The Gamma Option

by Jon Land

  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.

  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 th
e 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.

  “You got a reading?”

  “Look like Iranian gunships to me. The old Hueys from Nam we sold them.”

  “Shoot ’em out of the fuckin’ sky, son.”

  “Not in range yet, Dad.”

  “Then get us there! Fast!”

  Yakov was among the first wave of those within and on the barricade who fell to the barrage blistered down from the Huey gunship as it swept overhead. A few atop the debris turned upward and bravely fired on it, only to be sliced apart by the machine gunners spewing bullets out both sides. Evira managed to find cover during the first pass and slid back outward as a second gunship came in for its attack run.

  “Not yet, you bastards!” she raged. “Not yet!”

  A surface-to-air rocket launcher lay just before her. She grabbed for it, strapped it round her shoulder, and climbed to the first platform of the barricade. The second gunship was coming fast as the first swung back around and made tracks in its wake. Orange began to spit from the machine gun bores of the now lead Huey as it crossed
over the head of the barricade. Evira had time only to steady herself and raise the launcher to her shoulder before the chopper’s fire pinpointed her. She fired without time to properly aim, fired up and to the right in the desperate hope the heat-seeking missile would launch close enough to lock on. There was a whomp! and the Huey’s tail exploded, pitching it into a swirling dive.

  But there was no time to celebrate. The second Huey roared overhead and she had no second rocket to fire its way. She saw a launcher on the platform to her left and leaped for it just as the orange flashes tore into her. She felt a series of kicks to her ribs and chest and then she was falling, tumbling, still searching for something to grab onto.

  Evira felt no pain and maintained firm hold on her vision long enough to record the impossible sight of the second Huey being blown out of the sky as it hovered directly over the barricade. She tried to turn toward what she knew must be the Apaches, but her head wouldn’t move and neither could the rest of her.

  “Got him, sir!” The pilot beamed exuberantly after his Hellfire missile impacted squarely in the Huey’s side.

  “There’s more where that came from.”

  “Can’t wait to meet them.”

  “Just step on the gas,” Blaine said, reaching for his binoculars with the barricade a mere ten seconds away.

  The barricade was a shambles tumbling over upon itself. Well over a hundred dead and dying lay piled in heaps, some crawling back to their posts with weapons in hand and trails of blood left behind them. Those the battle had thus far spared clung to whatever positions they could forge out of the remnants of their fallen fortress, firing upon the onrushing soldiers until their bullets ran out or a stray shot found them.

  Kourosh had been trembling in shock behind a fallen section of the barricade when Evira had tumbled. He screamed her name and rushed to her side as the smoke and bullets surged by him. Blood had splashed on the rags he wore for clothes, and its coppery scent was thick in his nostrils even before he reached Evira. Whether she was alive or dead he could not tell. He only knew that she was bleeding very badly. He spoke her name softly and stroked her hair, then wailed again.