The Vengeance Man (2 page)

Iran – Kurdistan

I’ll bet you don’t even know where Kurdistan is. Well, let me tell you, it’s not exactly the place where you’d take your holidays. Especially since the ragheads drove those planes into the World Trade Centre a few years back.

But then, not many people know the little triangle of land that connects Turkey to Iraq and Iran. It's in the top right hand corner of Iraq. And the top left hand corner of Iran.  It doesn’t often make the TV newsmaps, but when it does it’s trouble. It’s called Kurdistan.

Not by the Turks and Iraqis and Iranians. They hate the Kurds. They call the region Turkey; or Iraq or Iran. They feel strongly about that out there – especially when Saddam was lording it up in Iraq. At best, they all  reckon that the Kurds are a bunch of nationalistic trouble makers with dreams of faded glory; at worst they know that they’re nothing but a bunch of cut throat thieves and terrorists, who need keeping down: hard. The late unlamented Saddam Hussein and his boys would agree,  I’m sure. So would the Turks. They’d been killing Kurds for as long as I can remember. About the only thing that the Turks, Iraqis and Iranians can agree on is that Kurdistan’s oil was far too valuable to be left to the Kurds…

I know Kurdistan from my days as what the government called a ‘special advisory trainer’.  The SAS 'Special Advisory and Training Team' based in Turkey had been a big secret.  In those days SAAT had been trying to turn a wild bunch of Kurdish freedom  fighters called the Pesh Merga into a disciplined fighting force and give the Iraqis and Saddam grief. Nothing to do with the British government, of course.  That would really have pissed off our Turkish NATO allies.

After three weeks I went out on an ambush with them against an Iraqi army convoy to see how they made out.  After that experience, I reckoned I should be learning from them. I learned that the Kurdish rebels were killers. Very professional and very nasty, if a bit wild. I also picked up enough of the strange mixture of Farsi, Arabic and Kurdmanji that passes for a language in the mountains.

This time round my  role was the same, only different and with a different target: Iran and the Revolutionary Guards.  I was a bit older, a bit wiser and a little more senior And the region was in Whitehall’s frame more than ever. The Yanks were agitating to destabili
se
Christ knows why. Left to their own devices the Ayatollahs would screw themselves, Fundamentalists against Reformers. With or without a nuclear bomb. Iran had had fuck all to do with the WTC attacks. Everyone in the business knew that. But not US Presidents apparently. So Iran was the target, with the Kurds supposedly leading the charge.

‘Operation Attorney’ they called it back in London. Very hush hush, according to Hereford and the briefers in the
“
Kremlin” building at SAS HQ. Destabilize the Ayatollah’s regime. Grab secret comms material.  Part of some great American plan to make a better world, stop them building a bomb, or at least to make things better for everyone else by giving the Iranians grief.

Again, the deal was that this was nothing to do with the SAS or Her Majesty’s Government. That went without saying - officially. But I was still advising an irregular armed group of Kurds in dirty pyjama trousers and raggy turbans heading  deep into Iranian territory - only this time they were not renegades in rebellion against Iraq and Turkey, but “gallant allies of the West”, trying to keep the Ayatollahs on the hop.  That's what Sal reckoned it was all about.

Sal  -- at least, that's what he said his name was -- was a New York American who had briefed me on Attorney at Varagoz in south east Turkey before they infiltrated me over the border. I like Americans, but I'm not a great CIA fan.   And Sal screamed 'CIA Special Ops
Division
' to his finger nails. Sal had been in Kuwait the first time round and didn’t like anyone in the Middle East, from what I could make out. He never quite told me what he’d been doing there but he knew his stuff. No doubt about that. And he’d had been generous enough to provide me with a nice new special forces Land Rover, fully kitted out for action, and every bit of hardware I had asked for; the only notable exception was that he'd provided not one thing stamped 'made in USA'. He had also given me a phenomenal brief on
nearly
everything I had asked him. There was no doubt that Op Attorney had benefitted from some very good planning back home in the US of A. Nothing on paper, of course. “We don’t need any paperwork, old buddy”

As the two day briefing drew to a close, I found myself warming to the guy.  We managed to put away a couple of glasses of some stuff called 'Old Patrero' that Sal claimed was real whiskey, "not that marketing faggots' crap in the Playboy ads with men in plaid skirts..." on the last night. It wasn't bad: for American whiskey.  Obviously we were never going to swap life histories, but I did tell Sal, who had a great line in  good jokes, that he was the best CIA spook I'd met,  whatever his real name was.  

Sal exploded.   Then he pointed out forcefully that his name really was Sal, that it was short for Salvatore, and that "he didn't work for State or the CIA who were a bunch of slimy shifty creeps who were too gutless to come out to the real world and get their precious hands dirty instead of which they left it to real soldiers like the DIA area intelligence officers who had seen a little action..."

At this point Sal stopped for breath and I could see that he was serious. So I apologised, he called me a Limey sonofabitch, and we had a little more of the Old Patrero.

I turned in at midnight and at dawn we parted good friends, as he saw me off down an unmarked track heading south east into Iran to join my Kurdish gang. "You'll like them,"  were his parting words. “They're just your kind of people..."

Most of this particular gang were just renegades, the sweepings of the original Kurdish rebels who had been unable to settle after old Mustafa Barzarni  died.  They would do anything to get at the Ira
qis
, the Turks or the Iranians.  And this time I was going further than I'd ever been, going deep to into the North West corner of Iran where the mountain passes point like fingers of an outstretched hand west back towards the oil wells of Irbil and Mosul in Iraq's northern oilfield, and the passes on the other side lead
east, deep into northern Iran.

I won't bore you with all the details - my main task was to ensure that a stateless band of Kurdish gangsters carried out a particular task for HM Government. My main qualification was my previous experience and a smattering of the mix of languages that passes for the local patois. I wasn't going to win a Nobel prize for Kurdish literature, but I could understand most of what went on. When I said jump, they jumped; except, of course, when they claimed they couldn't understand my Kurmanji.

To further encourage the faithful I carried a bag of  large and heavy Maria Theresa silver thalers and  some gold Krugerrands. Everyone recognizes gold. With the promise of double that amount on completion, I was everyone's favorite uncle. For my own insurance I carried a money belt of sovereigns and stored them carefully.

Up country in the Muslim world everyone needs a little insurance. In the Zagros mountains, a little bit more .

For my further insurance, Sal had thoughtfully provided me with two cheerful Turkish renegade Kurds as bodyguards, courtesy of G2 [Special Operations], TGS, the Turkish General Staff, Ankara. Sal had liked that.  "These guys are real trail scouts.  TGS has hired themselves the meanest bunch of bastards since Cochise whipped Geronimo.  Or was it the other way round? We
didn’
t get a lot of that kind of stuff
back in Queens.
  Anyway,  you're two of a kind. Well,  three, if you see what I mean.  You'll
really
like them. They’re cold hearted bastards – just like you…"

He was right.  And with a gang of Kurdish rebels I needed those guys to watch my back.      

The trouble with the gangs that wander in the mountains is that they are hard to find. They can roam anywhere in the hills.  It took us a week out from Turkey to find Jamal Faud and his gang, and another two weeks to encourage them to raid the isolated Iranian garrison and communications centre at Hasak . Nothing to do with HM Government, of course.  And
certainly
not the CIA.

Jamal had had his eye on Hasak  for some time. He was a tall grave individual, dark, where many of the Zagros Kurds are startlingly fair, with sombre eyes and a flashing grin that split the black beard like sunlight.  
If
he smiled.

Jamal and his gang lived by a strange mixture of patriotism and piracy.   Hasak combined the two nicely, just as Sal had said it would.   For a wandering  Kurdish land pirate with a hatred of the Iranians, there were rich pickings to be had at Hasak; and it housed a local Revolutionary Guard communications centre full of good things just for me.   It was a perfect target, and it wasn't properly defended like the camps on the border. However, Jamal's little group of thirty had shrunk to twenty-six by the time we made the hit on the town; four of them had melted away to take their chances in the mountains rather than face the Iranian Army the hard way.

And it was the hard way.  In order to avoid pursuit and hold off trouble as long as possible it was essential that Jamal's men took out the little airstrip near the town.  But my real target was the Iranian Guards Command Post in the barracks. As Jamal wanted to loot everything that wasn't nailed down in the Iranian stores dump as well, we ended up by having to split our forces between the three targets.  I argued hard against spreading ourselves too thinly, but Jamal had the guns, he wanted the loot and I was the only white face in the discussion, so I backed down, as much to save  Jamal's pride as anything. Politically that was cute - militarily it was potentially disastrous.

We hit Hasak just before dawn. It was just like the satellite pictures had shown; a little straggle of white houses, goats, and corrugated roof barracks in the bottom of a scrubby  green valley with steep mountain sides standing like walls about two miles out.  I led my own group into the little barracks and it was sheer bloody murder.

The only resistance came at the communications room, where some hero with a Saddam Houssein moustache decided to fight for his country. No beard, I noticed. Unusual for a Shi’a Muslim in The Islamic Republic . . .  By the time the place had been blown apart by our shoulder fired anti-tank rockets, and I’d gone through his pockets, we discovered that the hero was in fact an Iranian regular officer and he died for his country. The surviving heroes of the Revolutionary Guards - at least those whose bodies were not littering the dirt - had hightailed it.

The Iranian officer was certainly spread over a piece of it. Some of the other heroes dying for the great leader in Tehran were Special Communications troops. Unfortunately, they'd all had plenty of time to get off an SOS.  We had a job gutting the documents box, photographing everything in sight and grabbing every bit of classified I could lay hands on before we  escaped from the blood and flies and stink of the  shattered building.

The master plan was that Jamal's other main group would be taking out the airstrip while we tangled with the Iranian first team at the Comcen. On emerging from the rubble of the building, a gratifying cloud of smoke was rising above the straggle of whitewashed houses and two palm trees that represented a population centre here, a hundred miles south of the Turkish  border.  More worryingly, I could still also hear the crackle of small arms  fire.  That should have been well over by now.

We made our way quickly to the rendezvous in the central square where Jamal was supervising the loading of stores into a number of trucks. The white teeth  grinned piratically in the dark face and he spared me enough time to bellow, "Look at what I have found, English,' waving a hand at a miserable huddle of frightened women and children. I know enough of the ways of the mountains to know that a life of concubinage and slavery awaited them, but I wasn't there to morali
s
e.

"The planes, Jamal - what about the planes?"

He shrugged. "We have blown up two of the helicopters"

"What about the third helicopter?"

He shrugged again. "Nothing. There were only two. Even the hangar was empty. Your intelligence was wrong, English."

I swore. Sal's int briefing had been specific. The Iranian Brigade air platoon had three Russian-built Mil-8 or 'Hip' helicopters forward based at Hasak. He had  shown me overhead imagery of them and even the serial numbers. While the loss of the two ageing Mil 8s was a minor blow to the Iranian army, I was far more concerned with my own skin for the next four hours. We had to break north west for the cover of the moon country of broken mountains quickly, before it was too late and
Iranian
forces reacted. With one helicopter unaccounted for, we would still be at risk from hot pursuit, and nine hours of daylight to live through. The whole attack hinged on a clean getaway.

I glanced round, taking in the scene. A section of Jamal's band hunkered down, desert-fashion, watching the town exits. My own two bodyguards watched me, like a pair of hounds looking for reactions and decisions.

The women were waiting quietly and one calmed a crying child. A renewed gunfight broke out in the distance, briefly obliterated by the thud of a large explosion. We had obviously stirred up a hornets' nest and the sooner we got the hell out, the better.  I came to a decision. "Jamal."