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ancient enemy restored his fortunes.
    When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi legions stormed across the frontier, Iran’s purged, “pure” Army proved itself incapable and inept. In desperation, the Islamic Republic combed through its prison camps to find the veteran soldiers it needed to fight and win. It had found Amir Taleh.
    Throughout the eight-year-war, he had fought two enemies: the Iraqis and many inside the Republic’s own govern ingcircles. In a way, the mullahs were right. He had been Westernized, at least in the sense that he had accepted the Western idea that tactics and military reality were not affected by revolutionary doctrine. Competence and sound planning mattered more on the modern battlefield than blind courage.
    He’d proven that, in battle. Starting out in command of a company, promotion had come quickly to him, a combination of survival and skill. First an infantry battalion, then a Special Forces battalion. He’d spent more time in combat than almost any Iranian officer now alive much of it behind Iraqi lines. His decorations, grudgingly awarded, marked him as Iran’s top soldier.
    Those decorations had also saved him from falling into the hands of the Pasdaran, the fanatical Revolutionary Guards. Products of the Revolution, the Pasdaran’s leaders viewed all Regular Army officers as potential traitors or more dangerous still, as potential rivals for power within the Republic. For them Taleh was a walking nightmare: a decorated hero, a victorious leader, and a devout Muslim who ignored their authority. They’d never been able to touch him.
    He frowned. Of course, he had never been able to touch them either. To his utter frustration, he had been forced to watch them send thousands of devout young volunteers to futile deaths in foolish frontal assaults, unable to speak out. The Revolutionary Guards had no grasp of tactics. They did not understand their enemy. Wrapped in a cloak of ideology, they never evaluated their actions against the brutal test of reality. Worse yet, the men at the top had never made the sacrifices they demanded so casually of others.
    Since the end of the war, Taleh had devoted himself to rebuilding Iran’s Regular Army. Despite continuing opposition from the Pasdaran and other radicals, he’d risen steadily in rank, climbing to the very top of his profession. He had never married. Surrounded by enemies as he was, a wife and children would have been little more than a point of weakness, a constant vulnerability. No, his soldiers were his only family.
    Kazemi’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Five minutes, General.”
    He could see Tehran now. A thin haze of smoke still hung over the skyline, almost twenty-four hours after the attack. Fires were still burning out of control in some parts of the city, spreading outward from the gutted shells of the Majles, the Parliament building, and the Defense Ministry. One bright spot in all this was the destruction of Pasdaran headquarters, but the capital had suffered more in one day than it had in the entire eight years of war with Iraq.
    The American missiles had killed hundreds, and hundreds more were in hospitals all over the north of Iran. Most of those killed were government workers, technicians, military officers, or of finials. Every ruling body except the Council of Guardians had suffered some loss.
    The American message was clear. Payment for the dead in California had been returned tenfold, and much of his nation’s military power had been savaged. And to what end? Was this worth it? Taleh shook his head, still staring out across the city flowing by below him.
    Despite years of support from Tehran, HizbAllah and the other groups had done nothing to improve the strategic position of Iran or of Islam itself. Though occasionally stung by their random bombings, hijackings, and hostage-taking, the United States and its allies were still able to maintain their hold on the Middle East playing one Islamic country off against