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

folder as he walked up the sweeping curved staircase of his conquered villa, oblivious to the small gallery of baroque era European portraiture hanging on the red adobe wall beside him. The documents were all in Arabic, typed on a standard word processor and printed from a cheap desktop printer, based on the smudged ink he saw throughout. Smudging aside, he saw documents written by people with limited vocabularies peppered by unusually detailed phrases like “vector of attack,” and “theater of operations.”
    He frowned and said, “Fucking soldiers are the same everywhere,” since he’d concluded that these were operational documents written by ex-soldiers loyal to Saddam, now part of the insurgency. That meant the intelligence would be interesting in the right hands, but not, in his diplomat’s mind, a game changer.
    He was holding documents that might thwart two or three bomb attacks, and lead to a couple nighttime house raids capturing medium-value targets. Nothing in that folder would stop the insurgency, or even put much of a dent in it. For that, you either needed to somehow trick all of Iraq into loving its new conquerors, or to find the snake behind the insurgency and take its head off. The former was impossible, and the snake itself was more like a hydra: a dragon with many heads, and whenever you severed one, two more grew back in its place.
    Ambrose went to the mini-fridge in his seven hundred square foot bedroom with its white king-sized featherbed and took out another Budweiser. It was past noon, after all. Then he ran a cool bath and sank down into the red marble tub, ready to peruse more of these new documents that he’d already written off as bullshit.
    He sipped the beer, having that strange constricted pulse in his throat that comes of drinking something cold in a hot environment. The pages in the folder told him nothing he couldn’t already guess: insurgent militias made up of ex-soldiers had attacks planned on routes frequented by American trucks. Someone had snuck RPGs into an empty house in north Baghdad, and they were ready for dispersal to separate cells. It showed a degree of sophistication, but none of it was very interesting to a man like Ambrose, who, unlike the Bush apparatchiks around him, didn’t assume that Iraqis were stupid.
    The second half of the file amounted to supply requisitions from looted Iraqi army bases, along with some American equipment that had gone missing in trickles and streams ever since the Occupation began in April 2003. More tedium.
    Ambrose took another swig, then popped his neck and closed his eyes in the hopes that it would shake loose some cobwebs. He was doing it again; letting himself become bored by predictability before making sure he was looking at things that were actually so predictable.
    He tried to look at the last few pages of documents with fresh eyes, letting his lips move as his eyes scanned the pages word by word. Rockets…bullets…bomb making components. “Why would an insurgent write this shit down?” He asked himself aloud. He’d forgotten about the beer, and it was warm by the time he tried to take another swig, just like the bathtub that had gradually grown tepid to match the unholy combination of desert heat and tropical humidity that marred Baghdad afternoons.
    After a bit longer, the truth stared him in the face. They weren’t just requisitions, telling a militia what kind of inventory they had to kill with. He smiled and whispered, “No insurgent would ever write this down because you’re not from an insurgent, are you? You’re invoices. You’re receipts, telling somebody what they’re getting for their money.”
    Ambrose’s pale blue eyes took on a cold gleam that matched the tickle moving up his spine. He’d found something real: something to finally get at the hydra. If someone wanted receipts for weaponry bound for the insurgency, they represented interests that were more disciplined and methodical than any simple