Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (14 page)

“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 prehistoric, 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
.

“What is so funny, Persian?” the bearded man snarled with a rumble like tectonic plates splitting.

“Nothing, just this day I’m having. You know me, Sir, but I don’t know you. Who’s the lead goat-fucker in Syrian al-Qaida these days?”

The dull-eyed man grunted. “Just call me the Emir. They all do.”

“It takes a brave man to admit he fucks goats.”

Then the Emir sent his fist into the middle of Jamsheed’s leering face, and the Iranian went down in the dirt like a man struck by lightning.