still all the way over on Cyprus. If we’re going to reach them, we’ll need a military-grade transceiver. So we’ve got to find a Syrian army depot or something. Does Assad still have arms depots in western Syria, or will we need to infiltrate an active milita—”

  A crack appeared in the glass of the windshield, surrounding a round hole. Another appeared in rapid succession, accompanied by a quick chuff sound as something annihilated the glass.

  “Sniper!” Celestine gasped, and they both dove out of the truck, not knowing whether either side was even safe to use as cover.

  They landed on different sides of the vehicle and met on their bellies beneath the middle of the chassis. The friction of belly crawling was agony on Ambrose’s ribs and sternum. If no one were watching him or shooting at him or watching him be shot at, it would have been worth some whimpering. Now, his heart was racing but his senses were sharp. It was a talent he’d never noticed before his disastrous tour in Iraq: the worse things got, the sharper his eyes and ears became.