Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  At the base of the clock tower the blood trails converged on a pile of corpses. Most were elderly, the rest were women and children; there might have also been men under that pile, but they were hidden under a giant canvas banner depicting Syria’s beleaguered president. As with every image of Bashar al-Assad, this banner tried to show him at a slight angle but couldn’t hide the truth: he was a gangly, pale man with beady eyes, a thin mustache, and a head too small for his giraffe-like neck. He hadn’t wanted to be president, and it showed in every photo ever taken of him. Even amongst paid crowds of well-wishers, he seemed to be on constant lookout for some way back to his previous life as a doctor in Switzerland, before his fearsome father, Hafez al-Assad, died and left the family needing a new dictator for the family business. Jamsheed had met him once, when he traveled as a secret member of Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s entourage to Syria in the early 2000s. Assad had sweaty palms, and that was about all Jamsheed remembered about him.

  Syrian soldiers loitered around the corpse pile, posing next to their president’s massive pale head, attempting to make sure that both Bashar and an adequate number of corpses appeared in each shot. They laughed and joked like children in drab fatigues who had stolen their parents' guns.

  He curled his lip and walked away, towards a house at the other end of the square where he saw men in black fatigues milling about. These men weren’t joking, because Hezbollah wasn’t in Syria to play a game. Fighters were checking a portable communications relay and field stripping their weapons, ensuring that not a speck of dust had entered their firing mechanisms while they took the city. The Syrians had been too busy playing around to notice a strange man in unmarked fatigues walk into the middle of the square with an assault rifle, but not Hezbollah. The second he and Salman approached, men pulled their sidearms.

  Jamsheed slung the gun around his back and walked forward with his hands up. A Hezbollah fighter stood up to meet him, holding up what looked like an off-brand nine-millimeter pistol trained on Jamsheed’s center of mass.

  “Come and die, stranger!” the man yelled. He was young, with a prominent gold tooth.

  Salman spoke for them, “This is Colonel Jamsheed Mashhadi of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Your commander is expecting him. Lower your weapons, or there will be consequences.”

  The man with the gold tooth lowered his pistol a little, but not much. The men behind him looked equally unconvinced.

  Jamsheed kept walking forward, speaking Arabic in his soothing musician’s voice, “Boy, listen to me; I’m not Syrian, I’m not Lebanese, I’m not Israeli. That’s a Farsi accent you’re hearing, which makes me Iranian, and if your superiors find out you’ve drawn a weapon on an Iranian military advisor, you’ll be lucky if they only put a bullet in your head. Now where is your commander?”

  “Wading through a sea of idiots, wishing he were back in Beirut drinking good coffee,” a hard voice barked behind him in surprisingly good Farsi peppered by an Arabic speaker’s guttural accent.

  Jamsheed turned to see a man half his size and made of nothing but sinew stalk forward from the throng of gloating Syrians. He had big wolf eyes and a perfectly kept short silver beard, like a man perpetually covered in ice.

  The wolf-eyed man reached Jamsheed and shook his hand crisply, saying, “But this boy isn’t one of those idiots, Persian. You can’t fault a man for being well-trained, or for distrusting strangers in a warzone.” The man’s solid Farsi told Jamsheed that he was dealing with someone trained in Iran, and that meant a senior Hezbollah commander.

  “Fair enough, Commander. You heard my name and rank. Please return the favor,” Jamsheed said.

  “Jafar Haddad, Battalion Commander, Syrian Brigade.”

  Jamsheed grunted at Haddad’s title. Hezbollah never had a “Syrian Brigade” before; that meant they’d been sucked even deeper into Assad’s civil war than he’d thought. He replied, “Very good. I was told you’d meet me at Qusair. Why did you deviate from the plan?”

  Haddad jerked a thumb towards the Syrians and said, “Because of those animals. Rebels launched a successful night attack on one of the Syrian positions at Qusair, because Assad’s cannon fodder didn’t set up the defensive perimeter I recommended. Three Syrian officers died and the rest of their commanders went insane with vengeance. I reminded them that wartime enemies do have the right to strike back from time to time, but they didn’t appreciate the humor. So they threatened to abandon the Qusair siege and send all their men on punitive raids against these poor little villages,” he waved a hand resignedly across the sorry spectacle around them, “And the Qusair border crossing is too important for Hezbollah to abandon, so I told the Syrians that Hezbollah would deal with the rebel villages if they kept up the siege of Qusair itself. They sent along those dogs over there to ensure that the army can take credit for any Hezbollah victories.”

  “Heroic.”

  Haddad had some angry retort coming, but Jamsheed cut him off. “Don’t bother. I’m here to give you a chemical weapons arsenal, not debate whatever disgraceful habits the Syrians have taught you. Find us some breakfast so we can talk business.” He knew it was unfair, but Jamsheed wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to break enemies.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Syrian soldiers from the village insisted on joining the convoy as Jamsheed and Salman took their UAZ jeep northward towards the site where Assad’s soldiers had hidden the weapons. Safety in numbers, some would argue—but not Jamsheed. ‘Safety in numbers’ was a mantra for antelope, not tigers. He would rather have waited with Salman until nightfall, then crossed the burnt-out wasteland of the Syrian interior as they had the previous night, with headlights off and nothing to give them away except the slow grind of heavy tires over gravel back roads. The Hezbollah commander Haddad agreed with him, but the Syrian commander, some fool in a red beret, would not allow a foreign agent to traverse the road without oversight from Assad’s government. He wouldn’t even tell Jamsheed the whereabouts of the weapons unless he accepted an armed government escort, and Haddad wasn’t any help there either—Hezbollah hadn’t gotten access to the location of the weapons yet, so everyone was flying blind except the bastard in the red beret. So instead of traveling quietly by night, Jamsheed traveled north in a convoy of ten military rigs like his own, accompanied by fifty Syrian infantrymen.

  As he watched the brown landscape of a hundred other dead villages unfold around him, Jamsheed traced a mental schematic of these chemical weapons canisters called “Tuva.” He’d seen an original blueprint of the things in Tehran, where one of Qasem Soleimani’s agents had apparently bought the document from a Russian diplomat who hadn’t even bothered clocking off before accepting his bribe. After spending an evening with the schematic, Jamsheed had it destroyed. The enemies were everywhere, and sooner or later the CIA or those devils at Mossad acquired everything. The only truly safe place was inside the mind of men like Jamsheed; men who actually had the courage of their convictions. That was why Iran would win, he knew, while America would keep losing: they didn’t believe. Not like Jamsheed did. The Jews of Israel, however…that was a different proposition. Those animals knew how to believe in something, and had the courage to fight for it until their bodies ran out of blood to shed. The fact that they were born to fight for Satan, well, sometimes Jamsheed suspected that was what made his job worth doing. A holy war needed unholy enemies.

  Jamsheed had a mind that could visualize the inner mechanics of a baby grand piano, so shell casings were child’s play to him. Configuring the Tuva shells to accept a wide variety of launch devices would take time but, God bless Soviet simplicity, the shells were basically steel lumps that just needed a trained hand to make sure their bases stayed on tight. There were one hundred of them, allegedly, though he assumed more than a few would have disappeared between dispatch and delivery. He hoped the idiots hadn’t dropped any on their noses, because the crumple point at the tip of the warhead was the only vector for releasing the sarin inside them.

>   Then again, he’d been disappointed to learn that the warheads were only full of sarin, since he knew that the Soviets had developed much nastier chemicals and Syria had bought many of them. Maybe that was why Assad was in such a hurry to get rid of them, and why he’d accepted such a low price when Iran offered to buy the things on Hezbollah’s behalf. But underwhelmed or not, Jamsheed knew sarin would work. He’d learned that as a boy fighting the Iraqis, seeing his comrades fall around him dancing like swatted flies, hearing the crick-crack of human backs breaking themselves, all because a microscopic chemical compound tricked the human brain into misfiring all of its muscles in haphazard order. Lungs only breathed if the brain told them to pump, and spines only worked because the brain told back muscles not to spasm until vertebrae snapped.

  Those effects had worked beautifully when he got the chance to use sarin on Americans in that Baghdad warehouse. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but he knew U.S. marines when he saw them. They moved different than regular U.S. army, quicker and more fluid, like death couldn’t find them. That grace vanished when they hit the tripwires he’d left in the warehouse entrance. They dove in like hungry dogs going for meat, oblivious as to why, after months of cat and mouse, Jamsheed had suddenly left such an obvious trail for them to follow. But no, they saw their target and that superb training of theirs kicked in. Only the skinny fool who moved like a civilian, the Farsi-speaking CIA agent who had been tracking him, stopped in time to hear the canister break and smell that whiff of almonds in the air. And that didn’t save him, either. Poor marines. Poor skinny spy.

  Tiny shards of glass flew up at him with a cold hiss as an unseen bullet went through the truck’s windshield. It ripped through the seat directly to his left, leaving a gaping hole in the cheap upholstery. Jamsheed’s face was hot, and something sticky dripped down from the bridge of his nose. He ignored the glass that had slashed his face, ignored the blood pouring from those wounds, and focused on the thunderbolt of adrenaline that shot through his body.

  He grabbed his Kalashnikov and jumped out of the cab while the UAZ was still rolling, without waiting to see if Salman had done likewise from the driver’s seat. Another bullet hissed by, putting a second hole in the windshield right where his face would have been. A sniper. He ducked low behind the still-rolling truck and listened to the angry clack-clack sound of Kalashnikovs fired in short bursts echoing across both sides of the road as desperate Syrian soldiers fired out in all directions.

  The pneumatic cough of an RPG cut through the rattle of bullets, and a fireball erupted out of the truck three vehicles ahead of him. He was close enough to feel the shockwave from that impact, and it knocked him flat on his back.

  Sniper or not, Jamsheed dared to poke his head up over the hood of the truck and take in the scene. Two out of the ten trucks in his convoy were on fire: one from beneath the hood, and one from a gaping hole in its side where an RPG had hit. Both of the fiery trucks had stopped at an angle across the road, blocking the convoy’s ability to move forward. The trucks behind him were still full of active soldiers, screaming as they shot their rifles awkwardly out the window on full automatic. Jamsheed couldn’t begin to imagine what they were shooting at; the hills might have been crawling with snipers, but they were too well entrenched to be hit by terrified idiots firing wildly in all directions from rolling vehicles. The goddamned Syrians had insisted on accompanying them during the daytime, making a big, fat target that needed to take a big, fat road hemmed in on both sides by dusty grey-brown hills. They had practically begged the rebels to stage this ambush.

  Slowly, methodically, he saw the men in the trucks slump over in their seats, as little puffs of red shot up from their bodies where high-caliber rifle rounds hit harder than invisible sledgehammers. One, two, ten, twenty. Jamsheed hoped Assad hadn’t been counting on those men for something important, like ditch digging or murdering more grandmothers.

  Another RPG hit, two trucks behind him. This rocket struck low, and raised the truck a foot off the ground as the warhead exploded in its undercarriage. The proximity of the blast made Jamsheed’s teeth rattle. He crouched back against the truck, willing his ears to stop ringing, praying his eyes would uncross. As he burned off the fog in his head, three battered men staggered out of the flaming truck with blood tricking out of their noses and ears, coughing from the smoke that filled their cab. Jamsheed watched each of them stare blankly towards the hills, looking baffled as to why someone would fire an explosive warhead at them.

  Each of the three men did a full-bodied dance as they fell, riddled by what sounded like bullets from an assault rifle. That was bad news; it meant the ambushers felt comfortable moving out of sniping range and into close quarters combat. Jamsheed wondered how many more dead Syrians were visible from the snipers’ positions on those hilltops. He wanted to look around the truck for Salman, but he didn’t know what the sniper situation was on the other side of the road. At least on his side, the bastards seemed busy elsewhere.

  He slid forward between two stopped trucks, then crept beneath one of them on his belly. His movements were slow and mechanical, like a mantis on a leaf, as he endeavored to keep his heart rate down and his breathing quiet. Stilling his mind, he took stock of his options. If the ambushers did sweep the convoy’s wreckage for survivors, they would be too deafened from the firefight to hear him beneath the truck. If they bothered looking for him hard, their war-rattled eyes would have to compensate for the glare between the pitiless desert sun and the shadow beneath the truck before they even saw him. And if the ambushers looked very, very hard, Jamsheed would use his Kalashnikov to cut their feet off, then shoot them in their screaming heads. He had a full clip of thirty rounds, which would let him put down four men before they recovered from their surprise and counterattacked. By that point, Jamsheed would have at least two of their guns, and complete the bloodbath.

  He wedged himself against the truck’s front right inner wheel well until he was satisfied that the shadows under the truck broke up his shape completely. Then he held his Kalashnikov ready, slid the fire setting into burst mode, and waited to see how God might need him to die.

  As he waited, his veteran’s instincts began to tingle. The entire battle was wrong. The ambush had been technically flawless, first striking the lead vehicles so the convoy had no chance of escape, then luring the men out of their trucks with sniper fire, then killing them one by one with impunity. This was the work of professionals, and the Syrian civil war hadn’t produced many professionals.

  Then Jamsheed pinpointed the source of his uneasiness: he’d gotten the order of events wrong. The ambushers hadn’t started by cutting off the road. They started by firing at him, specifically, through his windshield. Then once he’d left the vehicle, they stopped going for him and targeted the other soldiers in the convoy. Jamsheed and the Syrians were traveling north along the road, which would have put the initial sniper, the one who shot through his windshield, on a hill north of him. After that shot, Jamsheed jumped out of the vehicle and hid along its right side, on the eastern bank of the road. The men in the truck behind him evacuated their vehicle after it was hit by an RPG, and also sought shelter on the east side of the road, where the ambushers sniped all of them. So if Jamsheed had leapt from the vehicle before the firefight even began in earnest—

  They had me the whole time, and they didn’t take the shot. They let me escape the truck, they let me crawl under here. They let me trap myself.

  Then he heard the trap springing. It didn’t sound like the devices he made—there was no wire being tripped, or metal coil shrieking as it was released from dynamic tension. This trap sounded like several pairs of boots walking over broken concrete and picking their way around charred bits of metal, right towards where he hid. Soon there were twelve feet peeking at him from the ground outside the shadow of the truck. One of them tapped impatiently on the rubble. They were murmuring to one another, but Jamsheed’s ringing ears were in no condition to make it out.

  A pr
ehistoric, booming voice broke the silence, cracking and rolling like shale sloughing off a mountainside. “Come out, Persian. This road isn’t for Shiites.”

  Jamsheed Mashhadi took stock of his options once again. He couldn’t kill six of them, especially if they knew who he was and exactly where he was; only an idiot thought that skill always beat numbers. But if they knew who he was and they hadn’t taken out the truck with an RPG while he still lurked under it, that also meant they wanted him alive. He needed to find out why.

  Jamsheed tossed the Kalashnikov out onto the road, then he climbed out from under the truck with his hands raised. He faced six men, half in fatigues and half wearing the elaborate dervish cloaks typical of rural tribesmen from the mountains of Yemen. Jamsheed hated working with Yemenis. They were prickly to a fault and tended to confuse honor with blood. In Jamsheed’s experience, the one had almost nothing to do with the other.

  The man who spoke was one of those Yemenis: well over six feet tall, he was a stone faced monster with an oft-broken nose and dead grey eyes like a barren landscape on a moonless night. His beard shot out in all directions like an unfurling storm cloud. Knots of muscle bulged beneath his threadbare colorless robes, and Jamsheed couldn’t imagine landing a blow anywhere on the Yemeni and making it stick.

  Jamsheed looked past them and saw a seventh man holding a black banner that danced in the hot wind. It was the black banner of jihad, flown by Muslim holy warriors for thirteen hundred years whenever there were infidels to kill. The white lettering on it was crude, but Jamsheed knew it must have read, “There is no god but God.” He smiled a bit to himself, bemused by the growing shittiness of his day. Jamsheed, he thought to himself, you have the rare distinction of being the first Quds Force operative in history to be captured by the Syrian branch of al-Qaida.