Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (25 page)

It was all grey, every inch of it. Most of the brick and mortar buildings would have been generic tan, once upon a time, but now they were fire-singed or just covered with ash from explosions in different parts of the town. The buildings had corners missing, or bits of roof ripped off, like massive eagles had swooped down and torn off parts of the city with steel claws. In the distance, they heard an artillery exchange that rumbled like timpani drums in an orchestra. That was the sound of Hezbollah artillerymen pounding western Qusair into powder.

Ambrose knew the bombardment was preparation for a full ground offensive by Hezbollah’s shock troops. Assad’s Syrian soldiers were hopeless anywhere except an open battlefield, but not Hezbollah—a good Hezbollah fighter learned to navigate the slums of Beirut with a Kalashnikov on his back by the time he was a teenager, and just kept getting deadlier as the movement swallowed up more of Lebanon. When the mortars stopped falling, that only meant Hezbollah felt ready to send in its
real
armed strength, to cut through the Free Syrian Army like a hot knife through butter.

Ambrose grimaced as he thought to himself,
Too bad we don’t have any of al-Qaida’s Baghdad veterans on our side.
Those
fuckers know how to fight.

“What’s so funny?” Celestine asked him as she lit a cigarette from his second to last pack.

He closed his eyes and listened to the shells rain death on west Qusair. “Absolutely nothing. Bad old memories of Baghdad, and how I can’t seem to get away from that goddamned place—“

“—Because you can’t stop thinking about Jamsheed Mashhadi. That’s why you’re not a real operative.”

He looked at her cockeyed and asked, “Operative. You mean a fucking spy, right?”

She glared back over the rim of her glasses, which made her eyes two different sizes cut in half. “Whatever word you want to use. In either case, you’re not it,” she said dismissively.

“I’m not it? Please don’t let my bosses know. I can’t go back to a desk job.”

She kept going, “You’re not it because you’re romanticizing our work. You live in a world where spies waste their decades of training just scheming against one another like archenemies. That’s not what we do.”

He looked at the ground and hid his thoughts with a smile. “That’s not what we do?”

“No. What we do is no different than any other military or diplomatic assignment. A soldier doesn’t waste time thinking about what any individual enemy fighter is planning, and a diplomat doesn’t let his life revolve around the ambassador of a rival country. It’s distracting, and that makes it dangerous. Jamsheed Mashhadi is irrelevant to this mission beyond the fact that he’s the man Iran sent to weaponize a lethal arms cache. Let him try to do his job and we’ll stop him as an incidental part of our larger objective: seizing and destroying those arms. At any rate, he’s dead; al-Qaida tortured him to death after you freed me.”

“Oh, that’s right.” He lit another cigarette.

“What’s right?”

He ditched his smile and looked straight at her, forgetting how much he liked the angles of her face and that goddamned husky accent. “I freed you. Now tell me how I freed you.”

She shared an honest, tired smile and said, “You walked into the place unarmed and bluffed.”

Ambrose nodded. “Goddamned right I did. I walked into an al-Qaida camp armed with a cheap mp3 player and sprung an Israeli spy with nothing but half-forgotten bullshit from the Wikipedia entry on unmanned military aircraft. So tell me, Lemark: was that going to be possible with the bullshit detachment you’re talking about?”

“It was…” she looked away from him and took a drag, “It was insane, that’s what it was. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life. Even as we were driving away, I kept looking at you and asking myself what in the hell kind of mind could do what you’d just done.”

He agreed, “Next time you start telling me my business, take a second to pause and remember who you’re dealing with. And if you’re about to tell me about Jamsheed Mashhadi, take
two
seconds.”

Celestine pushed him, “The fact that you’re insane doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And don’t forget for a second what’s happening here: you are here to help
me
carry out
my
mission, and
my
mission is to stop the transfer of a nerve gas arsenal to enemies of You-Know-Where.” She stopped short of pronouncing the magic word “Israel” that would’ve sent an armed Syrian guerrilla into the stratosphere.

He’d had enough. He spun at full speed and had a finger pointed at her face before she had time to blink. “
Fuck your mission
. You still don’t get it—you people
lost
the second the Syrian civil war began. Unless you send in ground troops, you’ll never stop this anarchy long enough to make sure assholes like Hezbollah can’t get things like Tuva from bigger assholes in Syria and Iran. As for Tuva itself, wake the fuck up: they’ve got too big a lead, and we don’t have enough intelligence to stop them,” he snarled.

He jammed a trembling thumb in his own chest, ignoring the pain that rippled out from his sternum. “Wayne wouldn’t bring a fuck-up like
me
out of retirement just to be on hand for that kind of failure. He called me here for one thing and one thing only: Tuva lured Jamsheed out of the shadows, and Wayne knows we may never get another chance at him,” he leaned back against the truck, shocked at how bad he was trembling, “So fuck you and your mission. Just get out of my way so I can kill the Iranian and get home to my cat.”

Celestine Lemark began the longest drag in the history of modern cigarettes, while her eyes took him apart and didn’t bother to put him back together again. She finished inhaling, then let the bluish smoke pour out of her crooked mouth like fog rolling off the horizon of a black ocean. “Fuck you, you cheap assassin.”

The cigarette fell out of his mouth as his voice cracked and he screamed, “
I am not an as
—”

Rebel soldiers behind him yelled:
airstrike! airstrike!

Before Celestine could even drop her cigarette, Ambrose grabbed her and pulled her into the courthouse entryway. They almost didn’t make it, as both of their feet slipped in the piles of shale rubble. Outside, past the marble pillars, they heard the
chuff-chuff
cough of an old plane engine chewing through the air. All around them, rebels recited verses from the Quran while others prepared their meager RPG stockpile.

Celestine cocked her head and said, “Not an airstrike. Those aren’t fighter jet engines.”

Ambrose poked his head around the bullet-pitted marble pillar and looked out. “Then what the hell is that?” he asked.

“That,” one of the rebels said, pointing into the sky past Ambrose’s head.

It came in low over the buildings to the west, cutting through the plumes of smoke that were all that remained of west Qusair. As its silhouette gained shape they saw a battered old miniature cargo liner the color of dirty seawater, gliding low towards their position.

Ambrose said, “No external weapons, no explosions in its wake, no gun in the nose. Yeah, it’s unarmed.” He narrowed his eyes and looked into the smoke. He saw something shimmering beneath the belly of the plane, a bright white cloud rippling through the air like whitewater as it poured from the ugly bastard’s cargo hold.

The plane passed over them with a sick mechanical grumble, leaving fluttering papers in its wake. Celestine walked out and Ambrose followed her, along with the rest of the Syrians.

She picked up one of the pages and blew soot off it. Then she read it aloud, “People of Qusair: do not be afraid. The elected government of Syria is here to save you from the war criminals and jihadists who call themselves the Free Syrian Army. Stay in your homes, lock your doors, and we will free you by nightfall,” she spit like a man, then cackled for a moment before saying, “Wait until the people of Qusair see the elected government of Syria send in Lebanese guerrillas waving the Hezbollah flag.”

Ambrose looked into the sun. He couldn’t tell its exact position through the brown and grey haze of battle, but he figured it was late in the morning, since the kid and the ex-officer had taken their sweet time getting back from inside the courthouse. Nightfall was seven-ish hours away at Syria’s Mediterranean latitude, but he doubted it would take Hezbollah nine hours to sweep through the rebel defenses.

“That was the final warning. Now Hezbollah does their thing,” Ambrose said.

Celestine crumpled the flyer and stormed towards the rebel headquarters in the courthouse. “Like hell they do.”

Ambrose winced with chest pain as he yelled after her, “And now we suddenly have a plan to stop that?”

She was already inside the dark building, and her voice echoed like a ghost’s moan, “The Mossad doesn’t train us to roll over and die. If Hezbollah has focused all of their troops at Qusair, that means that they’re distracted and the weapons are unguarded. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to destroy them.”

He looked around with clenched teeth as the Syrian fighters perked up at the word “Mossad.” A shell volley exploded close enough to suddenly sprinkle fine grains of concrete down on them and make Ambrose’s ears violently decompress like he’d come up too quick from diving. He cursed and hurried into the building after her.

“Celestine, wait!” he yelled from beneath her on the twisting marble staircase that led to the upper floors. He huffed, smoker’s lungs catching up with him.

She spun on the landing above him and pushed the black hair out of her face. There was contempt in her eyes, reminding him of what she’d said to him outside:
he wasn’t a professional.
She yelled something about a radio, just as more shells exploded even closer to the building. Now men were running up and down the stairs like worker ants with a rainstorm nearing their hive. Celestine had taken off again, and Ambrose had to fight his way past the flood of armed men to keep up with her.

His body stopped halfway up the stairs. His wounds were back, and they were tired of giving him a pass on the pain he’d earned. His chest burned where they had clamped the jumper cables to him. His ribs were sore where police in Latakia and jihadists in the wilderness had beaten him down. His wrists were flaky from blood where they’d tied him down with wire, and he had yet to figure out a good way to bind those wounds. The throbbing in his torso grew irresistible as he climbed the stairs, until his body forced him to acknowledge that he’d aggravated his injured sternum to the point that something gave out as he reached the first staircase landing.

He threw out his left hand to stabilize himself against the railing, but couldn’t know whether he’d even touched the thing, because his nerves didn’t register contact with the cold marble. When his eyes told him that they
had
connected, he watched in horror as his left hand once again danced like a half-crushed spider. The truth had rarely seemed so self-evident: he was a twitching, burnt, broken wreck. He
wasn’t
a professional, and he
wasn’t
the right man for this mission. Gideon and Celestine understood that, and Wayne had probably known it too, even if the Israelis were the only ones honest enough to say it.

But then he looked at his hand and thought of that warehouse in Baghdad: the red lights that lit the place like a slaughterhouse, the smell of almonds from the sarin, the froth that bubbled out of Adam Malik’s mouth as he flailed and died…and Jamsheed at the end of the aisle of boxes, smiling. He had perfect white teeth, stained vampire-red by the emergency lighting.
Jamsheed
. Every twitching nerve in Ambrose’s husk of a body told him that Jamsheed wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead, and Ambrose would never get another chance at him. And he would be with Tuva.

He climbed upward, trying to breathe through the knives that pierced his chest.

* * *

He found Celestine hunched over a radio that resembled the looted Russian military equipment in the rebels’ mineshaft. He’d caught her mid-conversation, just as a voice crackled back at her.

“Underworld acknowledges and concurs, Cherub, but we’re too late for that kind of analysis: what is your absolute, surest guess for Heaven’s current location?” Gideon Patai asked in his strange placeless accent.

Celestine looked at Ambrose as she answered, “Cherub can only speculate, Underworld. Given troop buildup in Qusair, suggestion that Mormons would need to hide Heaven close to them, but not close enough to risk destruction or capture during battle. That leaves areas near Homs and Qusair,” she took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose with a grimace, “Heaven would be fortified. Remote, but still accessible. Probably with good line of sight to see attackers coming.”

The other end of the connection crackled, then Gideon asked, “Remote with good line of sight suggests high ground, Cherub. High ground would be susceptible to an airstrike, wouldn’t it?”

She looked wary, offering, “Cherub concurs, but trying to find Heaven under such loose parameters—“

“Would be impossible, without more information to narrow down the search,” Ambrose interrupted. He walked over to the radio and wrapped his hand around hers to ensure that she kept the line open and Gideon had to listen to him. “But if we assume that Heaven is well-defended, and if you knew that Heaven had an air defense system, then you could find it by identifying that air defense system, couldn’t you, Underworld?”

There was garbled background conversation, then Wayne Shenzo answered, “Seraph…good to hear your voice. Underworld requests elaboration.”

Ambrose replied, “The fixer in Latakia—Zubair—showed me the depot where he transfers Russian weapons for Assad. There was an anti-aircraft battery, still in the box, labeled ‘Fortress of Homs.’ I didn’t recognize the code designation, but maybe you or Underworld do, and that can help you narrow the search?”

“
Krak des Chevaliers,
” Celestine blurted out in French.

“Repeat, Cherub?” Wayne asked.

She wrapped her other hand around Ambrose’s, and he could feel her squeezing down eagerly on the handset’s depressor. “Underworld, God Almighty: Seraph said the ‘Fortress of Homs.’ That isn’t a code designation—it’s an actual archaeological site a bit west of Homs itself. Modern Syrians call it that in Arabic, but be advised that the medieval French crusaders who built the place called it ‘
Krak des Chevaliers
.’ The damned place is famous enough to Google.”