‘I think so.’
Behrouz shifted into a squatting position, ready to move, and Martin did the same. He was still mesmerised by the man in the tree. He could now see that the object in his hand was one of the shovels they’d brought in to dig the latrines. Maybe he’d been hiding up there since nightfall, waiting to swing it into the face of the next Basiji saboteur who crept in to mess with the waste disposal arrangements.
The man brought one shoulder back, stood poised for a second or two, then flung the shovel like a javelin; Martin couldn’t see his target, but there was a thwack followed by a deranged mechanical clatter. Behrouz ran one way, Martin the other, but the javelin thrower chose this moment to jump from the tree, landing on top of Martin and knocking him flat.
‘Fuck!’ He disentangled himself and looked up to see the helicopter spinning wildly, moving backwards away from the park as it spiralled towards the ground. The shovel must have wedged between the tail rotor and its support, long enough to do real damage before the handle snapped and it fell away.
Martin clambered to his feet; he’d hurt his back and his right knee was giving him alarming signals, but he could just about walk. He couldn’t see where the javelin thrower had gone, but a dozen men were running across the park, carrying tree branches and other improvised clubs. Martin watched anxiously as they neared the wounded helicopter; the pilot was struggling to bring it down safely, but it was rolling and pitching erratically as it descended.
It hit the ground with a thud about twenty metres away. The spotlight went out immediately, but as the men rushed in the main rotor was still turning. Martin waited for gunshots, but all he could hear over the engine was shouting. He looked around for his phone and finally located it a few metres away on the grass. He picked it up to start recording the scene, and it emitted a chime; the IR transceiver had come within sight of someone carrying fresh news.
Martin ignored the bulletin and kept filming, though he could make out almost nothing of what was happening in the shadows around the helicopter. The engine finally cut off, making it easier to hear the shouting, but apart from a general tone of belligerence this left him none the wiser. Then three uniformed men emerged from the mêlée, walking with their hands clasped behind their heads in front of a protester carrying an automatic rifle. Their captors made them kneel on the grass, then bound their hands with what Martin guessed were strips of webbing cut from harnesses inside the helicopter.
Behrouz approached. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. You?’
Behrouz nodded. Martin handed him his phone. ‘Can you read this? I don’t think I’m up to Slightly Smart translations right now.’
Behrouz checked the newsfeed and said, ‘The Ministry of the Interior has been occupied. Seven officials have been taken under citizens’ arrest.’ He held up the phone to show Martin a group portrait of sullen bureaucrats kneeling with bound hands, almost echoing the scene on the grass.
Martin looked over towards the prison. The taxi rank was empty now, with the last of the helicopters flying north across the mountains. He said, ‘They’ve evacuated the management, that’s all.’ Maybe they’d never even planned to move the inmates; rather, the tide was turning so rapidly now that the prison officials and intelligence officers with the most to fear from the crowd’s retribution had opted for self-preservation and a pre-emptive retreat.
They approached the group of men clustered around the helicopter. Martin spotted Kambiz, the student who’d tipped him off to the first protest in Ferdowsi Square; his jacket was torn and he was grinning nervously, managing to look both jubilant and anxious at the same time.
‘What now?’ Martin asked him.
Kambiz gestured at the helicopter. ‘They’re trying to raise someone inside the prison on the radio. Now that VEVAK has run away, maybe we can negotiate with the remaining guards. We’re not here to set thieves and murderers free. But anyone who hasn’t even been before a court should not be in this place.’
Martin said, ‘You’ve got one gun and three prisoners. What is there to negotiate with?’
Kambiz shook his head. ‘It’s not about weapons. I wasn’t even born when the Shah was toppled, but everybody understands that when something rotten starts to fall, you don’t want to be standing where it will bury you.’
Martin glanced up at the watchtower; the sentries there had a clear line of sight, but they hadn’t fired on the men who’d captured the helicopter crew. Nobody wanted to be charged with treason by the present regime – but neither did they want to be charged with murder by their successors.
Half an hour later, the protesters sent a delegation of five people into the prison to negotiate face-to-face. No doubt there were things to be said that couldn’t be spoken over an open radio channel. Martin passed the tense hours that followed interviewing some of the people who’d been involved in the bench/car manoeuvre; the injured man had already been evacuated, but the other participants turned out to be mechanical engineering students who’d rehearsed something similar in the countryside a week before – albeit not with live ammunition and a helicopter. ‘We wanted to fit remote controls to the cars,’ one of them told Martin, ‘but we couldn’t get the parts without attracting suspicion.’ They’d bought half-a-dozen cheap Paykans from wrecking yards and left them in side-streets around the park before the siege had begun.
Just before dawn, the delegation returned. A deal had been struck in which the guards would continue to defend the cell blocks under the control of the prison authority – which held mainly convicted criminals – but they would not interfere with anything that took place in Evin 209 and 240, the political wings which came under VEVAK’s control.
Behrouz translated the news, but when he’d finished he told Martin bluntly, ‘If you report that deal, you can have my resignation. ’ If the regime survived, Martin doubted that his own silence would be enough to save anyone; someone on the inside would surely betray the prison guards to their brave superiors who’d flown off over the mountains. Then again, putting all the details down in newsprint would certainly diminish any prospect of a face-saving decision to let the guards’ inaction go unpunished.
He said, ‘I won’t mention it.’ He could find a circumspect way of phrasing things without actually lying. The protesters were still going to storm the prison, and the guards would still tactically withdraw, to concentrate on keeping the most dangerous prisoners confined. Nobody munching cornflakes in Sydney needed to know that certain choices had been made to allow all this to happen without bloodshed.
The sky was pale blue, but the sun was still hidden behind the apartment blocks of north Tehran as the protesters surged through the broken gates of Evin Prison. Martin let more than a hundred people enter before he even tried to elbow his way into the stream. If there was unexpected resistance ahead, he wanted to be close enough to the vanguard to witness it, but he didn’t feel obliged to put himself at any unnecessary risk. This wasn’t his revolution.
Still, as he and Behrouz passed through the gates and walked with the hushed throng between the grey cell blocks, Martin felt the history of the place weighing down on him. This was where the Shah’s henchmen had imprisoned and tortured his enemies. This was where thousands of opponents of Khomeini had been hanged in mass purges. This was where labour activists, journalists, homosexuals, scholars, environmentalists and women’s rights campaigners had been thrown into solitary confinement, beaten and raped. This was where Baha’i ended up, for the crime of believing in one prophet too many, or proselytising Christians for the crime of believing in one prophet too few. This was where student leaders, after the protests of 1999, had had their faces pushed into drains full of faeces until their bursting lungs had commanded them to inhale, and where ten years later those who’d marched against electoral fraud had been beaten into surreal confessions that the true source of their treasonous passions had been the meddling of foreign puppet-masters and excessive exposure to the BBC. But he couldn’t hold Evin’s obscenities at arm’s length as the aberrations of an alien culture. He had seen the American prison at Bagram, where innocent men had been battered to death; he had seen the detention camps in the Australian desert where refugees had lost their minds and slashed their bodies with razors. The toxic mixture of power and impunity was a universal human disease.