by Ken Follett
"Okay," Simons said reluctantly. "We'll wait awhile."
He looked tired, Boulware thought: an old man who just wanted to rest. Coburn looked the same: drained, exhausted, almost broken. Boulware wondered just what they had been through to get here.
Boulware himself felt terrific, even though he had had little sleep for forty-eight hours. He thought of his endless discussions with Mr. Fish about how to get to the border; of the screwup in Adana when the bus failed to come; of the taxi ride through a blizzard in the mountains... And here he was, after all.
The little guardhouse was bitterly cold, and the wood-burning stove did nothing but fill the room with smoke. Everyone was tired, and the scotch made them drowsy. One by one they began to fall asleep on the wooden benches and the floor.
Simons did not sleep. Rashid watched him, pacing up and down like a caged tiger, chain-smoking his plastic-tipped cigars. As dawn broke, he started looking out of the window, across no-man's-land to Iran.
"There are a hundred people with rifles across there," he said to Rashid and Boulware. "What do you think they would do if they should happen to find out exactly who it was who slipped across the border last night?"
Boulware, too, was beginning to wonder whether he had been right to propose waiting for Mr. Fish.
Rashid looked out the window. Seeing the Range Rovers on the other side, he remembered something. "The fuel can," he said. "I left the can with the money. We might need the money."
Simons just looked at him.
On impulse Rashid walked out of the guardhouse and started across the border.
It seemed a long way.
He thought about the psychology of the guards on the Iranian side. They have written us off, he decided. If they have any doubts about whether they did right last night, then they must have spent the last few hours making up excuses, justifying their action. By now they have convinced themselves that they did the right thing. It will take them a while to change their minds.
He reached the other side and stepped over the chain.
He went to the first Range Rover and opened the tailgate.
Two guards came running out of their hut.
Rashid lifted the can out of the car and closed the tailgate. "We forgot the oil," he said as he started walking back toward the chain.
"What do you need it for?" asked one of the guards suspiciously. "You don't have the cars anymore."
"For the bus," said Rashid as he stepped over the chain. "The bus that's taking us to Van."
He walked away, feeling their eyes on his back.
He did not look around until he was back inside the Turkish guardhouse.
A few minutes later they all heard the sound of a motor. They looked out of the windows. A bus was coming down the road.
They cheered all over again.
Pat Sculley, Jim Schwebach, Ron Davis, and Mr. Fish stepped off the bus and came into the guardhouse.
They all shook hands.
The latest arrivals had brought another bottle of scotch, so everyone had another celebratory drink.
Mr. Fish went into a huddle with Ilsman and the border guards.
Gayden put his arm around Pat Sculley and said: "Have you noticed who's with us?" He pointed.
Sculley saw Rashid, asleep in a corner. He smiled. In Tehran he had been Rashid's manager, and then, during that first meeting with Simons in the EDS boardroom--was it only six weeks ago?--he had strongly argued that Rashid should be in on the rescue. Now it seemed Simons had come round to the same point of view.
Mr. Fish said: "Pat Sculley and I have to go to Yuksekova and speak with the chief of police there. The rest of you wait here for us, please."
"Now hold it," Simons said. "We waited for Boulware. Then we waited for you. Now what are we waiting for?"
Mr. Fish said: "If we don't get clearance in advance, there will be trouble, because Paul and Bill have no passports."
Simons turned to Boulware. "Your guy Ilsman is supposed to have dealt with that problem," he said angrily.
"I thought he did!" said Boulware. "I thought he bribed them."
"So what's happening?"
Mr. Fish said: "It's better this way."
Simons growled: "Make it goddam fast."
Sculley and Mr. Fish went off.
The others started a poker game. They all had thousands of dollars hidden in their shoes, and they were a little crazy. One hand Paul got a full house, with three aces in the hole, and the pot went over a thousand dollars. Keane Taylor kept raising him. Taylor had a pair of kings showing, and Paul guessed he had another king in the hole, making a full house with kings. Paul was right. He won fourteen hundred dollars.
A new shift of border guards arrived, including an officer who was mad as hell to find his guardhouse littered with cigarette butts, hundred-dollar bills, and poker-playing Americans, two of whom had entered the country without passports.
The morning wore on, and they all began to feel bad--too much liquor and not enough sleep. As the sun climbed in the sky, poker did not seem fun anymore. Simons got jittery. Gayden started giving Boulware a hard time. Boulware wondered where Sculley and Mr. Fish had got to.
Boulware was now sure he had made a mistake. They should all have left for Yuksekova as soon as he had arrived. He had made another mistake in letting Mr. Fish take charge. Somehow he had lost the initiative.
At ten A.M., having been away four hours, Sculley and Mr. Fish came back.
Mr. Fish told the officer that they had permission to leave.
The officer said something sharp, and--as if accidentally--let his jacket fall open to reveal his pistol.
The other guards backed away from the Americans.
Mr. Fish said: "He says we leave when he gives permission."
"Enough," said Simons. He got to his feet and said something in Turkish. All the Turks looked at him in surprise: they had not realized he spoke their language.
Simons took the officer into the next room.
They came out a few minutes later. "We can go," said Simons.
They all went outside.
Coburn said: "Did you bribe him, Colonel--or frighten him to death?"
Simons gave the ghost of a smile and said nothing.
Pat Sculley said: "Want to come to Dallas, Rashid?"
For the last couple of days, Rashid reflected, they had been talking as if he would go all the way with them; but this was the first time anyone had asked him directly whether he wanted to. Now he had to make the most important decision of his life.
Want to come to Dallas, Rashid? It was a dream come true. He thought of what he was leaving behind. He had no children, no wife, not even a girlfriend--he had never been in love. But he thought of his parents, his sister, and his brothers. They might need him: life was sure to be rough in Tehran for some time. Yet what help could he give them? He would be employed for a few more days, or weeks, shipping the Americans' possessions back to the States, taking care of the dogs and cats--then nothing. EDS was finished in Iran. Probably computers were finished, too, for many years. Unemployed, he would be a burden to his family, just another mouth to feed in hard times.
But in America--
In America he could continue his education. He could put his talents to work, become a success in business--especially with the help of people like Pat Sculley and Jay Coburn.
Want to come to Dallas, Rashid?
"Yes," he said to Sculley. "I want to go to Dallas."
"What are you waiting for? Get on the bus!"
They all got on the bus.
Paul settled into his seat with relief. The bus pulled away, and Iran disappeared into the distance: he would probably never see the country again. There were strangers on the bus: some scruffy Turks in improvised uniforms, and two Americans who--someone mumbled--were pilots. Paul was too exhausted to inquire further. One of the Turkish guards from the border station had joined the party: presumably he was just hitching a ride.
They stopped in Yuksekova
. Mr. Fish told Paul and Bill: "We have to talk to the chief of police. He has been here twenty-five years and this is the most important thing that has ever happened. But don't worry. It's all routine."
Paul, Bill, and Mr. Fish got off the bus and went into the little police station. Somehow Paul was not worried. He was out of Iran, and although Turkey was not exactly a Western country, at least, he felt, it was not in the throes of a revolution. Or perhaps he was just too tired to be frightened.
He and Bill were interrogated for two hours, then released.
Six more people joined the bus at Yuksekova: a woman and a child who seemed to belong to the border guard, and four very dirty men--"Bodyguards," said Mr. Fish--who sat behind a curtain at the back of the bus.
They drove off, heading for Van, where a charter plane was waiting. Paul looked out at the scenery. It was prettier than Switzerland, he thought, but incredibly poor. Huge boulders littered the road. In the fields ragged people were treading down the snow so that their goats could get at the frozen grass beneath. There were caves with wood fences across their mouths, and it seemed that was where the people lived. They passed the ruins of a stone fortress that might have dated back to the Crusades.
The bus driver seemed to think he was in a race. He drove aggressively on the winding road, apparently confident that nothing could possibly be coming at him the other way. A group of soldiers waved him down, and he drove right past them. Mr. Fish yelled at him to stop, but he yelled back and kept going.
A few miles farther on, the army was waiting for them in force, probably having heard that the bus had run the last checkpoint. The soldiers stood in the road with their rifles raised, and the driver was forced to stop.
A sergeant jumped on the bus and dragged the driver off with a pistol at his head.
Now we're in trouble, Paul thought.
The scene was almost funny. The driver was not a bit cowed: he was yelling at the soldiers as loudly and as angrily as they were yelling at him.
Mr. Fish, Ilsman, and some of the mystery passengers got off the bus and started talking, and eventually they satisfied the military. The driver was literally thrown back onto the bus, but even that did not quench his spirit, and as he drove away he was still yelling out of the window and shaking his fist at the soldiers.
They reached Van late in the afternoon.
They went to the town hall, where they were handed over to the local police; and the scruffy bodyguards disappeared like melting snow. The police filled in forms, then escorted them to the airstrip.
As they were boarding the plane, Ilsman was stopped by a policeman: he had a .45 pistol strapped under his arm, and it seemed that even in Turkey passengers were not allowed to take firearms on board aircraft. However, Ilsman flashed his credentials yet again, and the problem went away.
Rashid was also stopped. He was carrying the fuel can with the money in it, and of course inflammable liquids were not allowed on an aircraft. He told the police the can contained suntan oil for the Americans' wives, and they believed him.
They all boarded the plane. Simons and Coburn, coming down from the effects of the stay-awake pills, both stretched out and were asleep within seconds.
As the plane taxied and took off, Paul felt as elated as if it were his first plane trip. He recalled how, in jail in Tehran, he had longed to do that most ordinary thing, get on a plane and fly away. Soaring up into the clouds now gave him a feeling he had not experienced for a long time: the feeling of freedom.
3_______
According to the peculiar rules of Turkish air travel, the charter plane could not go where a scheduled flight was available; so they could not fly directly to Istanbul where Perot was waiting, but had to change planes in Ankara.
While they were waiting for their connection, they solved a couple of problems.
Simons, Sculley, Paul, and Bill got into a taxi and asked for the American Embassy.
It was a long drive through the city. The air was brownish and had a strong smell. "The air's bad here," said Bill.
"High-sulfur coal," said Simons, who had lived in Turkey in the fifties. "They've never heard of pollution controls."
The cab pulled up at the U.S. Embassy. Bill looked out the window and his heart leaped: there stood a young, handsome marine guard in an immaculate uniform.
This was the U.S.A.
They paid off the cab.
As they went in, Simons said to the marine: "Is there a motor pool here, soldier?"
"Yes, sir," said the marine, and gave him directions.
Paul and Bill went into the passport office. In their pockets they had passport-sized photographs of themselves that Boulware had brought from the States. They went up to the desk, and Paul said: "We've lost our passports. We left Tehran in kind of a hurry."
"Oh, yes," said the clerk, as if he had been expecting them.
They had to fill in forms. One of the officials took them into a private office and told them he wanted some advice. The U.S. Consulate in Tabriz, Iran, was under attack by revolutionaries, and the staff there might have to escape as Paul and Bill had. They told him the route they had taken and what problems they had encountered.
A few minutes later they walked out of there, each holding a sixty-day U.S. passport. Paul looked at his and said: "Did you ever see anything so beautiful in your whole damn life?"
Simons emptied the oil from the can and shook out the money in the weighted plastic bags. There was a hell of a mess: some of the bags had broken and there was oil all over the banknotes. Sculley started cleaning off the oil and piling the money up in ten-thousand-dollar stacks: there was sixty-five thousand dollars plus about the same again in Iranian rials.
While he was doing this, a marine walked in. Seeing two disheveled, unshaven men kneeling on the floor counting out a small fortune in hundred-dollar bills, he did a double take.
Sculley said to Simons: "Do you think I ought to tell him, Colonel?"
Simons growled: "Your buddy at the gate knows about this, soldier."
The marine saluted and went out.
It was eleven P.M. when they were called to board their flight to Istanbul.
They went through the final security check one by one. Sculley was just ahead of Simons. Looking back, he saw that the guard had asked to see inside the envelope Simons was carrying.
The envelope contained all the money from the fuel can.
Sculley said: "Oh, shit."
The soldier looked in the envelope and saw the sixty-five thousand dollars and four million rials; and all hell broke loose.
Several soldiers drew their guns, one of them called out, and officers came running.
Sculley saw Taylor, who had fifty thousand dollars in a little black bag, pushing his way through the crowd around Simons, saying: "Excuse me, excuse me please, excuse me..."
Ahead of Sculley, Paul had already been cleared through the checkpoint. Sculley thrust his thirty thousand dollars into Paul's hands, then turned and went back through the checkpoint.
The soldiers were taking Simons away to be interrogated. Sculley followed with Mr. Fish, Ilsman, Boulware, and Jim Schwebach. Simons was led into a little room. One of the officers turned, saw five people following, and said in English: "Who are you?"
"We're all together," Sculley said.
They sat down and Mr. Fish talked to the officers. After a while he said: "They want to see the papers that prove you brought this money into the country."
"What papers?"
"You have to declare all the foreign currency you bring in."
"Hell, nobody asked us!"
Boulware said: "Mr. Fish, explain to these clowns that we entered Turkey at a tiny little border station where the guards probably don't know enough to read forms and they didn't ask us to fill in any forms but we're happy to do it now."
Mr. Fish argued some more with the officers. Eventually Simons was allowed to leave, with the money; but the soldiers took down his name, passport number, and description, and t
he moment they landed in Istanbul, Simons was arrested.
At three A.M. on Saturday, February 17, 1979, Paul and Bill walked into Ross Perot's suite at the Istanbul Sheraton.
It was the greatest moment in Perot's life.
Emotion welled up inside him as he embraced them both. Here they were, alive and well, after all this time, all those weeks of waiting, the impossible decisions and the awful risks. He looked at their beaming faces. The nightmare was over.
The rest of the team crowded in after them. Ron Davis was clowning, as usual. He had borrowed Perot's cold-weather clothes, and Perot had pretended to be anxious to get them back: now Davis stripped off his hat, coat, and gloves, and threw them on the floor dramatically, saying: "Here you are, Perot, here's your damned stuff!"
Then Sculley walked in and said: "Simons got arrested at the airport."
Perot's jubilation evaporated. "Why?" he exclaimed in dismay.
"He was carrying a lot of money in a paper envelope and they just happened to search him."
Perot said angrily: "Darn it, Pat, why was he carrying money?"
"It was the money from the fuel can. See--"
Perot interrupted: "After all Simons has done, why in the world did you let him take a completely unnecessary risk? Now see here. I'm taking off at noon, and if Simons isn't out of jail by then, you are going to stay in frigging Istanbul until he is!"
Sculley and Boulware sat down with Mr. Fish. Boulware said: "We need to get Colonel Simons out of jail."
"Well," said Mr. Fish, "it will take around ten days--"
"Bullshit," said Boulware. "Perot will not buy that. I want him out of jail now."
"It's five o'clock in the morning!" Mr. Fish protested.