On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

"I don't think this armory is booby-trapped," he said, and he opened the door.

He went down the staircase.

The basement consisted of two rooms divided by an archway. The place was dimly lit by narrow strip windows high in the walls, just above street level. The floor was of black mosaic tiles. In the first room were open boxes of loaded magazines. In the second were G3 machine guns.

After a minute some of the crowd upstairs followed him down.

He grabbed three machine guns and a sack of magazines and left. As soon as he got outside the building, people jumped all over him, asking for weapons: he gave away two of the guns and some of the ammunition.

Then he walked away, heading for Gasr Square.

Some of the mob went with him.

On the way they had to pass a military prison. A skirmish was going on there. A steel door in the high brick wall around the garrison had been smashed down, as if a tank had rolled through it, and the brickwork on either side of the entrance had crumbled. A burning car stood across the way in.

Rashid went around the car and through the entrance.

He found himself in a large compound. From where he stood, a bunch of people were shooting haphazardly at a building a couple of hundred yards away. Rashid took cover behind a wall. The people who had followed him joined in the shooting, but he held his fire. Nobody was really aiming. They were just trying to scare the soldiers in the building. It was a funny kind of battle. Rashid had never imagined the revolution would be like this: just a disorganized crowd with guns they hardly knew how to use, wandering around on a Sunday morning, firing at walls, encountering halfhearted resistance from invisible troops.

Suddenly a man near him fell dead.

It happened so quickly: Rashid did not even see him fall. At one moment the man was standing four feet away from Rashid, firing his rifle; the next moment he lay on the ground with his forehead blown away.

They carried the corpse out of the compound. Someone found a jeep. They put the body in the jeep and drove off. Rashid returned to the skirmish.

Ten minutes later, for no apparent reason, a piece of wood with a white undershirt tied to its end was waved out of one of the windows in the building they had been shooting at. The soldiers had surrendered.

Just like that.

There was a sense of anticlimax.

This is my chance, Rashid thought.

It was easy to manipulate people if you understood the psychology of the human being. You just had to study the people, comprehend their situation, and figure out their needs. These people, Rashid decided, want excitement and adventure. For the first time in their lives they have guns in their hands: They need a target, and anything that symbolizes the regime of the Shah will do.

Right now they were standing around wondering where to go next.

"Listen!" Rashid shouted.

They all listened--they had nothing better to do.

"I'm going to the Gasr Prison!"

Someone cheered.

"The people in there are prisoners of the regime--if we are against the regime we should let them out!"

Several people shouted their agreement.

He started walking.

They followed him.

It's the mood they're in, he thought; they'll follow anyone who seems to know where to go.

He started with a band of twelve or fifteen men and boys, but as he walked the group grew: everyone with nowhere to go automatically joined in.

Rashid had become a revolutionary leader.

Nothing was impossible.

He stopped just before Gasr Square and addressed his army. "The jails must be taken over by the people, just like the police stations and the garrisons; this is our responsibility. There are people in Gasr Prison who are guilty of nothing. They are just like us--our brothers, our cousins. Like us, they only want their freedom. But they were braver than we, for they demanded their freedom while the Shah was here, and they were thrown in jail for it. Now we shall let them out!"

They all cheered.

He remembered something Simons had said. "The Gasr Prison is our Bastille!"

They cheered louder.

Rashid turned and ran into the square.

He took cover on the street comer opposite the huge steel entrance gates of the prison. There was a fair-sized mob in the square already, he realized; probably the prison would be stormed today with or without his help. But the important thing was to help Paul and Bill.

He raised his gun and fired into the air.

The mob in the square scattered, and the shooting began in earnest.

Once again, the resistance was halfhearted. A few guards fired back from the towers on the walls and from the windows close to the gates. As far as Rashid could see, no one on either side was hit. Once again, the battle ended not with a bang but a whimper: the guards simply disappeared from the walls and the shooting stopped.

Rashid waited a couple of minutes, to make sure they had gone; then he ran across the square to the prison entrance.

The gates were locked.