A swift crosswind cleared the smoke from the last barrage. Farshad snatched the radio’s handset. He called out range, altitude, and windage to his gun crews, his ability to triangulate the three being one of those refined soldier skills that proved useless elsewhere in life. All at once, his several antiaircraft batteries began to chug out their fat, egg-shaped explosive rounds. The sky peppered with little detonations. Immediately, Farshad could tell they were off target. He had one battery of directed-energy cannons, but when he looked at them, he could tell their generators weren’t engaged. Another cyberattack? Or shitty maintenance? It didn’t matter.
Another missile barrage fell, this time directly onto his position.
Farshad crumpled forward, hands on his head, eyes shut. He opened his mouth so his eardrums wouldn’t rupture with the overpressure. And he waited, rolling the dice as he’d done so many times before. He could feel the alternating blasts, like a violent wind juking between two opposing directions. The back of his neck was covered in dirt. Then stillness. He lifted his head.
Range… altitude… windage…. Those were his first thoughts. He made his estimations and then gave another order to fire, noticing a slight tinge of desperation in his voice, which he swallowed away. This would be their last chance. The landing paratroopers would overwhelm the garrison if Farshad didn’t take out at least a portion of their transport planes.
Out chugged the egg-shaped explosive rounds.
Again, the sky peppered with little detonations.
Off target — all of them.
Then Farshad realized what he’d done — the fatal mistake he’d made. He’d calculated for wind, but not for wind at altitude. The erratic weather had caused wild atmospheric fluctuations. The crosswind he was experiencing at sea level must not be blowing at several hundred feet — or it was at least blowing differently. Even though he now noticed the inconsistency, it was too late. Standing in his command post, Farshad could do nothing but look above as in quick succession thousands of parachutes blossomed open into tidy skyborne rows.
The antiaircraft guns continued to fire, though they proved ineffective against the dispersed paratroopers. Farshad placed his rifle on the lip of his trench. He glanced from position to position, to the upturned faces of his men. A few took potshots at the descending paratroopers, but most didn’t, perhaps for fear of retribution. The seconds passed, as they had all morning, with strange imprecision.
Time bent.
A life’s worth of consequences existed in the moments it took for a plane to pass overhead. Or for a gust of wind to blow over a dusty fighting hole. Or for a parachute to descend to earth, coming down at… six hundred feet… Farshad watched… five hundred feet… he fingered his trigger… four hundred feet… the radio clutched in his hand… three hundred feet… the crosswind on his face.
The swift crosswind.
Farshad couldn’t believe it at first. Wouldn’t allow himself to believe it.
The crosswind he’d felt all morning caught the first stick of paratroopers as they descended below two hundred feet. Their parachutes, snatched by this slipstream, now raced dramatically across the frontage of the island, yanked out to sea as if by invisible tethers.
They splashed into the water.
Within minutes, thousands of others fell on top of them, all into the water. Although a few paratroopers touched down on the beach, or near enough to swim in, Farshad’s conscripts quickly rounded them up. Soon Farshad was out of his hole, standing on its lip, observing the miraculous expanse of parachutes dispersed across the open water like so many lily pads coating a pond.
Well into that afternoon survivors crawled onto the beach, many retching seawater. The garrison rounded them up one at a time, trotting them off at rifle point with a jaunty confidence that Farshad’s conscripts had hardly earned. Although this battle had cost the Russians an entire Spetsnaz division, Farshad didn’t feel he could count the victory as his own. He and his opposing commander had, after all, made an identical mistake, albeit with different consequences: both of them had incorrectly calculated the wind.
There was an unfairness to it, thought Farshad. But also, an irony. A miscalculation in one circumstance could win a battle, and in another lose it.
By the time the last of the paratroopers splashed into the water, the Russian missiles had stopped falling. Reports from Iranian reconnaissance aircraft scrambled from Bandar Abbas were that the Russian fleet, which was moving from the northern Indian Ocean to reinforce the islands after the paratroopers seized them, had retreated north, back toward the Red Sea and the Syrian port of Tartus.
The Russian prisoners mixed calmly among their Iranian captors, the two sides swapping cigarettes, speaking each other’s languages in broken phrases. Because neither nation existed in a formal state of war with the other, it allowed each side to assume a posture of mea culpa: the Russian paratroopers for their misbegotten and opportunistic invasion, and the Iranian conscripts for inflicting on them the inconvenience of captivity.
Farshad’s state of mind was neither apologetic nor hostile — he was numb. A bone-deep exhaustion had set in. After a battle — particularly a battle won — he had usually felt elation, a nearly uncontainable exuberance as he passed among his men, readying them for a counterattack and radioing his situation report to a congratulatory high command. Not this time. Farshad didn’t have the energy to prepare his men for an unlikely counterattack. As for the high command, when General Bagheri’s helicopter arrived from Bandar Abbas right after nightfall, Farshad could barely muster the effort to receive it.
When Bagheri stepped off the ramp, he walked with his arm extended, as if the congratulatory handshake he offered to Farshad had lured his entire body from Tehran. “Fine work,” Bagheri muttered. The radius of his congratulations spread wider as he trooped the line, clasping the shoulder of every soldier who came within reach. Only when a member of Bagheri’s staff handed out challenge coins did the befuddled conscripts realize they’d met the chief of staff of the armed forces.
General Bagheri and Farshad retired to the “command post.” They sat on the lip of Farshad’s hole, staring out into the spongy darkness. “Did they land over there?” asked General Bagheri, pointing in a vague direction, to where the night hid the thousands of parachutes littered over the surface of the water.
Farshad nodded.
General Bagheri gave a belly laugh. “You are the embodiment of Napoléon’s most famous maxim. Do you recall it?” Farshad shook his head. Not because he didn’t know the maxim (which he did), but because he didn’t care. He could feel himself struggling to stay awake. General Bagheri prattled on, “When it comes to a general, Napoléon said, ‘I would rather have one who is lucky than good.’”
Farshad leaned his head all the way back, his face flush with the stars. He felt a slight spasm through his body, as one feels when dozing off in a dull movie. General Bagheri continued to speak. His voice — and its message — only partly registered to Farshad as he listed further and further toward sleep. Bagheri was stumbling through a half-hearted apology, in which he conceded that he hadn’t believed Farshad’s report about the threat to these islands but in which he also congratulated himself for possessing the intuition to send Farshad to command the garrison. Farshad propped his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in his palms. General Bagheri didn’t seem to notice, continuing to heap praise not on Farshad himself but on his remarkable luck. The importance of this victory over the Russians couldn’t be overstated, explained General Bagheri. It would unite the nation and the nation would, of course, again recognize Farshad with the Order of the Fath. Schoolchildren would learn his name, which shouldn’t be that of a lowly naval officer. No, this wouldn’t do. General Bagheri then confided to Farshad that his staff had already begun to process the required paperwork to have Farshad reinstated to the Revolutionary Guards and, perhaps, even promoted.