Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt

by On Wings of Eagles [lit]

  as freight. He talked to people at each of the airlines, trying to develop

  contacts. He eventually had several meetings with the chief of security at

  Pan Am, telling turn everything except the names of Paul and Bill. They

  talked about getting the two fugitives on a scheduled flight wearing Pan Am

  cabin crew uniforms. The security chief wanted to help, but the affline's

  liability proved in the end to be an insuperable problem. Coburn then

  considered stealing a helicopter. He scouted a chopper base in the south of

  the city, and decided the theft was feasible. But, given the chaos of the

  hunian military, he suspected the aircraft were not being properly

  maintained and he knew they were short of spare parts. 'Men again, some of

  them might have contaminaW fuel.

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 225

  He reported all this to Simons. Simons was already uneasy about airports,

  and the snags uncovered by Coburn reinforced his prejudice. There were

  always police and military around airports; if something went wrong there

  was no escape. airports were designed to prevent people wandering where

  they should not go; at an airport you always had to put yourself in the

  hands of others. Furthermore, in that situation your worst enemy could be

  the people escaping: they needed to be very cool. Coburn thought Paul and

  Bill had the nerves to go through something like that, but there was no

  point telling Simons so: Simons always. had to make his own assessment of

  a man's character, and he had never met Paul or Bill.

  So in the end the team focused on getting out by road.

  There were six ways.

  To the north was the USSR, not a hospitable country. To the east were

  Afghanistan, equally inhospitable, and Pakistan, whose border was too far

  away-almost a thousand miles, mostly across desert. To the south was the

  Persian Gulf, with friendly Kuwait just fifty or a hundred miles across the

  water. That was Promising. To the west was unfriendly Iraq; to the

  northwest, friendly Turkey.

  Kuwait and Turkey were the destinations they favored.

  Simons asked Coburn to have a trustworthy Iranian employee drive south all

  the way to the Persian Gulf, to firid out whether the road was passable and

  the countryside Peaceful. Coburn asked the cycle man, so called because he

  zipped around Tehran on a motorcycle. A trainee systems engineer like

  Rashid, the Cycle Man was about twenty-five, short, and street-smart. He

  had learned English at school in California, and could talk with any

  regional American accent--southem, Puerto Rican, anything. EDs had hired

  him despite his lack of a college degree because he scored remarkably high

  marks on aptitude tests. When EDS's Iranian employees had joined the

  general strike, and Paul and Coburn had called a mass meeting to discuss it

  with them, the Cycle Man had astonished everyone by speaking out vehemently

  against his colleagues and in favor of the management. He made no secret of

  his pro-American feelings, yet Coburn was quite me the Cycle Man was

  involved with the revolutionaries. One day he had asked Keane Taylor for a

  car. Taylor had given him one. The next day he asked for mother. Taylor

  obliged. The Cycle Man always used his motorcycle anyway: Taylor and Coburn

  were pretty sure the cars were for the revolutionaries.

  226 Ken FoIku

  They did not care: it was more important that the Cycle Man become obligated

  to diem.

  So, in return for past favors, the Cycle Man drove to the Persian Gulf.

  He came back a few days later and reported that anything was possible if

  you had enough money. You could get to the Gulf and you could buy or rent

  a boat.

  He had no idea what would happen when you disembarked in Kuwait.

  That question was answered by Glenn Jackson.

  As well as being a hunter and a Baptist, Glenn Jackson was a Rocket Man. His

  combination of a first-class mathematical brain and the ability to stay calm

  under stress had got him into Mission Control at NASA's Manned Spacecraft

  Center in Houston as a flight controller. His job had been to design and

  operate the computer programs that calculated trajectories for in-flight

  maneuvering.

  Jackson's unflappability had been severely tested on Christmas Day 1968,

  during the last mission he worked on, the lunar flyby. When the spacecraft

  came out from behind the moon, astronaut Jim Lovell had read down the list

  of numbers, called residuals, which told Jackson how close the craft was to

  its planned course. Jackson had got a ftight: The numbers were way outside

  the acceptable limits of error. Jackson asked CAPCOM to have the astronaut

  read them down again, to double-check. Then he told the flight director

  that if those numbers were correct, the three astronauts were as good as

  dead: there was not enough fuel to correct such a huge divergence.

  Jackson asked for Lovell to read the numbers a third time, extra carefully.

  They were the same. Then Lovell said: "Oh, wait a minute, I'm reading these

  wrong . . . "

  When the real numbers came through, it turned out that the maneuver had

  been almost perfect.

  All that was a long way from busting into a prison.

  Still, it was beginning to look like Jackson would never get the chance to

  perpetrate a jailbreak. He had been cooling his heels in Pans for a week

  when he got instructions from Simons, via Dallas, to go to Kuwait.

  He flew to Kuwait and moved into Bob Young's house. Young had gone to

  Tehran to help the negotiating team, and his wife, Kris, and her new baby

  were in the States on vacation.

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 227

  Jackson told Malloy Jones, who was Acting Country Manager in Young's

  absence, that he had come to help with the preliminary study EDS was doing

  for Kuwait's central bank. He did a little work for the benefit of his cover

  story, then started looking around.

  He spent some time at the airport, watching the immigration officers. They

  were being very tough, he soon learned. Hundreds of Iranians without

  passports were flying into Kuwait: they were being handcuffed and put on

  the next flight back. Jackson concluded that Paul and Bill could not

  possibly fly into Kuwait.

  Assuming they could get in by boat, would they later be allowed to kave

  without passports? Jackson went to see the American Consul, saying that one

  of his children seemed to have lost a passport, and asking what was the

  procedure for replacing it. In the course of a long and rambling discussion

  the Consul revealed that the Kuwaitis had a way of checking, when they

  issued an exit visa, whether the person had entered the country legally.

  That was a problem, but perhaps not an insoluble one: once inside Kuwait,

  Paul and Bill would be safe from Dadgar, and surely the U.S. Embassy would

  then give them back their passports. The main question was: assuming the

  fugitives could reach the south of Iran and embark on a small boat, would

  they be able to land unnoticed in Kuwait? Jackson traveled the sixtymile

  length of the Kuwait coast, from the Iraqi border in the north to the

  Saudi-Arabian border in the south. He spent many hours on
the beaches,

  collecting seashells in winter. Normally, he had been told, coastal patrols

  were very light. But the exodus from Iran had changed everything. There

  were thousands of Iranians who wanted to leave the country almost as badly

  as Paul and Bill did; and those Iranians, like Simons, could look at a map

  and see the Persian Gulf to the south with friendly Kuwait just across the

  water. The Kuwait Coast Guard was wise to all this. Everywhere Jackson

  looked, he saw, out at sea, at least one patrol boat; and they appeared to

  be stopping all small craft.

  The prognosis was gloomy. Jackson called Merv Stauffer in Dallas and

  reported that the Kuwait exit was a no-no.

  That left Turkey.

  Simons had favored Turkey all along. It involved a shorter drive than

  Kuwait. Furthermore, Simons knew Turkey. He had served there in the Mes as

  part of the American military aid

  228 Ken FoUeu

  program, training the Turkish Army. He even spoke a little of the language.

  So he sent Ralph Boulware to Istanbul.

  Ralph Boulware grew up in bars. His father, Benjamin Russell Boulware, was

  a tough and independent black man who had a series of small businesses: a

  grocery store, real-estate rentals, bootlegging, but mostly bars. Ben

  Boulware's theory of childraising was that if he knew where they were, he

  knew what they were doing, so he kept his boys mostly within his sight,

  which meant mostly in the bar. It was not much of a childhood, and it left

  Ralph feeling that he had been an adult all Ins fife.

  He had realized he was different from other boys Ins age when he went to

  college and found his contemporaries getting an excited about gambling,

  drinking, and going with women. He knew all about gamblers, drunks, and

  whores already: he dropped out of college and joined the air force.

  In nine years in the air force he had never seen action, and while he was

  on the whole glad about that, it had left him wondering whether he had what

  it took to fight in a shooting war. The rescue of Paul and Bill might give

  him the chance to find out, he had thought; but Simons had sent him from

  Paris back to Dallas. It looked as though he was going to be ground crew

  again. Then new orders came.

  They came via Merv Stauffer, Perot's right-hand man, who was now Simons's

  link with the scattered rescue team. Stauffer went to Radio Shack and

  bought six five-channel two-way radios, ten rechargers, a supply of

  batteries, and a device for running the radios off a dashboard cigar

  lighter. He gave the equipment to Boulware and told him to meet Sculley and

  Schwebach in London before going on to Istanbul.

  Stauffer also gave him forty thousand dollars in cash, for expenses,

  bribes, and general purposes.

  The night before Boulware left, his wife started giving him a hard time

  about money. He had taken a thousand dollars out of the bank, without

  telling her, before he went to Pan"e believed in carrying cash money--and

  she had subsequently discovered how little was left in their account.

  Boulware did not want to explain to her why he had taken the money and how

  he had spent it. Mary insisted that she needed money. Boulware was not too

  concerned about that: she was staying with good friends and he knew she

  would be looked after. But she didn't buy his

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 229

  brush-off, and-as often happened when she was really determined-he decided

  to make her happy. He went into the bedroom, where he had left the box

  containing the radios and the forty thousand dollars, and counted out five

  hundred. Mary came in while he was doing it, and saw what was in the box.

  Boulware gave her the five hundred and said: "Will that hold YOUT'

  "Yes," she said.

  She looked at the box, then at her husband. "I'm not even going to ask,"

  she said; and she went out.

  Boulware left the next day. He met Schwebach and Sculley in London, gave

  them five of the six radio sets, kept one for himself, and flew on to

  Istanbul.

  He went from the airport straight to the office of Mr. Fish, the travel

  agent.

  Mr. Fish met him in an open-plan office with three or four other people

  sitting around.

  "My name is Ralph Boulware, and I work for EDS," Boulware began. "I think

  you know my daughters, Stacy Elaine and Kecia Nicole." The girls had played

  with Mr. Fish's daughters during the evacuees' stopover in Istanbul.

  Mr. Fish was not very warm.

  "I need to talk to you," Boulware said.

  "Fine, talk to me."

  Boulware looked around the room. "I want to talk to you in private. "

  "Why?99

  "You'll understand when I talk to you."

  "These are all my partners. There are no secrets here."

  Mr. Fish was giving Boulware a hard time. Boulware could guess why. There

  were two reasons. First, after all that Mr. Fish had done during the

  evacuation, Don Norsworthy had tipped him $150, which was derisory, in

  Boulware's opinion.'(1 didn't know what to do!" Norsworthy had said. "The

  man's bill was twenty-six thousand dollars. What should I have tipped

  him---ten percent?")

  Secondly, Pat Sculley had approached Mr. Fish with a transparent tale about

  smuggling computer tapes into Iran. Mr. Fish was neither a fool nor a

  criminal, Boulware guessed; and of course he had refused to have anything

  to do with Sculley's scheme.

  230 Ken Follett

  Now Mr. Fish thought EDS people were (a) cheapskates and (b) dangerously

  amateurish lawbreakers.

  But Mr. Fish was a small businessman. Boulware understood small

  businessme"is father had been one. They spoke two languages: straight talk,

  and cash money. Cash money would solve problem (a), and straight talk,

  problem (b).

  "Okay, let's start again," Boulware said. "When EDS was here you really

  helped those people, treated the children nice, and did a great deal for

  us. When they left there was a mix-up about showing you our appreciation.

  We're embarrassed that this was not handled properly and I need to settle

  that score."

  -It's no big deal-"

  "We're sorry," Boulware said, and he gave Mr. Fish a thousand dollars in

  hundred-dollar bills.

  The room went very quiet.

  "Well, I'm going to check in to the Sheraton," Boulware said. "Maybe we can

  talk later."

  "I'll come with you," said Mr. Fish.

  He personally checked Boulware into the hotel, and ensured that he got a

  good room, then agreed to meet turn for dinner that night in the hotel

  coffee shop.

  Mr. Fish was a high-class hustler, Boulware thought as he unpacked. The man

  had to be smart to have what appeared to be a very prosperous business in

  this dirt-poor country. The evacuees' experience showed that he had the

  enterprise to do more than issue plane tickets and make hotel bookings. He

  had the right contacts to oil the wheels of bureaucracy, judging by the way

  he had got everyone's baggage through customs. He had also helped solve the

  problem of the adopted Iranian baby with no passport. EDS's mistake had

  been to see that he was a hustler and o
verlook the fact that he was high

  clas"eceived, perhaps, by his unimpressive appearance: he was rather fat

  and dressed in drab clothes. Boulware, learning from past mistakes, thought

  he could handle Mr. Fish.

  That night over dinner Boulware told him he wanted to go to the Iran-Turkey

  border to meet some people coming out.

  Mr. Fish was horrified. "You don't understand," he said. "That is a

  terrible place. The people are Kurds and Azerbaij*aiu*s-wild mountain men,

  they don't obey any government. You know how they live up there? By

  smuggling, robbery, and murder. I personally would not dam to go there. If

  you, an American, go there, you will never come back. Never."

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 231

  Boulware thought he was probably exaggerating. "I have to go there, even if

  it's dangerous," he said. "Now, can I buy a light plane?"

  Mr. Fish shook his head. "It is illegal in Turkey for individuals to own

  airplanes."

  "A helicopter?"

  "Same thing."

  "AD right, can I charter a plane?"

  "It is possible. Where there is no scheduled flight, you can charter. It

  "Are there scheduled flights to the border area?" No."

  "All right."

  "However, chartering is so unusual that you will surely attract the

  attention of the authorities . . ."

  "We have no plans to do anything illegal. AD the same, we don't need the

  hassle of being investigated. So let's set up the option of chartering.

  Find out about price and availability, but hold off from making any kind of

  booking. Meanwhile, I want to know more about getting there by land. If you

  don't want to escort me, fine; but maybe you can find somebody who will.

  "I'll see what I can do."

  They met several times over the next few days. Mr. Fish's initial coolness

  totally disappeared, and Boulware felt they were becoming friends. Mr. Fish

  was alert and articulate. Although he was no criminal, he would break the

  law if the risks and rewards were proportionate, Boulware guessed. Boulware

  had some sympathy with that attitude-he, too, would break the law under the

  right circumstances. Mr. Fish was also a shrewd interrogator, and bit by

  bit Boulware told him the full story. Paul and Bill would probably have no

  passports, he admitted; but once in Turkey they would get new ones at the