by Bryce Adams
Soleimani did so while keeping the gun trained on his target, but Kareem walked towards the balcony without a second thought. The winds of Mount Damavand blew into the room, scattering the papers on Soleimani’s desk and making the robes of both clerics ripple like waves on a black ocean. As Kareem reached the doorframe, Soleimani stuck the gun between his ribs.
“Forgetting something, Kermani?” the general asked.
The secretary nodded, sighing. He dropped the black Samsung in Soleimani’s hand without even looking at him. The mountain wind had blown the sweat off his forehead, and Kareem looked braver and calmer than Soleimani—or probably anyone—had ever seen him.
He spoke without turning backwards, never facing away from the distant lights of Tehran, “My family, Ali—you swear they are safe?”
The wind muffled Khamenei’s calm voice, but they both still heard him swear, “They are blameless, old friend. Only you will face the hellfire.”
Kareem nodded to himself then walked onto the balcony. Soleimani only saw his silhouette for a moment, blocking out Tehran’s pulsing lights, before Kareem Kermani threw himself over the railing and down the side of Mount Damavand.
2012
September
Thursday
Chapter Fifteen
Ambrose Hayes woke up in a messy apartment in Jakarta, well before dawn. Someone had forgotten to turn on the Korean air conditioning unit attached to the room’s north wall, so it was roughly five hundred degrees Celsius in that green-tiled studio. Mysterious piles of clothes surrounded him, and nothing in the room reminded him of home. Then he realized that it was his own apartment, strewn with clothes he’d hastily kicked off before bed. Something in his apartment was beeping, but it couldn’t have been his phone—his only ring tone was an mp3 sample of Darth Vader breathing.
The cold blue light pulsing outward from the pocket of his linen pants on the floor told him a different story: it was his phone, sending out a ring tone he’d never heard, attached to a number he didn’t know, with a country code he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t going to voice mail after five rings, either. His groggy mind observed that you should never work for people who insist you use a pre-programmed cell phone.
He picked it up with the delicate touch of a man too sleepy to be angry, and said, “Halo?” in Indonesian, the language he’d been speaking day in, day out since arriving as a field correspondent in Jakarta several years earlier.
“Hayes. You know a place called Awanseri airfield? It’s in the old Batavia section of Jakarta, near the port,” asked the rough, friction-filled voice of an American man in late middle age, probably one who drank and smoked.
The sound of someone speaking American English threw Ambrose for a loop. “Wayne…is that you? What the hell number are you dialing from?” he asked.
“Does that matter, Hayes? Do you know the Awanseri airfield, and how quickly can you get there? I need you for something unusual that I’m not going to discuss over any phone, even at this number. You’ll want to be in on this.”
Ambrose pulled away the phone and looked at the time. Just past 2:00 in the morning. That meant he’d only been asleep a couple hours, which in turn meant that he was still drunk. He groaned, “I can get there by the afternoon, Wayne. That’ll give me time to get things in order.”
The thing on the other end of the line growled, “How soon can you be here, Hayes?”
Ambrose felt his left hand twitch from an old injury. It acted up less often now that he was only on semi-active duty, so its sudden resurgence didn’t seem like a good omen for whatever this “something unusual” was supposed to be. That sobered him up a bit.
His blue eyes shone in the dark. “I’m on the other end of town from the port of Jakarta. I learned about Awanseri airfield when I trailed those human traffickers last year. I can be there in an hour,” he said in the hard voice of someone who could will himself sober once the adrenaline hit.
“Be there in an hour, Hayes. Pack for warm weather, but bring a good pair of shoes. I know how much you hate infantry boots,” Wayne Shenzo said.
Ambrose hung up without saying goodbye then looked around his cluttered, boiling apartment, trying to find something clean amidst those piles of mysterious linen. He unearthed a hideous little red and white flower-print tourist’s bag and shoved some clothes in there. A couple shirts, another pair of jeans, some socks. Then a few personal items: his beaten-up Indian mp3 player, some triple-A batteries for it, the little red moleskin notebook where he took down mission notes, and five packs of Dji Sam Soe brand Indonesian clove cigarettes.
His silver Persian cat materialized as he packed, like a furry ball of moonlight sneaking out between clouds. Her name was Layla, and she was a gift from a woman named Layla. He’d leave a note so the housekeeper would remember to keep the little lady fed. He overfilled her bowl just to make sure, and kissed her on the nose. She was unimpressed, and grunted back at him unsympathetically with that pug nose of hers. Layla the cat wasn’t any better at goodbyes than Layla the woman had been.
Twenty million people aside, Jakarta was a city full of Muslims who woke up for prayers at dawn, so that meant it was a city that tried to sleep at night. It made catching a taxi a bitch, but Ambrose knew a guy that would drive him all the way to the port, for an amount that was definitely going on the tab of Wayne Shenzo. The price was fair based on his destination, however: those twenty million people and another two hundred million sewer rats stood between him and Awanseri airfield. Hayes acknowledged the problem, agreed to the price, then told the cabbie to shut up and drive.
They got to the address after passing what must have been ten miles of rusty ghost town, full of nothing but homeless druggies and the feral dog packs that hunted them. The taxi stopped at an unmarked airfield whose front was hidden by the endless row of warehouses. A single naked light bulb hung above the gate, attracting a cloud of thousands of flying ants. Beneath it sat an Indonesian with a pistol in his lap, reading a magazine. He didn’t raise the gun as they rolled up, which meant he was expecting Ambrose, or some other quiet, hurried white man just like him.
The guard nodded and waved him past the gate before going back to his tabloid. On the airfield there sat a single unmarked cargo plane, medium-sized, with a red light emanating from its open cargo hold. Ambrose didn’t like the idea of being cargo, but he still walked into the belly of the plan and took his place on a pile of boxes stamped with black Chinese characters. Pre-mission jitters—a subspecies of professionalism—had kicked in, so Ambrose forgot to be annoyed that Wayne hadn’t put a cot in his damned plane. The cargo door’s hydraulics began to close within moments of his arrival, then they snapped shut with a hiss that Ambrose imagined someone heard right before being swallowed by a crocodile.
* * *
The plane landed with a labored thump that knocked Ambrose halfway off his Chinese cargo box. His cell phone said the flight had taken more than eight hours, which had been ample time to paralyze his ass and everything else in his body that connected to it via the spine.
Two figures were waiting for him on the tarmac, drenched in morning light that canceled the red gloom of the cargo hold light that had solved for eight hours as his false sun. One of the men was short and broad with a slight stoop to his posture, the other tall and warped like a shadow that had been thrown onto a wall by firelight.
Wayne Shenzo was the short one. Ambrose hadn’t seen the man in two years, but despite the passage of time he still had wide shoulders, a smashed-in nose, and bear paw hands that looked capable of disassembling whichever fool dared to call him out.
The other man was a cipher, though Ambrose could guess who he was. About six foot four, thinner than an anorexic junkie, with a milky blind eye in his left socket. Whatever had caused the blast left a halo of scars around the rest of his face, but the attack hadn’t touched his right eye. That eye burned like molten obsidian, and one look filled a person with craven, atavistic fear, like the viewer was a rat and the thin man w
as a cobra. Only Gideon Patai had that face.
Ambrose had never met him, although their paths had crossed a few times. When he’d worked in Bangkok, Ambrose had known people who knew of Patai, but even at three degrees of separation the man’s fearsome reputation kept his secrets for him. Ambrose didn’t like Israeli spies, because in the end they all just turned out to be assassins, and he’d seen more than enough death in his life. With a man like Patai, however, he’d try really damned hard to choke back his contempt.
Wayne smiled and shook Ambrose’s hand with one of his massive, bone-breaking paws. “Hayes, welcome to Cyprus. Can I carry that bag for you?” he asked.
“Cyprus. Fuck,” Hayes said, “You’re sending me to Syria.”
Wayne gave an eloquent shrug as they led Ambrose off the tarmac, towards a little villa that abutted the private airfield.
* * *
Wayne and Gideon’s makeshift command center looked like the remnants of some old Ottoman pasha’s lounge. There was a long table surrounded by moth-eaten overstuffed couches that were hemmed in by intricate little wooden end tables filigreed with gold. Old rugs worth a fortune hung from every wall except the one on the east side, where a wide portal led to a classic Mediterranean veranda separated from the lounge by sheer white curtains that turned banana-yellow in the morning sunlight.
The old men had covered the room’s main table with maps of Syria, the largest of which they held down with an array of ash trays, scotch bottles, and a wireless radio transceiver. Wayne motioned for Ambrose to join them, while Gideon quietly watched Ambrose and inhaled a French Gauloises cigarette.
The Israeli tapped one long, manicured finger at a place on the map in western Syria, near a little village reading “al-Qusair” in English letters. Ambrose only knew the place by reputation: Qusair was the way station for weaponry being smuggled from Iran through Syria and onward to Hezbollah in tiny, chaotic Lebanon.
Iranian weapons, Ambrose thought. He was getting a sense of why they’d called him in. Hezbollah would be a first, though; he’d never dealt with the organization before and he didn’t want to start now. Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” was a Lebanese political movement that arose to protect Lebanon’s downtrodden Shiite peasantry. Fast forward thirty years, and they had become the world’s most lethal paramilitary organization, dedicated to seizing power in Lebanon and destroying the hated Israeli state to the south of Lebanon.
Iran made it all possible. In the 1980s Khomeini sent Revolutionary Guardsmen to train the first generation of Hezbollah like attack dogs, then Khomeini’s successor Ali Khamenei gave Hezbollah all the money it would need to take Khomeini’s Shiite revolution worldwide. If Iran and Israel ever went to war, Hezbollah would strike the first blow for Iran by raining missiles down across northern Israel.
Gideon Patai tapped at the map again and spoke English in an accent that sounded like it came from everywhere and nowhere. He could have been an alien dropped to earth, impersonating our ways until the mother ship landed. “There. That is Hezbollah’s idea of a perfect border crossing between Lebanon and Syria. No one can get an agent inside their ranks, so the bastards could be moving space shuttles through here with impunity,” he said.
Ambrose couldn’t keep his mouth shut, interjecting, “And why do we care, other than on general principle? Even if Hezbollah had access to the whole Syrian arsenal, it could never hide the gear once it hit Lebanon. Lebanon’s smaller than New Jersey, and we monitor every inch of it with spy satellites.”
Gideon drank him in with his remaining eye, nursing his Gauloises before answering, “My best Iranian contact went dark three days ago. Before that, he sent me two short text messages at eight p.m., Tehran time. The first message simply read ‘Tuva.’ Tuva is a serious problem.”
“Why?” Ambrose looked over at Wayne, who was filling a glass with scotch from a bottle of Dewars that had recently been holding down the big map of Syria. Even though it couldn’t have been eight in the morning, Wayne poured himself a tall glass. Thirsty spymasters in the field acknowledged no puny time zones.
“Wayne, why is that a serious problem?” Ambrose repeated.
Wayne nodded towards the Israeli and tasted his drink.
Gideon continued, “Tuva was supposed to be a Cold War fairy-tale. It was, allegedly, a hybrid of two things the Soviets did extremely well: chemical weapons and mass-production, combined to create a chemical agent deployable with the same ease and predictability as a single Kalashnikov round.”
“Bullshit,” Ambrose said, “There’s no such thing as ‘predictability’ with chemical weapons, unless you hit somebody point-blank in an enclosed space. They’re useless on a battlefield unless you’re willing to fire hundreds of them, and Israel’s air force would never give Hezbollah the chance to launch a hundred of anything from a fixed rocket position.”
Gideon looked at Wayne and said, “You told me this was the man.”
Wayne frowned. “This is the man, Gideon. Keep going. Hayes: shut the fuck up for five minutes,” he ordered.
Hayes shut the fuck up and the Israeli continued, “As you say, most chemical weapons are too unreliable to cause mass casualties. That’s what Tuva solves,” Gideon held up his cigarette pack, spinning it between his fingers by holding the edges, “It’s just a packaging system: a uniform shell canisters, twenty-two inches long. The casing houses gaseous contents at extremely high pressures, which effectively triples how much lethal agent a single canister can hold. Despite the pressurized contents, we also speculate that the cylinder’s alloys can take most small and medium arms fire without rupturing. In fact, the canisters only have a single weak point: an in-built hairline fracture along the nose, which is designed to crumple uniformly upon gravitic impact.”
“So you fire one of these things, it hits the target, and you have a totally controllable full-strength gas dispersion,” Ambrose added.
“Indeed,” Gideon tapped the sides of his cigarette pack, “And the damn things have an unusual generic socket at their bases that will attach to almost anything the Soviets made. You could load Tuva canisters into a truck-mounted rocket like a Katyusha or even a SCUD—perhaps even a shoulder-mounted RPG round, so long as it was Soviet in origin.”
So there it was. Ambrose said, “The Katyusha is the same rocket artillery that Hezbollah used against Israel when they fought in 2006, and there are thousands of Soviet-designed RPGs throughout Syria, Lebanon, and Hamas-controlled parts of Palestine.” He reached into the lapel pocket of his red button-up shirt and grabbed an Indonesian clove cigarette.
Gideon leaned over and gave him a light. “Interested yet, Mister Hayes? Colonel Shenzo says you’ll like this next bit even more,” the one-eyed man hinted.
“Hold on,” Ambrose let the cigarette dangle out of his mouth and raised his right hand, “First, you’re creepily well-informed about a weapon that isn’t supposed to exist. Second, if this system is so lethal, why in the hell would the Soviets have given it to Syria? They’d be breaking ten different arms treaties, not to mention risking the technology failing into NATO hands. Last, why would your person in Tehran know this? How are the Iranians involved?”
“I saw schematics for the system once, decades ago, while working a source in Kinshasa. I don’t tend to forget such things,” Gideon said, “As for the Syrians, who knows? My job isn’t to dig up old mysteries. My job is to predict the future and force it to cooperate at gunpoint. But if you insist on an explanation, Soviet quartermasters were notorious for lining their own pockets, and these things likely just fell off the back of the proverbial truck. I doubt the Syrians even knew what they’d accidentally bought, until very recently.”
“And who could have told them that?”
Gideon lit another Gauloises cigarette and said, “I mentioned that the message from Iran was only two words. The first, ‘Tuva.’ The second: ‘Jadugaar.’”
The damaged nerves in Ambrose’s left hand came alive, spasming. “That’s the Farsi word for ‘sorcerer,’�
� He observed. He whipped his head to confront Wayne Shenzo so quickly that his neck was sore. “Why didn’t you lead with this, instead of spending five minutes babbling about fucking Soviet relics? Why didn’t you warn me what this was really about?” He asked.
Wayne tossed a manila dossier folder onto the table. It fell open to a full-sized photo of a handsome Persian man with a strong chin, perfectly curly black hair, and a controlled five o’clock shadow that seemed standard issue for Persians worldwide. He was sitting behind a white baby grand piano, smiling as he played. The other photo showed a boy that couldn’t have been more than ten years old holding a Kalashnikov, standing atop the body of a dead Iraqi soldier, wearing a crimson headband proclaiming “God is great” in big yellow letters. It was Jamsheed Mashhadi, colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a weapons specialist attached to the shadowy Quds Force, codenamed Sorcerer. Ambrose recognized the folder’s contents well.
Wayne replied, “I didn’t tell you about Mashhadi immediately because I needed your head clear for a minute before I let loose your bloodlust.”
Gideon blew a big cloud of smoke out of his nose, wreathing his face in deadly mist as he said, “This twitchy fool doesn’t know bloodlust.”
Chapter Sixteen
Gideon stood on the balcony making phone calls in Hebrew as he burned through every Gauloises cigarette in Cyprus. Wayne and Ambrose still sat at the table, where Wayne was finally sharing the scotch with Ambrose, who cared even less about drinking and time zone etiquette than his boss did. Ambrose couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures of Mashhadi, both of which he’d discovered and added to the folder that included his original Baghdad notes on Sorcerer from 2005-6.
The photograph of Mashhadi sitting behind his piano was the cover of the DVD that captured his 2007 Christmas show in Paris. Ambrose had glimpsed the concert’s aftershow live in that bar in Jakarta, then gone back and watched the DVD of the actual performance. Jamsheed played western classical composers for almost three hours, then spent another two hours of bonus DVD answering questions about the sorry state of Iranian human rights posed to him by Parisian socialites.