More guardsmen charged onto the boulevard from the intersecting side streets. Yakov didn’t have to pick up a radio to know that his was now or would very soon be the last standing barricade in the city. He had more than two hundred men to defend it, but the endless waves of Hassani’s troops would wear them down, outlast them and blow them to hell in the end. He climbed down from the barricade and found Evira waiting for him.
“I think you and the boy should get out.”
“To where?” she came back. “You think anywhere in the city is safe?”
“You’re resourceful and he knows the city.”
They both looked toward Kourosh, who had given up hoping for a gun and was busy distributing extra ammunition to his more fortunate countrymen who’d been blessed with one.
“What kind of world is it we make for our children, Israeli?” she asked Yakov.
“It was made by our fathers,” he returned. “Made in a shape we are helpless to alter. The madmen come and go, always the same causes, the same rhetoric.”
“Lies. To themselves, to all, and in the end the people pay.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The explosions sounding in quick succession seemed to shake the barricade. Yakov nimbly vaulted back to a perch where he could peer out through a break in the structure. The sight sickened him. The Revolutionary Guard was firing rockets and grenades into clusters of the Iranian people still massed before the barricade. Screams raged, the high-pitched wails of women and children rising above the others as the entire city bled with agony. Yakov could not help but tremble as a fresh wave of Hassani’s troops fired indiscriminate bursts of machine gun fire into the wounded and dying to silence them. The drab gray-black of the Revolutionary Guard uniform was now the dominant color in the street, blending with the smoke. As the guards launched their attack on the barricade, their charging numbers stepped heedlessly upon the freshly slaughtered bodies that littered the asphalt.
Yakov leaped back down.
“Prepare to fire!” he shouted into cupped hands, and the word was passed through the length of the barricade, thanks in large measure to Kourosh, who ran up and down the lines repeating it in his boyish squeal.
“Prepare to fire!”
The fifteen Apaches zeroed in on Tehran like locusts making for a wheat field. They had sped over Iranian territory much too low to be picked up by radar, and, as expected, the uprising in the capital city had opened the back door for them. Even the midair refueling had left them undetected and, more importantly, had resulted in only a minimal delay.
The pilots and gunners had drilled over and over again to meet the strange conditions of this mission. They were to restrict their targets solely to concentrated positions of Revolutionary Guardsmen and avoid civilian casualties at all costs. Thanks to the TADS system, if selective strikes were ordered, a soldier could be hit by chain gun fire with a civilian standing a yard from him spared. The whole strategy was based on intensifying the chaos and riddling the guards’ numbers long enough to give the masses the edge they needed. Their numbers were sufficient to overrun the troops if the troops were divided and cut off from each other. And no machine of war could have been more perfect for that task than the mighty Apache.
“Christ,” the pilot of the lead Apache reported to McCracken after checking his radar and noticing the smoky area now coming clearly in view, “the center of the city’s lit up like the goddamn Fourth of July. This is gonna get awful hot, sir.”
“You get to like the heat after a while.”
The plan was for this Apache to break off from the convoy at the earliest possible time and make tracks for the royal palace so Blaine might fulfill his part in the mission. He and Johnny had just donned their Kevlar body armor suits and were already sweating heavily in them.
“How long?” McCracken asked the pilot.
“Three minutes to the battle zone and eight to the royal palace.”
Blaine turned to Wareagle. “Well, Indian, it’s back to the hellfire.”
The masses in Shah Reza Boulevard began a full-fledged retreat, slowed by the huge and sickening collection of bodies littering the streets. Many were the corpses of soldiers, but far more belonged to the people. The guardsmen continued their steady advance on the barricade, their fire unrestrained and wild. Anything that moved was shot. Meanwhile, the initial bursts and volleys fired from the barricade met with great success. Soldiers seemed to be taken wholly by surprise, hordes of them dropping in their tracks as more rushed forward.
Evira watched it for a time and could barely keep down the contents of her stomach. She had never seen such carnage, and could liken it only to a feeding frenzy by sharks.
A woman holding a child by the hand was shot in the back. The child leaned over her and was shot twice.
Teenagers hurling stones were cut down en masse by soldiers, who were then caught in a hail of 50-caliber machine gun fire coming from the top of the barricade.
“You’d better take this,” Yakov called to her, tossing an M-16 her way. “They’ll be on us in seconds.”
Kourosh saw the rifle in her hands and rushed over with a trio of spare clips.
“So we fight on the same side, Israeli,” Evira said to Yakov.
“You can still get out,” he returned.
“Help is coming.”
He shook her off, and her statement this time was not followed by a hopeful sweep of the air with her eyes.
The boulevard before them was empty now of all but the bodies and charging guardsmen, close enough for the enemy to use their own grenades and bazookas.
“Down!” Evira screamed, and lunged from the position she had taken amidst the barricade to tackle Kourosh to safety before the first bursts made impact.
The impregnable barricade blew inward in several areas like a dam springing leaks. More heavy fire resounded against it with deadly thuds while waves of Hassani’s troops charged forward. They rushed into the unbroken fury of the bullets pouring out from cracks in the huge pile of debris, willing to sacrifice themselves if the next wave could get closer.
Yakov’s strategy here had been brilliant, for he had made sure to hold back firing of their heaviest arms until it was certain that the soldiers had passed the point of no return. He ran up and down the beleaguered barricade encouraging the defenders and shouting orders to commence with their small artillery fire. Almost immediately, Shah Reza Boulevard exploded in huge chunks as bodies were blown apart, more corpses added to the mounting pile. The firing from both sides was nonstop, its appetite insatiable. The battle became one of position versus numbers, and there was no doubt numbers were going to win out as the screams multiplied from all levels of the barricade. The dead plunged off; the wounded did their best to climb down. All those who could hold guns continued to do so.
Those within the barricade were making a truly remarkable stand. But the waves of Revolutionary Guardsmen were endless, blurring out the asphalt now. And suddenly the familiar sound of helicopters split the morning air.
“The Apaches!” Evira sang out from her perch near Yakov on a platform a third of the way up the barricade.
“No,” he returned flatly, gazing ahead. “Look.”
“Oh God,” she muttered. “Oh God …”
“I got blips dead ahead,” the lead Apache pilot told McCracken.