by Bryce Adams
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jamsheed must have waited an hour in that hut for someone to show up and throw away their lives in exchange for getting Jamsheed a couple of weapons. He could muster reptilian levels of patience when the situation dictated, so where other men would have been crawling up the walls by then, Jamsheed was just starting to wonder whether he’d miscalculated something. The man he’d killed was clearly al-Qaida’s local sub-commander. He even gave himself the military rank of “emir” like he was some inbred Saudi princeling. This was his command, his fighters, his village, so it was damned unusual that no one had come looking for him.
In the meantime, all he could do was look at the digital camera and think of Evin Prison. That was the day he met his second father, General Qasem Soleimani. Qasem’s calm voice had blown apart all of the mental floodgates Jamsheed constructed after the war to keep himself sane. The general had immediately sensed Jamsheed’s ambivalence towards the Revolution, and correctly predicted how it had eaten away at him until Jamsheed wanted to be nothing more than a fucking piano player drinking and whoring his life away between spells in a European opera house.
Jamsheed knew that people underestimated the general’s cunning at their own peril, but he suspected that even Qasem hadn’t known how badly Jamsheed needed a person like Qasem Soleimani to find him in that prison cell. Jamsheed had practically condemned himself to death, for want of a trustworthy guide who would show him how he could still fight for Iran with fearing another betrayal at the liver-spotted hands of the ayatollahs. Qasem Soleimani had reminded Jamsheed Mashhadi that a true hero was measured by his conviction to a cause, not his capacity for blind loyalty.
He’d done so in a little room like this one, where servants of the ayatollahs had put a chair next to a tripod-mounted video camera and prepared to take a dead man’s confession.
An explosion shook the walls of the hut with its impact. Jamsheed’s hut hadn’t been its direct target—the place was still intact—but the blast was close enough that his hut felt the shockwave. More explosions rocked the hut’s walls, and he concluded that someone was pounding the village with a mortar attack. He hoped to hell it was Hezbollah, but the chaos of Syria’s civil war punished people who relied on hope. Whoever the attackers were, however, they wouldn’t know Jamsheed’s location, and that meant he could be vaporized at a moment’s notice; allies could fire a mortar, but airborne mortars themselves don’t have any allies. Ten impacts. Screaming. Eleven impacts. Something with a gas tank exploding. Twelve impacts, this time closer. He had to make a decision.
A thirteenth shell landed almost on top of his hut, sending a rain of dust down onto his head. Jamsheed’s adrenaline surged and he leapt out of the hut unarmed, high-stepping over dead men who lay scattered around three craters punched into the old brick square. He turned into an alley and ran south, away from the pillars of smoke he saw darkening the northern village skyline. Jamsheed panted as he cut a path between the abandoned huts, which made him inhale a mess of red and yellow and black particulate from twenty different types of thing on fire. Then he was free of the houses and staring out onto an untouched field of wheat. Apparently no one had told the field there was a war on. He burrowed in between the stalks, trying to push the stems around him back upright to hide his outline in the field.
He crouched and let his head emerge from the sea of wheat so he could pay more attention to the specifics of the mortar assault. More shells were falling, all in a concentrated area towards the middle of the town, where he’d noticed al-Qaida’s motor pool. That type of control meant skilled artillerymen, and the compact size of the explosions indicated small mortar tubes. The Syrian army wouldn’t have used such small caliber mortars, and no other militia had such good artillerymen. Only Hezbollah had that type of discipline. He knew, because he’d helped to train them. He cracked a cold smile and walked back into the village, positively curious to see what it would look like when al-Qaida zealots tried to confront the battle-hardened fighters of Hezbollah.
The spectacle didn’t disappoint him. Al-Qaida’s fighters had fallen back to the east end of the village and were making their stand between two fat Soviet military trucks that had survived the shelling. There were fifteen of them, maybe, crouched behind those trucks and screaming at one another trying to formulate something like a battle plan. It won’t help them, Jamsheed thought. Hezbollah’s bombardment had cut off the north and west ends of the village, driving the enemy eastward. After establishing that type of opening, Jamsheed and his fellow Iraq war veterans in the Revolutionary Guard had taught Hezbollah to send fighters immediately into the breach, while the enemy was still off-balance. Typically, a squad with a couple machine guns would pour down the center and pin the enemy down with a hail of high-caliber bullets. While the enemy tried to deal with that barrage, more heavily armed squads would sneak up to the enemy’s flanks and begin the real assault. RPGs and lobbed anti-personnel grenades thrown into the middle of a clumped enemy formation would tear apart their center and send the rest fleeing. Then the fleers were as good as dead, and all it took was an attacker’s bullet to make it official.
He watched as a Hezbollah machine gun kept the Qaida fighters pinned down, but as he’d predicted, that gun was still just for show while the real kill squads took position. As he hid behind a hut south of the action, he watched a column of eight Hezbollah fighters, three carrying RPGs, skirt through an alleyway in front of him, angling towards the jihadists’ left flank. Across the shooting zone, he thought he saw more men doing likewise to the north. They would be aiming for al-Qaida’s right flank.
He saw a flash of orange ignition, a plume of white smoke, and the shimmer of a guided missile leaving its launch tube. The RPG smashed into the undercarriage of one of the trucks and it went skyward in a fiery geyser of twisted metal. A second RPG hit the other truck, and it did the same. The impact and the fireball hit too quickly for the jihadists to even be thrown backwards by a shockwave. They just disappeared inside the fireballs.
Since it was done, Jamsheed’s only goal now was to avoid getting shot by his rescuers. Slinking around in the shadows near the battlefield was a good way to fail that mission, so he worked the narrow alleys of the village until he was back in the hut where the Emir had tried to coerce his confession. He sat in the chair next to the camera, one boot resting lazily on the Emir’s eyeless corpse, poring over the erstwhile confession they’d intended him to read. It was safer to let Hezbollah find him, after their bloodlust had subsided.
The banality of the document hit him the hardest. Two columns of writing, produced by a standard Arabic-font word processor—probably Open Office, knowing Syria. Or Iran. As the Emir had said, his copy of the script had the Farsi written phonetically. Farsi and Arabic both used the Arabic alphabet, but a lot of their shared Arabic vocabulary had serious differences in pronunciation when you ported it into Farsi. That meant an Arabic speaker like the Emir would need the Farsi words marked up with pronunciation notes to follow along with what Jamsheed said in his mother tongue. If Jamsheed imagined his enemy as a Farsi speaker who knew Arabic well, the bilingual confession of guilt made sense.
Except that it didn’t make sense, because whoever wanted Jamsheed dead also knew Jamsheed, and that meant knowing that he’d never read such a confession. He hadn’t broken inside the ayatollahs’ prison when they ripped apart his fingers, and he sure as hell wouldn’t break just from a beating by a few Arab jihadists. Maybe they were taking a gamble, hoping al-Qaida had methods that were creative enough to make him talk? No. Iran had some of the best torturers on earth, and they hadn’t defeated him. If anything, he figured, killing him was the ultimate point, but getting him to talk would have been a nice little victory on top of it. However, his hidden enemy must have known that the so-called “Emir,” being completely unable to speak Farsi, would have had zero chance against Jamsheed once that camera rolled. Yet they tried anyway, launching a plot that was irredeemably, unforgivably sloppy. The whole thing
reeked of misplaced ambition.
Ambition…what had the Emir said, something about Persians killing other Persians? That told him enough. He needed to find an intact truck and someone who knew the roads back to Damascus. He had questions that only an ambitious young diplomat could answer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ambrose was driving fast; more than fast enough to blow out a tire or break an axel on the Russian Land Rover knockoff he could barely control. The rocky terrain beneath the truck used to be a road, maybe, but he doubted it was ever much of one. Now there were potholes half his height and rocks that stuck up like serrated shark teeth. Still, they were running out of daylight, and he doubted that the scarred man could sell his commander on the Reaper drone idea forever. Then al-Qaida would come for them, and they knew this stretch of desert a hell of a lot better than Ambrose did.
Those realties created two conflicting imperatives that pushed him onward: he couldn’t break down there, but he also feared traveling in the open at night, with nothing but a lonely pair of headlights and taillights shining out like a beacon in the desert night for anyone to see. Traveling with the lights off wasn’t much of an option either, because the road was too bad and only a sliver of moon shone on the horizon behind them.
Celestine, the French-Israeli spy who looked like a recently mugged grad student, wasn’t much help. Ambrose had put so much thought into his rescue bluff and immediate exit strategy that he hadn’t bothered to work on the endgame. He knew they had to find Mashhadi, and he’d trusted Wayne enough to believe that the Frenchwoman’s intel on the chemical weapons would lead them to him, but that plan still left a lot of holes for stuff to leak through, and talking to her wasn’t reassuring.
Ambrose spoke loudly over the rev of the engine and the milling sound of military tires crushing rock, “Let me get this straight: you never actually saw the chemical weapons convoy. You only heard about it.”
She yelled back, “Yes. We knew there was a convoy of Syrian army moving the weapons, that it was heading towards Hezbollah’s strongholds, and that they were stopping somewhere short of the Lebanese border to do some field maintenance on the delivery mechanisms.” She reached into his bag and pulled out one of his fast-dwindling Indonesian clove cigarettes, lighting it with the shiny Zippo Ambrose had taken from Zubair’s neutered goon. “I never heard of ‘Tuva or ‘Sorcerer’ before you told me.”
He breathed in hard, then asked, “So you have no goddamned idea where we’re going?”
She tried to blow smoke in his face, but it shot past her and out the open top of the truck. “Lebanon is west, so we keep going west. We’ll learn more as we move,” Celestine predicted.
“That was your whole goddamned plan? ‘Going west’ and hoping that you crashed into Hezbollah at a truck stop with mechanics crawling over their missiles? Does the Mossad use sub-sub-contractors these days?” Ambrose yelled.
Celestine took a long drag off her cigarette, wearing an expression like she regretted leaving al-Qaida’s stockade.
He swerved to miss an elephantine monster of a rock, almost putting the car on two wheels, then turned back to Celestine, who still wouldn’t look at him. “Christ, I’m sorry, alright? I’ve had a lousy few hours, my superiors sent me into this mission with almost no mission parameters, and I’ve got no underwear. I just…they made it seem like you’d know more about our next move,” he said.
“Michael would have known. We met up outside Aleppo, and were going to deal with the arms shipment together.”
He replied, “Michael—was he more of the classic Mossad kick-ass-and-kill-Arabs half of your operation?” He saw Celestine’s face go blank again, and he groaned, “Look, again, I’m sorry if this is pissing you off. But I’m not very diplomatic at the best of times, and this isn’t the best of times. We’ve got a very well-armed and unfriendly militia behind us, and my mission—our mission, now—is basically to go lion hunting with a slingshot. I need you to get on my page and think of something more concrete.”
She furrowed her brow, accentuating a deep rage line above her nose. “You said you used to be a diplomat.”
He cracked a smile. “I never said I was a good one. Now seriously: maybe Michael’s dead, but he must have told you the score, even if you didn’t notice it at the time. You were smart enough to get recruited by Mossad as a weapons engineer, so don’t go selling your intuition short on me. Not now. Where were you planning to interdict those weapons?”
She screwed up her forehead, bright eyes moving behind her cracked glasses. She looked out into the dark and said, “I came in through the Turkish border, attached to a UN convoy doing humanitarian work. Michael was already in-country posing as a member of Medicins Sans Frontiers, and I was a civil engineer who specialized in water purification systems.” She tapped both of her index fingers on the dashboard, then added, “We were both in Syria on different missions, but he convinced me to link up with him outside Aleppo. He told me the Syrian army was moving a big weapons shipment to Hezbollah through Homs, and he needed an engineer to help him destroy the armaments. Then we split off from the main humanitarian convoy and headed west towards Homs.”
He pounded a fist on the top of the wheel and laughed, “Goddamned right, now we’re getting somewhere. Alright, so Michael knew a chemical weapons convoy was headed towards Lebanon, and he thought it would go through Homs. See? We just ruled out eighty percent of western Syria.”
She shook her head and took another drag, saying, “We didn’t know it was chemical weapons yet—we assumed it was rockets, or communications equipment, or something else more conventional. I didn’t hear about the chemical weapons angle until you mentioned it. Who knows what Michael would have done if he had that intelligence.”
He nodded. “Fair enough, but let’s not jump off the tracks yet.”
“What?”
Ambrose waved his hand. “Never mind. Just a stupid Americanism. It means we shouldn’t go crazy any sooner than we have to. So anyway, let’s stick to basics: I described what these Tuva canisters look like from the drawing, right?”
“Right.” She nodded her head down at his ugly red bag, where Gideon’s crumpled, dirt-covered drawings of the Tuva shells lay hidden in the front of Ambrose’s notebook.
“So we know they’re basically the size of a rocket warhead, right? And if it’s going to be a meaningful transfer of weapons, there’s gonna be a lot of them,” Ambrose guessed.
Celestine disagreed. “From what you said about their payloads, there might not need to be many of them. But yes, let’s assume the Syrians are transporting them in bulk. We’ll stay on your rails, or something.”
He motioned for a drag of her cigarette—his cigarette, rather. It’s often impossible to get good suction with wind blowing through a car, but he made do. Then he said, “So the shipment has to go through Homs, or close to it. It’ll be a big load to carry, and if Syria is anything like the other warzones I’ve stumbled into, that means the army has destroyed most of the smaller roads through tank deployment. But if there’s anything that a government keeps up during wartime, it’s supply routes to major cities.”
She took back the cigarette. “Right. That’s what I saw in Algeria and Su—“ Celestine shut up, reminding Ambrose that most secret agents were a helluva lot more secretive than he was, “I agree. Homs is still our most viable option. From there, we try to find out where Hezbollah’s main forces are deployed—“
“Qusair. Gideon said they’ve massed to take the town of Qusair.”
“Look at you, so well-informed for an American!” She flashed a smarmy smile, “So we’re going to Qusair via the main Homs road in the hope we get lucky.”
Ambrose looked at his blood-caked face in the mirror, then over at Celestine’s cracked glasses and bruised face. “We don’t look like lucky people,” he muttered.
Celestine felt her own bruised face. “No we do not. You’re electrocuted, I’ve been beaten, Michael is dead, and you should have seen the other prisoner
they brought in before you. Someone had torn off his fingernails before al-Qaida even got to him.”
She barely had time to get her hands out in front of her when Ambrose put on the brakes. Her crow-haired head still whipped back and forth, knocking her glasses off. She opened her mouth to scream at him, but he cut her off, speaking through the cloud of yellow dust enveloping their truck.
“Where was this guy from?” he whispered.
She found her glasses, and by the look on her face she’d thought better of arguing with him as long as that low demonic timbre permeated his voice. “He said he was a Turkish military advisor kidnapped near the border. I don’t know Turkish and he wouldn’t speak in English, so we only communicated in Arabic,” she said cautiously.
He looked at her with bloodshot eyes glowing volcanic red. “Do you think he was Turkish?”
“No.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jamsheed hid in the hut until all of the shooting stopped. Adrenaline had carried him earlier, but now that he was sitting down and more clearheaded, he felt terrible. The plain truth was that al-Qaida had battered him into meat—first right after they dragged him from under the truck, and then once or twice more while he was still comatose from the first beating. It was a miracle he had dodged that punch from the bearded giant, and an even bigger miracle that he’d run through mortar fire and made it to that field during the middle of Hezbollah’s assault. God really was looking out for him, albeit inconsistently.
Hezbollah fighters found him quickly, and ordered him onto his knees. He gave his name, nationality, and demanded to see their commander. The Shiite militiamen perked up when he declared himself Iranian—their money came from Iran, their leaders trained in Iran, and therefore men like Jamsheed had spent decades training Hezbollah like dogs to never forget who their masters were. They took him to Haddad, the wiry little commander with the trimmed silver beard who had met Jamsheed in the dead village outside Qusair. In what felt like déjà vu, he was once again standing in a town square, surrounding by corpses, watching flags being swapped on a flagpole. Two of his men were hoisting the yellow banner of Hezbollah, which burned like molten gold in the very last rays of the evening sun.