On Wings of Eagles

by Ken Follett

  The woman translated the last sentence. Paul studied Dadgar: His expression had frozen again. He said something in Farsi.

  Mrs. Nourbash translated. "He will see the other one now."

  Paul stared at her.

  He had wasted his breath, he realized. He might just as well have recited nursery rhymes. Dadgar was immovable.

  Paul was deeply depressed. He lay on his mattress, looking at the pictures of Karen and Ann Marie that he had stuck on the underside of the bunk above him. He missed the girls badly. Being unable to see them made him realize that in the past he had taken them for granted. Ruthie, too. He looked at his watch: it was the middle of the night in the States now. Ruthie would be asleep, alone in a big bed. How good it would be to climb in beside her and hold her in his arms. He put the thought out of his mind: he was just making himself miserable with self-pity. He had no need to worry about them. They were out of Iran, out of danger, and he knew that whatever might happen, Perot would take care of them. That was the good thing about Perot. He asked a lot of you--boy, he was just about the most demanding employer you could have--but when you needed to rely on him, he was like a rock.

  Paul lit a cigarette. He had a cold. He could never get warm in the jail. He felt too down to do anything. He did not want to go to the Chattanooga Room and drink tea; he did not want to watch the news in gibberish on TV; he did not want to play chess with Bill. He did not want to go to the library for a new book. He had been reading The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. He had found it a very emotional book. It was about several generations of families, and it made him think of his own family. The central character was a priest, and as a Catholic, Paul had been able to identify with that. He had read the book three times. He had also read Hawaii by James Michener, Airport by Arthur Hailey, and the Guinness Book of World Records. He never wanted to read another book for the rest of his life.

  Sometimes he thought about what he would do when he got out, and let his mind wander on his favorite pastimes, boating and fishing. But that could be depressing.

  He could not remember a time in his adult life when he had been at a loss for something to do. He was always busy. At the office he would typically have three days' work backed up. Never, never, did he lie down smoking and wondering how on earth he could keep himself amused.

  But the worst thing of all was the helplessness. Although he had always been an employee, going where his boss sent him and doing what he was ordered to do, nevertheless he had always known that he could at any time get on a plane and go home, or quit his job, or say no to his boss. Ultimately the decisions had been his. Now he could not make any decisions about his own life. He could not even do anything about his plight. With every other problem he had ever had, he had been able to work on it, try things, attack the problem. Now he just had to sit and suffer.

  He realized that he had never known the meaning of freedom until he lost it.

  3___

  The demonstration was relatively peaceful. There were several blazing cars but otherwise no violence: the demonstrators were marching up and down carrying pictures of Khomeini and putting flowers in the turrets of tanks. The soldiers looked on passively.

  The traffic was at a standstill.

  It was January 14, the day after Simons and Poche flew in. Boulware had gone back to Paris, and now he and the other four were waiting there for a flight to Tehran. Meanwhile Simons, Coburn, and Poche were heading downtown, to reconnoiter the jail.

  After a few minutes Joe Poche turned off the car engine and sat there, silent, showing as much emotion as he always did, which was none.

  By contrast Simons, sitting next to him, was animated. "This is history being made in front of our eyes!" he said. "Very few people get to observe firsthand a revolution in progress."

  He was a history buff, Coburn had gathered, and revolutions were his specialty. Coming through the airport, on being asked what was his occupation and the purpose of his visit, he said he was a retired farmer and this was the only chance he was ever likely to get of seeing a revolution. He had been telling the truth.

  Coburn was not thrilled to be in the middle of it. He did not enjoy sitting in a little car--they had a Renault 4--surrounded by excitable Muslim fanatics. Despite his new-grown beard he did not look Iranian. Nor did Poche. Simons did, however: his hair was longer now, he had olive skin and a big nose, and he had grown a white beard. Give him some worry beads and stand him on a comer and nobody would suspect for a minute that he was American.

  But the crowd was not interested in Americans, and eventually Coburn became confident enough to get out of the car and go into a baker's shop. He bought barbari bread, long, flat loaves with a delicate crust that were baked fresh every day and cost seven rials--ten cents. Like French bread, it was delicious when new but went stale very quickly. It was usually eaten with butter or cheese. Iran was run on barbari bread and tea.

  They sat watching the demonstration and chewing on the bread until, at last, the traffic began to move again. Poche followed the route he had mapped out the previous evening. Coburn wondered what they would find when they reached the jail. On Simons's orders he had kept away from downtown until now. It was too much to hope that the jail would be exactly as he had described it eleven days ago at Lake Grapevine: the team had based a very precise attack plan on quite imprecise intelligence. Just how imprecise, they would soon find out.

  They reached the Ministry of Justice and drove around to Khayyam Street, the side of the block on which the jail entrance was located.

  Poche drove slowly, but not too slowly, past the jail.

  Simons said, "Oh, shit."

  Coburn's heart sank.

  The jail was radically different from the mental picture he had built up.

  The entrance consisted of two steel doors fourteen feet high. On one side was a single-story building with barbed wire along its roof. On the other side was a taller building of gray stone, five stories high.

  There were no iron railings. There was no courtyard.

  Simons said: "So where's the fucking exercise yard?"

  Poche drove on, made a few turns, and came back along Khayyam Street in the opposite direction.

  This time Coburn did see a little courtyard with grass and trees, separated from the street by a fence of iron railings twelve feet high; but it plainly had nothing to do with the jail, which was farther up the street. Somehow, in that telephone conversation with Majid, the exercise yard of the jail had got mixed up with this little garden.

  Poche made one more pass around the block.

  Simons was thinking ahead. "We can get in there," he said. "But we have to know what we'll be up against once we're over the wall. Someone will have to go in and reconnoiter."

  "Who?" said Coburn.

  "You," said Simons.

  Coburn walked up to the jail entrance with Rich Gallagher and Majid. Majid pressed the bell and they waited.

  Coburn had become the "outside man" of the rescue team. He had already been seen at Bucharest by Iranian employees, so his presence in Tehran could not be kept secret. Simons and Poche would stay indoors as much as possible and keep away from EDS premises: nobody need know they were here. It would be Coburn who would go to the Hyatt to see Taylor and switch cars. And it was Coburn who went inside the jail.

  As he waited he ran over in his mind all the points Simons had told him to watch out for--security, numbers of guards, weaponry, layout of the place, cover, high ground ... It was a long list, and Simons had a way of making you anxious to remember every detail of his instructions.

  A peephole in the door opened. Majid said something in Farsi.

  The door was opened and the three of them went in.

  Straight ahead of him Coburn saw a courtyard with a grassed traffic circle and cars parked on the far side. Beyond the cars a building rose five stories high over the courtyard. To his left was the one-story building he had seen from the street, with the barbed wire on its roof. To his right was another steel do
or.

  Coburn was wearing a long, bulky down coat--Taylor had dubbed it the Michelin Man coat--under which he could easily have concealed a shotgun, but he was not searched by the guard at the gate. I could have had eight weapons on me, he thought. That was encouraging: security was slack.

  He noted that the gate guard was armed with a small pistol.

  The three visitors were led into the low building on the left. The colonel in charge of the jail was in the visiting room, along with another Iranian. The second man, Gallagher had warned Coburn, was always present during visits, and spoke perfect English: presumably he was there to eavesdrop. Coburn had told Majid he did not want to be overheard while talking to Paul, and Majid agreed to engage the eavesdropper in conversation.

  Coburn was introduced to the colonel. In broken English the man said he was sorry for Paul and Bill, and he hoped they would be released soon. He seemed sincere. Coburn noted that neither the colonel nor the eavesdropper was armed.

  The door opened, and Paul and Bill walked in.

  They both stared at Coburn in surprise--neither of them had been forewarned that he was in town, and the beard was an additional shock.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Bill said, and smiled broadly.

  Coburn shook hands warmly with both of them. Paul said: "Boy, I can't believe you're here."

  "How's my wife?" Bill said.

  "Emily's fine, so is Ruthie," Coburn told them.

  Majid started talking loudly in Farsi to the colonel and the eavesdropper. He seemed to be telling them a complicated story with many gestures. Rich Gallagher began to speak to Bill, and Coburn sat Paul down.

  Simons had decided that Coburn should question Paul about routines at the jail, and level with him about the rescue plan. Paul was picked rather than Bill because, in Coburn's opinion, Paul was likely to be the leader of the two.

  "If you haven't guessed it already," Coburn began, "we're going to get y'all out of here by force if necessary."

  "I guessed it already," Paul said. "I'm not sure it's a good idea."

  "What?"

  "People might get hurt."

  "Listen, Ross has retained just about the best man in the whole world for this kind of operation, and we have carte blanche--"

  "I'm not sure I want it."

  "You ain't being asked for your permission, Paul."

  Paul smiled. "Okay."

  "Now I need some information. Where do you exercise?"

  "Right there in the courtyard."

  "When?"

  "Thursdays."

  Today was Monday. The next exercise period would be January 18. "How long do you spend out there?"

  "About an hour."

  "What time of day?"

  "It varies."

  "Shit." Coburn made an effort to look relaxed, to avoid lowering his voice conspicuously or glancing over his shoulder to see whether anyone might be listening: This had to look like a normal friendly visit. "How many guards are there in this jail?"

  "Around twenty."

  "All uniformed, all armed?"

  "All uniformed, some armed with handguns."

  "No rifles?"

  "Well ... none of the regular guards have rifles, but ... See, our cell is just across the courtyard and has a window. Well, in the morning there's a group of about twenty different guards, like an elite corps, you might say. They have rifles and wear kind of shiny helmets. They have reveille right here; then I never see them for the rest of the day--I don't know where they go."

  "Try and find out."

  "I'll try."

  "Which is your cell?"

  "When you go out of here, the window is more or less opposite you. If you start in the right-hand comer of the courtyard and count toward the left, it's the third window. But they close the shutters when there are visitors--so we can't see women coming in, they say."

  Coburn nodded, trying to memorize it all. "You need to do two things," he said. "One: a survey of the inside of the jail, with measurements as accurate as possible. I'll come back and get the details from you so we can draw a plan. Two: get in shape. Exercise daily. You'll need to be fit."

  "Okay."

  "Now, tell me your daily routine."

  "They wake us up at six o'clock," Paul began.

  Coburn concentrated, knowing he would have to repeat all this to Simons. Nevertheless, at the back of his mind one thought nagged: if we don't know what time of day they exercise, how the hell do we know when to go over the wall?

  "Visiting time is the answer," Simons said.

  "How so?" Coburn asked.

  "It's the one situation when we can predict they will be out of the actual jail and vulnerable to a snatch, at a definite moment in time."

  Coburn nodded. The three of them were sitting in the living room of Keane Taylor's house. It was a big room with a Persian carpet. They had drawn three chairs into the middle, around a coffee table. Beside Simons's chair, a small mountain of cigar ash was growing on the carpet. Taylor would be furious.

  Coburn felt drained. Being debriefed by Simons was even more harrowing than he had anticipated. When he was sure he had told everything, Simons thought of more questions. When Coburn could not quite remember something, Simons made him think hard until he did remember. Simons drew from him information he had not consciously registered, just by asking the right questions.

  "The van and the ladder--that scenario is out," Simons said. "Their weak point now is their loose routine. We can get two men in there as visitors, with shotguns or Walthers under their coats. Paul and Bill would be brought to that visiting area. Our two men should be able to overpower the colonel and the eavesdropper without any trouble--and without making enough noise to alarm anyone else in the vicinity. Then ..."

  "Then what?"

  "That's the problem. The four men would have to come out of the building, cross the courtyard, reach the gate, either open it or climb it, reach the street, and get in a car ..."

  "It sounds possible," Coburn said. "There's just one guard at the gate..."

  "A number of things about this scenario bother me," Simons said. "One: the windows in the high building that overlook the courtyard. While our men are in the courtyard, anyone looking out of any one of those windows will see them. Two: the elite guard with shiny helmets and rifles. Whatever happens, our people have to slow down at the gate. If there's just one guard with a rifle looking out of one of those high windows, he could pick off the four of them like shooting fish in a barrel."

  "We don't know the guards are in the high building."

  "We don't know they're not."

  "It seems like a small risk--"

  "We're not going to take any risks we don't have to. Three: the traffic in this goddam city is a bastard. You just can't talk about jumping in a car and getting away. We could run into a demonstration fifty yards down the street. No. This snatch has got to be quiet. We must have time. What is that colonel like, the one in charge of the place?"

  "He was quite friendly," Coburn said. "He seemed genuinely sorry for Paul and Bill."

  "I wonder whether we can get to him. Do we know anything at all about him?"

  "No."

  "Let's find out."

  "I'll put Majid on it."

  "The colonel would have to make sure there were no guards around at visiting time. We could make it look good by tying him up, or even knocking him out.... If he can be bribed, we can still bring this thing off."

  "I'll get on it right away," said Coburn.

  4___

  On January 13 Ross Perot took off from Amman, Jordan, in a Lear jet of Arab Wings, the charter operation of Royal Jordanian Airlines. The plane headed for Tehran. In the baggage hold was a net bag containing half a dozen professional-sized videotapes, the kind used by television crews: this was Perot's "cover."

  As the little jet flew east, the British pilot pointed out the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A few minutes later the plane developed hydraulic trouble and had to turn back.


  It had been that kind of journey.

  In London he had caught up with lawyer John Howell and EDS manager Bob Young, both of whom had been trying for days to get a flight into Tehran. Eventually Young discovered that Arab Wings was flying in, and the three men had gone to Amman. Arriving there in the middle of the night had been an experience all on its own: it looked to Perot as if all the bad guys of Jordan were sleeping at the airport. They found a taxicab to take them to a hotel. John Howell's room had no bathroom: the facilities were right there beside the bed. In Perot's room the toilet was so close to the bath that he had to put his feet in the tub when he sat on the john. And like that ...

  Bob Young had thought of the videotapes "cover." Arab Wings regularly flew tapes into and out of Tehran for NBC-TV News. Sometimes NBC would have its own man carry the tapes; other times the pilot would take them. Today, although NBC did not know it, Perot would be their bagman. He was wearing a sports jacket, a little plaid hat, and no tie. Anyone watching for Ross Perot might not look twice at the regular NBC messenger with his regular net bag.

  Arab Wings had agreed to this ruse. They had also confirmed that they could take Perot out again on this NBC tape run.

  Back in Amman, Perot, Howell, and Young and the pilot boarded a replacement jet and took off again. As they climbed high over the desert Perot wondered whether he was the craziest man in the world or the sanest.

  There were powerful reasons why he should not go to Tehran. For one thing, the mobs might consider him the ultimate symbol of bloodsucking American capitalism and string him up on the spot. More likely, Dadgar might get to know that he was in town and try to arrest him. Perot was not sure he understood Dadgar's motives in jailing Paul and Bill, but the man's mysterious purposes would surely be even better served by having Perot behind bars. Why, Dadgar could set bail at a hundred million dollars and feel confident of getting it, if the money was what he was after.