The barricade had been built with its back to the very head of the boulevard where it jutted off into narrow, easily blocked-off side streets. The effect was that of enclosing those within on all sides. Evira felt claustrophobic from it all and only slightly reassured by the numerous gunmen posted atop the barricades facing every direction. Still, she had to admit they were formidably armed, what with the grenade launchers, RPGs, bazookas, heavy machine guns, and even several hand-held surface-to-air missiles to use against possible attacks from aircraft. Yes, the Israelis had thought of everything, but without the prompt arrival of the Apaches to lend air support it might not be enough.
“It goes well, Rashid!” another student leader she had not met said to the one who had escorted them here. The two young men embraced.
“The word was bad from the embassy,” Rashid returned. “Have you heard anything since?”
“Who has had time to talk? There was the barricade to finish.”
Yakov was already making his way over to the communications station. He looked nervous. The Apaches would be overdue in a scant fifteen minutes, and as of yet there had been no word from them. Evira followed him, close enough when she stopped to hear his side of the conversation into one of the radios he picked up.
“What do you mean?” he demanded into the receiver. “How did they get through? … That many? Oh God … No, it’s too late.… Yes, we can still do it. Just stay where you are and keep me updated.” He lowered the receiver to the table.
“Bad news?” Evira asked lamely.
Yakov’s eyes were glassy. “Hassani’s forces responded in far greater numbers than we expected, quicker as well. There are between five and ten thousand in the streets already and more coming. Talegahani Street is totally theirs. They’re heading this way.”
“You must have a plan, a contingency,” she said, watching Kourosh helping to put the finishing touches on the barricade that would be under siege in a matter of minutes.
“Yes. The Apaches, damn it! The Apaches!”
“No word from them?”
“None at all.”
Evira and Yakov looked at one another, both afraid to speak the obvious, that the Apaches weren’t coming and they had been abandoned.
“We’ve got to do something!” Evira insisted.
“Yes,” Yakov acknowledged, and raised a walkie-talkie that connected him to the members of his team scattered among the Iranian masses down Shah Reza Boulevard. “This is Yakov. Commence the burning.”
The Apaches looked like huge june bugs floating lazily beneath the sun, all black and steel. Over ninety minutes before, the Persian Gulf had given way to Iranian landfall, but McCracken was resting no easier. He gazed nervously at his watch.
“We haven’t made up enough time,” he said to Johnny Wareagle. “I figure an hour late minimum, Indian, maybe closer to an hour and a half.”
“The battle will still be there when we arrive, Blainey.”
“You sound pretty certain.”
“Isn’t it always?”
The fires spread quickly down Shah Reza Boulevard, chaos growing out of chaos as the frenzied masses grabbed flaming objects and flung them through plate-glass store windows. Smoke rose in a shroud over the center of Tehran as if to cordon it off from the rest of the city and the world. The flames had the pronounced effect of further fueling the mass’s rage. Whereas before many had been running without purpose, chanting with hands in the air, now no set of hands was without some sort of weapon. Yakov and his Operation Firestorm team had given out approximately 2,000 firearms beyond the barricades, but it was impossible to tell how many of those possessing them were concentrated here. Reports from other areas of the city indicated heavy exchanges of fire with Hassani’s Revolutionary Guard, the latter emerging victorious at every turn. Their casualties were high, but for now the guards seemed not to care, fighting with a passion and heart Yakov and the students had never expected. When Firestorm had been conceived, some had gone as far as to suggest that the guards would actually join the side of the masses. Now nothing could have been further from the truth.
Evira found Yakov searching the sky hopelessly for the Apaches he now believed were not coming.
“They’ll be here,” she insisted.
“You don’t understand. They haven’t called and we can’t raise them on the established frequency. That means the rules have changed.”
“Only because whoever’s leading the mission would never break radio silence and alert the Iranians to his approach.”
“That wasn’t the plan.”
“Things may have changed,” Evira said, clinging to the hope that McCracken was coming on the Apaches, though clearly she had no reason to. “They’ll be here,” she persisted. “We’ve just got to hold out.”
“We’re going to try,” Yakov told her.
In the next instant he had summoned the student leaders to his side. His orders were simple: they were to take to the barricade with their various units and prepare to make their stand here and now. The young Iranians’ faces grew red with excitement and fury. Their time had come, and they rushed off to gather their people. The word spread. There were screams of joy, of glee.
How naive, Evira thought to herself. How foolish…
Wooden crates were pried open and additional weapons distributed and ammo readied amidst the hooting. Evira hung back from it all. She had seen this scene before. Different countries, different causes, but always the same result: futility.
Armed now, the Iranians charged by her to their positions within and atop the huge barricade. She had lost sight of Kourosh again in all the excitement and feared he had wandered off into the streets to be swept away by the masses and lost forever. Her heart had begun to thud when she caught sight of him arguing up a storm with a man issuing rifles who had refused to give him one. Evira hurried over and dragged him away.
“I want to fight!” he protested. “I want to shoot the bastards!”
“You want to die?” she demanded, words coming with her thoughts. “You’ve seen what it’s like. Is that what you want?”
“I’ll kill them first!”
“Not all. You can never get them all,” she said, still holding him back.
“I’m not a coward! I want to fight!”
“It won’t come to that,” she said, trying to sound confident, eyes on the sky as if to make the Apaches appear. “It won’t.”
But she knew the sureness had left her voice.
Yakov grimly accepted the reports from his spotters scattered throughout Tehran.
“They are using heavy armaments!”
“The barricades are falling!”
“The people are running away!”
“The Revolutionary Guard is massing toward Shah Reza Boulevard!”
The final report was superfluous. Climbing to the top of the barricade, Yakov could see the first of the dark-clad Revolutionary Guardsmen pass onto the smoke-filled street before him. These first waves were set upon by the masses and crushed beneath the fury of fists and sticks. The screams of the anguished and frustrated became even more frenzied. The crowd tasted blood and wanted more.
In reprisal, the next blood spilled was their own. The initial barrages of fire that came from the second wave of guardsmen reached Yakov as soft thuds to his ears. In the huge congregated swell, men and women began to crumble and lurch backward, chests opened and heads spewed bone and brains. The smoke obscured much of the view, but Yakov saw enough. The enraged masses would hold out as long as their ammo and resolve held up, which was only as long as the truth of their plight’s hopelessness could remain hidden from them.