Ayoub was forty-one, and tall. He wore his thick black hair swept up and back, in what was almost a pompadour. A handsome man. He had made his reputation in the ’06 invasion. Wearing a stolen Israeli uniform, he had walked up to four IDF soldiers at an outpost near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre and killed them at point-blank range.
Ayoub had commanded Hezbollah’s army for a year. Twice already he should have been killed. Once in Syria, fifteen kilometers south of Damascus. Rebels strafed his convoy with rockets, blowing up the cars behind and in front of his. Six of his guards died. The second time in Beirut, just a month before. A van loaded with artillery shells leveled an office building. Ayoub was supposed to be inside, but he was running late.
Inshallah. Truly. He had stopped fearing his own death after that morning outside Tyre. Dawn, the best hour for a surprise attack. The night watchers were worn out. Everyone else was still half asleep. He came in from the east, knowing the sun would be behind him, in their eyes. Still. They should have cut him down before he got close. His Hebrew was good, not great. The uniform was good, but his shoes were wrong. But back then the Jews were used to fighting kids in Gaza who threw rocks and Molotovs. They didn’t know what real war looked like.
Worse, for them, they didn’t know they didn’t know. Ayoub would never forget the way they’d yelled in surprise when he raised his rifle.
So he lived. But his life belonged only to Allah, and one day Allah would call for him. Until then he would fight for his people. At this moment, with the Israelis keeping to their side of the border, the fight was mainly in Syria. Years before, Hezbollah had joined the Syrian civil war, siding with Bashar al-Assad against the rebels who wanted to demolish his regime.
Ayoub disliked Assad. He and his friends drank, gambled, used drugs. Charity was one of the five pillars of Islam, but Assad lived in a palace while his countrymen starved. As the war ground on, Assad’s crimes multiplied.
Yet Ayoub never questioned Hezbollah’s choice. The rebels on the other side raged against Shia like Ayoub. No matter that Shia and Sunni were all Muslims, that they all believed that Allah was the only God, and Muhammad his messenger. The Sunnis ruled the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia. There were five Sunni for every Shia. But that dominance wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to eliminate the Shia entirely.
Ayoub had seen the torture videos. Mostly they came from Iraq. Men begging for mercy as their eyes were gouged out, their faces sliced apart. Men led stumbling through the empty desert on the Iraq — Syria border. Held down. Chains strapped to their arms and legs. Each chain locked to a car. Each car driven a different way. He’d made himself stop watching them. He’d tried to forget.
But one he couldn’t. It was the simplest of all. No sound, a fixed camera focused on a plain wooden table. On it, a ten-liter bucket of water beside a cardboard box filled with puppies. Ayoub didn’t know the breed. In truth, he didn’t like dogs. But these creatures were impossible to hate. They curled over one another, full of life. They couldn’t have been more than a few days old. Eight in all.
A pair of gloved hands picked them up one by one, held them underwater as they squirmed and tried to breathe, their desperation obvious even without sound. Until their wriggling stopped. Then the hands threw the sodden corpses back in the box. They twisted over each other like broken vines. The hands pointed, proudly: See what I’ve done?
The screen went black. A single Arabic line splayed across it: The Shia are worse than dogs.
If the video had ended there, it would have been one more piece of Sunni propaganda. Not the stuff of nightmares. But it went on. The table reappeared. The bucket of water sat alone now. Until the gloved hands reached out, set a baby boy beside it. An infant, black-haired, black-eyed, naked, newly circumcised, his skin light Persian brown. He wriggled. He opened his mouth, screamed soundlessly at the camera. The gloved hands picked him up, carried him toward the bucket—
And the video ended.
What had happened to that boy? Ayoub wanted to believe that whoever had made the video had put him down after the camera was off. Maybe he was a prop, not Shia at all. But Ayoub knew these Sunnis. They had turned from Allah. Hezbollah could be cruel, but never without reason. Never with the joy the desert Arabs took in the suffering they inflicted.
They weren’t beasts. They were something worse, men with the souls of beasts.
And one had held that boy under the water until he drowned. In a basement somewhere in Syria or Iraq, a laptop held the truth. On nights when the wind stirred the dust in the Bekaa and kept him from sleeping, Ayoub promised himself that one day he’d find that computer and the man who owned it.
So, yes, Hezbollah had sent men to fight with Assad. As had Iran. The Iranians were Shia, too, the most powerful Shia nation by far. Naturally, Iran worked with Hezbollah. It gave the group seventy million dollars a year, trained Ayoub’s soldiers at bases outside Tehran, snuck freighters loaded with weapons through the Suez Canal and past the Israeli coast to Beirut.
And eight days before, when an Iranian friend of Ayoub’s sent a courier to tell him they needed to meet in Beirut, now, that very hour, Ayoub didn’t hesitate. He canceled his meetings, locked his phones in his desk, grabbed an old Honda motorcycle for the ride over the Dahr al Baydar pass into Beirut. He would make this trip with no guards. He preferred two wheels when he traveled alone.
The Iranian was a senior officer in the Quds Force, the foreign intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard. A very senior officer. He reported directly to Qassem Suleimani, who ran Quds. He called himself Ali, though Ayoub couldn’t be sure that was his name. They had met twice before. Both times Ali asked for help in Syria. Both times Ayoub agreed, sending more than a thousand paramilitaries. Ali didn’t explicitly promise what Hezbollah would receive in return. But weeks later, Hezbollah’s charities took in millions of dollars from Iranian expatriates in Europe.
On this third trip, Ayoub parked his motorcycle outside an apartment building in Haret Hreik, a crowded suburb south of downtown Beirut. Ayoub had never seen the building before. Each meeting with Ali happened at a different safe house. Not that Hezbollah would be foolish enough to try to monitor Ali’s comings and goings. And not that any other faction in Lebanon had any idea who he was. Ayoub knew how dearly Ali prized his anonymity. The Jews or the Americans would pay dearly for him if they stumbled across him.
Ali was small, hollow-cheeked, in his fifties. He had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a neat beard. He dressed modestly, Western-style, button-down shirts and sneakers. He hadn’t wasted time with small talk in their earlier meetings, and he didn’t today. No offers of tea or platters of hummus and big green olives.
“I need your help. Hezbollah’s help.”
“Of course.”
“This is about the Americans. As you can imagine. You saw the President’s speech?”
Twenty-four hours before, the United States had brazenly attacked the airport at the center of Tehran. Then the President gave Iran two weeks to open its borders or face invasion.
“Of course.”
“What he says, it’s a lie. He stares at the camera, lies to the whole world. I swear to you.”
“They lie always.”
In fact, Ayoub wasn’t sure the President had lied. Iran kept its nuclear strategy secret even from Hezbollah. Only a few people in Tehran knew the truth. Maybe the Iranians were trying to smuggle a bomb into America. So be it. Some part of Ayoub hoped that the President was telling the truth. Let the people in Washington or New York fear an Iranian bomb. The Americans were no friends of Hezbollah. They called Ayoub and his men terrorists. Never mind that Hezbollah ran medical clinics and handed out food all over Lebanon.