On Wings of Eagles

by Ken Follett

  With Simons and Boulware ready to give covering fire, Ron Davis would get out of the van, climb on the roof, step from the roof to the top of the fence, then jump down into the courtyard. Davis was chosen for this role because he was the youngest and fittest, and the jump--a twelve-foot drop--would be hard to take.

  Coburn would follow Davis over the fence. He was not in good shape, but his face was more familiar than any other to Paul and Bill, so they would know as soon as they saw him that they were being rescued.

  Next, Boulware would lower a ladder into the courtyard.

  Surprise might take them this far, if they were quick; but at this point the guards were sure to react. Simons and Boulware would now fire their shotguns into the air.

  The prison guards would hit the dirt, the Iranian prisoners would run around in terrified confusion, and the rescuers would have gained a few more seconds.

  What if there were interference from outside the jail, Simons asked--from police or soldiers in the street, revolutionary rioters or just public-spirited passersby?

  There would be two flanking guards, they decided: one at either end of the street. They would arrive in a car a few seconds before the van. They would be armed with handguns. Their job was simply to stop anyone who came to interfere with the rescue. Jim Schwebach and Pat Sculley were nominated. Coburn was sure Schwebach would not hesitate to shoot people if necessary; and Sculley, although he had never in his life shot anyone, had become so surprisingly ice-cool during the discussion that Coburn supposed he would be equally ruthless.

  Glenn Jackson would drive the car: the question of Glenn the Baptist shooting people would not arise.

  Meanwhile, in the confusion in the courtyard, Ron Davis would provide close cover, dealing with any nearby guards, while Coburn cut Paul and Bill out of the herd and urged them up the ladder. They would jump from the top of the fence to the roof of the van, then from there to the ground, and finally inside the van. Coburn would follow, then Davis.

  "Hey, I'm taking the biggest risk of all," said Davis. "Hell, I'm first in and last out--maximum exposure."

  "No shit," said Boulware. "Next question."

  Simons would get into the front of the van, Boulware would jump in the back and close the door, and Poche would drive them away at top speed.

  Jackson, in the car, would pick up the flanking guards, Schwebach and Sculley, and follow the van.

  During the getaway, Boulware would be able to shoot through the back window of the van, and Simons would cover the road ahead. Any really serious pursuit would be taken care of by Sculley and Schwebach in the car.

  At a prearranged spot they would dump the van and split up in several cars, then head for the air base at Doshen Toppeh, on the outskirts of the city. A U.S. Air Force jet would fly them out of Iran: it would be Perot's job to arrange that somehow.

  At the end of the evening they had the skeleton of a workable plan.

  Before they left, Simons told them not to talk about the rescue--not to their wives, not even to each other--outside the lake house. They should each think up a cover story to explain why they would be going out of the U.S. in a week or so. And, he added, looking at their full ashtrays and their ample waistlines, each man should devise his own exercise program for getting in shape.

  The rescue was no longer a zany idea in Ross Perot's mind: it was real.

  Jay Coburn was the only one who made a serious effort to deceive his wife.

  He went back to the Hilton Inn and called Liz. "Hi, honey."

  "Hi, Jay! Where are you?"

  "I'm in Paris ..."

  Joe Poche also called his wife from the Hilton.

  "Where are you?" she asked him.

  "I'm in Dallas."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Working at EDS, of course."

  "Joe, EDS in Dallas has been calling me to ask where you are!"

  Poche realized that someone who was not in on the secret of the rescue team had been trying to locate him. "I'm not working with those guys. I'm working directly with Ross. Somebody forgot to tell someone else, that's all."

  "What are you working on?"

  "It has to do with some things that have to be done for Paul and Bill."

  "Oh ..."

  When Boulware got back to the home of the friends with whom his family was staying, his daughters, Stacy Elaine and Kecia Nicole, were asleep. His wife said: "How was your day?"

  I've been planning a jailbreak, Boulware thought. He said: "Oh, okay."

  She looked at him strangely. "Well, what did you do?"

  "Nothing much."

  "For someone who was doing nothing much, you've been pretty busy. I called two or three times--they said they couldn't find you."

  "I was around. Hey, I think I'd like a beer."

  Mary Boulware was a warm, open woman to whom deceit was foreign. She was also intelligent. But she knew that Ralph had some firm ideas about the roles of husband and wife. The ideas might be old-fashioned, but they worked in this marriage. If there was an area of his business life that he didn't want to tell her about, well, she wasn't about to fight him over it.

  "One beer, coming up ..."

  Jim Schwebach did not try to fool his wife, Rachel. She had already outguessed him. When Schwebach had got the original call from Pat Sculley, Rachel had asked: "Who was that?"

  "That was Pat Sculley in Dallas. They want me to go down there and work on a study in Europe."

  Rachel had known Jim for almost twenty years--they had started dating when he was sixteen, she eighteen--and she could read his mind. She said: "They're going back over there to get those guys out of jail."

  Schwebach said feebly: "Rachel, you don't understand, I'm out of that line of business. I don't do that anymore."

  "That's what you're going to do ..."

  Pat Sculley could not lie successfully even to his colleagues, and with his wife he did not try. He told Mary everything.

  Ross Perot told Margot everything.

  And even Simons, who had no wife to pester him, broke security by telling his brother Stanley in New Jersey ...

  It proved equally impossible to keep the rescue plan from other senior executives at EDS. The first to figure it all out was Keane Taylor, the tall, irritable, well-dressed ex-marine whom Perot had turned around in Frankfurt and sent back to Tehran.

  Since that New Year's Day, when Perot had said: "I'm sending you back to do something very important," Taylor had been sure that a secret operation was being planned; and it did not take him long to figure out who was doing it.

  One day, on the phone from Tehran to Dallas, he had asked for Ralph Boulware.

  "Boulware's not here," he was told.

  "When will he be back?"

  "We're not sure."

  Taylor, never a man to suffer fools gladly, had raised his voice. "So, where has he gone?"

  "We're not sure."

  "What do you mean, you're not sure?"

  "He's on vacation."

  Taylor had known Boulware for years. It had been Taylor who gave Boulware his first management opportunity. They were drinking partners. Many times Taylor, drinking himself sober with Ralph in the early hours of the morning, had looked around and realized his was the only white face in an all-black bar. Those nights they would stagger back to whichever of their homes was nearest, and the unlucky wife who welcomed them would call the other and say: "It's okay, they're here."

  Yes, Taylor knew Boulware; and he found it hard to believe that Ralph would go on vacation while Paul and Bill were still in jail.

  The next day he asked for Pat Sculley, and got the same runaround.

  Boulware and Sculley on vacation while Paul and Bill were in jail?

  Bullshit.

  The next day he asked for Coburn.

  Same story.

  It was beginning to make sense: Coburn had been with Perot when Perot sent Taylor back to Tehran. Coburn, Director of Personnel, evacuation mastermind, would be the right choice to organize a secre
t operation.

  Taylor and Rich Gallagher, the other EDS man still in Tehran, started making a list.

  Boulware, Sculley, Coburn, Ron Davis, Jim Schwebach, and Joe Poche were all "on vacation."

  That group had a few things in common.

  When Paul Chiapparone had first come to Tehran he found that EDS's operation there was not organized to his liking: it had been too loose, too casual, too Persian. The Ministry contract had not been running to time. Paul had brought in a number of tough, down-to-earth EDS troubleshooters, and together they had knocked the business back into shape. Taylor himself had been one of Paul's tough guys. So had Bill Gaylord. And Coburn, and Sculley, and Boulware, and all the guys who were now "on vacation."

  The other thing they had in common was that they were all members of the EDS Tehran Roman Catholic Sunday Brunch Poker School. Like Paul and Bill, like Taylor himself, they were Catholics, with the exception of Joe Poche (and of Glenn Jackson, the only rescue-team member Taylor failed to spot). Each Sunday they had met at the Catholic Mission in Tehran. After the service they would all go to the house of one of them for brunch. And while the wives were cooking and the children playing, the men would get into a poker game.

  There was nothing like poker for revealing a man's true character.

  If, as Taylor and Gallagher now suspected, Perot had asked Coburn to put together a team of completely trustworthy men, then Coburn was sure to have picked them from the poker school.

  "Vacation my ass," Taylor said to Gallagher. "This is a rescue team."

  The rescue team returned to the lake house on the morning of January 4 and went over the whole plan again.

  Simons had endless patience for detail, and he was determined to prepare for every possible snag that anyone could dream up. He was much helped by Joe Poche, whose tireless questioning--wearying though it was, to Coburn at least--was in fact highly creative, and led to numerous improvements of the rescue scenario.

  First, Simons was dissatisfied with the arrangements for protecting the rescue team's flanks. The idea of Schwebach and Sculley, short but deadly, just plain shooting anyone who tried to interfere was crude. It would be better to have some kind of diversion, to distract any police or military types who might be nearby. Schwebach suggested setting fire to a car down the street from the jail. Simons was not sure that would be enough--he wanted to blow up a whole building. Anyway, Schwebach was given the job of designing a time bomb.

  They thought of a small precaution that would shave a second or two off the time for which they would be exposed. Simons would get out of the van some distance from the jail and walk up to the fence. If all was clear he would give a hand signal for the van to approach.

  Another weak element of the plan was the business of getting out of the van and climbing on its roof. All that jumping out and scrambling up would use precious seconds. And would Paul and Bill, after weeks in prison, be fit enough to climb a ladder and jump off the roof of a van?

  All sorts of solutions were canvassed--an extra ladder, a mattress on the ground, grab handles on the roof--but in the end the team came up with a simple solution: they would cut a hole in the roof of the van and get in and out through that. Another little refinement, for those who had to jump back down through the hole, was a mattress on the floor of the van to soften their landing.

  The getaway journey would give them time to alter their appearances. In Tehran they planned to wear jeans and casual jackets, and they were all beginning to grow beards and mustaches to look less conspicuous there; but in the van they would carry business suits and electric shavers, and before switching to the cars they would all shave and change their clothes.

  Ralph Boulware, independent as ever, did not want to wear jeans and a casual jacket beforehand. In a business suit with a white shirt and a tie he felt comfortable and able to assert himself, especially in Tehran, where good Western clothing labeled a man as a member of the dominant class in society. Simons calmly gave his assent: the most important thing, he said, was for everyone to feel comfortable and confident during the operation.

  At the Doshen Toppeh Air Base, from which they planned to leave in an air force jet, there were both American and Iranian planes and personnel. The Americans would, of course, be expecting them, but what if the Iranian sentries at the entrance gave them a hard time? They would all carry forged military identity cards, they decided. Some wives of EDS executives had worked for the military in Tehran and still had their ID cards: Merv Stauffer would get hold of one and use it as a model for the forgeries.

  Throughout all this, Simons was still very low key, Coburn observed. Chain-smoking his cigars (Boulware told him: "Don't worry about getting shot, you're going to die of cancer!"), he did little more than ask questions. The plans were made in a round-table discussion, with everyone contributing, and decisions were arrived at by mutual agreement. Yet Coburn found himself coming to respect Simons more and more. The man was knowledgeable, intelligent, painstaking, and imaginative. He also had a sense of humor.

  Coburn could see that the others were also beginning to get the measure of Simons. If anyone asked a dumb question, Simons would give a sharp answer. In consequence, they would hesitate before asking a question, and wonder what his reaction might be. In this way he was getting them to think like him.

  Once on that second day at the lake house they felt the full force of his displeasure. It was, not surprisingly, young Ron Davis who angered him.

  They were a humorous bunch, and Davis was the funniest. Coburn approved of that: laughter helped to ease the tension in an operation such as this. He suspected Simons felt the same. But one time Davis went too far.

  Simons had a pack of cigars on the floor beside his chair, and five more packs out in the kitchen. Davis, getting to like Simons and characteristically making no secret of it, said with genuine concern: "Colonel, you smoke too many cigars--it's bad for your health."

  By way of reply he got The Simons Look, but he ignored the warning.

  A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen and hid the five packs of cigars in the dishwasher.

  When Simons finished the first pack he went looking for the rest and could not find them. He could not operate without tobacco. He was about to get in a car and go to a store when Davis opened the dishwasher and said: "I have your cigars here."

  "You keep those, goddammit," Simons growled, and he went out.

  When he came back with another five packs he said to Davis: "These are mine. Keep your goddam hands off them."

  Davis felt like a child who has been put in the corner. It was the first and last prank he played on Colonel Simons.

  While the discussion went on, Jim Schwebach sat on the floor, trying to make a bomb.

  To smuggle a bomb, or even just its component parts, through Iranian customs would have been dangerous--"That's a risk we don't have to take," Simons said--so Schwebach had to design a device that could be assembled from ingredients readily available in Tehran.

  The idea of blowing up a building was dropped: it was too ambitious and would probably kill innocent people. They would make do with a blazing car as a diversion. Schwebach knew how to make "instant napalm" from gasoline, soap flakes, and a little oil. The timer and the fuse were his two problems. In the States he would have used an electrical timer connected with a toy rocket motor; but in Tehran he would be restricted to more primitive mechanisms.

  Schwebach enjoyed the challenge. He liked fooling around with anything mechanical: his hobby was an ugly-looking stripped-down '73 Oldsmobile Cutlass that went like a bullet out of a gun.

  At first he experimented with an old-fashioned clockwork stove-top timer that used a striker to hit a bell. He attached a phosphorus match to the striker and substituted a piece of sandpaper for the bell, to ignite the match. The match in turn would light a mechanical fuse.

  The system was unreliable, and caused great hilarity among the rest of the team, who jeered and laughed every time the match failed to ignite.

>   In the end Schwebach settled on the oldest timing device of all: a candle.

  He test-burned a candle to see how long it took to burn down one inch; then he cut another candle off at the right length for fifteen minutes.

  Next he scraped the heads off several old-fashioned phosphorous matches and ground up the inflammable material into a powder. This he packed tightly into a piece of aluminum kitchen foil. Then he stuck the foil into the base of the candle. When the candle burned all the way down, it heated the aluminum foil and the ground-up match heads exploded. The foil was thinner at the bottom so that the explosion would travel downward.

  The candle, with this primitive but reliable fuse in its base, was set into the neck of a plastic jar, about the size of a hip flask, full of jellied gasoline.

  "You light the candle and walk away from it," Schwebach told them when his design was complete. "Fifteen minutes later you've got a nice little fire going."

  And any police, soldiers, revolutionaries, or passersby--plus, quite possibly, some of the prison guards--would have their attention fixed on a blazing automobile three hundred yards up the street while Ron Davis and Jay Coburn were jumping over the fence into the prison courtyard.

  That day they moved out of the Hilton Inn. Coburn slept at the lake house, and the others checked into the Airport Marina--which was closer to Lake Grapevine--all except Ralph Boulware, who insisted on going home to his family.

  They spent the next four days training, buying equipment, practicing their shooting, rehearsing the jailbreak, and further refining the plan.

  Shotguns could be bought in Tehran, but the only kind of ammunition allowed by the Shah was birdshot. However, Simons was expert at reloading ammunition, so they decided to smuggle their own shot into Iran.

  The trouble with putting buckshot into birdshot slugs would be that they would get relatively few shot into the smaller slugs: the ammunition would have great penetration but little spread. They decided to use Number 2 shot, which would spread wide enough to knock down more than one man at a time, but had enough penetration to smash the windshield of a pursuing car.

  In case things turned really nasty, each member of the team would also carry a Walther PPK in a holster. Merv Stauffer got Bob Snyder, head of security at EDS and a man who knew when not to ask questions, to buy the PPKs at Ray's Sporting Goods in Dallas. Schwebach had the job of figuring out how to smuggle the guns into Iran.