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Despite this lack of information, the brigade had been alerted for immediate deployment, with a warning order that they might have to make a combat jump somewhere. No doubt, Evans thought, the people in Washington were thrashing about trying to decide what the division was to do. Until a decision was made, the 17th Airborne Division was going to be held in a ready-to-go posture.
    As he sat on the concrete, resting against his gear with sweat rolling down his face, Evans looked at his men baking in the hot May sun. You can bet, he told himself, the Soviets aren’t sitting around in Iran with nothing to do.
    Tabriz, Iran 0410 Hours, 27 May (0040 Hours, 27 May, GMT ) It had been almost an hour since the last Iranian attack. Junior Lieutenant
    Nikolai llvanich carefully raised his head over the edge of the parapet of the shallow trench his unit occupied. He took great care while he did this.
    Less than two hours before, his company commander had been killed doing the same thing. The deputy company commander had said that it had been a lucky shot. But as far as Ilvanich was concerned, dead was dead, regardless of what luck had to do with it.
    In the darkness he could see only shadows and faint images in the no-man’s-land between his position and the ditch that the Iranians had come from. The barbed wire that had been strung up by Ilvanich’s men in the center of the no-man’s-land had been breached in several places during the four Iranian attacks so far. Those attacks had not been easy or cheap.
    Iranian bodies lay draped across the wire where it was still attached to the posts. In the gaps where the Iranians had succeeded in breaching the wire, a confused pile of corpses and limbs had accumulated. Every now and then a soft moan would rise from the pile, indicating that some of the attackers had only been wounded.
    Slowly Ilvanich slipped back down into the trench, coming to rest on the ground and facing toward the rear with his back against the trench wall. He looked at his watch. There were only twenty or so minutes to go before sunrise. He was sure that if they could hang on until the sun came up, they would be able to hold. Ilvanich and his men, what was left of them, were exhausted and drained. The stress and exertion of the last twelve hours had pushed them all to the brink of collapse.
    They had parachuted into Tabriz two days before and seized the airport without much effort. The first twenty four hours had gone well, more like maneuver than war. Starting just before dawn of the second day, however,
    Iranian militia forces had begun to make their presence felt. It had begun with sniping that was effective enough to be dangerous.
    In the early afternoon of that day Iranians began to arrive in force.
    The first group drove up in buses and trucks and began to dismount in plain view of Ilvanich’s position five kilometers away. Patiently Ilvanich waited for the battalion’s mortars or divisional artillery to smash the assembling enemy horde. But nothing happened. He continued to report the location and the growing number of Iranians, but received nothing in return other than an acknowledgment of his report. He was sure the artillery observers could see what he saw. Still, nothing was fired on the enemy as they dismounted from their vehicles. While he watched in frustration, Ilvanich remembered that in his study of Western imperialist armies he had read that even platoon leaders like him could request and direct artillery fire. The book went on to explain how this practice was wasteful and tended to dilute a unit’s combat power. As he watched the Iranians go about their preparations for attack unmolested, Ilvanich wished that he could have been a little wasteful.
    “Here they come again!” The shout was followed immediately by the crack of small-arms fire and the din of exploding grenades. Ilvanich leaped to his feet and rushed over to the machine gun just to his left.
    The crew of that weapon was already hammering