Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran

by Bryce Adams

  For a veteran like Mashhadi, wearing that headband was a personal declaration of war on the cosmos. He was no longer in Syria to fight; he was in Syria to die, and take his enemies screaming to hell with him, whoever Jamsheed Mashhadi in his madness had concluded those enemies might be.

  Haddad had the drop on a wounded Mashhadi the last time they met, but this time he looked clear as winter ice. Haddad was a good soldier, but he didn’t think that would be enough, one on one, if Mashhadi needed putting down. At that point only two options presented themselves: prayer, or something so contemptible that Haddad wouldn’t even allow himself to think about it yet, except on the furthest cusp of his mind.

  Haddad stopped his truck in front of Mashhadi’s and felt the weight of the revolver on his hip as he said, “Colonel, good to see you healthy. We heard troubling things from Damascus.”

  Mashhadi cocked his head, looking through Haddad into the burning city behind them. He asked, “What kind of things, Brother?”

  Being called “brother” by an armed lunatic was the last thing Haddad wanted. He responded, “Nothing since late yesterday evening, when I called your ambassador to find out where you were.”

  “And he said?”

  “Neither of us said much; what did we even know to say?” The Hezbollah commander shrugged, looking carefully at each of Mashhadi’s weapons to see which the Iranian could get at the fastest. There was dried blood on the man’s hands, giving Haddad a damned good idea what had happened in Damascus. He needed to warn the Hezbollah leadership in Beirut immediately, but how to do it without Mashhadi stopping him? He didn’t know. He’d just have to play it cool until he did.

  Mashhadi looked at his own hands, smiling, then actually winked at Haddad as he said, “Whatever you’re thinking, brother, let it go. I’ll just tell you what happened.”

  Haddad’s gun hand clenched and unclenched. “That might be best, Colonel.”

  “While al-Qaida tortured me, I learned that someone in the Iranian government had set me up to be captured and killed, once I’d made a false confession implicating myself in crimes against the Islamic Revolution. I was familiar with the methods used, so I knew the Iranian ambassador would have information about this plot. I went to Damascus to confront him,” he considered his bloody hands for a moment, seeming to forget he’d done so only seconds beforehand, then continued, “I was right. The ambassador knew about the plot because he was part of it. He admitted as much, and showed me the document that proved it.” He held up a carefully folded piece of paper with red stains spattered across it.

  Haddad didn’t care about whatever the hell it said on that paper. “What did you do to the ambassador, Colonel?”

  “I killed him, Brother. I killed him for betraying the Revolution, then I blew up the Iranian embassy with explosives attached to diesel generators in the compound’s basement.”

  Haddad swallowed. “You…blew up your own embassy? Who knows about this?”

  “My driver Salman, you, and I. No one at the embassy survived, and the ayatollahs will just now be piecing together what was done,” Mashhadi smiled, revealing pink teeth, “I assume you’ll try to warn them soon enough, but I’d advise waiting until after I’ve taken care of the weapons for you.”

  Mashhadi placed a nailless finger over his lips. “Let’s both live to savor this victory, eh? Speaking of which,” he gave Qusair one last sweep with his ravenous eyes, while shoving the blood-spattered piece of paper back into his hip pocket, “This city looks pacified. Shall we get to wherever you’ve hidden my nerve gas, and I’ll finally prepare that arsenal for us? I’m assuming by now that your Syrian counterparts have told you its whereabouts.”

  Haddad didn’t like Mashhadi calling him “brother,” but he really didn’t like the phrase “my nerve gas.” He said, “Of course…Brother, but first I need to have a quick meeting with the rebels and discuss the terms of surrender. Qusair wouldn’t have fallen so easily if we hadn’t cut a bit of a deal with them first.”

  “May I politely suggest killing them all?”

  The Hezbollah commander was out of patience with the blood-spattered Iranian, and snapped, “This isn’t Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Colonel. Maybe an outsider can’t see it, but we’ve developed rules of war here in Syria: when Hezbollah makes an agreement with another faction, we honor it. It’s the only way we’re keeping any semblance of order in this hellhole.”

  “Order.” It wasn’t a question. “That must be what I saw in the little whitewashed village where we met. Order looked a lot like a pile of dead villagers full of Hezbollah bullets, rotting under Assad’s flag,” Mashhadi observed.

  Haddad’s hunter’s eyes narrowed as he replied, “Hezbollah is here to end this war, at Iran’s behest. That means we serve Assad when we need to, and that coward is capable of terrible things. But that is not who we are: Hezbollah serves the Arab people in their war against the devils in America and Israel. We do not kill other Muslims except as a last resort, and the only way we can keep our name intact is by honoring the agreements we make, even with our enemies.”

  Jamsheed Mashhadi smiled. “You certainly didn’t learn any of that nonsense from me. Again: what if I convinced you to pretend this is a war, and you just killed these fools for daring to oppose you?”

  “Not today,” Haddad muttered. He started his engine and turned the truck around, towards the clearing in central Qusair where he’d agreed to meet the enemy commander. Along the way he picked up Hassan and another truckload of fighters to watch his back while he acquired the Israeli and American hostages. He definitely wasn’t telling Mashhadi about them.

  Not that it mattered, because Jamsheed Mashhadi was following them in his own truck, which rolled over the rubble-strewn streets with the sound of skulls being crushed in a rock-grinder.

  Haddad stopped thinking about prayer, and started thinking about the other course of action, which until recently had seemed so contemptible.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Ambrose and Celestine sat on some half-crushed bricks at a crossroads in the middle of Qusair, guarded by eight rebel fighters that Ambrose could see. He suspected that more invisible shooters had a bead on them from the shell of a six-story office building north of their location. Ambrose assumed the kid would be one of those marksmen. The Free Syrian Army officer had led them to this square with as much courtesy as a wartime hostage taker could muster; they weren’t bound, no one had beaten them, and no one had even frisked them. He even let Ambrose carry his own bag, although there was nothing in it that Ambrose wanted anymore.

  He looked at Celestine. She hadn’t said a word since their captor led them out of the rebel headquarters in the abandoned courthouse. Now she sat two feet from him with her arms cradling her knees, gazing intently at the remains of a shwarma restaurant lodged in the base of a mountain made of brick and exposed wiring. He knew she wasn’t looking at the building itself, because there was almost nothing left to look at, and the remnants were as unremarkable in ruins as they must have been the day they were built. She was looking at that building because it was the furthest point westward on the constricted urban horizon. That rubble and the choked street next to it would give her the cleanest view of the death that was coming to collect her.

  Ambrose could guess where her thoughts were headed, because a Mossad operative caught by Hezbollah in the company of an American spook would have a very special fate in store for her. First, Hezbollah would beat her unconscious, then they would bind her and bag her. There probably wouldn’t be any rape, because Hezbollah fighters kept good discipline in the field. But they were going to throw her unconscious body in a truck and drive it across the Lebanese border, where they’d secret her into a nameless Shiite village in the mountains.

  Then Mossad would hunt for her in vain, and give up knowing she was probably alive. In the meantime, Hezbollah would smuggle her into their warren of fortifications in south Beirut, where she would learn to love a dark basement and a rotted mattress with tetanu
s-covered springs sticking out of it. If they ever let her near a TV, she’d see Hezbollah’s leaders speak at rallies, coyly suggesting that there might be captured Jewish spies in Lebanon and that there might be a chance of Israel getting them back, if x-y-z demands were met.

  And then some day, if Hezbollah didn’t kill her for being the pain in the ass that she was, Israel would cave to Hezbollah’s demands and she’d go home to experience the full extent to which her life had been destroyed. Israel was a small, tight-knit country that transmitted gossip at light speed: if she kept her birth name, Celestine Lemark would walk the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem for the rest of her life as unwitting performance art, using her every breath to demonstrate the power of Iran and its Hezbollah proxies. And then she’d die, probably alone. After all, who gave a shit about the final moments of such a disgraceful, shameful figure?

  By that point, Ambrose knew that he did. But that didn’t mean he had anything comforting to tell her. He’d lied to her enough that day.

  Ambrose knew his own fate was simpler: Hezbollah would kill him. An American spook was worth keeping alive for a while just to get a little bit of intelligence and PR juice, but the Hezbollah leadership in Beirut were nobody’s fools, and they knew that these days, the presence of a live CIA agent would sooner or later lead to an unwanted visit from a SEAL team. So Ambrose was going to live just long enough to get tortured for information and paraded in front of a few cheap digital camcorders. Then they’d put him in a warehouse and shoot him in the head. Or so they thought. Ambrose felt the black cylinders in his pocket dig against his skin through his jeans, and tried to keep the calculating gleam out of his eyes as the first truckload of Hezbollah showed up.

  Ambrose had only spent a few days in Beirut on vacation, so he’d never seen Hezbollah at such close range, but they looked just like he’d imagined, with big black beards and sharp predatory eyes that took in everything around them. They weren’t like the hollow-eyed peasant fanatics who died for al-Qaida—they were a genuine army, ready to kill in the name of god and the Shiites’ Hidden Imam.

  Their leader was in the next truck. He didn’t wear any insignia, but all of those proud bearded warriors wilted in front of him like flowers in the desert sun. He was short, with a cleanly trimmed silver beard every bit as urbane as his soldiers’ were wild. There was a big gun on his hip in a well-oiled holster that looked ready to draw quicker than a viper could strike. He only glanced at each of them for a moment, but Ambrose sensed a disciplined mind that had only needed a moment to dissect both prisoners and confirm that they were in fact the right bill of sale.

  The Hezbollah commander walked up to the Free Syrian Army officer with a thumb through his gun belt, and the two exchanged a quick handshake. If Ambrose hadn’t seen them both already, it would’ve been hard to tell who fought for whom.

  “Commander,” the Free Syrian Army officer said, “Thank you for meeting with me. Did you get here alright? I gave the order to let you through our defensive line unhindered.”

  The Hezbollah man smiled, revealing well-proportioned teeth stained slightly yellow from coffee and tea. “I’m sorry, Commander, but you didn’t have much of a defensive line left to penetrate. By God, you had some snipers in this city before we started bombing it. If it wasn’t for them,” he gestured at the moonscape around them, “I doubt you and I’d be talking.”

  “That was the idea,” The rebel commander said while looking down at his opponent. Ambrose felt a little electrical tickle hit the air when both men locked gazes.

  The Hezbollah commander seemed to sense that it was time for a little face saving, as he smiled and said, “God knows we both lost martyrs to wretched Qusair, but their blood was not shed for nothing: I have ordered Hezbollah to remain outside the city until the Free Syrian Army has completely withdrawn, out of respect for your bravery.”

  “You have my gratitude, Commander. And the gratitude of my men. I’ll give the withdrawal order immediately, so long as Assad’s army is also prepared to stand down.”

  The Hezbollah commander spat in the dust and said, “Assad’s fools are stretched across the entire Lebanese border hunting smaller outfits than yours.” He pointed towards himself with a knotty finger. “I am the law in Qusair, as far as Assad’s men are concerned, and I guarantee they will not touch you. I have the prisoners you offered, and we have confirmed our negotiations face to face. Now if we are finished, go with God.”

  The silver-bearded man spun jerkily as he heard another car roll up from behind Hezbollah’s position. His facial muscles tensed beneath his silver beard as he grabbed his rival by the shoulder and said, “Commander, you need to go, now. Withdraw your men immediately and I’ll do the same with mine.”

  The rebel commander narrowed his sad eyes a bit, revealing cavernous sunburned wrinkles. “What’s the matter, Commander?”

  His head exploded in red rain and blood-blackened chunks. Ichor splattered across the Hezbollah commander’s face, and Ambrose felt a chunk of skull land where the top of his ear met his temple. A red crater appeared where the man’s face should have been, and the rebel officer fell forward with shards of teeth decorating the remnants of his jaw.

  Ambrose threw an arm around Celestine and they belly-flopped into the ash. Above them pistol shots cracked like the sound of bones breaking, only to be drowned out by the ruinous hellhound baying of assault rifles as they made men scream and buildings disintegrate. One of the Hezbollah fighters collapsed beside them with a smoking hole in his eye socket and blood leaking out from his nose. His boots kept twitching, tapping Ambrose softly in the shin.

  The Hezbollah commander dominated the fray as he strode howling across the killing ground, while his long-barrel revolver thundered in his hand. His battle voice was a high-pitched demonic shriek geared towards commands that cut through the bass rumble of gunfire. He ordered his men to direct the fire towards the gutted building north of their position, where Ambrose had suspected snipers were clustered. The remaining Hezbollah fighters complied, and soon the building’s superstructure was evaporating into dust. Ambrose saw a muzzle flash from an upper floor window as a bit of brick exploded near the Hezbollah commander’s foot, but that was it. There were too many bullets flying towards that tower, and sooner or later the Hidden Imam made one of his servants’ shots hit home.

  The muzzle flashes stopped, so the commander ordered all of his men to cease firing.

  Then the commander spun around with his teeth bared and screamed “Bastard!” so loudly that the zigzag vein on his temple almost burst. He eyes look just as incendiary, and Ambrose didn’t envy whoever was on the receiving end of his fury. The commander raised up his gun, ready to kill someone who Ambrose couldn’t see from his vantage point on the ground.

  The Hezbollah commander’s gun exploded in his hand and he stumbled to his knees with a shocked, hateful scream. Two fingers were gone—Ambrose knew because they’d landed next to him—and he couldn’t see how bad off the others were, because the commander had balled his hand into a fist and was groaning as blood spurted out from between his knuckles.

  Ambrose looked at Celestine to see if she had escaped the firefight unscathed. Dust had turned her dark hair preternaturally white, but otherwise she looked fine. Then he saw the repressed terror in her eyes as she stared past Ambrose towards the injured commander.

  A man stood over the Hezbollah commander with his back to the hostages. He wore a dirty military uniform, generic and utilitarian, and boots that were just as unremarkable. Twin pistol holsters crossed his hips, and he had one of their guns pointed at the commander’s head. The aggressor had broad shoulders and powerful tanned forearms exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. Something red dangled from his windswept silver-black hair, but Ambrose couldn’t make it out. It could have been the knot from a bandanna, but that didn’t mean much in a war where half the fighters seemed to have some sort of rag wrapped around their foreheads.

  The man put one of those utilitarian boots on the kneeli
ng commander’s chest and pushed him backwards into the exposed brick, slowly, slowly, like a mother setting down a baby. The commander tensed a bit, but didn’t really fight back as long as the man with the bandanna had a pistol trained on him.

  The gunman asked a question in thickly accented Arabic, “Is this what you wanted, Commander? The people of God to kill one another at the very moment of His triumph?”

  The Hezbollah commander had gotten control of himself, banishing any shock from his face. In its place was a cold helping of military steel that rang through his voice with the same metallic clarity as the silver of his beard. “Soldiers,” he said, “Kill this man if he does not let me up immediately.” He shot a look over at Ambrose and Celestine, adding, “And kill him if he tries to do anything to our prisoners.”

  “Prisoners…” the man with the red bandanna whispered as he turned.

  Ambrose looked Jamsheed Mashhadi right in the eye. The bloodshot cracks between his blue irises didn’t stop Ambrose from boring into the dark brown orbs that gave Jamsheed his hellish magnetism. Jamsheed cocked his head for a moment, and his lips moved as he said something to himself in Farsi.

  Then Jamsheed blinked and looked past Ambrose, right at Celestine. With movements so quick even Ambrose barely predicted them, the Iranian practically walked over Ambrose to reach her. Mashhadi knelt down, so close that Ambrose could have touched his stubbly face, and stroked his fingers across her jaw line.

  Jamsheed’s hand closed around her throat as he whispered in French, “You should have stayed in Jerusalem, Mademoiselle Water Engineer.”

  “I missed you, Colonel Mashhadi,” she said back through gritted teeth.

  Mashhadi grinned, showing pink stains around the roots of his teeth. Then his grip on her throat tightened. Celestine gasped and tried to say something. Mashhadi didn’t respond. Ambrose finally realized that the Iranian wasn’t trying to interrogate her, or even intimidate her: Jamsheed was strangling her to death in front of all those men, and despite the commander’s orders, no one in Hezbollah seemed inclined to stop him.