"What the fuck is he doing?" said Gayden.
"This is asking for trouble," said Coburn.
They approached the second checkpoint. Without stopping. Rashid yelled at
the guard through the window. The guard said something in reply. Rashid
accelerated. Paul followed.
Coburn breathed a sigh of relief. That was just like Rashid: he did the
unexpected, on impulse, without thinking through the consequences; and
somehow he always got away with it. It just made life a little tense for
the people with him.
Next time they stopped, Rashid explained that he had simply told the guard
the two Range Rovers had been cleared at the first checkpoint.
At the next roadblock Rashid persuaded the guards to write a pass on his
windshield in magic marker, and they were waved through another three
roadblocks without being searched.
Keane Taylor was driving the lead car when, climbing a long, winding hill,
they saw two heavy trucks, side by side and filling the whole width of the
road, coniing downhill fast toward them. Taylor swerved off the road and
bumped to a halt in the ditch, and Paul followed. The trucks went by, still
side by side, and everyone said what a lousy driver Taylor was.
At midday they took a break. They parked at the roadside near a ski lift
and lunched on dry crackers and cupcakes. Although there was snow on the
mountainsides, the sun was shining and they were not cold. Taylor got out
his bottle of Cognac, but it had leaked and was empty: Coburn suspected
that Simons had surreptitiously loosened the cork. They drank water.
They passed through the small, neat town of Zanjan, where on the
reconnaissance trip Coburn and Simons had talked to the chief of police.
Just beyond Zanjan the hunian State Highway ended-rather abruptly. In the
second car, Coburn saw Rashid's Range Rover
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 315
suddenly disappear from view. Paul slammed on the brakes and they got out to
look.
Where the tarmac ended, Rashid had gone down a steep slope for about eight
feet and landed nose-down in mud. Off to the right, their route continued
up an unpaved mountain road.
Rashid restarted the stalled engine and put the car into fourwheel drive
and reverse gear. Slowly he inched back up the bank and onto the road.
The Range Rover was covered with mud. Rashid turned on the wipers and
washed the windshield. When the mud splashes were gone, so was the pass
that had been written on with magic marker. Rashid could have rewritten it,
but nobody had a magic marker.
They drove west, heading for the southern tip of Lake Rezaiyeh. 'Me Range
Rovers were built for rough roads, and they could still do forty miles per
hour. They were climbing all the time: the temperature dropped steadily,
and the countryside was covered with snow, but the road was clear. Coburn
wondered whether they might even make the border tonight, instead of
tomorrow as planned.
Gayden, in the backseat, leaned forward and said: "Nobody's going to
believe it was this easy. We better make up some war stories to tell when
we get home."
He spoke too soon.
As daylight faded they approached Mahabad. Its outskirts were marked by a
few scattered huts, made of wood and mud brick, along the sides of the
winding road. The two Range Rovers swept around a bend and pulled up
sharply: the road was blocked by a parked truck and a large but apparently
disciplined crowd. The men were wearing the traditional baggy trousers,
black vest, red-and-white checkered headdress and bandolier of Kurdish
tribesmen.
Rashid jumped out of the lead car and went into his act.
Coburn studied the guns of the guards, and saw both Russian and American
automatic weapons.
"Everyone out of the cars," said Rashid.
By now it was routine. One by one they were searched. This time the search
was a little more thorough, and they found Keane Taylor's little
switchblade knife, but they let him keep it. They did not find Coburn's
knife, or the money.
Coburn waited for Rashid to say: "We can go." It was taking longer than
usual. Rashid argued with the Kurds for a few
316 Ken Follett
minutes, then said: "We have to go and see the head man of the town. "
They got back into the cars. A Kurd with a rifle joined them in each car
and directed them into the little town.
They were ordered to stop outside a small whitewashed building. One of the
guards went in, came out again a minute later, and got back into the car
without explanation.
They stopped again outside what was clearly a hospital. Here they picked up
a passenger, a young Iranian in a suit.
Coburn wondered what the hell was going on.
Finally they drove down an alley and parked outside what looked like a
small private house.
They went inside. Rashid told them to take off their shoes.
Gayden had several thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills in his shoes.
As he took them off he frantically stuffed the money up into the toes of
the shoes.
They were ushered into a large room furnished with nothing but a beautiful
Persian carpet. Simons quietly told everyone where to sit. Leaving a space
in the circle for the Iranians, he put Rashid on the right of the space.
Next to Rashid was Taylor, then Coburn, then Simons himself opposite the
space. On Simons's right Paul and Bill sat, back a little from the line of
the circle, where they would be least conspicuous. Gayden, completing the
circle, sat on Bill's right.
As Taylor sat down he saw that he had a big hole in the toe of his sock,
and hundred-dollar bills were poking through the hole. He cursed under his
breath and hastily pushed the money back toward his heel.
The young man in the suit followed them in. He seemed educated and spoke
good English. "You are about to meet a man who has just escaped after
twenty-five years it. jail," he said.
Bill almost said: Well, how about that, I've just escaped from jail
myself!--but he stopped himself just in time.
"You are to be put on trial, and this man will be your judge," the young
Iranian went on.
The words on trial hit Paul like a blow, and he thought: we've come all
this way for nothing.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 317
3
The Clean Team spent Wednesday at Lou Goelz's house in Tehran.
Early in the morning a call came through from Tom Walter in Dallas. The
line was poor and the conversation confused, but Joe Poche was able to tell
Walter that he and the Clean Team were safe, would move into the Embassy as
soon as possible, and would leave the country whenever the Embassy got the
evacuation flights finally organized. Poch6 also reported that Cathy
Gallagher's condition had not improved, and she had been taken to the
hospital the previous evening.
John Howell called Abolhasan, who had another message from Dadgar. Dadgar
was willing to negotiate a lower bail. If EDS located Paul and Bill, the
company should turn them in and post the lower bail. The Americans should
real
ize that it would be hopeless for Paul and Bill to try to leave Iran by
regular means and very dangerous for them to leave otherwise.
Howell took that to mean that Paid and Bill would not have been allowed to
get out on an Embassy evacuation flight. He wondered again whether the
Clean Team might be in more danger than the Dirty Team. Bob Young felt the
same. While they were discussing it, they heard shooting. It seemed to be
coming from the direction of the U.S. Embassy.
The National Voice of Iran, a radio station broadcasting from Baku moss the
border in the Soviet Union, had for several days been issuing "news"
bulletins about clandestine American plans for a counterrevolution. On
Wednesday the National Voice announced that the files of SAVAK, the Shah's
hated secret police force, had been transferred to the U.S. Embassy. The
story was almost certainly invented, but it was highly plausible: the CIA
had created SAVAK and was in close contact with it, and everyone knew that
U.S. embassies-4ike all embassies-were fall of spies thinly disguised as
diplomatic attaclids. Anyway, some of the revolutionaries in Tehran believed
the story, and -without consulting any of the Ayatollah's aides-decided to
take action.
318 Ken Follett
During the morning they entered the high buildings surrounding the Embassy
compound and took up position with automatic weapons. They opened fire at
ten-thirty.
Ambassador William Sullivan was in his outer office, taking a call at his
secretary's desk. He was speaking to the Ayatollah's Deputy Foreign
Minister. President Carter had decided to recognize the new, revolutionary
government in Iran, and Sullivan was making arrangements to deliver an
official note.
When he put the phone down, he turned around to see his press attaclid,
Barry Rosen, standing there with two American journalists. Sullivan was
furious, for the White House had given specific instructions that the
decision to recognize the new goveminent was to be announced in Washington,
not Tehran. Sullivan took Rosen into the inner office and chewed him out.
Rosen told him that the two journalists were there to make arrangements for
the body of Joe Alex Morris, the Los Angeles Times correspondent who had
been shot during the fighting at Doshen Toppeh. Sullivan, feeling foolish,
told Rosen to ask the journalists not to reveal what they had learned in
overhearing Sullivan on the phone.
Rosen went out. Sullivan's phone rang. He picked it up. There was a sudden
tremendous crash of gunfire, and a hail of bullets shattered his windows.
Sullivan hit the floor.
He slithered across the room and into the next office, where he came
nose-to-nose with his deputy, Charlie Naas, who had been holding a meeting
about the evacuation flights. Sullivan had two phone numbers that he could
use, in an emergency, to reach revolutionary leaders. He now told Naas to
call one, and the army attach6 to call the other. Still lying on the floor,
the two men pulled telephones off a desk and started dialing.
Sullivan took out his walkie-talkie and called for reports from the marine
units in the compound.
The machine-gun attack had been covering fire for a squad of about
seventy-five revolutionaries who had come over the front wall of the
Embassy compound and were now advancing on the ambassadorial residence.
Fortunately most of the staff were with Sullivan in the chancery building.
Sullivan ordered the marines to fall back, not to use their rifles, and to
fire their sidearms only in self-defense.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 319
Then he crawled out of the executive suite and into the corridor.
During the next hour, as the attackers took the residence and the cafeteria
building, Sullivan got all the civilians in the chancery herded into the
communications vault upstairs. When he heard the attackers breaking down
the steel doors of the building, he ordered the marines inside to join the
civilians in the vault. There he made them pile their weapons in a comer,
and ordered everyone to surrender as soon as possible.
Eventually Sullivan himself went into the vault, leaving the army attach6
and an interpreter outside.
When the attackers reached the second floor, Sullivan opened the vault door
and walked out with his hands over his head.
The othem-about a hundred people-followed him.
They were all herded into the waiting room of the executive suite and
frisked. There was a confused dispute between two factions of Iranians, and
Sullivan realized that the Ayatollah's people had sent a rescue
force-presumably in response to the phone calls by Charlie Naas and the
army attach6--wW the rescuers had arrived on the second floor at the same
time as the attackers.
Suddenly a shot came through the window.
All the Americans dropped to the floor. One of the Iranians seemed to think
the shot had come from within the room, and he swung his AK-47 rifle wildly
at the tangle of prisoners on the floor-, then Barry Rosen, the press
attach6, yelled in Farsi: "It came from outside! It came from outside!" At
that moment Sullivan found himself lying next to the two journalists who
had been in his outer office. "I hope you're getting all this down in your
notebooks," he said.
Eventually they were taken out into the courtyard, where Ibrahim Yazdi, the
Ayatollah's new Deputy Prime Minister, apologized to Sullivan for the
attack.
Yazdi also gave Sullivan a personal escort, a group of students who would
henceforth be responsible for the safety of the U.S. Ambassador. The leader
of the group explitined to Sullivan that they were well qualified to guard
him. They had studied him, and were familiar with his routine, for until
recently their assignment had been to assassinate him.
Late that afternoon Cathy Gallagher called from the hospital. She had been
given some medication that solved her problem, at
320 Ken Follett
least temporarily, and she wanted to rejoin her husband and the others at
Lou Goetz's house.
Joe Poch6 did not want any more of the Clean Team to leave the house, but
he also did not want any Iranians to know where they were; so he called
Gholarn and asked him to pick up Cathy at the hospital and bring her to the
comer of the street, where her husband would meet her.
She arrived at around seven-thirty that evening. She was feeling better,
but Gholam had told her a horrifying story. "They shot up our hotel rooms
yesterday," she said.
Gholam had gone to the Hyatt to pay EDS's bill and pick up the suitcases
they had left behind, Cathy explained. The rooms had been wrecked, there
were bullet holes everywhere, and the luggage had been slashed to ribbons.
"Just our rooms?" Howell asked.
. 'Yes. 11
"Did he find out how it happened?"
When Gholarn went to pay the bill, the hotel manager had said to him: "Who
the heU were those people-the CIAT' Apparently, on Monday morning, shortly
after all the EDS people left the hotel, the revolutionaries had taken it
over. They had harassed
all the Americans, demanding their passports, and
had shown pictures of two men whom they were seeking. The manager had not
recognized the men in the photographs. Nor had anyone else.
Howell wondered what had so enraged the revolutionaries that they had
smashed up the rooms. Perhaps Gayden's well-stocked bar offended their
Muslim sensibilities. Also left behind in Gayden's suite were a tape
recorder used for dictation, some suction microphones for taping phone
conversations, and a child's walkie-talkie set. The revolutionaries might
have thought this was CIA surveillance gear.
Throughout the day, vague and alarming reports of what was happening at the
Embassy reached Howell and the Clean Team through Goe1z's houseman, who was
calling friends. But Goelz returned as the others were having dinner, and
after a couple of stiff drinks he was none the worse for his experience. He
had spent a good deal of time lying on his ample belly in a corridor. The
next day he went back to his desk, and he came home that evening with good
news: evacuation flights would start on Saturday, and the Clean Team would
be on the first.
Howell thought: Dadgar may have other ideas about that.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 321
4
In Istanbul, Ross Perot had a dreadful feeling that the whole operation was
slipping out of control.
He heard, via Dallas, that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been overrun by
revolutionaries. He also knew, because Tom Walter had talked to Joe Pochd
earlier, that the Clean Team had been planning to move into the Embassy
compound as soon as possible. But after the attack on the Embassy, almost
all telephone lines to Tehran had been disconnected, and the White House
was monopolizing the few lines left. So Perot did not know whether the
Clean Team had been in the Embassy at the time of the attack, nor did he
know what kind of danger they might be in even if they were still at
Goelz's house.
'Me loss of phone contact also meant that Merv Stauffer could not call
Gholam to find out whether the Dirty Team had sent "a message for Jim
Nyfeler" saying either that they were okay or that they were in trouble.
The whole seventh-floor crew in Dallas was at work pulling strings to get
Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt Page 42
