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Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt

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by On Wings of Eagles [lit]


  And Scott survived. He turned into a soccer-playing, treeclimbing,

  creek-wading, thoroughly healthy little boy. And Coburn began to understand

  the way people felt about Ross Perot.

  Perot's single-mindedness, his ability to focus narrowly on one thing and

  shut out distractions until he got the job done, had its disagreeable side.

  He could wound people. A day or two after Paul and Bill were arrested, he

  had walked into an office where Coburn was talking on the phone to Lloyd

  Briggs in Tehran. It had sounded to Perot as though Coburn was giving

  instructions, and Perot believed strongly that people in the head office

  should not give orders to those out there on the battlefield who knew the

  situation best. He had given Coburn a merciless telling-off in front of a

  room full of people.

  Perot had other blind spots. When Coburn had worked in recruiting, each

  year the company had named someone "Recruiter of the Year. " The names of

  the winners were engraved on a plaque. The list went back years, and in

  time some of the winners left the company. When that happened Perot wanted

  to erase their names from the plaque. Coburn thought that was

  90 Ken Folleu

  weird. So the guy left the company--w what? He had been Recruiter of the

  Year, one year, and why try to change history? It was almost as if Perot

  took it as a personal insult that someone should want to work elsewhere.

  Perot's faults were of a piece with his virtues. His peculiar attitude

  toward people who left the company was the obverse of his intense loyalty

  to his employees. His occasional unfeeling harshness was just part of the

  incredible energy and determination without which he would never have

  created EDS. Coburn found it easy to forgive Perot's shortcomings.

  He had only to look at Scott.

  -hft. Perot?" Sally called. "It's Henry Kissinger."

  Perot's heart missed a beat. Could Kissinger and Zahedi have done it in the

  last twenty-four hours? Or was he calling to say he had faded?

  "Ross Perot."

  "Hold the line for Henry Kissinger, please."

  A moment later Perot heard the familiar guttural accent. "Hello, Ross?"

  "Yes." Perot held his breath.

  "I have been assured that your men will be released tomorrow at ten A.M.,

  Tehran time."

  Perot let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. "Dr. Kissinger, that's

  just about the best news I've heard since I don't know when. I can't thank

  you enough."

  "The details are to be finalized today by U.S. Embassy officials and the

  Iranian Foreign Ministry, but this is a formality: I have been advised that

  your men will be released."

  :'It's just great. We sure appreciate your help."

  'You're welcome."

  It was nine-thirty in the morning in Tehran, midnight in Dallas. Perot sat

  in his office, waiting. Most of his colleagues had gone home, to sleep in a

  bed for a change, happy in the knowledge that by the time they woke up, Paul

  and Bill would be fkee. Perot was staying at the office to see it through to

  the end.

  In Tehran, Lloyd Briggs was at the Bucharest office, and one of the hanian

  employees was outside the jail. As soon as Paul and Bill appeared, the

  Iranian would call Bucharest and Briggs would call Perot.

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 91

  Now that the crisis was almost over, Perot had time to wonder where he had

  gone wrong. One mistake occurred to him immediately. When he had decided,

  on December 4, to evacuate all his staff from Iran, he had not been

  determined enough and he had let others drag their feet and raise

  objections until it was too late.

  But the big mistake had been doing business in Iran in the first place.

  With hindsight he could see that. At the time, he had agreed with his

  marketing people--and with many other American businessmen--that oil-rich,

  stable, Westem-oriented Iran presented excellent opportunities. He had not

  perceived the strains beneath the surface, he knew nothing about the

  AyatoUah Khomeini, and he had not foreseen that one day there would be a

  President naive enough to try to impose American beliefs and standards on

  a Middle Eastern country.

  He looked at his watch. It was half past midnight. Paul and Bill should be

  walking out of that jail right now.

  Kissinger's good news had been confirmed by a phone call from David Newsom,

  Cy Vance's deputy at the State Department. And Paul and Bill were getting

  out not a moment too soon. The news from Iran had been bad again today.

  Bakhtiar, the Shah's new Prime Minister, had been rejected by the National

  Front, the party that was now seen as the moderate opposition. The Shah had

  announced that he might take a vacation. William Sullivan, the American

  Ambassador, had advised the dependents of all Americans working in Iran to

  go home, and the embassies of Canada and Britain had followed suit. But the

  strike had closed the airport, and hundreds of women and children were

  stranded. However, Paul and Bill would not be stranded. Perot had had good

  friends at the Pentagon ever since the POW campaign: Paul and Bill would be

  flown out on a U.S. Air Forcejet.

  At one o'clock Perot called Tehran. There was no news. Well, he thought,

  everyone says the Iranians have no sense of time.

  The irony of this whole thing was that EDS had never paid bribes, in Iran

  or anywhere else. Perot hated the idea of bribery. EDS's code of conduct

  was set out in a twelve-page booklet given to every new employee. Perot had

  written it himself. "Be aware that federal law and the laws of most states

  prohibit giving anything of value to a goverm-nent official with the intent

  to influence any official act ... Since the absence of such intent might be

  difficult to prove, neither money nor anything of value should be given to

  a federal, state, or foreign government official

  92 Ken FoUeu

  ... A determination that a payment or practice is not forbidden by law does

  not conclude the analysis . . . It is always appropriate to make further

  inquiry into the ethics ... Could you do business in complete trust with

  someone who acts the way you do? The answer must be YES. - The last page of

  the booklet was a form that the employee had to sip, acknowledging that he

  had received and read the code.

  When EDS first went to Iran, Perot's puritan principles had been reinforced

  by the Lockheed scandal. Daniel J. Haughton, chairman of the Lockheed

  Aircraft Corporation, had admitted to a Senate committee that Lockheed

  routinely paid millions of dollars in bribes to sell its planes abroad. His

  testimony had been an embarrassing performance that dispsted Perot:

  wriggling on his seat, Haughton had told the committee that the payments

  were not bribes but "kickbacks. - Subsequently the Foreign Corrupt

  Practices Act made it an offense under U.S. law to pay bribes in foreign

  countries.

  Perot had called in lawyer Tom Luce and made him personally responsible for

  ensuring that EDS never paid bribes. During the negotiation of the Ministry

  of Health contract in Iran, Luce had offended not a few EDS executives by

  the thoroughness a
nd persistence with which he had cross-examined them

  about the propriety of their dealings.

  Perot was not hungry for business. He was already making millions. He did

  not need to expand abroad. If you have to pay bribes to do business there,

  he had said, why, we just won't do business there.

  His business principles were deeply ingrained. His ancestors were Frenchmen

  who came to New Orleans and set up trading posts along the Red River. His

  father, Gabriel Ross Perot, had been a cotton broker. The trade was

  seasonal, and Ross Senior had spent a lot of time with his son, often

  talking about business. "There's no point in buying cotton from a farmer

  once, - he would say. "You have to beat him fairly, earn his trust, and

  develop a relationship with him, so that he'll be happy to sell you his

  cotton year after year. Then you're doing business.

  Bribery just did not fit in there.

  At one-thirty Perot called the EDS office in Tehran again. SUB there was no

  news. "Call the jail, or send somebody down there," he said. "Find out when

  they're getting out."

  He was beginning to feel uneasy.

  What will I do if this doesn't work out? he thought. If I put up

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 93

  the bail, I'll have spent thirteen million dollars and still Paul and Bill

  will be forbidden to leave Iran. Other ways of getting them out using the

  legal system came up against the obstacle raised by the Iranian lawyers-4hat

  the case was political, which seemed to mean that Paul's and Bill's

  innocence made no difference. But political pressure had failed so far:

  neither the U.S. Embassy in Tehran nor the State Department in Washington

  had been able to help; and if Kissinger should fail, that would surely be

  the end of all hope in that area. What, then, was left?

  Force.

  The phone rang. Perot snatched up the receiver. "Ross Perot.

  "This is Lloyd Briggs."

  "Are they out?"

  "No."

  Perot's heart sank. "What's happening?"

  "We spoke to the jail. They have no instructions to release Paul and Bill."

  Perot closed his eyes. The worst had happened. Kissinger had failed.

  He sighed. "Thank you, Lloyd."

  "What do we do next?"

  "I don't know," said Perot.

  But he did know.

  He said good-bye to Briggs and hung up the phone.

  He would not admit defeat. Another of his father's principles had been:

  take care of the people who work for you. Perot could remember the whole

  family driving twelve miles on Sundays to visit an old black man who had

  used to mow their lawn, just to make sure that he was well and had enough

  to eat. Perot's father would employ people he did not need, just because

  they had no job. Every year the Perot family car would go to the county

  fair crammed with black employees, each of whom was given a little money to

  spend and a Perot business card to show if anyone tried to give him a hard

  time. Perot could remember one who had ridden a freight train to California

  and, on being arrested for vagrancy, had shown Perot's father's business

  card. The sheriff had said: "We don't care whose nigger you are, we're

  throwing you in jail. " But he had called Perot Senior, who had wired the

  train fare for the man to come back. "I been to California, and I'se back,"

  the man said when he reached Texarkana; and Perot Senior gave him back his

  job.

  Perot's father did not know what civil rights were: this was

  94 Ken Follett

  how you treated other human beings. Perot had not known his parents were

  unusual until he grew up.

  His father would not leave his employees in jail. Nor would Perot.

  He picked up the phone. "Get T. J. Marquez."

  It was two in the morning, but T.J. would not be surprised: this was not

  the first time Perot had woken him up in the middle of the night, and it

  would not be the last.

  A sleepy voice said: "Hello?"

  :'Tom, it doesn't look good."

  1"Y? I I

  "They haven't been released and the jail says they aren't going to be."

  :'Aw, damn."

  'Conditions are getting worse over there--did you see the news?"

  "I sure did."

  :'Do you think it's time for Simons?"

  'Yeah, I think it is."

  :'Do you have his number?"

  'No, but I can get it. "

  "Call him," said Perot.

  3

  Bull Simons was going crazy.

  He was thinking of burning down his house. It was an old woodframe

  bungalow, and it would go up like a pile of matchwood, and that would be

  the end of it. The place was hell to him--but it was a hell he did not want

  to leave, for what made it hell was the bittersweet memory of the time when

  it had been heaven.

  Lucille had picked the place. She saw it advertised in a magazine, and

  together they had flown down from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to look it

  over. At Red Bay, in a dirt-poor part of the Florida Panhandle, the

  ramshackle house stood in forty acres of rough timber. But there was a

  two-acre lake with bass in it.

  Lucille had loved it.

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 95

  It was 1971, and time for Simons to retire. He had been a colonel for ten

  years, and if the Son Tay Raid could not get him promoted to general,

  nothing would. The truth was, he did not fit in the Generals' Club: he had

  always been a reserve officer, he had never been to a top military school

  such as West Point, his methods were unconventional, and he was no good at

  going to Washington cocktail parties and kissing ass. He knew he was a

  goddain fine soldier, and if that was not good enough, why, Art Simons was

  not good enough. So he retired, and did not regret it.

  He had passed the happiest years of his life here at Red Bay. All their

  married life he and Lucille had endured periods of separation, sometimes as

  much as a year without seeing one another, during his tours in Vietnam,

  Laos, and Korea. From the moment he retired they were together all day and

  all night, every day of the year. Simons raised hogs. He knew nothing about

  farming, but he got the information he needed out of books, and built his

  own pens. Once the operation was under way he found there was not much to

  do but feed the pigs and look at them, so he spent a lot of time fooling

  around with his collection of 150 guns, and eventually set up a little

  gunsmithing shop where he would repair his and his neighbors' weapons and

  load his own ammunition. Most days he and Lucille would wander, hand in

  hand, through the woods and down to the lake, where they might catch a

  bass. In the evening, after supper, she would go to the bedroom as if she

  were preparing for a date, and come out later, wearing a housecoat over her

  nightgown and a red ribbon tied in her dark, dark hair, and sit on his lap

  ...

  Memories like these were breaking his heart.

  Even the boys had seemed to grow up, at last, during those golden years.

  Harry, the younger, had come home one day and said: "Dad, I've got a heroin

  habit and a cocaine habit and I need your help. " Simons knew little about

  drugs. He had smoked marijuana o
nce, in a doctor's office in Panama, before

  giving his men a talk on drugs, just so that he could tell them he knew

  what it was like; but all he knew about heroin was that it killed people.

  Still, he had been able to help Harry by keeping him busy, out in the open,

  building hog pens. It had taken a while. Many times Harry left the house

  and went into town to score dope, but he always came back, and eventually

  he did not go into town anymore.

  The episode had brought Simons and Harry together again.

  96 Ken Follett

  Simons would never be close to Bruce, his elder son; but at least he had

  been able to stop worrying about the boy. Boy? He was in his thirties, and

  just about as bullheaded as . . . well, as his father. Bruce had found Jesus

  and was detennined to bring the rest of the world to the Lord-starting with

  Colonel Simons. Simons had practically thrown him out. However, unlike

  Bruce's other youthful enthusiasms--dnigs, I Ching, back-to-nature

  communes--Jesus had lasted, and at least Bruce had settled down to a stable

  way of life, as pastor of a tiny church in the frozen northwest of Canada.

  Anyway, Simons was through agonizing about the boys. He had brought them up

  as well as he could, for better or worse, and now they were men and had to

  take care of themselves. He was taking care of Lucille.

  She was a tall, handsome, statuesque woman with a penchant for big hats.

  She looked pretty damn impressive behind the wheel of their black Cadillac.

  But in fact she was the reverse of formidable. She was soft, easygoing, and

  lovable. The daughter of two teachers, she had needed someone to make

  decisions for her, someone she could follow blindly and trust completely;

  and she had found what she needed in Art Simons. He, in turn, was devoted

  to her. By the time he retired they had been married for thirty years, and

  in all that time he had never been in the least interested in another

  woman. Only his job, with its overseas postings, had come between them; and

  now that was over. He had told her: "My retirement plans can be summed up

  in one word: you."

  They had seven wonderful years.

  Lucille died of cancer on March 16, 1978.

  And Bull Simons went to pieces.

  Every man has a breaking point, they said. Simons had thought the rule did

 

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