when Amir Taleh one of the officer corps’ rising stars had refused to obey any order to fire on the crowds. There had been a blood price to pay for such defiance, of course.
Taleh shifted slightly, still conscious of the old scars across his back. He’d been arrested immediately and taken to a secret SAVAK prison. There he had endured countless beatings, countless acts of cruelty and torture. But he had survived. Scourged by men, he had grown ever more steadfast in his faith.
As God had willed.
When the Shah finally fell from power, he waited for his freedom. He waited in vain. The Islamic Revolution, which should have been his salvation, simply replaced one set of jailers with another. To the mullahs, Taleh’s refusal to obey the Shah’s martial-law orders meant nothing. In their eyes, his military training in America had “Westernized” him beyond redemption. They saw him and the other young officers like him as “a threat to the Islamic society” they planned to build.
And so the faqih, the Islamic judges who now ruled Iran, had ordered the armed forces “purified.” Hundreds of fieldgrade and general officers were executed. Others escaped to the West and into a dreary, inglorious exile.
By some standards, Taleh was lucky. He was simply left in prison to rot a captive languishing without trial and without a sentence. But just as a war against his own people had proved his downfall, so a war against an ancient enemy restored his fortunes.
When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi legions stormed across the frontier, Iran’s purged, “pure” Army proved itself incapable and inept. In desperation, the Islamic Republic combed through its prison camps to find the veteran soldiers it needed to fight and win. It had found Amir Taleh.
Throughout the eight-year-war, he had fought two enemies: the Iraqis and many inside the Republic’s own govern ingcircles. In a way, the mullahs were right. He had been Westernized, at least in the sense that he had accepted the Western idea that tactics and military reality were not affected by revolutionary doctrine. Competence and sound planning mattered more on the modern battlefield than blind courage.
He’d proven that, in battle. Starting out in command of a company, promotion had come quickly to him, a combination of survival and skill. First an infantry battalion, then a Special Forces battalion. He’d spent more time in combat than almost any Iranian officer now alive much of it behind Iraqi lines. His decorations, grudgingly awarded, marked him as Iran’s top soldier.
Those decorations had also saved him from falling into the hands of the Pasdaran, the fanatical Revolutionary Guards. Products of the Revolution, the Pasdaran’s leaders viewed all Regular Army officers as potential traitors or more dangerous still, as potential rivals for power within the Republic. For them Taleh was a walking nightmare: a decorated hero, a victorious leader, and a devout Muslim who ignored their authority. They’d never been able to touch him.
He frowned. Of course, he had never been able to touch them either. To his utter frustration, he had been forced to watch them send thousands of devout young volunteers to futile deaths in foolish frontal assaults, unable to speak out. The Revolutionary Guards had no grasp of tactics. They did not understand their enemy. Wrapped in a cloak of ideology, they never evaluated their actions against the brutal test of reality. Worse yet, the men at the top had never made the sacrifices they demanded so casually of others.
Since the end of the war, Taleh had devoted himself to rebuilding Iran’s Regular Army. Despite continuing opposition from the Pasdaran and other radicals, he’d risen steadily in rank, climbing to the very top of his profession. He had never married. Surrounded by enemies as he was, a wife and children would have been little more than a point of weakness, a constant vulnerability. No, his soldiers were his only family.
Kazemi’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Five minutes, General.”
He could see Tehran now. A thin haze of smoke still hung over the skyline, almost twenty-four hours after the attack. Fires were still burning out of control in some parts of the city, spreading outward from the gutted shells of the Majles, the Parliament building, and the Defense Ministry. One bright spot in all this was the destruction of Pasdaran headquarters, but the capital had suffered more in one day than it had in the entire eight years of war with Iraq.
The American missiles had killed hundreds, and hundreds more were in hospitals all over the north of Iran. Most of those killed were government workers, technicians, military officers, or officials. Every ruling body except the Council of Guardians had suffered some loss.
The American message was clear. Payment for the dead in California had been returned tenfold, and much of his nation’s military power had been savaged. And to what end? Was this worth it? Taleh shook his head, still staring out across the city flowing by below him.
Despite years of support from Tehran, HizbAllah and the other groups had done nothing to improve the strategic position of Iran or of Islam itself. Though occasionally stung by their random bombings, hijackings, and hostage-taking, the United States and its allies were still able to maintain their hold on the Middle East playing one Islamic country off against another.
The helicopter settled heavily onto a makeshift landing pad set up near the office building he’d selected as the Defense Ministry’s temporary quarters. Several staff officers were visible through the swirling dust, anxiously awaiting his return.
As soon as the rotors slowed, Taleh was out, favoring his leg but moving as quickly as he could. The Defense Council meeting was still four days off, but there were preparations to make.
Somewhere in the air over Tehran, he’d made his decision. This waste and destruction must never be allowed to happen again.
General Mansur Rafizaden sat in the back of his speeding black Mercedes sedan, angrily contemplating the upcoming meeting. By rights the Supreme Defense Council should have been gathering at his headquarters, not at those of the Army. He scowled. That cunning fox Amir Taleh was growing bolder in his efforts to steal power away from the Islamic Republic’s true and tested guardians.
For more than a decade, Rafizaden had led the Basij, the People’s Militia. He and his officers had mobilized tens of thousands of teenagers into hastily trained battalions for service in the war with Iraq. Many had died in that service, but since their deaths assured them all a place in Paradise, he was sure they had gone gladly.
Now he found himself suddenly thrust into command of the whole Pasdaran, a promotion earned when American warheads decimated the upper ranks of the Revolutionary Guards. Though new to his post, he took his responsibilities most seriously and he had no intention of surrendering his organization’s hard-won powers to Taleh or any other tainted soldier.
Rafizaden began considering plans to humble his rivals. A guardian of the Revolution had to be energetic. He couldn’t wait for threats to appear. He had to find those who were dangerous and crush them long before they could become a threat. Well, Taleh and his fellows were clearly dangerous.
While he sat deep in thought, his black Mercedes sedan raced through northern Tehran, escorted by two jeeps one leading, the other trailing. Each jeep was filled with teenage Basij soldiers carrying a collection of assault rifles and submachine guns. During the more violent days of the Revolution, and during the war with Iraq, such escorts had been a necessity. Now they were viewed as almost a formality, and positions in the jeeps were given out as honors to favored soldiers.
The ambush took them all by surprise.
Just as the Pasdaran convoy passed one intersection, an Army truck suddenly roared out onto the street behind them. Before the men in the rear jeep could react, the truck braked hard and turned sideways, blocking the street to any other traffic.. At the same instant a panel van pulled out across the convoy’s path. The van’s driver scrambled out of his vehicle on the passenger side, diving out of sight.
Even as the surprised Basij troopers readied their weapons, rifle and machine-gun fire rained down on the two jeeps from several second-story windows. Hundreds of rounds ricocheted off pavement and metal and tore the guards to pieces in seconds.
Both escort jeeps, their drivers killed by the fusillade, spun out of control and crashed into the buildings lining the street. The Mercedes, armored against small-arms fire, tried to steer around the abandoned panel van, bouncing up and over the curb in a desperate bid to escape the trap.
An antitank rocket slammed into the sedan’s windshield and exploded, spewing white-hot glass and metal fragments across the driver and a bodyguard in the front seat. Rafizaden and an aide in the back ducked down and
