On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

by Ken Follett

  So they stayed, like everyone else, and waited for things to get better--or worse.

  Coburn's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at the door, and Majid walked in. A short, stocky man of about fifty with a luxuriant mustache, he had once been wealthy: his tribe had owned a great deal of land and had lost it in the land reform of the sixties. Now he worked for Coburn as an administrative assistant, dealing with the Iranian bureaucracy. He spoke fluent English and was highly resourceful. Coburn liked him a lot: Majid had gone out of his way to be helpful when Coburn's family arrived in Iran.

  "Come in," Coburn said. "Sit down. What's on your mind?"

  "It's about Fara."

  Coburn nodded. Fara was Majid's daughter, and she worked with her father: her job was to make sure that all American employees always had up-to-date visas and work permits. "Some problem?" Coburn said.

  "The police asked her to take two American passports from our files without telling anyone."

  Coburn frowned. "Any passports in particular?"

  "Paul Chiapparone's and Bill Gaylord's."

  Paul was Coburn's boss, the head of EDS Corporation Iran. Bill was second-in-command and manager of their biggest project, the contract with the Ministry of Health.

  "What the hell is going on?" Coburn said.

  "Fara is in great danger," Majid said. "She was instructed not to tell anyone about this. She came to me for advice. Of course I had to tell you, but I'm afraid she will get into very serious trouble."

  "Wait a minute, let's back up," Coburn said. "How did this happen?"

  "She got a telephone call this morning from the Police Department, Residence Permit Bureau, American Section. They asked her to come to the office. They said it was about James Nyfeler. She thought it was routine. She arrived at the office at eleven-thirty and reported to the head of the American Section. First he asked for Mr. Nyfeler's passport and residence permit. She told him that Mr. Nyfeler is no longer in Iran. Then he asked about Paul Bucha. She said that Mr. Bucha also was no longer in the country."

  "Did she?"

  "Yes."

  Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought. Bucha had been a resident here, had left the country, and had come back in, briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.

  Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone also?' Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr. Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it quietly, not to cause alarm."

  "What did she say?" Coburn asked.

  "She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this, and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."

  "This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.

  "If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them--"

  "We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was wondering whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the passports?"

  "They did not."

  Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was that a clue? Coburn did not know.

  Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul Chiapparone and get back to you."

  On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He, too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the wall, and a lot on his mind.

  Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight, mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.

  In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary social-security system, which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness. When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for benefits. The whole system would be run by computers--EDS's specialty.

  The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in any case not due until fardah--usually translated "tomorrow," in practice, "some time in the future."

  Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades. Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more Iranians capable of top management.

  He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.

  When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.

  For a while Paul did not take much notice of local politics. He knew there were rumblings of discontent, but that was true of just about every country in the world, and the Shah seemed to have as firm a grip on the reins of power as any ruler. Like the rest of the world, Paul missed the significance of the events of the first half of 1978.

  On January 7 the newspaper Etelaat published a scurrilous attack on an exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomeini, alleging, among other things, that he was homosexual. The following day, eighty miles from Tehran in the town of Qom--the principal center of religious education in the country--outraged theology students staged a protest sit-in that was bloodily broken up by the military and the police. The confrontation escalated, and seventy people were killed in two more days of disturbances. The clergy organized a memorial procession for the dead forty days later in accordance with Islamic tradition. There was more violence during the procession, and the dead were commemorated in another memorial forty days later.... The processions continued, and grew larger and more violent, through the first six months of the year.

  With hindsight Paul could see that calling these marches "funeral processions" had been a way to circumvent the Shah's ban on political demonstrations. But at the time he had had no idea that a massive political movement was building. Nor had anyone else.

  In August 1978 Paul went home to the States on leave. (So did William Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to
Iran.) Paul loved all kinds of water sports, and he had gone to a sportfishing tournament in Ocean City, New Jersey, with his cousin Joe Porreca. Paul's wife, Ruthie, and the children, Karen and Ann Marie, went to Chicago to visit Ruthie's parents. Paul was a little anxious because the Ministry of Health still had not paid EDS's bill for the month of June; but it was not the first time they had been late with a payment, and Paul had left the problem in the hands of his second-in-command, Bill Gaylord, and he was fairly confident Bill would get the money in.

  While Paul was in the U.S. the news from Iran was bad. Martial law was declared on September 7, and the following day more than a hundred people were killed by soldiers during a demonstration in Jaleh Square in the heart of Tehran.

  When the Chiapparone family came back to Iran the very air seemed different. For the first time Paul and Ruthie could hear shooting in the streets at night. They were alarmed: suddenly they realized that trouble for the Iranians meant trouble for them. There was a series of strikes. The electricity was continually being cut off, so they dined by candlelight and Paul wore his topcoat in the office to keep warm. It became more and more difficult to get money out of the banks, and Paul started a check-cashing service at the office for employees. When they got low on heating oil for their home Paul had to walk around the streets until he found a tanker, then bribe the driver to come to the house and deliver.

  His business problems were worse. The Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, had been arrested under Article 5 of martial law, which permitted a prosecutor to jail anyone without giving a reason. Also in jail was Deputy Minister Reza Neghabat, with whom Paul had worked closely. The Ministry still had not paid its June bill, nor any since, and now owed EDS more than four million dollars.

  For two months Paul tried to get the money. The individuals he had dealt with previously had all gone. Their replacements usually did not return his calls. Sometimes someone would promise to look into the problem and call back: after waiting a week for the call that never came, Paul would telephone once again, to be told that the person he had spoken to last week had now left the Ministry. Meetings would be arranged, then canceled. The debt mounted at the rate of $1.4 million a month.

  On November 14 Paul wrote to Dr. Heidargholi Emrani, the Deputy Minister in charge of the Social Security Organization, giving formal notice that if the Ministry did not pay up within a month EDS would stop work. The threat was repeated on December 4 by Paul's boss, the president of EDS World, at a personal meeting with Dr. Emrani.

  That was yesterday.

  If EDS pulled out, the whole Iranian social-security system would collapse. Yet it was becoming more and more apparent that the country was bankrupt and simply could not pay its bills. What, Paul wondered, would Dr. Emrani do now?

  He was still wondering when Jay Coburn walked in with the answer.

  At first, however, it did not occur to Paul that the attempt to steal his passport might have been intended to keep him, and therefore EDS, in Iran.

  When Coburn had given him the facts he said: "What the hell did they do that for?"

  "I don't know. Majid doesn't know, and Fara doesn't know."

  Paul looked at him. The two men had become close in the last month. For the rest of the employees Paul was putting on a brave face, but with Coburn he had been able to close the door and say, Okay, what do you really think?

  Coburn said: "The first question is, What do we do about Fara? She could be in trouble."

  "She has to give them some kind of an answer."

  "A show of cooperation?"

  "She could go back and tell them that Nyfeler and Bucha are no longer resident ..."

  "She already told them."

  "She could take their exit visas as proof."

  "Yeah," Coburn said dubiously. "But it's you and Bill they're really interested in now."

  "She could say that the passports aren't kept in the office."

  "They may know that's not true--Fara may even have taken passports down there in the past."

  "Say senior executives don't have to keep their passports in the office."

  "That might work."

  "Any convincing story to the effect that she was physically unable to do what they asked her."

  "Good. I'll discuss it with her and Majid." Coburn thought for a moment. "You know, Bucha has a reservation on a flight out tomorrow. He could just go."

  "He probably should--they think he's not here anyway."

  "You could do the same."

  Paul reflected. Maybe he should get out now. What would the Iranians do then? They might just try to detain someone else. "No," he said. "If we're going, I should be the last to leave."

  "Are we going?" Coburn asked.

  "I don't know." Every day for weeks they had asked each other that question. Coburn had developed an evacuation plan that could be put into effect instantly. Paul had been hesitating, with his finger on the button. He knew that his ultimate boss, back in Dallas, wanted him to evacuate--but it meant abandoning the project on which he had worked so hard for the last sixteen months. "I don't know," he repeated. "I'll call Dallas."

  That night Coburn was at home, in bed with Liz, and fast asleep when the phone rang.

  He picked it up in the dark. "Yeah?"

  "This is Paul."

  "Hello." Coburn turned on the light and looked at his wristwatch. It was two A.M.

  "We're going to evacuate," Paul said.

  "You got it."

  Coburn cradled the phone and sat on the edge of the bed. In a way it was a relief. There would be two or three days of frantic activity, but then he would know that the people whose safety had been worrying him for so long were back in the States, out of reach of these crazy Iranians.

  He ran over in his mind the plans he had made for just this moment. First he had to inform 130 families that they would be leaving the country within the next 48 hours. He had divided the city into sectors, with a team leader for each sector: he would call the leaders, and it would be their job to call the families. He had drafted leaflets for the evacuees telling them where to go and what to do. He just had to fill in the blanks with dates, times, and flight numbers, then have the leaflets duplicated and distributed.

  He had picked a lively and imaginative young Iranian systems engineer, Rashid, and given him the job of taking care of the homes, cars, and pets that would be left behind by the fleeing Americans and--eventually--shipping their possessions to the U.S. He had appointed a small logistics group to organize plane tickets and transportation to the airport.

  Finally he had conducted a small-scale rehearsal of the evacuation with a few people. It had worked.

  Coburn got dressed and made coffee. There was nothing he could do for the next couple of hours, but he was too anxious and impatient to sleep.

  At four A.M. he called the half-dozen members of the logistics group, woke them, and told them to meet him at the "Bucharest" office immediately after curfew.

  Curfew began at nine each evening and ended at five in the morning. For an hour Coburn sat waiting, smoking and drinking a lot of coffee and going over his notes.

  When the cuckoo clock in the hall chirped five he was at the front door, ready to go.

  Outside there was a thick fog. He got into his car and headed for Bucharest, crawling along at fifteen miles per hour.

  Three blocks from his house, half a dozen soldiers leaped out of the fog and stood in a semicircle in front of his car, pointing their rifles at his windshield.

  "Oh, shit," Coburn said.

  One of the soldiers was still loading his gun. He was trying to put the clip in backward, and it would not fit. He dropped it and went down on one knee, scrabbling around on the ground looking for it. Coburn would have laughed if he had not been scared.

  An officer yelled at Coburn in Farsi. Coburn lowered the window. He showed the officer his wristwatch and said: "It's after five."

  The soldiers had a conference. The officer came back and asked Co
burn for his identification.

  Coburn waited anxiously. This would be the worst possible day to get arrested. Would the officer believe that Coburn's watch was right and his was wrong?

  At last the soldiers got out of the road and the officer waved Coburn on.

  Coburn breathed a sigh of relief and drove slowly on.

  Iran was like that.

  2_____

  Coburn's logistics group went to work making plane reservations, chartering buses to take people to the airport, and photocopying handout leaflets. At ten A.M. Coburn got the team leaders into Bucharest and started them calling the evacuees.

  He got reservations for most of them on a Pan Am flight to Istanbul on Friday, December 8. The remainder--including Liz Coburn and the four children--would get a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt that same day.

  As soon as the reservations were confirmed, two top executives at EDS headquarters, Merv Stauffer and T. J. Marquez, left Dallas for Istanbul to meet the evacuees, shepherd them to hotels, and organize the next stage of their flight back home.

  During the day there was a small change in plan. Paul was still reluctant to abandon his work in Iran. He proposed that a skeleton staff of about ten senior men stay behind, to keep the office ticking over, in the hope that Iran would quiet down and EDS would eventually be able to resume working normally. Dallas agreed. Among those who volunteered to stay were Paul himself, his deputy Bill Gaylord, Jay Coburn, and most of Coburn's evacuation logistics group. Two people who stayed behind reluctantly were Carl and Vicki Commons: Vicki was nine months pregnant and would leave after her baby was born.

  On Friday morning Coburn's team, their pockets full of ten-thousand-rial (about $140) notes for bribes, virtually took over a section of Mehrabad Airport in western Tehran. Coburn had people writing tickets behind the Pan Am counter, people at passport control, people in the departure lounge, and people running baggage-handling equipment. The plane was overbooked: bribes ensured that no one from EDS was bumped off the flight.

  There were two especially tense moments. An EDS wife with an Australian passport had been unable to get an exit visa because the Iranian government offices that issued exit visas were all on strike. (Her husband and children had American passports and therefore did not need exit visas.) When the husband reached the passport-control desk, he handed over his passport and his children's in a stack with six or seven other passports. As the guard tried to sort them out, EDS people in the queue behind began to push forward and cause a commotion. Some of Coburn's team gathered around the desk asking loud questions and pretending to get angry about the delay. In the confusion the woman with the Australian passport walked through the departure lounge without being stopped.