tuned to CNN’s broadcast of the terrorist threat, and picked up the phone with an urgency tinged with sadness.
He had heard of no interdiction. He was aware of no operation in-place or in-motion with a target that was going live tonight. It was obvious to him that they had missed something. They all had.
And people were going to die. Many people, it seemed, from the words being broadcast.
Esfahan, Iran (18:27 Local)
Turning back to his laptop computer from watching the quiet and beautiful sunset minutes before, Mohammad Maleki decided he needed to get back to his studies. For the last hour he had been blogging, posting to his and to other blogs of those trying to bring democracy to Iran.
His parents had been young, newly-married middle-class professionals when the student takeover occurred in 1979. They often told him of the freedoms enjoyed before that revolution. How stupid those students had been, he thought for the millionth time. How many productive lives, how many minds, had been wasted in the intervening decades?
Now a new generation of students, his generation, was trying to overthrow those revolutionaries and move Iran forward rather than backward. The recent elections proved to the world that Iran’s future would not be its recent past. The violence the world had witnessed was only a beginning.
The freedom of the internet, no matter how hard the mullahs tried to stop it, gave these students the freedom of speech and of information required to help bring down these tyrants. One of the ironies of the internet, he knew, was the creation, in America of all places, of a tool for Farsi blogging. As a result of this tool, Farsi was the third-most used language on the internet, following only English and Chinese. It was being put to greater use every day by those Iranians interested in returning freedom to their country.
This final year in his studies provided Maleki with one of the best rooms in the Graduate Student dormitory. He sat in the cool evening air on the 15th-floor balcony of his dorm, overlooking the Graduate Studies building 50 meters away.
Maleki had an exam on Monday morning, an important test in his final push toward a Master’s degree in chemistry. Having wasted enough time blogging he clicked to return to his home page to link to the department’s site. Once there, he was going, for the final time he hoped, to try the mock exam posted on his specialty, new materials for electrode fabrication.
When his home page was loaded, however, he saw it again had been updated by the irritating mullah-heads, the name he and his fellows in the Student Movement Coordination Committee gave their fellow “students” placed in the university to ensure loyalty to the theocracy.
Rather than the picture he preferred of the ancient, beautiful and peaceful Khaju Bridge at night, that dead bearded international terrorist again was occupying the center of the screen. While Maleki watched in distaste the image dissolved into that of his newly-famous son. Beneath the picture was his latest threat to the world.
Irritated, Mohammed scanned it quickly, shaking his head in disgust, and then clicked over to the Chemistry site.
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