Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran Read Online Free

frightened expression commingled with something like pity. He said, “Jamsheed, we don’t have any army left. That’s what the Imam says. He’s listened to his generals and the other ayatollahs, and they’ve told him that we don’t have any army, or any money to rebuild one.” Tears ran down the man’s hollow cheeks and the papery, stubbly skin on his face pulled back even tighter. “Jamsheed, it’s over. There’s nothing left. God doesn’t want us to fight anymore, and he told Imam Khomeini to stop while holy Iran can still be saved.”
    Jamsheed stood up with a fourth grenade in his hand. His cracking teenage voice hit a solid deep note as he rasped, “God said nothing. The ayatollahs are tricking Imam Khomeini. We still have soldiers, we still have the will to fight. No amount of black-robed cowards will change that with their sniveling.”
    “ Jamsheed! ” The man screamed. The lieutenant was backing away from him so quickly that he fell backwards onto his pelvis with a scream. He tried to raise up a hand, but the deflated timbre of his voice said that his spirit was spent and ready to disperse, like the air in a popped balloon.
    Jamsheed looked down at his own hand. In his anger he’d popped the pin on the fourth grenade. It was live, and he was holding it like a farmer would an apple.
    It would be a good death, Jamsheed reckoned. God wouldn’t consider it a suicide, once he looked in Jamsheed’s heart and saw how deeply he wanted to erase his shame. God would forgive him because Jamsheed still had the gold key to paradise around his neck. He was already a martyr, just waiting for someone to tell God’s angels that he was coming.
    Twelve seconds passed, then thirty, then a minute. The grenade didn’t go off. The powder must have been wet from all its time in that goddamned swamp. All of it must have been wet. All of it was useless.
    He fell to his knees, chuckling, and no one tried to move him for a long time.

Chapter Four
     
    Evin Prison was a darkling hell. Jamsheed didn’t know what year it was anymore. The Baseej militias, bearded street gangs paid by the ayatollahs to keep order in Tehran, had broken his jaw and half his ribs before turning him over to normal police. They got Jamsheed while he had been leaving Imam Khomeini Airport, fresh from a concert in Milan. When the Baseej came for him, Jamsheed hadn’t fought back. In the initial instant he’d restrained himself out of amusement; it had to be a mistake, and they wanted someone else coming off the plane. When the bearded goons with their soft skin and affected zeal started screaming Jamsheed Mashhadi! Traitor Mashhadi! He’d been too dumbfounded to retaliate, even as he thought about how to kill all of them with his bare hands.
    So Jamsheed sat in Evin, crying a bit as every change in the weather made the fingertips on his left hand throb at the blackened cuticles where his fingernails should have been. Part of his mind remembered how they laughed while they tore the nails out, but those scraps of terror were nothing coherent.
    He was going to die. But while the pain and hunger grew so great that they practically canceled each other out, a calm, enlightened sliver of himself made peace with his coming end.
    He had found that slice of himself as a boy running through a particular minefield on the Iraqi border. He remembered a field of trampled wildflowers and swirling dust, and a thousand children like himself screaming with fury as they ran headlong into Iraqi artillery emplacements. The boy next to him stepped on a mine and disappeared with a puff of gore and yellow dirt. From inside his refuge, nothing really seemed so bad. Not even dying in the dark of a torturer’s cell.
    The single overhead light was a bulb dangling from the end of an exposed wire. It came on with the reptilian hiss of an old filament igniting. Its brownish yellow incandescence was nothing, a mockery of electricity, but it still damn near blinded him. He gasped