by Bryce Adams
Ambrose kicked Mashhadi in the face full-force with the sole of his running shoe. The Iranian’s head made a satisfying gunch sound and whipped back as Ambrose connected, telling him he’d just crushed in a cheekbone, or maybe even an eye socket.
The kick’s force knocked Mashhadi back onto his side in the dust, narrowly missing a piece of rebar that would have impaled him through a kidney. Instead, Mashhadi rolled with the kick and used the same momentum to tumble upwards into a fighting crouch. Ambrose ignored the pain in his chest and followed suit with an adrenaline fueled kick-up, and then both men circled each other.
Ambrose was light on his feet, bouncing as he flexed his shoulders and knees, ready to shatter a rib or cave in a soft spot on Mashhadi’s skull if the Iranian came any closer. Mashhadi moved slower, with his hands spread wide like a bear’s paws. After experiencing Ambrose’s kick he must have known he was squaring off against a real fighter, but Mashhadi still moved slow and telegraphed his intentions: he would close the distance, grapple Ambrose with those powerful hands, then rip him apart, regardless of how many knees or elbows Jamsheed took doing it. Ambrose took two steps, preparing to come in low at Mashhadi’s groin. The Iranian smiled and lunged forward to meet him.
A gunmetal scream ripped the air, and both men jumped backwards before their bodies made contact. The dirt in front of them exploded with the impact of multiple bullets, generating a curtain of airborne dust between them. Each man backed off, muscles surging with murderous adrenaline, as they looked at the Hezbollah commander. He gripped a Kalashnikov in his left hand and braced the barrel against the forearm of his maimed right hand. It didn’t look awkward: it looked like he’d kill them all without batting an eye.
“No,” The commander said to Ambrose and Mashhadi like they were untrained dogs.
“Commander,” Ambrose said in Arabic with his nostrils flaring, “You’ve got a serious problem here, and it isn’t your American or Israeli prisoners.” He pointed at Mashhadi, not caring that five more guns cocked when he moved. “You’re only just now realizing what kind of animal Iran has sent to you, and you sure as hell aren’t going to outthink him or outfight him once he decides to go for something juicier than your gun hand.”
“Shut up,” The commander said, looking more intently at Mashhadi than he did at Ambrose.
“Fucking. Kill. Him,” Ambrose insisted.
Ambrose felt the next volley of Kalashnikov rounds whistle by his head, followed by a white flash that flared up from behind his eyes. Immediately following that flash, his face simultaneously burned and froze. He felt something cool pour down his cheek and drip off his chin.
Celestine murmured words that Ambrose’s ringing ears couldn’t make out, and then he reached up with his hand to feel the gash that a bullet had traced directly beneath his left eye. It felt half an inch wide, a couple inches long, and uniformly deep, as though the commander had scooped into his cheek with a burning knife.
Ambrose turned to look at Celestine and felt the motion squeeze more blood out of his cut face. As he looked back at the commander he briefly observed Mashhadi, standing with his fists clenched and an amused look on his face. At least someone was enjoying the show.
“You know I’m right,” was all Ambrose said. The annoyed look on the commander’s face, combined with how his eyes darted uneasily between the three foreigners, told him Ambrose had won the argument—but sometimes winning didn’t mean a goddamned thing.
“Commander Haddad,” Jamsheed Mashhadi said in a soft voice mixing equal parts musical sweetness and military authority, “Let’s leave this tomb and make some warheads.”
Haddad looked the Iranian up and down, like a caveman wondering whether he could reason with a volcano. “You will not talk to either prisoner, understood? You will not touch them, or even acknowledge their existence. They are of great value to Hezbollah, and Iran has no say in this matter.”
Mashhadi had eyes only for Haddad. “All I care about are the warheads, Commander. As for the prisoners, I trust Hezbollah to know its own business.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Ambrose spoke in Farsi, “I hope you’re lying, Jamsheed. We started a conversation years ago in Baghdad, and I’d really like to finish it.”
Mashhadi didn’t look at him, but he did shake his head and smile as a fourth truck rolled up to join the three already on hand. This truck was a commandeered American Humvee from Iraq, painted heartless military drab.
Haddad’s men threw Ambrose and Mashhadi into the Humvee at gunpoint. There was a single row of seats in the way back, and a lot of room for people to splay across the floor, probably unwillingly. Ambrose didn’t waste time playing defiant. He sat down cross-legged on the floor holding the ugly red bag that no one had bothered to take from him yet. In Hezbollah’s defense it had been a rough twenty minutes, and Haddad, who seemed like nobody’s fool, was suffering through the pain of having two fingers blown off his gun hand by an erstwhile ally. No doubt Haddad assumed that the dead Free Syrian Army commander had frisked them thoroughly and he left the matter at that, even though Ambrose now suspected that the rebel commander had deliberately neglected to do so.
Ambrose did nothing to upset the fiction. He held the bag close, hoping that they would all think he was some apparatchik with a pile of paperwork that would blow the CIA’s Middle East operations wide open. But if anyone did look he was still in the clear, because all they would have found was an empty handgun, a pack and a half of cigarettes, a pair of jeans, and a yellow Thai beer T-shirt with two lions on it.
Mashhadi passed him and sat in one of the three seats in the Humvee’s remaining back row. Two Hezbollah men sat down next to him, and three more sat on the floor near Ambrose. Between the five of them, they had enough hardware to shame an infantry squad. Looking at them, Ambrose didn’t think that kind of armament was an accident: Haddad had ensured Ambrose and Jamsheed got into the Humvee first, then spent several critical seconds speaking with his men before letting them get into the same vehicle with the two foreigners. The Hezbollah fighters each had their hands on holstered pistols. Based on what he’d seen, Ambrose concluded that the poor fucker Haddad only had a single closed-top vehicle for transporting dangerous prisoners, which had probably seemed like a fine idea until Ambrose and Jamsheed Mashhadi entered his life.
In all the confusion, Ambrose hadn’t seen what happened to Celestine. His stomach writhed as he thought of Haddad dragging her away on her own, but a rational kernel of his mind told him the commander had done Ambrose a favor, since at that moment the most dangerous place in Syria was the three feet separating Ambrose from Jamsheed Mashhadi.
If Mashhadi knew he was a captive too, the Iranian was too cool to show it. He looked around at the armed men, cracking a little smile. Then he looked down at Ambrose with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye and asked in Farsi, “So I know you from Baghdad, you say?”
The Hezbollah guard next to Mashhadi drew his pistol and threatened, “You two aren’t supposed to talk with each other.”
Mashhadi gestured around them, replying in smooth, Farsi-accented Arabic, “Or what, you’ll shoot me? We’re surrounded by armed men in a sealed Humvee, going to God knows where. What are we supposed to do, if not talk to one another for a little bit?”
“I don’t care what you do, but you’re not going to speak with each other. Commander Haddad told you that.”
The Iranian sighed. In the same motion he took the gun right out of the man’s hand and held it at the guard’s own head. Even Ambrose’s eyes couldn’t follow how Mashhadi got that weapon.
“Do you see what happens when I get bored, Brother?” Mashhadi asked, “Mischief gets into me. Now I’m going to speak with the American. You won’t understand a word of it, so calm down and enjoy the ride to…wherever we’re going.”
He tossed the gun onto the floor of the Humvee, while the other Hezbollah fighters were still only beginning to react to Mashhadi’s move. Ambrose could have grabbed
it, and he would have grabbed it, if he knew what Haddad had done to Celestine, but he couldn’t risk any violence until she was safe.
As the gun fell, Ambrose and Mashhadi exchanged a look that told the whole story: they could each get a gun easily, deal with those five men, get out of the Humvee and finish things properly without any Hezbollah fools getting in the way. Maybe they could even do it there in the Humvee, unarmed, since their armed guards were practically defenseless at such close range.
“Yeah, we met in Baghdad once. In warehouse 20,” Ambrose answered in good Tehran-accented Farsi.
Ambrose held up his left hand, waving it so Mashhadi could see it, front and back. Every finger on it was twitching, some at the middle knuckle, some only at the fingertip, and his thumb started writhing all the way down where it met his palm.
The Iranian blinked. It was the first time Ambrose noticed him do that. Mashhadi said, “Well that is unusual. Who got you to atropine, Mister CIA? The marines with you—those were marines, I assume—weren’t looking healthy when I left them.”
“A good man saved me, then killed himself because of what you did in that warehouse. His name was Michael Tesoro.”
“Dead Americans don’t have names.”
They went over a huge bump and the Humvee dropped a solid foot before springing back up on its reinforced chassis. The drop made Ambrose fly forward until he was right at Mashhadi’s feet. Ambrose watched the Iranian’s right hand curl into a knife-edge fist with the knuckles stuck outward like the lip of an ax.
The American prepared to spring forward with an elbow into his enemy’s ribs. It was a bad angle for striking power, but coming up from right beneath Mashhadi would also make it a bitch to defend against.
Then the Iranian uncurled his fist and gave Ambrose another appraising look, this time at much closer range. Ambrose couldn’t imagine how many motes of dried blood or torture-inspired lines must have decorated his own face. His eyes alone probably made him look like a stiff wind would knock him over. Whatever Jamsheed saw, he didn’t reveal it.
“I wondered who you were, after that night. You were the one who tracked me all the way through Baghdad, weren’t you?” Jamsheed asked.
“For all the good it did me.” Ambrose moved back to the other side of the Humvee’s floor, aware that Jamsheed kept looking at his nerve-damaged left hand.
Now Jamsheed leaned forward, his eyes shining. “You can’t tease me like that, now that you’ve gotten me genuinely interested in you,” he pointed at Ambrose with his nail-less left hand, “Not even Mossad knew about me back then. People still don’t know about me. What made you different? What was my mistake?”
“You liked Qusay Hussein’s real estate too much.”
“Another half-answer. Did the CIA teach you that? I can’t recall ever speaking directly with one of you people.” Jamsheed tapped his mouth thoughtfully, split lip touching blackened cuticle.
Ambrose and the pain in his chest were tired of banter, so he said, “I’m not CIA. I outsmarted you on my fucking free time.”
Jamsheed showed his palms expressively. “Until warehouse 20, that is. I didn’t really think you’d fall for that information I planted in that safe house apartment. Hell, I wasn’t sure you even existed. But even supposing you did exist, I underestimated how eager you were, or how many men you would sacrifice to get to me. How many Americans did you kill in that mission? I counted three at the time, although in my defense I recall two of the deaths being friendly fire. Sarin isn’t kind to fast-twitch nerves in a man’s trigger finger.”
Ambrose didn’t take the bait. Instead, he asked, “What’s with the headband, Jamsheed? Have you kept your original one since you were a kid? Is that the one Khomeini gave you personally?”
Jamsheed didn’t seem to take his bait either, replying, “If you’re not CIA, then you’re only making me more curious, and most of my peers will tell you that’s not a good thing. When something makes me curious, my inclination is to rip it apart and see how it works,” he tapped the headband, “At any rate, this is an original, albeit not mine. I lost mine in 1988, in a trench outside of Basra. An Iraqi and I were fighting over a knife, and he ripped off my bandanna to strangle me with it.”
“So your poor headband was ruined.”
“More importantly, I got the knife.”
“Can I guess why you’re wearing it?”
Jamsheed flashed his bloodstained pink teeth. “You can try.”
Ambrose looked at his face, then down to the collar of Jamsheed’s faded fatigues. “You’ve got a key under there, don’t you? A little golden key that Khomeini or one of ayatollah lackeys promised you was your ticket to heaven if you died a martyr.”
The Iranian nodded indulgently as he pulled out the key. “And this tells you…?”
“That you’ve gone off the fucking map, Jamsheed. I’ve followed you for almost ten years, and when you’re on your game, you’re one of the smartest men on the planet.”
“And?”
“And smart men don’t go into a warzone dressed like ten year olds.” Ambrose saw Jamsheed’s jaw twitch as his ground his teeth. He’d found the wound, and it was time to poke it. “Someone broke you, and it wasn’t al-Qaida. Whatever happened here in Syria, it was worse than war or even torture in Evin Prison in Tehran…and you couldn’t take it.”
Jamsheed interlaced his fingers and leaned forward on his knees. “God reminded me that the Revolution isn’t done. It wasn’t a gentle reminder.”
Ambrose cocked his chin upward and asked, “While we’re on the subject of gentle, let’s get back to that authentic martyr’s headband you’re wearing. How are you planning to die, Jamsheed?”
“By fire.”
“Find me gasoline and a match.”
Jamsheed responded conversationally, “Zionist war planes are going to pinpoint my position and retaliate after I fire those shells full of sarin into northern Israel. I won’t bother running. Once that gas is spreading through downtown Haifa, my task will be finished, and God will finally let me use Imam Khomeini’s little key. Zionists will strike at holy Iran, and the faithful of the world will begin the final war to end this age of darkness,” he dangled it in front of Ambrose, “Do you know why I still carry this? Do you know what it means to me?”
“It means you’re insane, and I’ve spent the last decade radically overestimating you.”
Jamsheed chuckled in that musical way of his. “I wear it to remind myself of what I realized about you when I was a boy, fighting Iraqis in mud-bottomed trenches while clouds of poison floated above me. That’s when I realized that America will never stop until all of the Muslim faithful are dead. You will use bombs, you will gas, you will use your Zionist attack dogs and wilder animals like Saddam Hussein, never stopping to reflect on the suffering you leave in your wake,” he clutched the key in his nail-less fist until his knuckles drained white, “You do this because hatred of God is in you all the way down to your bones. While you and your hatred still exist, no one on this earth is safe, because we are all God’s children, and we all seek safety beneath His shadow.”
Ambrose said, “If you think Americans hate god, you should visit Mississippi.”
“I think I drove through it once on my way to a concert in New Orleans. Very nice people, as I recall.”
Ambrose bared his teeth, revealing his long canines. “Jamsheed Mashhadi, world traveler. When I think of how fucking long you’ve crisscrossed this planet, hiding behind your piano while you teach baby-killing zealots how to bomb tour buses and synagogues—“
Jamsheed made a shushing motion with his nail-less index finger. “Now Mister…whoever you are…don’t be angry just because you never caught me.”
Now Ambrose smiled for real. “I’m Ambrose Rutherford Hayes, and I caught you twenty minutes ago when we climbed into this Humvee.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Haddad saw the American and the Iranian off in the armored Humvee that his troops had commandeered for prisoner
transport. There was a chance those two mean would get weapons and turn the vehicle into a bloodbath, but he decided he’d rather risk that carnage than let them travel in separate vehicles and potentially escape. More importantly, he needed to talk with the Israeli bitch alone. He’d heard Mashhadi speak to her in French. Haddad hadn’t studied the language since secondary school in Lebanon, where the ex-colonial language was still mandatory, in some schools, but he could try to dredge it up, given the stakes of inaction. It was the only way he could communicate without his men hearing him. They were loyal to a fault, but Hezbollah loyalty stopped well short of overlooking Israeli collaborators, which is just what Haddad felt like he was about to become.
He put on a good show of shoving her into the back seat of his open-topped truck with his left hand. His right hand was numb, but at least it had stopped bleeding since he wrapped it in a field dressing. Once they were moving, the Israeli barely acknowledged him. She was lost in her own mind, calmly meditating on the hot scrubland around them. Those thick glasses (what was left of them) and unkempt hair made him think of a demented librarian, but he knew better; Mossad agents were Israeli military, first and foremost. If he rubbed her the wrong way, he didn’t put it past the little woman to kill him where he sat.
So he leaned in cautiously and said in French, “We need to talk.”
She looked at him peripherally. Her eyes were smaller when seen from the side, where her lenses couldn’t magnify them. Without the obstruction they also lost their befuddled librarian’s ignorance, and he saw someone with dark and hungry eyes belonging to a bird of prey.
“In French, no less,” she nodded at the backs of the men in the front seat, “This should be good.”
“It is. Keep speaking French, please.”