Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (18 page)

She squinted up at him, trying to see through the gloom, then settled on a groan. “Fuck. They sent an American.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The door flung open, and men in dirty robes dragged Jamsheed out of the goat pen. Marie muttered something in French behind him, but Jamsheed didn’t catch it. His robed jailors had the faces of men that war had hollowed out. Their grips were strong but mechanical, dragging him forward with no attempt to look at Jamsheed’s face or say anything in his direction. They had bloodshot eyes that darted unthinkingly back and forth even amidst a secure village full of armed compatriots. Jamsheed saw terror in those eyes. Too much time staring into the sun, too much time praying to God.

The wild-eyed silent men dragged him across a dusty lane covered with the tire tracks of military vehicles and threw him into another dark room. It was in some kind of mud-brick house that reminded Jamsheed of the doomed little village where he’d rendezvoused with Hezbollah. Al-Qaida had converted it into a grungy command center, with hand-drawn maps of what he assumed was western Syria covering the walls. All of the light in the room came from a single exposed light bulb hanging from a frayed stem. There was a pile of rolled up Muslim prayer rugs in the corner, next to a low table that held half a dozen copies of the Quran. Above the Qurans, a framed picture of that dead fool Osama bin Laden beamed downward at his followers. Jamsheed had never met him or even given him much thought, because at the end of the day Osama bin Laden was just another rich boy playing soldier, the same as Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein.

Other than the flickering light bulb, there was only one electrical device in the entire room: a shiny tripod-mounted video camera with a little red light blinking next to its lens. The hollow men took him by the shoulders and shoved him down into a metal folding chair right in front of the camera. Then he heard them leave, and another man entered. Jamsheed didn’t bother looking backwards. He knew from personal experience that a nervous prisoner only made for a hungrier torturer.

The man walked around him with heavy boot stomps, like a dozen sandbags being dropped onto concrete. Halfway around Jamsheed, somewhere behind his left ear, the man’s voice boomed out at him.

“Look at me,” the Emir commanded.

Jamsheed turned to the left and saw the stone-faced monster right beside him. “Hello, Emir. I never got the opportunity to praise you for how well that ambush went this afternoon. Fine work, especially given the caliber of recruit you people tend to attract,” Jamsheed offered.

The Emir sat down in a chair across from him with his back to the video camera. He had two rolled-up pieces of paper in his hand, white sheets that looked incongruously pure as they were clenched between those giant fingers with their hairy knuckles.

The Emir replied, “Good. You like to talk. That will make this quicker.”

Jamsheed held up his maimed left hand. “Whatever this is, it might take longer than you’d think. People tell me I’m stubborn.”

The Emir grunted in acknowledgment as he shoved one of the papers at Jamsheed’s chest. “They said that. That’s why I’ll start off lower than your fingernails, if you test me.”

Jamsheed glanced at the paper and saw the same speech broken into two columns, one side in Arabic and the other in Farsi. Both used the Arabic alphabet, but they were different languages with different rules, and even similar words were pronounced differently.

He grimaced while looking at the video camera. “Do I start with the Arabic then read the Farsi, or vice-versa?”

“You read the Farsi. The Arabic is for me, to follow along,” the Emir said. He raised up his sheet of paper, showing a similar copy of the speech in both languages. “My version also has your Farsi marked up phonetically, so I can sound out the words and tell if you’re cheating.”

There went another one of Jamsheed’s ideas, although he was impressed that the Emir knew the word “phonetically.”

Jamsheed said, “So someone gave you a Farsi speech, translated it into Arabic so you got the gist of it, then took the time to mark up the Farsi so you could ensure I was reading what’s written down. Very thorough. May I go on?”

The Emir nodded, his dull eyes betraying nothing.

“Someone paid you off. You won’t tell me who, you won’t tell me how much, and you don’t care why they did it. But they’re someone fluent in both languages, who knows me well enough to take precautions,” Jamsheed pointed to the Arabic, “To ensure that I didn’t mangle the speech. And they want me to give that speech in Farsi, because this video is meant for Iran.” Jamsheed crossed one of his legs, like he was sitting in a Parisian café with espresso in front of him. “So you weren’t just paid to execute me—you could have done that back on the road. You took money to help someone in Iran eliminate a political rival.”

The bearded man spoke, “We don’t care why Persians want to kill Persians. We’ll kill you all for free, but a bit of funding makes things even easier.”

“No matter whether it’s from inhuman Persian Shiite heretics?” Jamsheed inquired.

The Emir said, “If you want to behead the devil, you need a sword. If the devil buys the sword for you, that’s his mistake.”

Jamsheed hummed as he perused the contents of his falsified confession. “Homosexuality, American sympathies, spying for the French...” he lowered the paper, “The ‘homosexuality’ charge seems a little unnecessary, don’t you think? It’s just so damned petty.”

That actually got a chuckle out of his captor. Then the Emir asked, “So you are ready?”

Jamsheed ignored the question and said, “You should know, I’ve been in this situation before. The man with the script and the camera couldn’t break me then, either. They just kept talking, and threatening, and giving me childish temper tantrum beatings, until God intervened and set me free.”

“Not today, Persian. The only god in Syria is mine.”

Jamsheed cracked his neck on both sides then sat upright in his chair, clearing his throat. “Very well. Just make sure to film from my chest up and use a dull focus so my bruises don’t show up too clearly. I’ll try to do my part and act terrified. We want this to look natural, after all.”

The bearded man stood up and turned the camera ‘on’ from sleep mode. He checked the zoom screen to make sure the recording was in focus, then sat back down to read along with his copy of the speech. Jamsheed almost cackled when the bearded monster took out a dainty pair of reading glasses that barely fit around the ruined crag of his nose.

There were maybe three feet between them. Jamsheed wasn’t shackled, and each of his legs was much longer than three feet.

He cleared his throat again and began, “My name is Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi, son of Javad and Maryam Mashhadi. I hold the rank of full colonel in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, assigned to the Quds Force as a foreign intelligence agent. I have personally overseen revolutionary activities in fourteen countries. For eleven years, I have conducted these missions while secretly working for French military intelligence. I was recruited by the French through an American CIA agent whom I met in a homosexual nightclub in Paris during one of my pleasure-trips abroad. I was weak, and could not resist his temptations. Since then, I have ensured that every Revolutionary mission under my charge has been compromised. Even missions under my command which appear to succeed are deceptions: in every instance, I have alerted the French to our plans, and they have passed this on to the Americans, who have reacted by killing many brave and gifted martyrs who were living deep undercover in their target countries. I am a serial killer of Muslims, whom I gladly butcher in the name of Jesus the Christ, Son of God and true savior of the world.”

The bearded man clenched his fist until two of his knuckles popped. “That is not written here. Was that ‘Jesus’ you said? What are you doing?” The Emir barked.

Jamsheed shot back in Arabic, “I just said I worship Jesus, Son of God, and I kill Muslims in his name. Good addition, eh? Now let me continue before we have to restart this whole thing.”

The man stabbed his mammoth index finger at the final paragraph and commanded, “Here. Start here and then just read through the final paragraph. The speech is meant to be simple.”

Jamsheed nodded, then looked back at the camera with big soulful eyes. “Pro-Revolutionary Shiites in Baghdad captured me while I was meeting with my French contacts in the Green Zone. They have pronounced a death sentence on me, but not before I admitted to my crimes and begged to God for mercy. But hear me now: I refuse to do so, for Allah is a lie. Only Jesus Christ is God, and Allah must bow before him, or—”

“You are saying something about Jesus again,
and
Allah. Do not make me break your neck.”

Jamsheed leaned forward towards the camera and continued with a cruel smile, “Just as you will bow before me, O slave of the ayatollahs, in the moment before I end you. I am going to kill the Arab dogs you sent to fetch this sham confession, then I am going to hunt you down. The last things you will feel are my left hand, the hand you maimed, closing your mouth shut while my right hand slides through your ribs to stop your heart. Then Jamsheed Mohsen Mashhadi will scatter your bones into shards, so that on the Day of Resurrection God will call to your spirit, and nothing shall be left to rise from the dus—“

It didn’t matter that he was sitting down, because Jamsheed saw the Emir’s punch coming. He threw his weight forward to duck under the big man’s swing and came up inches from the Emir’s face while the man’s outstretched limbs left his body undefended. With the linear brutality of a lathe punching sheet metal, Jamsheed drove each of his thumbs into one of the Emir’s eyes. Once each thumb had stabbed inward to full extension, Jamsheed made identical wrist flicks to mangle the sockets before he retracted both thumbs with a scooping motion that took out whatever was left of the Emir’s eyes.

The man hadn’t even gasped. Part of that was just shock, but Jamsheed attributed the rest to pure grit on the Emir’s part; he was a genuine warrior, standing there noiselessly as his brain processed the fact that his eyeballs were ripped out. Jamsheed appreciated such fortitude, even as he picked up the metal folding chair and took the Emir apart.

Wiping off his gory hands on the dead man’s robes, Jamsheed played out the remainder of the scenario in his mind. He noted three distinct advantages: training, surprise, and Hezbollah. His training would take him most of the way. Once he had a rifle and a sidearm, Jamsheed would go through the al-Qaida trash like a scythe through wheat. Surprise would help that. Jamsheed would kill the wild-eyed men when they in came to check on the Emir. He’d do it noiselessly, then take their weapons and steal off on foot through the wilderness, if need be. The gleaming salt deserts of Iran made the Syrian scrubland look like a jungle by comparison. And if they tried to chase him, they would most likely be cut off by a Hezbollah counteroffensive. The Lebanese were no fools—Jamsheed was a jewel in the Revolution’s crown, and the results for their organization would be dire if al-Qaida hunted him down like a dog in the Syrian wilderness.

He crouched in the shadows of the hut, right beneath the smiling picture of Bin Laden, ready to grab the first fool who stumbled through the door.

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.