On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

All this had started, Howell thought, as a business problem: the customer unable to pay, the supplier refusing to go on working. Might a compromise be possible, under which EDS would switch on the computers and the Ministry would pay at least some money? He decided to ask Dadgar directly.

"Would it help if EDS were to renegotiate its contract with the Ministry of Health?"

"This might be very helpful," Dadgar answered. "It would not be a legal solution to our problem, but it might be a practical solution. Otherwise, to waste all the work that has been done in computerizing the Ministry would be a pity."

Interesting, thought Howell. They want a modern social-security system--or their money back. Putting Paul and Bill in jail on thirteen million dollars' bail was their way of giving EDS those two options--and no others. We're getting straight talk, at last.

He decided to be blunt. "Of course, it would be out of the question to begin negotiations while Chiapparone and Gaylord are still in jail."

Dadgar replied: "Still, if you commit to good-faith negotiations, the Ministry will call me and the charges might be changed, the bail might be reduced, and Chiapparone and Gaylord might even be released on their personal guarantees."

Nothing could be plainer than that, Howell thought. EDS had better go see the Minister of Health.

Since the Ministry stopped paying its bills there had been two changes of government. Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, who was now in jail, had been replaced by a general; and then, when Bakhtiar became Prime Minister, the general had in turn been replaced by a new Minister of Health. Who, Howell wondered, was the new guy; and what was he like?

"Mr. Young, of the American company EDS, is calling you, Minister," said the secretary.

Dr. Razmara took a deep breath. "Tell him that American businessmen may no longer pick up the phone and call ministers of the Iranian government and expect to talk to us as if we were their employees," he said. He raised his voice. "Those days are over!"

Then he asked for the EDS file.

Manuchehr Razmara had been in Paris over Christmas. French-educated-he was a cardiologist--and married to a Frenchwoman, he considered France his second home, and spoke fluent French. He was also a member of the Iranian National Medical Council and a friend of Shahpour Bakhtiar, and when Bakhtiar had become Prime Minister he had called his friend Razmara in Paris and asked him to come home to be Minister of Health.

The EDS file was handed to him by Dr. Emrani, the Deputy Minister in charge of Social Security. Emrani had survived the two changes of government: he had been here when the trouble had started.

Razmara read the file with mounting anger. The EDS project was insane. The basic contract price was forty-eight million dollars, with escalators taking it up to a possible ninety million. Razmara recalled that Iran had twelve thousand working doctors to serve a population of thirty-two million, and that there were sixty-four thousand villages without tap water; and he concluded that whoever had signed the deal with EDS were fools or traitors, or both. How could they possibly justify spending millions on computers when the people lacked the fundamental necessities of public health like clean water? There could only be one explanation: they had been bribed.

Well, they would suffer. Emrani had prepared this dossier for the special court that prosecuted corrupt civil servants. Three people were in jail: former Minister Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, and two of his Deputy Ministers, Reza Neghabat and Nili Arame. That was as it should be. The blame for the mess they were in should fall primarily on Iranians. However, the Americans were also culpable. American businessmen and their government had encouraged the Shah in his mad schemes, and had taken their profits: now they must suffer. Furthermore, according to the file, EDS had been spectacularly incompetent: the computers were not yet working, after two and a half years, yet the automation project had so disrupted Emrani's department that the old-fashioned systems were not working either, with the result that Emrani could not monitor his department's expenditure. This was a principal cause of the Ministry's overspending its budget, the file said.

Razmara noted that the U.S. Embassy was protesting about the jailing of the two Americans, Chiapparone and Gaylord, because there was no evidence against them. That was typical of the Americans. Of course there was no proof: bribes were not paid by check. The Embassy was also concerned for the safety of the two prisoners. Razmara found this ironic. He was concerned for his safety. Each day when he went to the office he wondered whether he would come home alive.

He closed the file. He had no sympathy for EDS or its jailed executives. Even if he had wanted to have them released, he would not have been able to, he reflected. The anti-American mood of the people was rising to fever pitch. The government of which Razmara was a part, the Bakhtiar regime, had been installed by the Shah and was therefore widely suspected of being pro-American. With the country in such turmoil, any Minister who concerned himself with the welfare of a couple of greedy American capitalist lackeys would be sacked if not lynched--and quite rightly. Razmara turned his attention to more important matters.

The next day his secretary said: "Mr. Young, of the American company EDS, is here asking to see you, Minister."

The arrogance of the Americans was infuriating. Razmara said: "Repeat to him the message I gave you yesterday--then give him five minutes to get off the premises."

4____

For Bill, the big problem was time.

He was different from Paul. For Paul--restless, aggressive, strong-willed, ambitious--the worst of being in jail was the helplessness. Bill was more placid by nature: He accepted that there was nothing to do but pray, so he prayed. (He did not wear his religion on his sleeve: he did his praying late at night, before going to sleep, or early in the morning before the others woke up.) What got to Bill was the excruciating slowness with which time passed. A day in the real world--a day of solving problems, making decisions, taking phone calls, and attending meetings--was no time at all: a day in jail was endless. Bill devised a formula for conversion of real time to jail time.

Time took on this new dimension for Bill after two or three weeks in jail, when he realized there was going to be no quick solution to the problem. Unlike a convicted criminal, he had not been sentenced to ninety days or five years, so he could gain no comfort from scratching a calendar on the wall as a countdown to freedom. It made no difference how many days had passed: his remaining time in jail was indefinite, therefore endless.

His Persian cellmates did not seem to feel this way. It was a revealing cultural contrast: the Americans, trained to get fast results, were tortured by suspense; the Iranians were content to wait for fardah, tomorrow, next week, sometime, eventually--just as they had been in business.

Nevertheless, as the Shah's grip weakened, Bill thought he saw signs of desperation in some of them, and he came to mistrust them. He was careful not to tell them who was in town from Dallas or what progress was being made in the negotiations for his release: he was afraid that, clutching at straws, they would have tried to trade information to the guards.

He was becoming a well-adjusted jailbird. He learned to ignore dirt and bugs, and he got used to cold, starchy, unappetizing food. He learned to live within a small, clearly defined personal boundary, the prisoner's "turf." He stayed active.

He found ways to fill the endless days. He read books, taught Paul chess, exercised in the hall, talked to the Iranians to get every word of the radio and TV news, and prayed. He made a minutely detailed survey of the jail, measuring the cells and the corridors and drawing plans and sketches. He kept a diary, recording every trivial event of jail life, plus everything his visitors told him and all the news. He used initials instead of names and sometimes put in invented incidents or altered versions of real incidents, so that if the diary were confiscated or read by the authorities it would confuse them.

Like prisoners everywhere, he looked forward to visitors as eagerly as a child waiting for Christmas. The EDS people brought decent food, warm clothing, new books, and letters from home. One day Keane Taylor brought a picture of Bill's six-year-old son, Christopher, standing in front of the Christmas tree. Seeing his little boy, even in a photograph, gave Bill strength: a powerful reminder of what he had to hope for, it renewed his resolve to hang on and not despair.

Bill wrote letters to Emily and gave them to Keane, who would read them to her over the phone. Bill had known Keane for ten years, and they were quite close--they had lived together after the evacuation. Bill knew that Keane was not as insensitive as his reputation would indicate--half of that was an act--but still it was embarrassing to write "I love you" knowing that Keane would be reading it. Bill got over the embarrassment, because he wanted very badly to tell Emily and the children how much he loved them, just in case he never got another chance to say it in person. The letters were like those written by pilots on the eve of a dangerous mission.

The most important gift brought by the visitors was news. The all-too-brief meetings in the low building across the courtyard were spent discussing the various efforts being made to get Paul and Bill out. It seemed to Bill that time was the key factor. Sooner or later, one approach or another had to work. Unfortunately, as time passed, Iran went downhill. The forces of the revolution were gaining momentum. Would EDS get Paul and Bill out before the whole country exploded?

It was increasingly dangerous for the EDS people to come to the south of the city, where the jail was. Paul and Bill never knew when the next visit would come, or whether there would be a next visit. As four days went by, then five, Bill would wonder whether all the others had gone back to the United States and left him and Paul behind. Considering that the bail was impossibly high, and the streets of Tehran impossibly dangerous, might they all give up Paul and Bill as a lost cause? They might be forced, against their wills, to leave in order to save their own lives. Bill recalled the American withdrawal from Vietnam, with the last Embassy officials being lifted off the roofs by helicopter, and he could imagine the scene repeated at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

He was occasionally reassured by a visit from an Embassy official. They, too, were taking a risk in coming, but they never brought any hard news about government efforts to help Paul and Bill, and Bill came to the conclusion that the State Department was inept.

Visits from Dr. Houman, their Iranian attorney, were at first highly encouraging; but then Bill realized that in typically Iranian fashion Houman was promising much and producing little. The fiasco of the meeting with Dadgar was desperately depressing. It was frightening to see how easily Dadgar outmaneuvered Houman, and how determined Dadgar was to keep Paul and Bill jailed. Bill had not slept that night.

When he thought about the bail he found it staggering. No one had ever paid that much ransom, anywhere in the world. He recalled news stories about American businessmen kidnapped in South America and held for a million or two million dollars. (They were usually killed.) Other kidnappings, of millionaires, politicians, and celebrities, had involved demands for three or four million--never thirteen. No one would pay that much for Paul and Bill.

Besides, even that much money would not buy them the right to leave the country. They would probably be kept under house arrest in Tehran--white the mobs took over. Bail sometimes seemed more like a trap than a way of escape. It was a catch-22.

The whole experience was a lesson in values. Bill learned that he could do without his fine house, his cars, fancy food, and clean clothes. It was no big deal to be living in a dirty room with bugs crawling across the walls. Everything he had in life had been stripped away, and he discovered that the only thing he cared about was his family. When you got right down to it, that was all that really counted: Emily, Vicki, Jackie, Jenny, and Chris.

Coburn's visit had cheered him a little. Seeing Jay in that big down coat and woolen hat, with a growth of red beard on his chin, Bill had guessed that he was not in Tehran to work through legal channels. Coburn had spent most of the visit with Paul, and if Paul had learned more, he had not passed it on to Bill. Bill was content: he would find out as soon as he needed to know.

But the day after Coburn's visit there was bad news. On January 16 the Shah left Iran.

The television set in the hall of the jail was switched on, exceptionally, in the afternoon; and Paul and Bill, with all the other prisoners, watched the little ceremony in the Imperial Pavilion at Mehrabad Airport. There was the Shah, with his wife, three of his four children, his mother-in-law, and a crowd of courtiers. There, to see them off, was Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, and a crowd of generals. Bakhtiar kissed the Shah's hand, and the royal party went out to the airplane.

The Ministry people in the jail were gloomy: most of them had been friends, of one kind or another, with the royal family or its immediate circle. Now their patrons were leaving. It meant, at the very least, that they had to resign themselves to a long stay in jail. Bill felt that the Shah had taken with him the last chance of a pro-American outcome in Iran. Now there would be more chaos and confusion, more danger to all Americans in Tehran--and less chance of a swift release for Paul and Bill.

Soon after the television showed the Shah's jet rising into the sky, Bill began to hear a background noise, like a distant crowd, from outside the jail. The noise quickly grew to a pandemonium of shouting and cheering and hooting of horns. The TV showed the source of the noise: a crowd of hundreds of thousands of Iranians was surging through the streets, yelling: "Shah raft!" The Shah has gone! Paul said it reminded him of the New Year's Day parade in Philadelphia. All cars were driving with their headlights on and most were hooting continuously. Many drivers pulled their windshield wipers forward, attached rags to them, and turned them on, so that they swayed from side to side, permanent mechanical flag-wavers. Truckloads of jubilant youths careened around the streets celebrating, and all over the city crowds were pulling down and smashing statues of the Shah. Bill wondered what the mobs would do next. This led him to wonder what the guards and the other prisoners would do next. In the hysterical release of all this pent-up Iranian emotion, would Americans become targets?

He and Paul stayed in their cell for the rest of the day, trying to be inconspicuous. They lay on their bunks, talking desultorily. Paul smoked. Bill tried not to think about the terrifying scenes he had watched on TV, but the roar of that lawless multitude, the collective shout of revolutionary triumph, penetrated the prison walls and filled his ears, like the deafening crack and roll of nearby thunder a moment before the lightning strikes.

Two days later, on the morning of January 18, a guard came to Cell Number 5 and said something in Farsi to Reza Neghabat, the former Deputy Minister. Neghabat translated to Paul and Bill: "You must get your things together. They are moving you."

"Where to?" Paul asked.

"To another jail."

Alarm bells rang in Bill's mind. What kind of jail were they going to? The kind where people were tortured and killed? Would EDS be told where they had gone, or would the two of them simply disappear? This place was not wonderful, but it was the devil they knew.

The guard spoke again, and Neghabat said: "He tells you not to be concerned--this is for your own good."

It was the work of minutes to put together their toothbrushes, their shared shaver, and their few spare clothes. Then they sat and waited--for three hours.

It was unnerving. Bill had got used to this jail, and--despite his occasional paranoia--basically he trusted his cellmates. He feared the change would be for the worse.

Paul asked Neghabat to try to get news of the move to EDS, maybe by bribing the colonel in charge of the jail.

The cell father, the old man who had been so concerned for their welfare, was upset that they were leaving. He watched sadly as Paul took down the pictures of Karen and Ann Marie. Impulsively Paul gave the photographs to the old man, who was visibly moved and thanked him profusely.

At last they were taken out into the courtyard and herded onto a minibus, along with half a dozen other prisoners from different parts of the jail. Bill looked around at the others, trying to figure out what they had in common. One was a Frenchman. Were all the foreigners being taken to a jail of their own, for their safety? But another was the burly Iranian who had been boss of the downstairs cell where they had spent their first night--a common criminal, Bill assumed.

As the bus pulled out of the courtyard, Bill spoke to the Frenchman. "Do you know where we're going?"

"I am to be released," the Frenchman said.

Bill's heart leaped. This was good news! Perhaps they were all to be released.

He turned his attention to the scene in the streets. It was the first time for three weeks he had seen the outside world. The government buildings all around the Ministry of Justice were damaged: the mobs really had run wild. Burned cars and broken windows were everywhere. The streets were full of soldiers and tanks, but they were doing nothing--not maintaining order, not even controlling the traffic. It seemed to Bill only a matter of time before the weak Bakhtiar government would be overthrown.

What had happened to the EDS people--Taylor, Howell, Young, Gallagher, and Coburn? They had not appeared at the jail since the Shah left. Had they been forced to flee, to save their own lives? Somehow Bill was sure they were still in town, still trying to get him and Paul out of jail. He began to hope that this transfer had been arranged by them. Perhaps, instead of taking the prisoners to a different jail, the bus would divert and take them to the U.S. air base. The more he thought about it, the more he believed that everything had been arranged for their release. No doubt the American Embassy had realized, since the departure of the Shah, that Paul and Bill were in serious danger, and had at last got on the case with some real diplomatic muscle. The bus ride was a ruse, a cover story to get them out of the Ministry of Justice jail without arousing the suspicion of hostile Iranian officials such as Dadgar.

The bus was heading north. It passed through districts with which Bill was familiar, and he began to feel safer as the turbulent south of the city receded behind him.

Also, the air base was to the north.

The bus entered a wide square dominated by a huge structure like a fortress. Bill looked interestedly at the building. Its walls were about twenty-five feet high and dotted with guard towers and machine-gun emplacements. The square was full of Iranian women in chadors, the traditional black robes, all making a heck of a noise. Was this some kind of palace, or mosque? Or perhaps a military base?

The bus approached the fortress and slowed down.

Oh, no.

A pair of huge steel doors was set centrally in the front. To Bill's horror, the bus drove up and stopped with its nose to the gateway.

This awesome place was the new prison, the new nightmare.

The gates opened and the bus entered.

They were not going to the air base, EDS had not arranged a deal, the Embassy had not got moving, they were not going to be released.

The bus stopped again. The steel doors closed behind it and a second pair of doors opened in front. The bus passed through and stopped in a massive compound dotted with buildings. A guard said something in Farsi, and all the prisoners stood up to get off the bus.

Bill felt like a disappointed child. Life is rotten, he thought. What did I do to deserve this?

What did I do?

"Don't drive so fast," said Simons.

Joe Poche said: "Do I drive unsafe?"

"No, I just don't want you violating the laws."

"What laws?"

"Just be careful."

Coburn interrupted: "We're there."

Poche stopped the car.

They all looked across the heads of the weird women in black and saw the vast fortress of the Gasr Prison.

"Jesus Christ," said Simons. His deep, rough voice was tinged with awe. "Just look at that bastard."

They all stared at the high walls, the enormous gates, the guard towers and the machine-gun nests.

Simons said: "That place is worse than the Alamo."

It dawned on Coburn that their little rescue team could not attack this place, not without the help of the entire U.S. Army. The rescue they had planned so carefully and rehearsed so many times was now completely irrelevant. There would be no modifications or improvements to the plan, no new scenarios; the whole idea was dead.

They sat in the car for a while, each with his own thoughts.

"Who are those women?" Coburn wondered aloud.

"They have relatives in the jail," Poche explained.

Coburn could hear a peculiar noise. "Listen," he said. "What is that?"

"The women," said Poche. "Wailing."

Colonel Simons had looked up at an impregnable fortress once before.

He had been Captain Simons then, and his friends had called him Art, not Bull.

It was October 1944. Art Simons, twenty-six years old, was commander of Company B, 6th Ranger Infantry Battalion. The Americans were winning the war in the Pacific, and were about to attack the Philippine Islands. Ahead of the invading U.S. forces, the 6th Rangers were already there, committing sabotage and mayhem behind enemy lines.

Company B landed on Homonhon Island in the Leyte Gulf and found there were no Japanese on the island. Simons raised the Stars and Stripes on a coconut palm in front of two hundred docile natives.

That day a report came in that the Japanese garrison on nearby Suluan Island was massacring civilians. Simons requested permission to take Suluan. Permission was refused. A few days later he asked again. He was told that no ships could be spared to transport Company B across the water. Simons asked permission to use native transportation. This time he got the okay.

Simons commandeered three native sailboats and eleven canoes and appointed himself Admiral of the Fleet. He sailed at two A.M with eighty men. A storm blew up, seven of the canoes capsized, and Simons's fleet returned to shore with most of the navy swimming.

They set off again the next day. This time they sailed by daylight, and--since Japanese planes still controlled the air--the men stripped off and concealed their uniforms and equipment in the bottoms of the boats, so that they would look like native fishermen. The ruse worked, and Company B made landfall on Suluan Island. Simons immediately reconnoitered the Japanese garrison.

That was when he looked up at an impregnable fortress.

The Japanese were garrisoned at the south end of the island, in a lighthouse at the top of a three-hundred-foot coral cliff.

On the west side a trail led halfway up the cliff to a steep flight of steps cut into the coral. The entire stairway and most of the trail were in full view of the sixty-foot lighthouse tower and three west-facing buildings on the lighthouse platform. It was a perfect defensive position: two men could have held off five hundred on that flight of coral steps.

But there was always a way.

Simons decided to attack from the east, by scaling the cliff.

The assault began at one A.M. on November 2. Simons and fourteen men crouched at the foot of the cliff, directly below the garrison. Their faces and hands were blacked: there was a bright moon and the terrain was as open as an Iowa prairie. For silence, they communicated by hand signals and wore their socks over their boots.

Simons gave the signal and they began to climb.

The sharp edges of the coral sliced into the flesh of their fingers and the palms of their hands. In places, there were no footholds, and they had to go up climbing vines handover-hand. They were completely vulnerable: if one curious sentry should look over the platform, down the east side of the cliff, he would see them instantly, and could pick them off one by one--easy shooting.

They were halfway up when the silence was rent by a deafening clang. Someone's rifle stock had banged against a coral cone. They all stopped and lay still against the face of the cliff. Simons held his breath and waited for the rifle shot from above that would begin the massacre. It never came.

After ten minutes they went on.

The climb took a full hour.

Simons was first over the top. He crouched on the platform, feeling naked in the bright moonlight. No Japanese were visible, but he could hear voices from one of the low buildings. He trained his rifle on the lighthouse.

The rest of the men began to reach the platform. The attack was to start as soon as they got the machine gun set up.

Just as the gun came over the edge of the cliff, a sleepy Japanese soldier wandered into view, heading for the latrine. Simons signaled to his point guard, who shot the Japanese; and the firefight began.

Simons turned immediately to the machine gun. He held one leg and the ammunition box while the gunner held down the other leg and fired. The astonished Japanese ran out of the buildings straight into the deadly hail of bullets.

Twenty minutes later it was all over. Some fifteen of the enemy had been killed. Simons's squad suffered two casualties, neither fatal. And the "impregnable" fortress had been taken.

There was always a way.

Seven

1___

The American Embassy's Volkswagen minibus threaded its way through the streets of Tehran, heading for Gasr Square. Ross Perot sat inside. It was January 19, the day after Paul and Bill were moved, and Perot was going to visit them in the new jail.

It was a little crazy.

Everyone had gone to great lengths to hide Perot in Tehran, for fear that Dadgar--seeing a far more valuable hostage than Paul or Bill--would arrest him and throw him in jail. Yet here he was, heading for the jail of his own free will, with his own passport in his pocket for identification.

His hopes were pinned on the notorious inability of government everywhere to let its right hand know what its left was doing. The Ministry of Justice might want to arrest him, but it was the military who ran the jails, and the military had no interest in him.

Nevertheless, he was taking precautions. He would go in with a group of people--Rich Gallagher and Jay Coburn were on the bus, as well as some Embassy people who were going to visit an American woman in the jail--and he was wearing casual clothes and carrying a cardboard box containing groceries, books, and warm clothing for Paul and Bill.

Nobody at the prison would know his face. He would have to give his name as he went in, but why would a minor clerk or prison guard recognize it? His name might be on a list at the airport, at police stations, or at hotels; but the prison would surely be the last place Dadgar would expect him to turn up.

Anyway, he was determined to take the risk. He wanted to boost Paul's and Bill's morale, and to show them that he was willing to stick out his neck for them. It would be the only achievement of his trip: his efforts to get the negotiations moving had come to nothing.

The bus entered Gasr Square and he got his first sight of the new prison. It was formidable. He could not imagine how Simons and his little rescue team could possibly break in there.

In the square were scores of people, mostly women in chadors, making a lot of noise. The bus stopped near the huge steel doors. Perot wondered about the bus driver: he was Iranian, and he knew who Perot was ...

They all got out. Perot saw a television camera near the prison entrance.

His heart missed a beat.

It was an American crew.

What the hell were they doing there?

He kept his head down as he pushed his way through the crowd, carrying his cardboard box. A guard looked out of a small window set into the brick wall beside the gates. The television crew seemed to be taking no notice of him. A minute later a little door in one of the gates swung open, and the visitors stepped inside.

The door clanged shut behind them.

Perot had passed the point of no return.

He walked on, through a second pair of steel doors, into the prison compound. It was a big place, with streets between the buildings, and chickens and turkeys running around loose. He followed the others through a doorway into a reception room.

He showed his passport: The clerk pointed to a register. Perot took out his pen and signed "H. R. Perot" more or less legibly.

The clerk handed back the passport and waved him on.

He had been right. Nobody here had heard of Ross Perot.

He walked on into a waiting room--and stopped dead.

Standing there, talking to an Iranian in general's uniform, was someone who knew perfectly well who Ross Perot was.

It was Ramsey Clark, a Texan who had been U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Perot had met him several times and knew Clark's sister Mimi very well.

For a moment Perot froze. That explains the television cameras, he thought. He wondered whether he could keep out of Clark's sight. Any moment now, he thought, Ramsey will see me and say to the general: "Lord, there's Ross Perot of EDS," and if I look as if I'm trying to hide, it will be even worse.

He made a snap decision.

He walked over to Clark, stuck out his hand, and said: "Hello, Ramsey, what are you doing in jail?"

Clark looked down--he was six foot three--and laughed. They shook hands.

"How's Mimi?" Perot asked before Clark had a chance to perform introductions.

The general was saying something in Farsi to an underling.

Clark said: "Mimi's fine."

"Well, good to see you," Perot said, and walked on.

His mouth was dry as he went out of the waiting room and into the prison compound with Gallagher, Coburn, and the Embassy people. That had been a close shave. An Iranian in colonel's uniform joined them: he had been assigned to take care of them, Gallagher said. Perot wondered what Clark was saying to the general now ...

Paul was sick. The cold he had caught in the first jail had recurred. He was coughing persistently and had pains in his chest. He could not get warm, in this jail or in the old one: for three whole weeks he had been cold. He had asked his EDS visitors to get him warm underwear, but for some reason they had not brought any.

He was also miserable. He really had expected that Coburn and the rescue team would ambush the bus that brought him and Bill here from the Ministry of Justice, and when the bus had entered the impregnable Gasr Prison he had been bitterly disappointed.

General Mohari, who ran the prison, had explained to Paul and Bill that he was in charge of all the jails in Tehran, and he had arranged for their transfer to this one for their own safety. It was small consolation: being less vulnerable to the mobs, this place was also more difficult, if not impossible, for the rescue team to attack.

The Gasr Prison was part of a large military complex. On its west side was the old Gasr Ghazar Palace, which had been turned into a police academy by the Shah's father. The prison compound had once been the palace gardens. To the north was a military hospital; to the east an army camp where helicopters took off and landed all day.

The compound itself was bounded by an inner wall twenty-five or thirty feet high, and an outer wall twelve feet high. Inside were fifteen or twenty separate buildings, including a bakery, a mosque, and six cell blocks, one reserved for women.

Paul and Bill were in Building Number 8. It was a two-story block in a courtyard surrounded by a fence of tall iron bars covered with chicken wire. The environment was not bad, for a jail. There was a fountain in the middle of the courtyard, rose bushes around the sides, and ten or fifteen pine trees. The prisoners were allowed outside during the day, and could play volleyball or Ping-Pong in the courtyard. However, they could not pass through the courtyard gate, which was manned by a guard.

The ground floor of the building was a small hospital with twenty or so patients, mostly mental cases. They screamed a lot. Paul and Bill and a handful of other prisoners were on the first floor. They had a large cell, about twenty feet by thirty, which they shared with only one other prisoner, an Iranian lawyer in his fifties who spoke English and French as well as Farsi. He had showed them pictures of his villa in France. There was a TV set in the cell.

Meals were prepared by some of the prisoners--who were paid for this by the others--and eaten in a separate dining room. The food here was better than at the first jail. Extra privileges could be bought, and one of the other inmates, apparently a hugely wealthy man, had a private room and meals brought in from outside. The routine was relaxed: there were no set times for getting up and going to bed.

For all that, Paul was thoroughly depressed. A measure of extra comfort meant little. What he wanted was freedom.

He was not much cheered when they were told, on the morning of January 19, that they had visitors.

There was a visiting room on the ground floor of Building Number 8, but today, without explanation, they were taken out of the building and along the street.

Paul realized they were headed for a building known as the Officers' Club, set in a small tropical garden with ducks and peacocks. As they approached the place he glanced around the compound and saw his visitors coming in the opposite direction.

He could not believe his eyes.

"My God!" he said delightedly. "It's Ross!"

Forgetting where he was, he turned to run over to Perot: the guard jerked him back.

"Can you believe this?" he said to Bill. "Perot's here!"

The guard hustled him through the garden. Paul kept looking back at Perot, wondering whether his eyes were deceiving him. He was led into a big circular room with banqueting tables around the outside and walls covered with small triangles of mirrored glass: it was like a small ball-room. A moment later Perot came in with Gallagher, Coburn, and several other people.

Perot was grinning broadly. Paul shook his hand, then embraced him. It was an emotional moment. Paul felt the way he did when he listened to "The Star Spangled Banner": a kind of shiver went up and down his spine. He was loved, he was cared for, he had friends, he belonged. Perot had come halfway across the world into the middle of a revolution just to visit him.

Perot and Bill embraced and shook hands. Bill said: "Ross, what in the world are you doing here? Have you come to take us home?"

"Not quite," Perot said. "Not yet."

The guards gathered at the far end of the room to drink tea. The Embassy staff who had come in with Perot sat around another table, talking to a woman prisoner.

Perot put his box on a table. "There's some long underwear in here for you," he said to Paul. "We couldn't buy any, so this is mine, and I want it back, you hear?"

"Sure," Paul grinned.

"We brought you some books as well, and groceries--peanut butter and tuna fish and juice and I don't know what." He took a stack of envelopes from his pocket. "And your mail."

Paul glanced at his. There was a letter from Ruthie. Another envelope was addressed to "Chapanoodle." Paul smiled: that would be from his friend David Behne, whose son Tommy, unable to pronounce "Chiapparone," had dubbed Paul "Chapanoodle." He pocketed the letters to read later, and said: "How's Ruthie?"

"She's just fine. I talked to her on the phone," Perot said. "Now, we have assigned one man to each of your wives, to make sure everything necessary is done to take care of them. Ruthie's in Dallas now, Paul, staying with Jim and Cathy Nyfeler. She's buying a house, and Tom Walter is handling all the legal details for her."

He turned to Bill. "Emily has gone to visit her sister Vickie in North Carolina. She needed a break. She's been working with Tim Reardon in Washington, putting pressure on the State Department. She wrote to Rosalynn Carter--you know, as one wife to another--she's trying everything. Matter of fact, we're all trying everything ..."

As Perot ran down the long list of people who had been asked to help--from Texas congressmen all the way up to Henry Kissinger--Bill realized that the main purpose of Perot's visit was to boost his and Paul's morale. It was something of an anticlimax. For a moment back there, when he had seen Perot walking across the compound with the other guys, grinning all over his face, Bill had thought: here comes the rescue party--at last they've got this damn thing solved, and Perot is coming to tell us personally. He was disappointed. But he cheered up as Perot talked. With his letters from home and his box of good-ies, Perot was like Santa Claus; and his presence here, and the big grin on his face, symbolized a tremendous defiance of Dadgar, the mobs, and everything that threatened them.

Bill was worried, now, about Emily's morale. He knew instinctively what was going on in his wife's mind. The fact that she had gone to North Carolina told him she had given up hope. It had become too much for her to keep up a facade of normality with the children at her parents' house. He knew, somehow, that she had started smoking again. That would puzzle little Chris. Emily had given up smoking when she went into the hospital to have her gallbladder removed, and she had told Chris then that she had had her smoker taken out. Now he would wonder how it had got back in.

"If all this fails," Perot was saying, "we have another team in town who will get you out of here by other methods. You'll recognize all the members of the team except one, the leader, an older man."

Paul said: "I have a problem with that, Ross. Why should a bunch of guys get cut up for the sake of two?"

Bill wondered just what was being planned. Would a helicopter fly over the compound and pick them up? Would the U.S. Army storm the walls? It was hard to imagine--but with Perot, anything could happen.

Coburn said to Paul: "I want you to observe and memorize all the details you can about the compound and the prison routine, just like before."

Bill was feeling embarrassed about his mustache. He had grown it to make him look more Iranian. EDS executives were not allowed to have mustaches or beards, but he had not expected to see Perot. It was silly, he knew, but he felt uncomfortable about it. "I apologize for this," he said, touching his upper lip. "I'm trying to be inconspicuous. I'll shave it off as soon as I get out of here."

"Keep it," Perot said with a smile. "Let Emily and the children see it. Anyway, we're going to change the dress code. We've had the results of the employee attitude survey, and we'll probably permit mustaches, and colored shirts, too."

Bill looked at Coburn: "And beards?"

"No beards. Coburn has a very special excuse."

The guards came to break up the party: visiting time was over.

Perot said: "We don't know whether we'll get you out quickly or slowly. Tell yourselves it will be slowly. If you get up each morning thinking 'Today could be the day,' you may have a lot of disappointments and become demoralized. Prepare yourselves for a long stay, and you may be pleasantly surprised. But always remember this: we will get you out."

They all shook hands. Paul said: "I really don't know how to thank you for coming, Ross."

Perot smiled. "Just don't leave without my underwear."

They all walked out of the building. The EDS men headed across the compound toward the prison gate, leaving Paul and Bill and their guards watching. As his friends disappeared, Bill was seized by a longing just to go with them.

Not today, he told himself, not today.

Perot wondered whether he would be allowed to leave.

Ramsey Clark had had a full hour to let the cat out of the bag. What had he said to the general? Would there be a reception committee waiting in the administration block at the prison entrance?

His heart beat faster as he entered the waiting room. There was no sign of the general or of Clark. He walked through and into the reception area. Nobody looked at him.

With Coburn and Gallagher close behind, he walked through the first set of doors.

Nobody stopped him.

He was going to get away with it.

He crossed the little courtyard and waited by the big gates.

The small door set into one of the gates was opened.

Perot walked out of the prison.

The TV cameras were still there.

All I need, he thought, having gotten this far, is to have the U.S. networks show my picture ...

He pushed his way through the crowd to the Embassy minibus and climbed aboard.

Coburn and Gallagher got on with him, but the Embassy people had lagged behind.

Perot sat on the bus, looking out the window. The crowd in the square seemed malevolent. They were shouting in Farsi. Perot had no idea what they were saying.

He wished the Embassy people would hurry up.

"Where are those guys?" he said tetchily.

"They're coming," Coburn said.

"I thought we'd all just come on out, get in the bus, and leave."

A minute later the prison door opened again and the Embassy people came out. They got on the bus. The driver started the engine and pulled away across Gasr Square.

Perot relaxed.

He need not have worried quite so much. Ramsey Clark, who was there at the invitation of Iranian human-rights groups, did not have such a good memory. He had known that Perot's face was vaguely familiar, but thought he was Colonel Frank Borman, the president of Eastern Airlines.

2___

Emily Gaylord sat down with her needlepoint. She was making a nude for Bill.

Jay Coburn: holding in his hands the safety of 131 employees in a city where mob violence ruled the streets

Paul and Bill: their bail was S13 million.

Ross Perot: until this moment, life had been good to him.

Perot's parents: he had his father's love of jokes, his mother's iron will.

Bull Simons. ABOVE with Lucille. BELOW, the San Francisco party.

ABOVE. the Seventh Floor Squad.

FROM LEFT: gentle Mery Stauffer. aggressive "Tom Luce, slow-talking Tom Walter, and argumentative T. J. Marquez.

BELOW. Tehran negotiators. FROM LEFT jovial Bill Gayden. persistent John Howell, and quick-tempered keane Taylor.

Sculley: world's worst liar

Schwebach : explosives

Boulware: independent

The Dirty Dozen they were not.

Davis: karate

Jackson: rocket man

Poche: iron man

ABOVE, the code.

BELOW, Ross Perot and his son.

Fire and smoke seen from the roof of the EDS Bucharest office.

Iran exploded into revolution on Friday, February 9, 1979.

ON THE RUN

Keane Taylor in cold-weather gear.

Lunch break. FROM LEFT Rashid, Simons, Gayden, and Bill.

The mountains of northwest Iran.

Davis and Gayden.

A beautiful sight: the bus at the border.

ABOARD THE "PERSIAN WHOREHOUSE"

Simons and Boulware.

Pilot John Carlen.

Davis, Perot, and Gayden.

Taylor and Coburn.

SLEEPING EAGLES

Simons and Coburn

Perot.

Paul.

Sculley.

TOGETHER AGAIN

Bill and Emily.

Paul and Ruthie.

John Howell with Angela and baby Michael.

Bob, Molly, and Christine Young.

Perot and Simons tell the story.

Bill with Emily and daughters Vicki and Jacqueline.

She was back at her parents' house in Washington, and it was another normal day of quiet desperation. She had driven Vicki to high school, then returned and taken Jackie, Jenny, and Chris to elementary school. She had dropped by her sister Dorothy's place and talked for a while with her and her husband, Tim Reardon. Tim was still working through Senator Kennedy and Congressman Tip O'Neill to put pressure on the State Department.

Emily was becoming obsessed with Dadgar, the mystery man who had the power to put her husband in jail and keep him there. She wanted to confront Dadgar herself, and ask him personally why he was doing this to her. She had even asked Tim to try to get her a diplomatic passport, so she could go to Iran and just knock on Dadgar's door. Tim had said it was a pretty crazy idea, and she realized he was right; but she was desperate to do something, anything, to get Bill back.

Now she was waiting for the daily call from Dallas. It was usually Ross, T. J. Marquez, or Jim Nyfeler who called. After that she would pick up the children, then help them with their homework for a while. Then there was nothing ahead but the lonely night.

She had only recently told Bill's parents that he was in jail. Bill had asked her, in a letter read over the phone by Keane Taylor, not to tell them until it was absolutely necessary, because Bill's father had a history of strokes and the shock might be dangerous. But after three weeks the pretense had become impossible, so she had broken the news; and Bill's father had been angry at having been kept in the dark so long. Sometimes it was hard to know the right thing to do.

The phone rang, and she snatched it up. "Hello?"

"Emily? This is Jim Nyfeler."

"Hi, Jim, what's the news?"

"Just that they've been moved to another jail."

Why was there never any good news?

"It's nothing to worry about," Jim said. "In fact, it's good. The old jail was in the south of the city, where the fighting is. This one is further north, and more secure--they'll be safer there."

Emily lost her cool. "But, Jim," she yelled, "you've been telling me for three weeks that they're perfectly safe in jail. Now you say they've been moved to a new jail and now they'll be safe!"

"Emily--"

"Come on, please don't lie to me!"

"Emily--"

"Just tell it like it is and be upfront, okay?"

"Emily, I don't think they have been in danger up till now, but the Iranians are taking a sensible precaution, okay?"

Emily felt ashamed of herself for getting mad at him. "I'm sorry, Jim."

"That's all right."

They talked a little longer, then Emily hung up and went back to her needlepoint. I'm losing my grip, she thought. I'm going around in a trance, taking the kids to school, talking to Dallas, going to bed at night and getting up in the morning ...

Visiting her sister Vickie for a few days had been a good idea, but she didn't really need a change of scene--what she needed was Bill.

It was hard to keep on hoping. She began to think about how life might be without Bill. She had an aunt who worked at Woody's Department Store in Washington: maybe she could get a job there. Or she could talk to her father about getting secretarial work. She wondered whether she would ever fall in love with anyone else, if Bill should die in Tehran. She thought not.

She remembered when they were first married. Bill had been at college, and they were short of money; but they had gone ahead and done it because they could not bear to be apart any longer. Later, as Bill's career began to take off, they prospered, and gradually bought better cars, bigger houses, more expensive clothes ... more things. How worthless those things were, she thought now; how little it mattered whether she was rich or poor. Bill was what she wanted, and he was all she needed. He would always be enough for her, enough to make her happy.

If he ever came back.

Karen Chiapparone said: "Mommy, why doesn't Daddy call? He always calls when he's away."

"He called today," Ruthie lied. "He's fine."

"Why did he call when I was at school? I'd like to talk to him."

"Honey, it's so difficult to get through from Tehran--the lines are so busy. He just has to call when he can."

"Oh."

Karen wandered off to watch TV, and Ruthie sat down. It was getting dark outside. She was finding it increasingly difficult to lie to everyone about Paul.

That was why she had left Chicago and come to Dallas. Living with her parents and keeping the secret from them had become impossible. Mom would say: "Why do Ross and the fellows from EDS keep calling you?"

"They just want to make sure we're okay, you know," Ruthie would say with a forced smile.

"That is so nice of Ross to call."

Here in Dallas she could at least talk openly to other EDS people. Moreover, now that the Iran business was certain to be closed down, Paul would be based at EDS headquarters, at least for a while, so Dallas would be their home; and Karen and Ann Marie had to go to school.

They were all living with Jim and Cathy Nyfeler. Cathy was especially sympathetic, for her husband had been on the original list of four men whose passports Dadgar had asked for: if Jim had happened to be in Iran at the time, he would now be in jail with Paul and Bill. Stay with us, Cathy had said; it will only be for maybe a week; then Paul will be back. That had been at the beginning of January. Since then Ruthie had proposed getting an apartment of her own, but Cathy would not hear of it.

Right now Cathy was at the hairdresser's, the children were watching TV in another room, and Jim was not yet home from work, so Ruthie was alone with her thoughts.

With Cathy's help she was keeping busy and putting on a brave face. She had enrolled Karen in school and found a kindergarten for Ann Marie. She went out to lunch with Cathy and some of the other EDS wives--Mary Boulware, Liz Coburn, Mary Sculley, Marva Davis, and Toni Dvoranchik. She wrote bright, optimistic letters to Paul, and listened to his bright, optimistic replies read over the phone from Tehran. She shopped and went to dinner parties.

She had killed a lot of time house-hunting. She did not know Dallas well, but she remembered Paul saying that Central Expressway was a nightmare, so she looked for houses well away from it. She had found one she liked and decided to buy it, so there would be a real home for Paul to come back to, but there were legal problems because he was not here to sign the papers: Tom Walter was trying to sort that out.

Ruthie was making it look good, but inside she was dying.

She rarely slept more than an hour at night. She kept waking up wondering whether she would ever see Paul again. She tried to think about what she would do if he did not come back. She supposed she would return to Chicago and stay with Mom and Dad for a while, but she would not want to live with them permanently. No doubt she could get some kind of a job ... But it was not the practical business of living without a man and taking care of herself that bothered her: it was the idea of being without Paul, forever. She could not imagine what life would be like if he were not there. What would she do, what would she care about, what would she want, what could possibly make her happy? She was completely dependent on him, she realized. She could not live without him.

She heard a car outside. That would be Jim, home from work: perhaps he would have some news.

A moment later he came in. "Hi, Ruthie. Cathy not home?"

"She's at the hairdresser's. What happened today?"

"Well ..."

She knew from his expression that he had nothing good to tell her and he was trying to find an encouraging way of saying so.

"Well, they had a meeting scheduled to talk about the bail, but the Iranians didn't turn up. Tomorrow--"

"But why?" Ruthie fought to keep calm. "Why don't they turn up when they arrange these meetings?"

"You know, sometimes they're called out on strike, and sometimes people just can't move around the city because of ... because of the demonstrations, and so on ..."

She seemed to have been hearing reports like this for weeks. There were always delays, postponements, frustrations. "But, Jim," she began; then the tears started and she could not stop them. "Jim ..." Her throat tightened up until she could not speak. She thought: All I want is my husband! Jim stood there looking helpless and embarrassed. All the misery she had kept locked up for so long suddenly flooded out, and she could not control herself any longer. She burst into tears and ran from the room. She rushed to her bedroom, threw herself on the bed, and lay there sobbing her heart out.

Liz Coburn sipped her drink. Across the table were Pat Sculley's wife, Mary, and another EDS wife who had been evacuated from Tehran, Toni Dvoranchik. The three women were at Recipes, a restaurant on Greenville Avenue, Dallas. They were drinking strawberry Daiquiris.

Toni Dvoranchik's husband was here in Dallas. Liz knew that Pat Sculley had disappeared, like Jay, in the direction of Europe. Now Mary Sculley was talking as if Pat had gone not just to Europe but to Iran.

"Is Pat in Tehran?" Liz asked.

"They're all in Tehran, I guess," Mary said.

Liz was horrified. "Jay in Tehran ..." She wanted to cry. Jay had told her he was in Paris. Why couldn't he tell the truth? Pat Sculley had told Mary the truth. But Jay was different. Some men would play poker for a few hours, but Jay had to play all night and all the next day. Other men would play nine or eighteen holes of golf: Jay would play thirty-six. Lots of men had demanding jobs, but Jay had to work for EDS. Even in the army, when the two of them had been not much more than kids, Jay had to volunteer for one of the most dangerous assignments, helicopter pilot. Now he had gone to Tehran in the middle of a revolution. Same old thing, she thought: he's gone away, he's lying to me, and he's in danger. She suddenly felt cold all over, as if she were in shock. He's not coming back, she thought numbly. He's not going to get out of there alive.

3____

Perot's good spirits soon passed. He had got into the prison, defying Dadgar, and had cheered up Paul and Bill; but Dadgar still held all the cards. After six days in Tehran he understood why the political pressure he had been putting on in Washington had been ineffectual: the old regime in Iran was struggling for survival and had no control. Even if he posted the bail--and a lot of problems had to be solved before that could happen--Paul and Bill would still be held in Iran. And Simons's rescue plan was now in tatters, ruined by the move to the new prison. There seemed to be no hope.

That night Perot went to see Simons.

He waited until dark, for safety. He wore his jogging suit with tennis shoes and a dark businessman's overcoat. Keane Taylor drove him.

The rescue team had moved out of Taylor's house. Taylor had now met Dadgar face-to-face, and Dadgar had started examining EDS's records: it was possible, Simons had reasoned, that Dadgar would raid Taylor's house, looking for incriminating documents. So Simons, Coburn, and Poche were living in the home of Bill and Toni Dvoranchik, who were now back in Dallas. Two more of the team had made it to Tehran from Paris: Pat Sculley and Jim Schwebach, the short but deadly duo who had been flank guards in the original, now useless, rescue scenario.

In a typical Tehran arrangement, Dvoranchik's home was the ground floor of a two-story house, with the landlord living upstairs. Taylor and the rescue team left Perot alone with Simons. Perot looked around the living room distastefully. No doubt the place had been spotless when Toni Dvoranchik lived here, but now, inhabited by five men, none of whom was very interested in housekeeping, it was dirty and run-down, and it stank of Simons's cigars.

Simons's huge frame was slumped in an armchair. His white whiskers were bushy and his hair long. He was chain-smoking, as usual, drawing heavily on his little cigar and inhaling with relish.

"You've seen the new prison," Perot said.

"Yeah," Simons rasped.

"What do you think?"

"The idea of taking that place with the kind of frontal attack we had in mind just isn't worth talking about."

"That's what I figured."

"Which leaves a number of possibilities."

It does? thought Perot.

Simons went on: "One: I understand there are cars parked in the prison compound. We may find a way to get Paul and Bill driven out of there in the trunk of a car. As part of that plan, or as an alternative, we may be able to bribe or blackmail this general who is in charge of the place."

"General Mohari."

"Right. One of your Iranian employees is getting us a rundown on the man."

"Good."

"Two: the negotiating team. If they can get Paul and Bill released under house arrest, or something of that kind, we can snatch the two of them. Get Taylor and those guys to concentrate on this house-arrest idea. Agree to any conditions the Iranians care to name, but get 'em out of that jail. Working on the assumption that they would be confined to their homes and kept under surveillance, we're developing a new rescue scenario."

Perot was beginning to feel better. There was an aura of confidence about this massive man. A few minutes ago Perot had felt almost hopeless: now Simons was calmly listing fresh approaches to the problem, as if the move to the new jail, the bail problems, and the collapse of the legitimate government were minor snags rather than total catastrophe.

"Three," Simons went on, "there's a revolution going on here. Revolutions are predictable. The same things happen every damn time. You can't say when they'll occur, only that they will, sooner or later. And one of the things that always happens is, the mob storms the prisons and lets everyone out."

Perot was intrigued. "Is that so?"

Simons nodded. "Those are the three possibilities. Of course, at this point in the game we can't pick one: we have to prepare for each of them. Whichever of the three happens first, we'll need a plan for getting everyone out of this goddam country just as soon as Paul and Bill are in our hands."

"Yes." Perot was worried about his own departure: that of Paul and Bill would be a good deal more hazardous. "I've had promises of help from the American military--"

"Sure," Simons said. "I'm not saying they're insincere, but I will say they have higher priorities, and I'm not prepared to place a great deal of reliance on their promises."

"All right." That was a matter for Simons's judgment, and Perot was content to leave it to him. In fact, he was content to leave everything to Simons. Simons was probably the best-qualified man in the world to do this job, and Perot had complete faith in him. "What can I do?"

"Get back to the States. For one thing, you're in danger here. For another, I need you over there. Chances are, when we eventually come out, it won't be on a scheduled flight. We may not fly at all. You'll have to pick us up somewhere--it could be Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey, or Afghanistan--and that will take organizing. Go home and stay ready."

"Okay." Perot stood up. Simons had done to him what Perot sometimes did to his staff: inspired him with the strength to go one more mile when the game seemed lost. "I'll leave tomorrow."

He got a reservation on British Airways flight 200, Tehran to London via Kuwait, leaving at 10:20 A.M. on January 20, the next day.

He called Margot and asked her to meet him in London. He wanted a few days alone with her: they might not get another chance, once the rescue started to unfold.

They had had good times in London in the past. They would stay at the Savoy Hotel. (Margot liked Claridge's, but Perot did not--they turned the heat too high, and if he opened the windows he was kept awake by the roar of the all-night traffic along Brook Street.) He and Margot would see plays and concerts, and go to Margot's favorite London nightclub, Annabel's. For a few days they would enjoy life.

If he got out of Iran.

In order to minimize the amount of time he would have to spend at the airport, he stayed at the hotel until the last minute. He called the airport to find out whether the flight would leave on time, and was told that it would.

He checked in a few minutes before ten o'clock.

Rich Gallagher, who accompanied him to the airport, went off to inquire whether the authorities were planning to give Perot a hard time. Gallagher had done this before. Together with an Iranian friend who worked for Pan Am, he walked through to passport control carrying Perot's passport. The Iranian explained that a VIP was coming through, and asked to clear the passport in advance. The official at the desk obligingly looked through the loose-leaf folder that contained the stop list and said there would be no problems for Mr. Perot. Gallagher returned with the good news.

Perot remained apprehensive. If they wanted to pick him up, they might be smart enough to lie to Gallagher.

Affable Bill Gayden, the president of EDS World, was flying in to take over direction of the negotiating team. Gayden had left Dallas for Tehran once before, but had turned back in Paris on hearing about Bunny Fleischaker's warning of more arrests to come. Now he, like Perot, had decided to risk it. By chance, his flight came in while Perot was waiting to leave, and they had an opportunity to talk.

In his suitcase Gayden had eight American passports belonging to EDS executives who looked vaguely like Paul or Bill.

Perot said: "I thought we were getting forged passports for them. Couldn't you find a way?"

"Yeah, we found a way," Gayden said. "If you need a passport in a hurry, you can take all the documentation down to the courthouse in Dallas; then they put everything in an envelope and you carry it to New Orleans, where they issue the passport. It's just a plain government envelope sealed with Scotch tape, so you could open it on the way to New Orleans, take out the photographs, replace them with photographs of Paul and Bill--which we have--reseal the envelope, and, bingo, you've got passports for Paul and Bill in false names. But it's against the law."

"So what did you do instead?"

"I told all the evacuees that I had to have their passports in order to get their belongings shipped over from Tehran. I got a hundred or two hundred passports, and I picked the best eight. I bogused up a letter from someone in the States to someone here in Tehran saying: 'Here are the passports you asked for us to return so you could deal with the immigration authorities,' just so that I've got a piece of paper to show if I'm asked why the hell I'm carrying eight passports."

"If Paul and Bill use those passports to cross a frontier, they'll be breaking the law anyway."

"If we get that far, we'll break the law."

Perot nodded. "It makes sense."

His flight was called. He said goodbye to Gayden and to Taylor, who had driven him to the airport and would take Gayden to the Hyatt. Then he went off to discover the truth about the stop list.

He went first through a "Passengers Only" gate, where his boarding pass was checked. He walked along a corridor to a booth where he paid a small sum as airport tax. Then, on his right, he saw a series of passport-control desks.

Here the stop list was kept.

One of the desks was manned by a girl who was absorbed in a paperback book. Perot approached her. He handed over his passport and a yellow exit form. The form had his name at the top.

The girl took the yellow sheet, opened his passport, stamped it, and handed it back without looking at him. She returned to her book immediately.

Perot walked into the departure lounge.

The flight was delayed.

He sat down. He was on tenterhooks. At any moment the girl could finish her book, or just get bored with it, and start checking the stop list against the names on the yellow forms. Then, he imagined, they would come for him, the police or the military or Dadgar's investigators, and he would go to jail, and Margot would be like Ruthie and Emily, not knowing whether she would ever see her husband again.

He checked the departures board every few seconds: it just said "Delayed."

He sat on the edge of his chair for the first hour.

Then he began to feel resigned. If they were going to catch him, they would, and there was nothing he could do about it. He started to read a magazine. Over the next hour he read everything in his briefcase. Then he started talking to the man sitting next to him. Perot learned that the man was an English engineer working in Iran on a project for a large British company. They chatted for a while, then swapped magazines.

In a few hours, Perot thought, I'll be in a beautiful hotel suite with Margot--or in an Iranian jail. He pushed the thought from his mind.

Lunchtime went by, and the afternoon wore on. He began to believe they were not going to come for him.

The flight was finally called at six o'clock.

Perot stood up. If they come for me now ...

He joined the crowd and approached the departure gate. There was a security check. He was frisked, and waved through.

I've almost made it, he thought as he boarded the plane. He sat between two fat people in an economy seat--it was an all-economy flight. I think I've made it.

The doors were closed and the plane began to move.

It taxied onto the runway and gathered speed.

The plane took off.

He had made it.

He had always been lucky.

His thoughts turned to Margot. She was handling this crisis the way she had handled the prisoners-of-war adventures: she understood her husband's concept of duty and she never complained. That was why he could stay focused on what he had to do, and block out negative thoughts that would excuse inaction. He was lucky to have her. He thought of all the lucky things that had happened to him: good parents, getting into the Naval Academy, meeting Margot, having such fine children, starting EDS, getting good people to work for him, brave people like the volunteers he had left behind in Iran ...

He wondered superstitiously whether an individual had a certain limited quantity of luck in his life. He saw his luck as sand in an hourglass, slowly but steadily running out. What happens, he thought, when it's all gone?

The plane descended toward Kuwait. He was out of Iranian airspace--he had escaped.

While the plane was refueling he walked to the open door and stood there, breathing the fresh air and ignoring the stewardess who kept asking him to return to his seat. There was a nice breeze blowing across the tarmac, and it was a relief to get away from the fat people sitting on either side of him. The stewardess eventually gave up and went to do something else. He watched the sun go down. Luck, he thought; I wonder how much I've got left?

Eight

1____

The rescue team in Tehran now consisted of Simons, Coburn, Poche, Sculley, and Schwebach. Simons decided that Boulware, Davis, and Jackson would not come to Tehran. The idea of rescuing Paul and Bill by frontal assault was now dead, so he did not need such a big team. He sent Glenn Jackson to Kuwait, to investigate that end of the southerly route out of Iran. Boulware and Davis went back to the States to await further orders.

Majid reported to Coburn that General Mohari, the man in charge of the Gasr Prison, was not easily corruptible, but had two daughters at school in the United States. The team briefly discussed kidnapping the girls and forcing Mohari to help Paul and Bill escape; but they rejected the idea. (Perot hit the roof when he learned they had even discussed it.) The idea of sneaking Paul and Bill out in the trunk of a car was put on the back burner for a while.

For two or three days they concentrated on what they would do if Paul and Bill were released under house arrest. They went to look at the houses the two men had occupied before the arrest. The snatch would be easy unless Dadgar put Paul and Bill under surveillance. The team would use two cars, they decided. The first car would pick up Paul and Bill. The second, following at a distance, would contain Sculley and Schwebach, who would be responsible for eliminating anyone who tried to tail the first car. Once again, the deadly duo would do the killing.

The two cars would keep in touch by shortwave radio, they decided. Coburn called Merv Stauffer in Dallas and ordered the equipment. Boulware would take the radios to London: Schwebach and Sculley went to London to meet him and pick them up. While in London, the deadly duo would try to get hold of some good maps of Iran, for use during the escape from the country, should the team have to leave by road. (No good maps of the country were to be found in Tehran, as the Jeep Club had learned in happier days: Gayden said Persian maps were at the "Turn left by the dead horse" level.)

Simons wanted also to prepare for the third possibility--that Paul and Bill would be released by a mob storming the prison. What should the team do in that eventuality? Coburn was continuously monitoring the situation in the city, calling his contacts in U.S. military intelligence and several trustworthy Iranian employees: if the prison were overrun he would know very quickly. What then? Someone would have to look for Paul and Bill and bring them to safety. But a bunch of Americans driving into the middle of a riot would be asking for trouble: Paul and Bill would be safer mingling inconspicuously with the crowd of escaping prisoners. Simons told Coburn to speak to Paul about this possibility the next time he visited the jail, and instruct Paul to head for the Hyatt Hotel.

However, an Iranian could go looking for Paul and Bill in the riots. Simons asked Coburn to recommend an Iranian employee of EDS who was really street-smart.

Coburn thought immediately of Rashid.

He was a dark-skinned, rather good-looking twenty-three-year-old from an affluent Tehran family. He had completed EDS's training program for systems engineers. He was intelligent and resourceful, and he had bags of charm. Coburn recalled the last time Rashid had demonstrated his talent for improvisation. Ministry of Health employees who were on partial strike had refused to key the data for the payroll system, but Rashid had got all the input together, taken it down to Bank Omran, talked someone there into keying the data, then run the program on the Ministry computer. The trouble with Rashid was that you had to keep an eye on him, because he never consulted anyone before implementing his unconventional ideas. Getting the data keyed the way he had constituted strikebreaking, and might have got EDS into big trouble--indeed, when Bill had heard about it he had been more anxious than pleased. Rashid was excitable and impulsive, and his English was not so good, so he tended to dash off and do his own crazy thing without telling anyone--a tendency that made his managers nervous. But he always got away with it. He could talk his way into and out of anything. At the airport, meeting people or seeing them off, he always managed to pass through all the "Passengers Only" barriers even though he never had a boarding card, ticket, or passport to show. Coburn knew him well, and liked him enough to have brought him home for supper several times. Coburn also trusted him completely, especially since the strike, when Rashid had been one of Coburn's informants among the hostile Iranian employees.

However, Simons would not trust Rashid on Coburn's say-so. Just as he had insisted on meeting Keane Taylor before letting him in on the secret, so he would want to talk to Rashid.

So Coburn arranged a meeting.

When Rashid was eight years old he had wanted to be President of the United States.

At twenty-three he knew he could never be President, but he still wanted to go to America, and EDS was going to be his ticket. He knew he had it in him to be a great businessman. He was a student of the psychology of the human being, and it had not taken him long to understand the mentality of EDS people. They wanted results, not excuses. If you were given a task, it was always better to do a little more than was expected. If for some reason the task was difficult, or even impossible, it was best not to say so: they hated to hear people whining about problems. You never said: "I can't do that because ..." You always said: "This is the progress I have made so far, and this is the problem I am working on right now ..." It so happened that these attitudes suited Rashid perfectly. He had made himself useful to EDS, and he knew the company appreciated it.

His greatest achievement had been installing computer terminals in offices where the Iranian staff were suspicious and hostile. So great was the resistance that Pat Sculley had been able to install no more than two per month: Rashid had installed the remaining eighteen in two months. He had planned to capitalize on this. He had composed a letter to Ross Perot, who--he understood--was the head of EDS, asking to be allowed to complete his training in Dallas. He had intended to ask all the EDS managers in Tehran to sign the letter: but events had overtaken him, most of the managers had been evacuated, and EDS in Iran was falling to pieces; and he never mailed the letter. So he would think of something else.

He could always find a way. Everything was possible for Rashid. He could do anything. He had even got out of the army. At a time when thousands of young middle-class Iranians were spending fortunes in bribes to avoid military service, Rashid, after a few weeks in uniform, had convinced the doctors that he was incurably ill with a twitching disease. His comrades and the officers over him knew that he was in perfect health, but every time he saw the doctor he twitched uncontrollably. He went before medical boards and twitched for hours--an absolutely exhausting business, he discovered. Finally, so many doctors had certified him ill that he got his discharge papers. It was crazy, ridiculous, impossible--but doing the impossible was Rashid's normal practice.

So he knew that he would go to America. He did not know how, but careful and elaborate planning was not his style anyway. He was a spur-of-the-moment man, an improviser, an opportunist. His chance would come and he would seize it.

Mr. Simons interested him. He was not like the other EDS managers. They were all in their thirties or forties, but Simons was nearer to sixty. His long hair and white whiskers and big nose seemed more Iranian than American. Finally, he did not come right out with whatever was on his mind. People like Sculley and Coburn would say: "This is the situation and this is what I want you to do and you need to have it done by tomorrow morning ..." Simons just said: "Let's go for a walk."

They strolled around the streets of Tehran. Rashid found himself talking about his family, his work at EDS, and his views on the psychology of the human being. They could hear continual shooting, and the streets were alive with people marching and chanting. Everywhere they saw the wreckage of past battles, overturned cars and burned-out buildings. "The Marxists smash up expensive cars and the Muslims trash the liquor stores," Rashid told Simons.

"Why is this happening?" Simons asked him.

"This is the time for Iranians to prove themselves, to accomplish their ideas, and to gain their freedom."

They found themselves in Gasr Square, facing the prison. Rashid said: "There are many Iranians in these jails simply because they ask for freedom."

Simons pointed at the crowd of women in chadors. "What are they doing?"

"Their husbands and sons are unjustly imprisoned, so they gather here, wailing and crying to the guards to let the prisoners go."

Simons said: "Well, I guess I feel the same about Paul and Bill as those women do about their men."

"Yes. I, too, am very concerned about Paul and Bill."

"But what are you doing about it?" Simons said.

Rashid was taken aback. "I am doing everything I can to help my American friends," he said. He thought of the dogs and cats. One of his tasks at the moment was to care for all the pets left behind by EDS evacuees--including four dogs and twelve cats. Rashid had never had pets and did not know how to deal with large, aggressive dogs. Every time he went to the apartment where the dogs were stashed to feed them, he had to hire two or three men off the streets to help him restrain the animals. Twice now he had taken them all to the airport in cages, having heard that there was a flight out that would accept them; and both times the flight had been canceled. He thought of telling Simons about this, but somehow he knew that Simons would not be impressed.

Simons was up to something, Rashid thought, and it was not a business matter. Simons struck him as an experienced man--you could see that just by looking at his face. Rashid did not believe in experience. He believed in fast education. Revolution, not evolution. He liked the inside track, short cuts, accelerated development, superchargers. Simons was different. He was a patient man, and Rashid--analyzing Simons's psychology--guessed that the patience came from a strong will. When he is ready, Rashid thought, he will let me know what he wants from me.

"Do you know anything about the French Revolution?" Simons asked.

"A little."

"This place reminds me of the Bastille--a symbol of oppression."

It was a good comparison, Rashid thought.

Simons went on: "The French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and let all the prisoners out."

"I think the same will happen here. It's a possibility, at least."

Simons nodded. "If it happens, someone ought to be here to take care of Paul and Bill."

"Yes." That will be me, Rashid thought.

They stood together in Gasr Square, looking at the high walls and huge gates, and the wailing women in their black robes. Rashid recalled his principle: always do a little more than EDS asks of you. What if the mobs ignored Gasr Prison? Maybe he should make sure they did not. The mob was nothing but people like Rashid--young, discontented Iranian men who wanted to change their lives. He might not only join the mob--he might lead it. He might lead an attack on the prison. He, Rashid, might rescue Paul and Bill.

Nothing was impossible.

2____

Coburn did not know all that was going on in Simons's mind at this point. He had not been in on Simons's conversations with Perot and Rashid, and Simons did not volunteer much information. From what Coburn did know, the three possibilities--the trunk-of-a-car trick, the house-arrest-and-snatch routine, and the storming of the Bastille--seemed pretty vague. Furthermore, Simons was doing nothing to make it happen,but appeared content to sit around the Dvoranchik place discussing ever-more-detailed scenarios. Yet none of this made Coburn uneasy. He was an optimist anyway; and he--like Ross Perot--figured there was no point in second-guessing the world's greatest rescue expert.

While the three possibilities were simmering, Simons concentrated on routes out of Iran, the problem Coburn thought of as "Getting out of Dodge."

Coburn looked for ways of flying Paul and Bill out. He poked around warehouses at the airport, toying with the idea of shipping Paul and Bill 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 him 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 airline'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 Iranian military, he suspected the aircraft were not being properly maintained and he knew they were short of spare parts. Then again, some of them might have contaminated fuel.

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 find 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--southern, 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 sure 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 another. Taylor obliged. The Cycle Man always used his motorcycle anyway: Taylor and Coburn were pretty sure the cars were for the revolutionaries. They did not care: it was more important that the Cycle Man become obligated to them.

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 fright: 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 Paris 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. 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 leave 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 sixty-mile 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 fifties as part of the American military and 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 child-raising 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 his life.

He had realized he was different from other boys his age when he went to college and found his contemporaries getting all 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 Paris--he 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 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 you?"

"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?"

"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. ("I 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.

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

But Mr. Fish was a small businessman. Boulware understood small businessmen--his 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 him 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 overlook the fact that he was high class--deceived, 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 Azerbaijanis--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 dare to go there. If you, an American, go there, you will never come back. Never."

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."

"All right, can I charter a plane?"

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

"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. All 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 nearest American Consulate. Paul and Bill might have some trouble getting out of Iran, he said, and he wanted to be prepared to cross the border himself, perhaps in a light aircraft, to bring them out. None of this fazed Mr. Fish as much as the idea of traveling in bandit country.

However, a few days later he introduced Boulware to a man who had relatives among the mountain bandits. Mr. Fish whispered that the man was a criminal, and he certainly looked the part: he had a scar on his face and little beady eyes. He said he could guarantee Boulware safe passage to the border and back, and his relatives could even take Boulware across the border into Iran, if necessary.

Boulware called Dallas and told Merv Stauffer about the plan. Stauffer relayed the news to Coburn, in code; and Coburn told Simons. Simons vetoed it. If the man is a criminal, Simons pointed out, we can't trust him.

Boulware was annoyed. He had gone to some trouble to set it up--did Simons imagine it was easy to get these people? And if you wanted to travel in bandit country, who else but a bandit would escort you? But Simons was the boss, and Boulware had no option but to ask Mr. Fish to start all over again.

Meanwhile, Sculley and Schwebach flew into Istanbul.

The deadly duo had been on a flight from London to Tehran via Copenhagen when the Iranians had closed their airport again, so Sculley and Schwebach joined Boulware in Istanbul. Cooped up in the hotel, waiting for something to happen, the three of them got cabin fever. Schwebach reverted to his Green Beret role and tried to make them all keep fit by running up and down the hotel stairs. Boulware did it once and then gave up. They became impatient with Simons, Coburn, and Poche, who seemed to be sitting in Tehran doing nothing: why didn't those guys make it happen? Then Simons sent Sculley and Schwebach back to the States. They left the radios with Boulware.

When Mr. Fish saw the radios he had a fit. It was highly illegal to own a radio transmitter in Turkey, he told Boulware. Even ordinary transistor radios had to be registered with the government, for fear their parts would be used to make transmitters for terrorists. "Don't you understand how conspicuous you are?" he said to Boulware. "You're running up a phone bill of a couple of thousand dollars a week, and you're paying cash. You don't appear to be doing business here. The maids are sure to have seen the radios and talked about it. By now you must be under surveillance. Forget your friends in Iran--you are going to end up in jail."

Boulware agreed to get rid of the radios. The snag about Simons's apparently endless patience was that further delay caused new problems. Now Sculley and Schwebach could not get back into Iran, yet still nobody had any radios. Meanwhile, Simons kept saying no to things. Mr. Fish pointed out that there were two border crossings from Iran to Turkey, one at Sero and the other at Barzagan. Simons had picked Sero. Barzagan was a bigger and more civilized place, Mr. Fish pointed out; everyone would be a little safer there. Simons said no.

A new escort was found to take Boulware to the border. Mr. Fish had a business colleague whose brother-in-law was in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, the Turkish equivalent of the CIA. The name of this secret policeman was Ilsman. His credentials would secure for Boulware army protection in bandit country. Without such credentials, Mr. Fish said, the ordinary citizen was in danger not only from bandits but also from the Turkish Army.

Mr. Fish was very jumpy. On the way to meet Ilsman, he took Boulware through a whole cloak-and-dagger routine, changing cars and switching to a bus for part of the journey, as if he were trying to shake off a tail. Boulware could not see the need for all that if they were really going to visit a perfectly upright citizen who just happened to work in the intelligence community. But Boulware was a foreigner in a strange country, and he just had to go along with Mr. Fish and trust the man.

They ended up at a big, run-down apartment building in an unfamiliar section of the city. The power was off--just like Tehran!--so it took Mr. Fish a while to find the right apartment in the dark. At first he could get no answer. His attempt to be secretive fell apart at this point, for he had to hammer on the door for what seemed like half an hour, and every other inhabitant of the building got a good look at the visitors in the meantime. Boulware just stood there feeling like a white man in Harlem. At last a woman opened up, and they went in.

It was a small, drab apartment crowded with ancient furniture and dimly lit by a couple of candles. Ilsman was a short, fat man of about Boulware's age, thirty-five. Ilsman had not seen his feet for many years--he was gross. He made Boulware think of the stereotyped fat police sergeant in the movies, with a suit too small and a sweaty shirt and a wrinkled tie wrapped around the place where his neck would have been if he had had a neck.

They sat down, and the woman--Mrs. Ilsman, Boulware presumed--served tea--just like Tehran! Boulware explained his problem, with Mr. Fish translating. Ilsman was suspicious. He cross-questioned Boulware about the two fugitive Americans. How could Boulware be sure they were innocent? Why did they have no passports? What would they bring into Turkey? In the end he seemed convinced that Boulware was leveling with him, and he offered to get Paul and Bill from the border to Istanbul for eight thousand dollars, in all.

Boulware wondered whether Ilsman was for real. Smuggling Americans into the country was a funny pastime for an intelligence agent. And if Ilsman really was MIT, who was it that Mr. Fish thought might have been following him and Boulware across town?

Perhaps Ilsman was freelancing. Eight thousand dollars was a lot of money in Turkey. It was even possible that Ilsman would tell his superiors what he was doing. After all--Ilsman might figure--if Boulware's story were true no harm would be done by helping; and if Boulware were lying, the best way to find out what he was really up to might be to accompany him to the border.

Anyway, at this point Ilsman seemed to be the best Boulware could get. Boulware agreed to the price, and Ilsman broke out a bottle of scotch.

While other members of the rescue team were fretting in various parts of the world, Simons and Coburn were driving the road from Tehran to the Turkish border.

Reconnaissance was a watchword with Simons, and he wanted to be familiar with every inch of his escape route before he embarked on it with Paul and Bill. How much fighting was there in that part of the country? What was the police presence? Were the roads passable in winter? Were the filling stations open?

In fact there were two routes to Sero, the border crossing he had chosen. (He preferred Sero because it was a little-used frontier post at a tiny village, so there would be few people and the border would be lightly guarded, whereas Barzagan--the alternative Mr. Fish kept recommending-- would be busier.) The nearest large town to Sero was Rezaiyeh. Directly across the path from Tehran to Rezaiyeh lay Lake Rezaiyeh, a hundred miles long: you had to drive around it, either to the north or to the south. The northerly route went through larger towns and would have better roads. Simons therefore preferred the southerly route, provided the roads were passable. On this reconnaissance trip, he decided, they would check out both routes, the northerly going and the southerly on the return.

He decided that the best kind of car for the trip was a British Range Rover, a cross between a jeep and a station wagon. There were no dealerships or used car lots open in Tehran now, so Coburn gave the Cycle Man the job of getting hold of two Range Rovers. The Cycle Man's solution to the problem was characteristically ingenious. He had a notice printed with his telephone number and the message: "If you would like to sell your Range Rover, call this number." Then he went around on his motorcycle and put a copy under the windshield wipers of every Range Rover he saw parked on the streets.

He got two vehicles for twenty thousand dollars each, and he also bought tools and spare parts for all but the most major repairs.

Simons and Coburn took two Iranians with them: Majid, and a cousin of Majid's who was a professor at an agricultural college in Rezaiyeh. The professor had come to Tehran to put his American wife and their children on a plane to the States: taking him back to Rezaiyeh was Simons's cover story for the trip.

They left Tehran early in the morning, with one of Keane Taylor's fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline in the back. For the first hundred miles, as far as Qazvin, there was a modern freeway. After Qazvin the road was a two-lane blacktop. The hillsides were covered with snow, but the road itself was clear. If it's like this all the way to the border, Coburn thought, we could get there in a day.

They stopped at Zanjan, two hundred miles from Tehran and the same distance from Rezaiyeh, and spoke to the local chief of police, who was related to the professor. (Coburn could never quite work out the family relationships of Iranians: they seemed to use the word "cousin" rather loosely.) This part of the country was peaceful, the police chief said; if they were to encounter any problems it would happen in the area of Tabriz.

They drove on through the afternoon, on narrow but good country roads. After another hundred miles they entered Tabriz. There was a demonstration going on, but it was nothing like the kind of battle they had got used to in Tehran, and they even felt secure enough to take a stroll around the bazaar.

Along the way Simons had been talking to Majid and the professor. It seemed like casual conversation, but by now Coburn was familiar with Simons's technique, and he knew that the colonel was feeling these two out, deciding whether he could trust them. So far the prognosis seemed good, for Simons began to drop hints about the real purpose of the trip.

The professor said that the countryside around Tabriz was pro-Shah, so before they moved on, Simons stuck a photograph of the Shah on the windshield.

The first sign of trouble came a few miles north of Tabriz, where they were stopped by a roadblock. It was an amateur affair, just two tree trunks laid across the road in such a way that cars could maneuver around them but could not pass through at speed. It was manned by villagers armed with axes and sticks.

Majid and the professor talked to the villagers. The professor showed his university identity card, and said that the Americans were scientists come to help him with a research project. It was clear, Coburn thought, that the rescue team would need to bring Iranians when and if they did the trip with Paul and Bill, to handle situations like this.

The villagers let them pass.

A little later Majid stopped and waved down a car coming in the opposite direction. The professor talked to the driver of the other car for a few minutes, then reported that the next town, Khoy, was anti-Shah. Simons took down the picture of the Shah from the windshield and replaced it with one of the Ayatollah Khomeini. From then on they would stop oncoming cars regularly and change the picture according to local politics.

On the outskirts of Khoy there was another roadblock.

Like the first one, it looked unofficial, and was manned by civilians; but this time the ragged men and boys standing behind the tree trunks were holding guns.

Majid stopped the car and they all got out.

To Coburn's horror, a teenage boy pointed a gun at him.

Coburn froze.

The gun was a 9mm Llama pistol. The boy looked about sixteen. He had probably never handled a firearm before today, Coburn thought. Amateurs with guns were dangerous. The boy was holding the gun so tightly that his knuckles showed white.

Coburn was scared. He had been shot at many times, in Vietnam, but what frightened him now was the possibility that he would be killed by goddam accident.

"Rooskie," the boy said. "Rooskie."

He thinks I'm a Russian, Coburn realized.

Perhpas it was because of the bushy red beard and the little black wool cap.

"No, American," Coburn said.

The boy kept his pistol leveled.

Coburn stared at those white knuckles and thought: I just hope the punk doesn't sneeze.

The villagers searched Simons, Majid, and the professor. Coburn, who could not take his eyes off the kid, heard Majid say: "They're looking for weapons." The only weapon they had was a little knife that Coburn was wearing in a scabbard behind his back, under his shirt.

A villager began to search Coburn, and at last the kid lowered his pistol.

Coburn breathed again.

Then he wondered what would happen when they found his knife.

The search was not thorough, and the knife was not found.

The vigilantes believed the story about a scientific project. "They apologize for searching the old man," Majid said. The "old man" was Simons, who was now looking just like an elderly Iranian peasant. "We can go on," Majid added.

They climbed back into the car.

Outside Khoy they turned south, looping over the top end of the lake, and drove down the western shore to the outskirts of Rezaiyeh.

The professor guided them into the town by remote roads, and they saw no roadblocks. The journey from Tehran had taken them twelve hours, and they were now an hour away from the border crossing at Sero.

That evening they all had dinner--chella kebab, the Iranian dish of rice and lamb--with the professor's landlord, who happened to be a customs official. Majid gently pumped the landlord for information, and learned that there was very little activity at the Sero frontier station.

They spent the night at the professor's house, a two-story villa on the outskirts of the town.

In the morning Majid and the professor drove to the border and back. They reported that there were no roadblocks and the route was safe. Then Majid went into town to seek out a contact from whom he could buy firearms, and Simons and Coburn went to the border.

They found a small frontier post with only two guards. It had a customs warehouse, a weighbridge for trucks, and a guardhouse. The road was barred by a low chain stretched between a post on one side and the wall of the guardhouse on the other. Beyond the chain were about two hundred yards of no-man's-land, then another, smaller frontier post on the Turkish side.

They got out of the car to look around. The air was pure and bitingly cold. Simons pointed across the hillside. "See the tracks?"

Coburn followed Simons's finger. In the snow, close behind the border station, was a trail where a small caravan had crossed the border, impudently close to the guards.

Simons pointed again, this time above their heads. "Easy to cut the guards off." Coburn looked up and saw a single telephone wire leading down the hill from the station. A quick snip and the guards would be isolated.

The two of them walked down the hill and took a side road, no more than a dirt track, into the hills. After a mile or so they came to a small village, just a dozen or so houses made of wood or mud brick. Speaking halting Turkish, Simons asked for the chief. A middle-aged man in baggy trousers, waistcoat, and headdress appeared. Coburn listened without understanding as Simons talked. Finally Simons shook the chief's hand, and they left.

"What was all that about?" Coburn asked as they walked away.

"I told him I wanted to cross the border on horseback at night with some friends."

"What did he say?"

"He said he could arrange it."

"How did you know the people in that particular village were smugglers?"

"Look around you," Simons said.

Coburn looked around at the bare, snow-covered slopes.

"What do you see?" Simons said.

"Nothing."

"Right. There is no agriculture here, no industry. How do you think these people make a living? They're all smugglers."

They returned to the Range Rover and drove back into Rezaiyeh. That evening Simons explained his plan to Coburn.

Simons, Coburn, Poche, Paul, and Bill would drive from Tehran to Rezaiyeh in the two Range Rovers. They would bring Majid and the professor with them as interpreters. In Rezaiyeh they would stay at the professor's house. The villa was ideal: no one else lived there, it was detached from other houses, and from there quiet roads led out of the city. Between Tehran and Rezaiyeh they would be unarmed: judging by what had happened at the roadblocks, guns would get them into trouble. However, at Rezaiyeh they would buy guns. Majid had made a contact in the city who would sell them Browning 12-gauge shotguns for six thousand dollars apiece. The same man could also get Llama pistols.

Coburn would cross the border legitimately in one of the Range Rovers and link up with Boulware, who would also have a car, on the Turkish side. Simons, Poche, Paul, and Bill would cross on horseback with the smugglers. That was why they needed the guns: in case the smugglers should decide to "lose" them in the mountains. On the other side they would meet Coburn and Boulware. They would all drive to the nearest American Consulate and get new passports for Paul and Bill. Then they would fly to Dallas.

It was a good plan, Coburn thought; and he now saw that Simons was right to insist on Sero rather than Barzagan, for it would be difficult to sneak across the border in a more civilized, heavily populated area.

They returned to Tehran the next day. They left late and did most of the journey by night, so as to be sure to arrive in the morning, after curfew was lifted. They took the southerly route, passing through the small town of Mahabad. The road was a single-lane dirt track through the mountains, and they had the worst possible weather: snow, ice, and high winds. Nevertheless, the road was passable, and Simons determined to use this route, rather than the northerly one, for the escape itself.

If it ever happened.

3___

One evening Coburn went to the Hyatt and told Keane Taylor he needed twenty-five thousand dollars in Iranian rials by the following morning.

He didn't say why.

Taylor got twenty-five thousand dollars in hundreds from Gayden, then called a carpet dealer he knew in the south of the city and agreed on an exchange rate.

Taylor's driver, Ali, was highly reluctant to take him downtown, especially after dark, but after some argument he agreed.

They went to the shop. Taylor sat down and drank tea with the carpet dealer. Two more Iranians came in: one was introduced as the man who would exchange Taylor's money; the other was his bodyguard, and looked like a hoodlum.

Since Taylor's phone call, the carpet dealer said, the exchange rate had changed rather dramatically--in the carpet dealer's favor.

"I'm insulted!" Taylor said angrily. "I'm not going to do business with you people!"

"This is the best exchange rate you can get," said the carpet man.

"The hell it is!"

"It's very dangerous for you to be in this part of the city, carrying all that money."

"I'm not alone," Taylor said. "I've got six people outside waiting for me."

He finished his tea and stood up. He walked slowly out of the shop and jumped into the car. "Ali, let's get out of here, fast."

They drove north. Taylor directed Ali to another carpet dealer, an Iranian Jew with a shop near the palace. The man was just closing up when Taylor walked in.

"I need to change some dollars for rials," Taylor said.

"Come back tomorrow," said the man.

"No, I need them tonight."

"How much?"

"Twenty-five thousand dollars."

"I don't have anything like that much."

"I've really got to have them tonight."

"What's it for?"

"It's to do with Paul and Bill."

The carpet dealer nodded. He had done business with several EDS people and he knew that Paul and Bill were in jail. "I'll see what I can do."

He called his brother from the back of the shop and sent him out. Then he opened his safe and took out all his rials. He and Taylor stood there counting money: the dealer counted the dollars and Taylor the rials. A few minutes later a kid came in with his hands full of rials and dumped them on the counter. He left without speaking. Taylor realized the carpet dealer was rounding up all the cash he could lay his hands on.

A young man came up on a motor scooter, parked outside, and walked in with a bag full of rials. While he was in the shop someone stole his motor scooter. The young man dropped the bag of money and ran after the thief, yelling at the top of his voice.

Taylor went on counting.

Just another normal business day in revolutionary Tehran.

John Howell was changing. With each day that went by he became a little less the upright American lawyer and a little more the devious Persian negotiator. In particular, he began to see bribery in a different light.

Mehdi, an Iranian accountant who had done occasional work for EDS, had explained things to him like this: "In Iran many things are achieved by friendship. There are several ways to become Dadgar's friend. Me, I would sit outside his house every day until he talked to me. Another way for me to become his friend would be to give him two hundred thousand dollars. If you like, I could arrange something like this for you."

Howell discussed this proposal with the other members of the negotiating team. They assumed that Mehdi was offering himself as a bribe intermediary, as Deep Throat had. But this time Howell was not so quick to reject the idea of a corrupt deal for Paul's and Bill's freedom.

They decided to play along with Mehdi. They might be able to expose the deal and discredit Dadgar. Alternatively, they might decide the arrangement was solid and pay up. Either way, they wanted a clear sign from Dadgar that he was bribable.

Howell and Keane Taylor had a series of meetings with Mehdi. The accountant was as jumpy as Deep Throat had been, and would not let the EDS people come to his office during normal working hours: he always met them early in the morning or late at night, or at his house or down back alleys. Howell kept pressing him for an unmistakable signal: Dadgar was to come to a meeting wearing odd socks, or with his tie on backward. Mehdi would propose ambiguous signals, such as Dadgar giving the Americans a hard time. On one occasion Dadgar did give them a hard time, as Mehdi had forecast, but that might have happened anyway.

Dadgar was not the only one giving Howell a hard time. Howell was talking to Angela on the phone every four or five days, and she wanted to know when he was coming home. He did not know. Paul and Bill were naturally pressing him for hard news, but his progress was so slow and indefinite that he could not possibly give them deadlines. He found this frustrating, and when Angela started questioning him on the same point he had to suppress his irritation.

The Mehdi initiative came to nothing. Mehdi introduced Howell to a lawyer who claimed to be close to Dadgar. The lawyer did not want a bribe--just normal legal fees. EDS retained him, but at the next meeting Dadgar said: "Nobody has any special relationship with me. If anybody tries to tell you differently, don't believe them."

Howell was not sure what to make of all this. Had there been nothing in it right from the start? Or had EDS's caution frightened Dadgar into dropping a demand for a bribe? He would never know.

On January 30 Dadgar told Howell he was interested in Abolfath Mahvi, EDS's Iranian partner. Howell began to prepare a dossier on EDS's dealings with Mahvi.

Howell now believed that Paul and Bill were straightforward commercial hostages. Dadgar's investigation into corruption might be genuine, but he knew by now that Paul and Bill were innocent; therefore, he must be holding them on orders from above. The Iranians had originally wanted either their promised computerized welfare system or their money back. Giving them their welfare system meant renegotiating the contract--but the new government was not interested in renegotiating and in any case was unlikely to stay in power long enough to consummate a deal.

If Dadgar could not be bribed, convinced of Paul's and Bill's innocence, or ordered by his superiors to release them on the basis of a new contract between EDS and the Ministry, there remained to Howell only one option: pay the bail. Dr. Houman's efforts to get the amount reduced had come to nothing. Howell now concentrated on ways of getting thirteen million dollars from Dallas to Tehran.

He had learned, bit by bit, that there was an EDS rescue team in Tehran. He was astonished that the head of an American corporation would set in motion something like that. He was also reassured, for if he could only get Paul and Bill out of jail, somebody else was standing by to get them out of Iran.

Liz Coburn was frantic with worry.

She sat in the car with Toni Dvoranchik and Toni's husband, Bill. They were heading for the Royal Tokyo restaurant. It was on Greenville Avenue, not far from Recipes, the place where Liz and Toni had drunk Daiquiris with Mary Sculley and Mary had shattered Liz's world by saying, "They're all in Tehran, I guess."

Since that moment Liz had been living in constant, stark terror.

Jay was everything to her. He was Captain America, he was Superman, he was her whole life. She did not see how she could live without him. The thought of losing him scared her to death.

She called Tehran constantly but never reached him. She called Merv Stauffer every day, asking, "When is Jay coming home? Is he all right? Will he get out alive?" Merv tried to soothe her, but he would not give her any information, so she would demand to speak to Ross Perot, and Merv would tell her that was not possible. Then she would call her mother and burst into tears and pour out all her anxiety and fear and frustration over the phone.

The Dvoranchiks were kind. They were trying to take her mind off her worries.

"What did you do today?" Toni asked.

"I went shopping," Liz said.

"Did you buy anything?"

"Yes." Liz started to cry. "I bought a black dress. Because Jay isn't coming home."

During those days of waiting, Jay Coburn learned a good deal about Simons.

One day Merv Stauffer called from Dallas to say that Simons's son Harry had been on the phone, worried. Harry had called his father's house and spoken to Paul Walker, who was minding the farm. Walker had said he did not know where Simons was, and had advised Harry to call Merv Stauffer at EDS. Harry was naturally worried, Stauffer said. Simons called Harry from Tehran and reassured him.

Simons told Coburn that Harry had had some problems, but he was a good boy at heart. He spoke of his son with a kind of resigned affection. (He never mentioned Bruce, and it was not until much later that Coburn realized Simons had two sons.)

Simons talked a lot about his late wife, Lucille, and how happy the two of them had been after Simons retired. They had been very close during the last few years, Coburn gathered, and Simons seemed to regret that it had taken him so long to realize how much he loved her. "Hold on to your mate," he advised Coburn. "She's the most important person in your life."

Paradoxically, Simons's advice had the opposite effect on Coburn. He envied the companionship Simons and Lucille had had, and he wanted that for himself; but he was so sure he could never achieve it with Liz that he wondered if someone else would be his true soul mate.

One evening Simons laughed and said: "You know, I wouldn't do this for anyone else."

It was a characteristically cryptic Simons remark. Sometimes, Coburn had learned, you got an explanation; sometimes you did not. This time Coburn got an explanation: Simons told him why he felt indebted to Ross Perot.

The aftermath of the Son Tay Raid had been a bitter experience for Simons. Although the Raiders had not brought back any American POWs, it had been a brave try, and Simons expected the American public to see it that way. Indeed, he had argued, at a breakfast meeting with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, in favor of releasing the news of the raid to the press. "This is a perfectly legitimate operation," he had told Laird. "These are American prisoners. This is something Americans traditionally do for Americans. For Christ's sake, what is it we're afraid of here?"

He soon found out. The press and public saw the raid as a failure and yet another intelligence foul-up. The banner headline on the front page of the next day's Washington Post read: U.S. RAID TO RESCUE POWS FAILS. When Senator Robert Dole introduced a resolution praising the raid and said: "Some of these men have been languishing in prison for five years," Senator Kennedy replied: "And they're still there!"

Simons went to the White House to receive the Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism" from President Nixon. The rest of the Raiders were to be decorated by Defense Secretary Laird. Simons was enraged to learn that over half of his men were to get nothing more than the Army Commendation Ribbon, only slightly better than a Good Conduct Ribbon, and known to soldiers as a "Green Weenie." Mad as hell, he picked up the phone and asked for the Army Chief of Staff, General Westmoreland. He got the Acting Chief, General Palmer. Simons told Palmer about the Green Weenies and said: "General, I don't want to embarrass the army, but one of my men is just likely to shove an Army Commendation Ribbon up Mr. Laird's ass." He got his way: Laird awarded four Distinguished Service Crosses, fifty Silver Stars, and no Green Weenies.

The POWs got a huge morale boost from the Son Tay Raid (which they heard about from incoming prisoners). An important side effect of the raid was that the POW camps--where many prisoners had been kept permanently in solitary confinement--were closed, and all the Americans were brought into two large prisons where there was not enough room to keep them apart. Nevertheless, the world branded the raid a failure, and Simons felt a grave injustice had been done to his men.

The disappointment rankled with him for years--until, one weekend, Ross Perot threw a mammoth party in San Francisco, persuaded the army to round up the Son Tay Raiders from all over the world, and introduced them to the prisoners they had tried to rescue. That weekend, Simons felt, his Raiders had at last got the thanks they deserved. And Ross Perot had been responsible.

"That's why I'm here," Simons told Coburn. "Sure as hell, I wouldn't do this for anyone else."

Coburn, thinking of his son Scott, knew exactly what Simons meant.

4___

On January 22 hundreds of homafars--young air force officers--mutinied at bases in Dezful, Hamadan, Isfahan, and Mashad, and declared themselves loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The significance of the event was not apparent to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who still expected the Iranian military to crush the Islamic revolution; nor to Premier Shahpour Bakhtiar, who was talking about meeting the revolutionary challenge with a minimum of force; nor to the Shah, who instead of going to the United States was hanging on in Egypt, waiting to be summoned back to save his country in its hour of need.

Among the people who did see its significance were Ambassador William Sullivan and General Abbas Gharabaghi, the Iranian Chief of Staff.

Sullivan told Washington that the idea of a pro-Shah countercoup was moonshine; the revolution was going to succeed and the U.S. had better start thinking about how it would live with the new order. He received a harsh reply from the White House suggesting that he was disloyal to the President. He decided to resign, but his wife talked him out of it: he had a responsibility to the thousands of Americans still in Iran, she pointed out, and he could hardly walk out on them now.

General Gharabaghi also contemplated resigning. He was in an impossible position. He had sworn his oath of loyalty, not to the Parliament or the government of Iran, but to the Shah personally; and the Shah was gone. For the time being Gharabaghi took the view that the military owed loyalty to the Constitution of 1906, but that meant little in practice. Theoretically the military ought to support the Bakhtiar government. Gharabaghi had been wondering for some weeks whether he could rely on his soldiers to follow orders and fight for Bakhtiar against the revolutionary forces. The revolt of the homafars showed that he could not. He realized--as Brzezinski did not--that an army was not a machine to be switched on and off at will, but a collection of people, sharing the aspirations, the anger, and the revivalist religion of the rest of the country. The soldiers wanted a revolution as much as the civilians. Gharabaghi concluded that he could no longer control his troops, and he decided to resign.

On the day that he announced his intention to his fellow generals, Ambassador William Sullivan was summoned to Prime Minister Bakhtiar's office at six o'clock in the evening. Sullivan had heard, from U.S. General "Dutch" Huyser, of Gharabaghi's intended resignation, and he assumed that this was what Bakhtiar wanted to talk about.

Bakhtiar waved Sullivan to a seat, saying with an enigmatic smile: "Nous serons trois." There will be three of us. Bakhtiar always spoke French with Sullivan.

A few minutes later General Gharabaghi walked in. Bakhtiar spoke of the difficulties that would be created if the general were to resign. Gharabaghi began to reply in Farsi, but Bakhtiar made him speak French. As the general talked, he toyed with what seemed to be an envelope in his pocket: Sullivan guessed it was his letter of resignation.

As the two Iranians argued in French, Bakhtiar kept turning to the American Ambassador for support. Sullivan secretly thought Gharabaghi was absolutely right to resign, but his orders from the White House were to encourage the military to support Bakhtiar, so he doggedly argued, against his own convictions, that Gharabaghi should not resign. After a discussion of half an hour, the general left without delivering his letter of resignation. Bakhtiar thanked Sullivan profusely for his help. Sullivan knew it would do no good.

On January 24 Bakhtiar closed Tehran's airport to stop Khomeini from entering Iran. It was like opening an umbrella against a tidal wave. On January 26 soldiers killed fifteen pro-Khomeini protestors in street fighting in Tehran. Two days later Bakhtiar offered to go to Paris for talks with the Ayatollah. For a ruling Prime Minister to offer to visit an exiled rebel was a fantastic admission of weakness, and Khomeini saw it that way: he refused to talk unless Bakhtiar first resigned. On January 29, thirty-five people died in the fighting in Tehran and another fifty in the rest of the country. Gharabaghi, bypassing his Prime Minister, began talks with the rebels in Tehran, and gave his consent to the return of the Ayatollah. On January 30 Sullivan ordered the evacuation of all nonessential Embassy personnel and all dependents. On February 1 Khomeini came home.

His Air France jumbo jet landed at 9:15 A.M. Two million Iranians turned out to greet him. At the airport the Ayatollah made his first public statement. "I beg God to cut off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers."

Simons saw it all on TV; then he said to Coburn: "That's it. The people are going to do it for us. The mob will take that jail."

Nine

1_____

At midday on February 5 John Howell was on the point of getting Paul and Bill out of jail.

Dadgar had said that he would accept bail in one of three forms: cash, a bank guarantee, or a lien on property. Cash was out of the question. First, anyone who flew into the lawless city of Tehran with $12,750,000 in a suitcase might never reach Dadgar's office alive. Second, Dadgar might take the money and still keep Paul and Bill, either by raising the bail or by rearresting them on some new pretext. (Tom Walter suggested using counterfeit money, but nobody knew where to get it.) There had to be a document that gave Dadgar the money and at the same time gave Paul and Bill their freedom. In Dallas Tom Walter had at last found a bank willing to issue a letter of credit for the bail, but Howell and Taylor were having trouble finding an Iranian bank to accept it and issue the guarantee Dadgar required. Meanwhile, Howell's boss Tom Luce thought about the third option, a lien on property, and came up with a wild and wacky idea that just might work: pledging the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as bail for Paul and Bill.

The State Department was by now loosening up, but was not quite ready to pledge its Tehran embassy as bail. However, it was ready to give the guarantee of the United States government. That in itself was unique: the U.S.A. standing bail for two jailed men!

First, Tom Walter in Dallas got a bank to issue a letter of credit in favor of the State Department for $12,750,000. Because this transaction took place entirely within the U.S., it was accomplished in hours rather than days. Once the State Department in Washington had the letter, Minister Counselor Charles Naas--Ambassador Sullivan's deputy--would deliver a diplomatic note saying that Paul and Bill, once released, would make themselves available to Dadgar for questioning; otherwise, the bail would be paid by the Embassy.

Right now Dadgar was in a meeting with Lou Goelz, Consul General at the Embassy. Howell had not been invited to attend, but Abolhasan was there for EDS.

Howell had had a preliminary meeting with Goelz yesterday. Together they had gone over the terms of the guarantee, with Goelz reading the phrases in his quiet, precise voice. Goelz was changing. Two months ago Howell had found him maddeningly correct: it was Goelz who had refused to give back Paul's and Bill's passports without telling the Iranians. Now Goelz seemed ready to try the unconventional. Perhaps living in the middle of a revolution had made the old boy unbend a little.

Goelz had told Howell that the decision to release Paul and Bill would be made by Prime Minister Bakhtiar, but it must first be cleared with Dadgar. Howell was hoping Dadgar would not make trouble, for Goelz was not the type of man to bang the table and force Dadgar to back down.

There was a tap at the door and Abolhasan walked in.

Howell could tell from his face that he brought bad news.

"What happened?"

"He turned us down," Abolhasan said.

"Why?"

"He won't accept the guarantee of the United States government."

"Did he give a reason?"

"There's nothing in the law that says he can accept that as bail. He has to have cash, a bank guarantee--"

"Or a lien on property, I know." Howell felt numb. There had been so many disappointments, so many dead ends, he was no longer capable of resentment or anger. "Did you say anything about the Prime Minister?"

"Yes. Goelz told him we would take this proposal to Bakhtiar."

"What did Dadgar say to that?"

"He said it was typical of the Americans. They try to resolve things by bringing influence to bear at high levels, with no concern for what is happening at lower levels. He also said that if his superiors did not like the way he was handling this case, they could take him off it, and he would be very happy, because he was weary of it."

Howell frowned. What did all this mean? He had recently concluded that what the Iranians really wanted was the money. Now they had flatly turned it down. Was this genuinely because of the technical problem that the law did not specify a government guarantee as an acceptable form of bail--or was that an excuse? Perhaps it was genuine. The EDS case had always been politically sensitive, and now that the Ayatollah had returned, Dadgar might well be terrified of doing anything that could be construed as pro-American. Bending the rules to accept an unconventional form of bail might get him into trouble. What would happen if Howell succeeded in putting up bail in the legally required form? Would Dadgar then feel he had covered his rear, and release Paul and Bill? Or would he invent another excuse?

There was only one way to find out.

The week the Ayatollah returned to Iran, Paul and Bill asked for a priest.

Paul's cold seemed to have turned to bronchitis. He had asked for the prison doctor. The doctor did not speak English, but Paul had no trouble explaining his problem: he coughed, and the doctor nodded.

Paul was given some pills that he assumed were penicillin, and a bottle of cough medicine. The taste of the medicine was strikingly familiar, and he had a sudden, vivid flashback: he saw himself as a little boy, and his mother pouring the glutinous syrup from an old-fashioned bottle onto a spoon and dosing him with it. This was exactly the same stuff. It eased his cough, but he had already done some damage to the muscles in his chest, and he suffered a sharp pain every time he breathed deeply.

He had a letter from Ruthie that he read and reread. It was an ordinary, newsy kind of letter. Karen was in a new school, and having some trouble adjusting. This was normal: every time she changed schools, Karen would be sick to her stomach for the first couple of days. Ann Marie, Paul's younger daughter, was much more happy-go-lucky. Ruthie was still telling her mother that Paul would be home in a couple of weeks, but the story was becoming implausible, for that two-week deadline had now been stretched for two months. She was buying a house, and Tom Walter was helping her with the legal processes. Whatever emotions Ruthie was going through, she did not put them in the letter.

Keane Taylor was the most frequent visitor to the jail. Each time he came, he would hand Paul a pack of cigarettes with fifty or a hundred dollars folded inside. Paul and Bill could use the money in jail to buy special privileges, such as a bath. During one visit the guard left the room for a moment, and Taylor handed over four thousand dollars.

On another visit Taylor brought Father Williams.

Williams was pastor of the Catholic Mission where, in happier times, Paul and Bill had met with the EDS Tehran Roman Catholic Sunday Brunch Poker School. Williams was eighty years old, and his superiors had given him permission to leave Tehran, because of the danger. He had preferred to stay at his post. This kind of thing was not new to him, he told Paul and Bill: he had been a missionary in China during World War II, when the Japanese had invaded, and later, during the revolution that brought Mao Tse-tung to power. He himself had been imprisoned, so he understood what Paul and Bill were going through.

Father Williams boosted their morale almost as much as Ross Perot had. Bill, who was more devout than Paul, felt deeply strengthened by the visit. It gave him the courage to face the unknown future. Father Williams granted them absolution for their sins before he left. Bill still did not know whether he would get out of the jail alive, but now he felt prepared to face death.

Iran exploded into revolution on Friday, February 9, 1979.

In just over a week Khomeini had destroyed what was left of legitimate government. He had called on the military to mutiny and the members of Parliament to resign. He had appointed a "provisional government" despite the fact that Bakhtiar was still officially Prime Minister. His supporters, organized into revolutionary committees, had taken over responsibility for law and order and garbage collection, and had opened more than a hundred Islamic cooperative stores in Tehran. On February 8 a million people or more marched through the city in support of the Ayatollah. Street fighting went on continually between stray units of loyalist soldiers and gangs of Khomeini men.

On February 9, at two Tehran air bases--Doshen Toppeh and Farahabad--formations of homafars and cadets gave a salute to Khomeini. This infuriated the Javadan Brigade, which had been the Shah's personal bodyguard, and they attacked both air bases. The homafars barricaded themselves in and repelled the loyalist troops, helped by crowds of armed revolutionaries milling around inside and outside the bases.

Units of both the Marxist Fedayeen and the Muslim Mujahedeen guerrillas rushed to Doshen Toppeh. The armory was broken open and weapons were distributed indiscriminately to soldiers, guerrillas, revolutionaries, demonstrators, and passersby.

That night at eleven o'clock the Javadan Brigade returned in force. Khomeini supporters within the military warned the Doshen Toppeh rebels that the Brigade was on its way, and the rebels counterattacked before the Brigade reached the base. Several senior officers among the loyalists were killed early in the battle. The fighting continued all night, and spread to a large area around the base.

By noon on the following day, the battlefield had widened to include most of the city.

That day John Howell and Keane Taylor went downtown for a meeting.

Howell was convinced they would get Paul and Bill released within hours. They were all set to pay the bail.

Tom Walter had a Texas bank ready to issue a letter of credit for $12,750,000 to the New York branch of Bank Melli. The plan was that the Tehran branch of Bank Melli would then issue a bank guarantee to the Ministry of Justice, and Paul and Bill would be bailed out. It had not worked quite that way. The deputy managing director of Bank Melli, Sadr-Hashemi, had recognized--as had all the other bankers--that Paul and Bill were commercial hostages, and that once they were out of jail EDS could argue in an American court that the money had been extorted and should not be paid. If that happened, Bank Melli in New York would not be able to collect on the letter of credit--but Bank Melli in Tehran would still have to pay the money to the Iranian Ministry of Justice. Sadr-Hashemi said he would change his mind only if his New York lawyers told him there was no way EDS could block payment on the letter of credit. Howell knew perfectly well that no decent American attorney would issue such an opinion.

Then Keane Taylor thought of Bank Omran. EDS had a contract to install an on-line computerized accounting system for Bank Omran, and Taylor's job in Tehran had been to supervise this contract, so he knew the bank's officials. He met with Farhad Bakhtiar, who was one of the top men there as well as being a relative of Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. It was clear that the Prime Minister was going to fall from power any day, and Farhad was planning to leave the country. Perhaps that was why he was less concerned than Sadr-Hashemi about the possibility that the $12,750,000 would never be paid. Anyway, for whatever reason, he had agreed to help.

Bank Omran did not have a U.S. branch. How, then, could EDS pay the money? It was agreed that the Dallas bank would lodge its letter of credit with the Dubai branch of Bank Omran by a system called Tested Telex. Dubai would then call Tehran on the phone to confirm that the letter of credit had been received, and the Tehran branch of Bank Omran would issue the guarantee to the Ministry of Justice.

There were delays. Everything had to be approved by the board of directors of Bank Omran, and by the bank's lawyers. Everyone who looked at the deal suggested small changes in the language. The changes, in English and Farsi, had to be communicated to Dubai and to Dallas; then a new telex had to be sent from Dallas to Dubai, tested, and approved by phone with Tehran. Because the Iranian weekend was Thursday and Friday, there were only three days in the week when both banks were open; and because Tehran was nine and a half hours ahead of Dallas, there was never a time of day when both banks were open. Furthermore, the Iranian banks were on strike a good deal of the time. Consequently a two-word change could take a week to arrange.

The last people who had to approve the deal were the Iranian central bank. Getting that approval was the task Howell and Taylor had set themselves for Saturday, February 10.

The city was relatively quiet at eight-thirty in the morning when they drove to Bank Omran. They met with Farhad Bakhtiar. To their surprise, he said that the request for approval was already with the central bank. Howell was delighted--for once something was happening ahead of time in Iran! He left some documents with Farhad--including a signed letter of agreement--and he and Taylor drove farther downtown to the central bank.

The city was waking up now, the traffic even more nightmarish than usual, but dangerous driving was Taylor's specialty, and he tore through the streets, cutting across lanes of traffic, U-turning in the middle of freeways, and generally beating the Iranian drivers at their own game.

At the central bank they had a long wait to see Mr. Farhang, who would give approval. Eventually he stuck his head out of his office door and said the deal had already been approved and the approval notified to Bank Omran.

This was good news!

They got back into the car and headed for Bank Omran. Now they could tell that there was serious fighting in parts of the city. The noise of gunfire was continuous, and plumes of smoke rose from burning buildings. Bank Omran was opposite a hospital, and the dead and wounded were being brought in from the battle zones in cars, pickup trucks, and buses, all the vehicles having white cloths tied to their radio antennae to signify emergency, all hooting constantly. The street was jammed with people, some coming to give blood, others to visit the sick, still others to identify corpses.

They had resolved the bail problem not a moment too soon. Not only Paul and Bill, but now Howell and Taylor and all of them, were in grave danger. They had to get out of Iran fast.

Howell and Taylor went into the bank and found Farhad.

"The central bank has approved the deal," Howell told him.

"I know."

"Is the letter of agreement all right?"

"No problems."

"Then, if you give us the bank guarantee, we can go to the Ministry of Justice with it right away."

"Not today."

"Why not?"

"Our lawyer, Dr. Emami, has reviewed the credit document and wishes to make some small changes."

Taylor muttered: "Jesus Christ."

Farhad said: "I have to go to Geneva for five days."

Forever was more likely.

"My colleagues will look after you, and if you have any problems just call me in Switzerland."

Howell suppressed his anger. Farhad knew perfectly well that things were not that simple: with him away, everything would be more difficult. But nothing would be accomplished by an emotional outburst, so Howell just said: "What are the changes?"

Farhad called in Dr. Emami.

"I also need the signatures of two more directors of the bank," Farhad said. "I can get those at the board meeting tomorrow. And I need to check the references of the National Bank of Commerce in Dallas."

"And how long will that take?"

"Not long. My assistants will deal with it while I am away."

Dr. Emami showed Howell the changes he proposed in the language of the credit letter. Howell was happy to agree to them, but the rewritten letter would have to go through the time-consuming process of being transmitted from Dallas to Dubai by Tested Telex and from Dubai to Tehran by telephone.

"Look," said Howell, "let's try to get all this done today. You could check the references of the Dallas bank now. We could find those other two bank directors, wherever in the city they are, and get their signatures this afternoon. We could call Dallas, give them the language changes, and get them to send the telex now. Dubai could confirm to you this afternoon. You could issue the bank guarantee--"

"There is a holiday in Dubai today," said Farhad.

"All right, Dubai can confirm tomorrow morning--"

"There is a strike tomorrow. Nobody will be here at the bank."

"Monday, then--"

The conversation was interrupted by the sound of a siren. A secretary put her head around the door and said something in Farsi. "There is an early curfew," Farhad translated. "We must all leave now."

Howell and Taylor sat there looking at each other. Two minutes later they were alone in the office. They had failed yet again.

That evening Simons said to Coburn: "Tomorrow is the day."

Coburn thought he was full of shit.

2____

In the morning on Sunday, February 11, the negotiating team went as usual to the EDS office they called "Bucharest." John Howell left, taking Abolhasan with him, for an eleven o'clock meeting with Dadgar at the Ministry of Health. The others--Keane Taylor, Bill Gayden, Bob Young, and Rich Gallagher--went up on the roof to watch the city burn.

Bucharest was not a high building, but it was located on a slope of the hills that rose to the north of Tehran, so from the roof they could see the city laid out like a tableau. To the south and east, where modern skyscrapers rose out of the low-rise villas and slums, great palls of smoke billowed up into the murky air, while helicopter gunships buzzed around the fires like wasps at a barbecue. One of EDS's Iranian drivers brought a transistor radio up to the roof and tuned it to a station that had been taken over by the revolutionaries. With the help of the radio and the driver's translation, they tried to identify the burning buildings.

Keane Taylor, who had abandoned his elegant vested suits for jeans and cowboy boots, went downstairs to take a phone call. It was the Cycle Man.

"You need to get out of there," the Cycle Man told Taylor. "Get out of the country as quickly as you can."

"You know we can't do that," Taylor said. "We can't leave without Paul and Bill."

"It's going to be very dangerous for you."

Taylor could hear, at the other end of the line, the noise of a terrific battle. "Where the hell are you, anyway?"

"Near the bazaar," said the Cycle Man. "I'm making Molotov cocktails. They brought in helicopters this morning and we just figured out how to shoot them down. We burned four tanks--"

The line went dead.

Incredible, Taylor thought as he cradled the phone. In the middle of a battle, he suddenly thinks of his American friends, and calls to warn us. Iranians will never cease to surprise me.

He went back up on the roof.

"Look at this," Bill Gayden said to him. Gayden, the jovial president of EDS World, had also switched to off-duty clothes: nobody was even pretending to do business anymore. He pointed to a column of smoke in the east. "If that isn't the Gasr Prison burning, it's damn close."

Taylor peered into the distance. It was hard to tell.

"Call Dadgar's office at the Ministry of Health," Gayden told Taylor. "Howell should be there now. Get him to ask Dadgar to release Paul and Bill to the custody of the Embassy, for their own safety. If we don't get them out, they're going to burn to death."

John Howell had hardly expected Dadgar to turn up. The city was a battlefield, and an investigation into corruption under the Shah now seemed an academic exercise. But Dadgar was there in his office, waiting for Howell. Howell wondered what the hell was driving the man. Dedication? Hatred of Americans? Fear of the incoming revolutionary government? He would probably never know.

Dadgar had asked Howell about EDS's relationship with Abolfath Mahvi, and Howell had promised a complete dossier. It seemed the information was important to Dadgar's mysterious purposes, for a few days later he had pressed Howell for the dossier, saying: "I can interrogate the people here and get the information I need," which Howell took as a threat to arrest more EDS executives.

Howell had prepared a twelve-page dossier in English, with a covering letter in Farsi. Dadgar read the covering letter, then spoke. Abolhasan translated: "Your company's helpfulness is laying the groundwork for a change in my attitude toward Chiapparone and Gaylord. Our legal code provides for such leniency toward those who supply information."

It was farcical. They could all be killed in the next few hours, and here was Dadgar still talking about applicable provisions of the legal code.

Abolhasan began to translate the dossier aloud into Farsi. Howell knew that choosing Mahvi as an Iranian partner had not been the smartest move EDS ever made: Mahvi had got the company its first small contract in Iran, but subsequently he had been blacklisted by the Shah and had caused trouble over the Ministry of Health contract. However, EDS had nothing to hide. Indeed, Howell's boss Tom Luce, in his eagerness to place EDS above suspicion, had filed details of the EDS-Mahvi relationship with the American Securities Exchange Commission, so that much of what was in the dossier was already public knowledge.

The phone interrupted Abolhasan's translation. Dadgar picked it up, then handed it to Abolhasan, who listened for a moment, then said: "It's Keane Taylor."

A minute later he hung up and said to Howell: "Keane has been up on the roof at Bucharest. He says there are fires down by Gasr Prison. If the mob attacks the prison, Paul and Bill could get hurt. He suggested we ask Dadgar to turn them over to the American Embassy."

"Okay," Howell said. "Ask him."

He waited while Abolhasan and Dadgar conversed in Farsi.

Finally Abolhasan said: "According to our laws, they have to be kept in an Iranian prison. He can't consider the U.S. Embassy to be an Iranian prison."

Crazier and crazier. The whole country was falling apart, and Dadgar was still consulting his book of rules. Howell said: "Ask how he proposes to guarantee the safety of two American citizens who have not been charged with any crime."

Dadgar's reply was: "Don't be concerned. The worst that could happen is that the prison might be overrun."

"And what if the mob decides to attack Americans?"

"Chiapparone will probably be safe--he could pass for Iranian."

"Terrific," said Howell. "And what about Gaylord?"

Dadgar just shrugged.

Rashid left his house early that morning.

His parents, his brother, and his sister planned to stay indoors all day, and they had urged him to do the same, but he would not listen. He knew it would be dangerous on the streets, but he could not hide at home while his countrymen were making history. Besides, he had not forgotten his conversation with Simons.

He was living by impulse. On Friday he had found himself at Farahabad Air Base during the clash between the homafars and loyalist Javadan Brigade. For no particular reason, he had gone into the armory and started passing out rifles. After half an hour of that he got bored and left.

That same day he had seen a dead man for the first time. He had been at the mosque when a bus driver who had been shot by soldiers had been brought in. On impulse Rashid had uncovered the face of the corpse. A whole section of the head was destroyed, a mixture of blood and brains: it had been sickening. The incident seemed like a warning, but Rashid was in no mood to heed warnings. The streets were where things were happening, and he had to be there.

This morning the atmosphere was electric. Crowds were everywhere. Hundreds of men and boys were toting automatic rifles. Rashid, wearing a flat English cap and an open-neck shirt, mingled with them, feeling the excitement. Anything could happen today.

He was vaguely heading for Bucharest. He still had duties: he was negotiating with two shipping companies to transport the belongings of the EDS evacuees back to the States, and he had to feed the abandoned dogs and cats. The scenes on the streets changed his mind. Rumor said that the Evin Prison had been stormed last night; today it might be the turn of the Gasr Prison, where Paul and Bill were.

Rashid wished he had an automatic rifle like the others.

He passed an army building that appeared to have been invaded by the mob. It was a six-story block containing an armory and a draft registration office. Rashid had a friend who worked there, Malek. It occurred to him that Malek might be in trouble. If he had come to work this morning, he would be wearing his army uniform--and that alone might be enough to get him killed today. I could lend Malek my shirt, Rashid thought; and impulsively he went into the building.

He pushed his way through the crowd on the ground floor and found the staircase. The rest of the building seemed empty. As he climbed, he wondered whether soldiers were hiding out on the upper floors: if so, they might shoot anyone who came along. He went on regardless. He climbed to the top floor. Malek was not there. Nobody was there. The army had abandoned the place to the mob.

Rashid returned to the ground floor. The crowd had gathered around the entrance to the basement armory, but no one was going in. Rashid pushed his way to the front and said: "Is this door locked?"

"It might be booby-trapped," someone said.

Rashid looked at the door. All thoughts of going to Bucharest had now left him. He wanted to go to the Gasr Prison, and he wanted to carry a gun.

"I don't think this armory is booby-trapped," he said, and he opened the door.

He went down the staircase.

The basement consisted of two rooms divided by an archway. The place was dimly lit by narrow strip windows high in the walls, just above street level. The floor was of black mosaic tiles. In the first room were open boxes of loaded magazines. In the second were G3 machine guns.

After a minute some of the crowd upstairs followed him down.

He grabbed three machine guns and a sack of magazines and left. As soon as he got outside the building, people jumped all over him, asking for weapons: he gave away two of the guns and some of the ammunition.

Then he walked away, heading for Gasr Square.

Some of the mob went with him.

On the way they had to pass a military prison. A skirmish was going on there. A steel door in the high brick wall around the garrison had been smashed down, as if a tank had rolled through it, and the brickwork on either side of the entrance had crumbled. A burning car stood across the way in.

Rashid went around the car and through the entrance.

He found himself in a large compound. From where he stood, a bunch of people were shooting haphazardly at a building a couple of hundred yards away. Rashid took cover behind a wall. The people who had followed him joined in the shooting, but he held his fire. Nobody was really aiming. They were just trying to scare the soldiers in the building. It was a funny kind of battle. Rashid had never imagined the revolution would be like this: just a disorganized crowd with guns they hardly knew how to use, wandering around on a Sunday morning, firing at walls, encountering halfhearted resistance from invisible troops.

Suddenly a man near him fell dead.

It happened so quickly: Rashid did not even see him fall. At one moment the man was standing four feet away from Rashid, firing his rifle; the next moment he lay on the ground with his forehead blown away.

They carried the corpse out of the compound. Someone found a jeep. They put the body in the jeep and drove off. Rashid returned to the skirmish.

Ten minutes later, for no apparent reason, a piece of wood with a white undershirt tied to its end was waved out of one of the windows in the building they had been shooting at. The soldiers had surrendered.

Just like that.

There was a sense of anticlimax.

This is my chance, Rashid thought.

It was easy to manipulate people if you understood the psychology of the human being. You just had to study the people, comprehend their situation, and figure out their needs. These people, Rashid decided, want excitement and adventure. For the first time in their lives they have guns in their hands: They need a target, and anything that symbolizes the regime of the Shah will do.

Right now they were standing around wondering where to go next.

"Listen!" Rashid shouted.

They all listened--they had nothing better to do.

"I'm going to the Gasr Prison!"

Someone cheered.

"The people in there are prisoners of the regime--if we are against the regime we should let them out!"

Several people shouted their agreement.

He started walking.

They followed him.

It's the mood they're in, he thought; they'll follow anyone who seems to know where to go.

He started with a band of twelve or fifteen men and boys, but as he walked the group grew: everyone with nowhere to go automatically joined in.

Rashid had become a revolutionary leader.

Nothing was impossible.

He stopped just before Gasr Square and addressed his army. "The jails must be taken over by the people, just like the police stations and the garrisons; this is our responsibility. There are people in Gasr Prison who are guilty of nothing. They are just like us--our brothers, our cousins. Like us, they only want their freedom. But they were braver than we, for they demanded their freedom while the Shah was here, and they were thrown in jail for it. Now we shall let them out!"

They all cheered.

He remembered something Simons had said. "The Gasr Prison is our Bastille!"

They cheered louder.

Rashid turned and ran into the square.

He took cover on the street comer opposite the huge steel entrance gates of the prison. There was a fair-sized mob in the square already, he realized; probably the prison would be stormed today with or without his help. But the important thing was to help Paul and Bill.

He raised his gun and fired into the air.

The mob in the square scattered, and the shooting began in earnest.

Once again, the resistance was halfhearted. A few guards fired back from the towers on the walls and from the windows close to the gates. As far as Rashid could see, no one on either side was hit. Once again, the battle ended not with a bang but a whimper: the guards simply disappeared from the walls and the shooting stopped.

Rashid waited a couple of minutes, to make sure they had gone; then he ran across the square to the prison entrance.

The gates were locked.

The mob crowded around. Someone fired a burst at the gates, trying to shoot them open. Rashid thought: he's seen too many cowboy movies. Another man produced a crowbar from somehere, but it was impossible to force the gates open. We would need dynamite, Rashid thought.

In the brick wall beside the gates was a little barred window, through which a guard could see who was outside. Rashid smashed the glass with his gun, then started to attack the brickwork in which the bars were embedded. The man with the crowbar helped him; then three or four others crowded around, trying to loosen the bars with their hands, their gun barrels, and anything else that came to hand. Soon the bars came out and fell to the ground.

Rashid wriggled through the window.

He was inside!

Anything was possible.

He found himself in a little guardroom. There were no guards. He put his head out of the door. Nobody.

He wondered where the keys to the cell blocks were kept.

He went out of the office and past the big gates to another guardroom on the far side of the entrance. There he found a big bunch of keys.

He returned to the gates. Inset into one of them was a small door secured by a simple bar.

Rashid lifted the bar and opened the door.

The mob poured in.

Rashid stood back. He handed keys to anyone who would take them, saying, "Open every cell--let the people go!"

They swarmed past him. His career as a revolutionary leader was over. He had achieved his objective. He, Rashid, had led the storming of the Gasr Prison!

Once again, Rashid had done the impossible.

Now he had to find Paul and Bill among the eleven thousand eight hundred inmates of the jail.

Bill woke up at six o'clock. All was quiet.

He had slept well, he realized with some surprise. He had not expected to sleep at all. The last thing he remembered was lying on his bunk listening to what sounded like a pitched battle outside. If you're tired enough, he thought, I suppose you can sleep anywhere. Soldiers sleep in fox-holes. You become acclimatized. No matter how frightened you may be, in the end your body takes control and you nod off.

He said a rosary.

He washed, brushed his teeth, shaved, and dressed; then he sat looking out the window, waiting for breakfast, wondering what EDS was planning for today.

Paul woke up around seven. He looked at Bill and said: "Couldn't sleep?"

"Sure I slept," Bill said. "I've been up an hour or so."

"I didn't sleep well. The shooting was heavy most of the night." Paul got out of his bunk and went to the bathroom.

A few minutes later breakfast came: bread and tea. Bill opened a can of orange juice that had been brought in by Keane Taylor.

The shooting started again around eight o'clock.

The prisoners speculated about what might be going on outside, but no one had any hard information. All they could see was the helicopters darting across the skyline, apparently shooting down at rebel positions on the ground. Every time a helicopter flew over the prison, Bill watched for a ladder to come dropping out of the sky into the courtyard of Building Number 8. This was his regular daydream. He also fantasized about a small group of EDS people, led by Coburn and an older man, swarming over the prison wall with rope ladders; or a large force of American military arriving at the last minute, like the cavalry in the Western movies, blasting a huge gap in the wall with dynamite.

He had done more than daydream. In his quiet, apparently casual way, he had inspected every inch of the building and courtyard, estimating the fastest way out under various imagined circumstances. He knew how many guards there were and how many rifles they possessed. Whatever might happen, he was ready.

It began to look as if today would be the day.

The guards were not following their normal routines. In jail everything was done by routine: a prisoner, with little else to do, observed the patterns and quickly became familiar with them. Today everything was different. The guards appeared nervous, whispering in corners, hurrying everywhere. The sounds of battle outside grew louder. With all this going on, was it possible today would end like any other day? We might escape, Bill thought, or we might get killed; but surely we won't be turning off the TV and lying down on our bunks as usual tonight.

At about ten-thirty he saw most of the officers crossing the prison compound, heading north, as if they were going to a meeting. They hurried back half an hour later. The major in charge of Building Number 8 went into his office. He emerged a couple of minutes later--in civilian clothes! He carried a shapeless parcel--his uniform?--out of the building. Looking through the window, Bill saw him put the parcel in the trunk of his BMW, which was parked outside the courtyard fence, then get in the car and drive away.

What did that mean? Would all the officers leave? Was that how it would happen--would Paul and Bill be able just to walk out?

Lunch came a little before noon. Paul ate but Bill was not hungry. The firing seemed very close now, and they could hear shouting and chanting from the streets.

Three of the guards in Building Number 8 suddenly appeared in civilian clothes.

This had to be the end.

Paul and Bill went downstairs and into the courtyard. The mental patients on the ground floor all seemed to be screaming. Now the guards in the gun towers were firing into the streets outside: the prison must be under attack.

Was that good news or bad? wondered Bill. Did EDS know this was happening? Could it be part of Coburn's rescue? There had been no visitors for two days. Had they all gone home? Were they still alive?

The sentry who normally guarded the courtyard gate had gone, and the gate was open.

The gate was open!

Did the guards want the prisoners to leave?

Other cell blocks must have been open, too, for there were now prisoners as well as guards running around the compound. Bullets whistled through the trees and ricocheted off buildings.

A slug landed at Paul's feet.

They both stared at it.

The guards in the gun towers were now firing into the compound.

Paul and Bill turned and ran back into Building Number 8.

They stood at a window, watching the mounting chaos in the compound. It was ironic: for weeks they had thought of little else but their freedom, yet now that they could walk out, they hesitated.

"What do you think we should do?" said Paul.

"I don't know. Is it more dangerous in here or out there?"

Paul shrugged.

"Hey, there's the billionaire." They could see the rich prisoner from Building Number 8--the one who had a private room and meals brought in from outside--crossing the compound with two of his henchmen. He had shaved off his luxuriant handlebar mustache. Instead of his mink-lined camel coat, he wore a shirt and pants: he was stripped for action, traveling light, ready to move fast. He was heading north, away from the prison gates: did that mean there was a back way out?

The guards from Building Number 8, all now in civilian clothes, crossed the little courtyard and went out through the gate.

Everyone was leaving, yet still Paul and Bill hesitated.

"See that motorcycle?" said Paul.

"I see it."

"We could leave on that. I used to ride a motorcycle."

"How would we get it over the wall?"

"Oh, yeah." Paul laughed at his own foolishness.

Their cellmate had found a couple of big bags and he began to pack his clothes. Bill felt the urge to take off, just to get out of here, whether or not that was part of the EDS plan. Freedom was so close. But bullets were flying around out there, and the mob attacking the jail might well be anti-American. On the other hand, if the authorities were somehow to regain control of the prison, Paul and Bill would have lost their last chance of escape ...

"I wonder where Gayden is now, the son of a bitch," said Paul. "The only reason I'm here is because he sent me to Iran."

Bill looked at Paul and realized he was only joking.

The patients from the ground-floor hospital swarmed out into the courtyard: someone must have unlocked their doors. Bill could hear a tremendous commotion, like crying, from the women's cell block on the other side of the street. There were more and more people out in the compound, flocking toward the prison entrance. Looking that way, Bill saw smoke. Paul saw it at the same moment.

Bill said: "If they're going to burn the place..."

"We'd better get out."

The fire tipped the balance: their decision was made.

Bill looked around the cell. The two of them had few possessions. Bill thought of the diary he had kept faithfully for the last forty-three days. Paul had written lists of things he would do when he got back to the States, and had figured out, on a sheet of paper, the finance on the new house Ruthie was buying. They both had precious letters from home that they had read over and over again.

Paul said: "We're probably better off not carrying anything that shows we're Americans."

Bill had picked up his diary. Now he dropped it again. "You're right," he said reluctantly.

They put on their coats: Paul had a blue London Fog raincoat and Bill an overcoat with a fur collar.

They had about two thousand dollars each, money that Keane Taylor had brought in. Paul had some cigarettes. They took nothing else.

They went out of the building and crossed the little courtyard, then hesitated at the gate. The street was now a sea of people, like the crowd leaving a sports stadium, walking and running in one mass toward the prison gates.

Paul stuck out his hand. "Hey, good luck, Bill."

Bill shook his hand. "Good luck to you."

Probably we'll both die in the next few minutes, Bill thought, most likely from a stray bullet. I'll never see the kids grow up, he realized sadly. The thought that Emily would have to manage on her own made him angry.

Amazingly enough, he felt no fear.

They stepped through the little gate, and then there was no more time for reflection.

They were swept into the throng, like twigs dropped into a fast-flowing stream. Bill concentrated on sticking close to Paul and staying upright, not to get trampled. There was still a lot of shooting. One lone guard had stayed at his post and seemed to be firing into the crowd from his gun tower. Two or three people fell--one of them was the American woman they had seen before--but it was not clear whether they had been shot or had merely stumbled. I don't want to die yet, Bill thought; I've got plans, things I want to do with my family, in my career; this is not the time, not the place, for me to die; what a rotten hand of cards I've been dealt...

They passed the Officers' Club where they had met with Perot just three weeks ago--it seemed like years. Vengeful prisoners were smashing up the club and wrecking the officers' cars outside. Where was the sense in that? For a moment the whole scene seemed unreal, like a dream, or a nightmare.

The chaos around the main prison entrance was worse. Paul and Bill held back, and managed to detach themselves from the crowd, for fear of being crushed. Bill recalled that some of the prisoners had been here for twenty-five years: it was no wonder, after that length of time, that when they smelled freedom they went berserk.

It seemed that the prison gates must still be shut, for scores of people were trying to climb the immense exterior wall. Some were standing on cars and trucks that had been pushed up against the wall. Others were climbing trees and crawling precariously along overhanging branches. Still more had leaned planks against the brickwork and were trying to scramble up those. A few people had reached the top of the wall by one means or another and were letting down ropes and sheets to those below, but the ropes were not long enough.

Paul and Bill stood watching, wondering what to do. They were joined by some of the other foreign prisoners from Building Number 8. One of them, a New Zealander charged with drug smuggling, had a big grin all over his face as if he were enjoying the whole thing hugely. There was a kind of hysterical elation in the air, and Bill began to catch it. Somehow, he thought, we're going to get out of this mess alive.

He looked around. To the right of the gates the buildings were burning. To the left, some distance away, he saw an Iranian prisoner waving as if to say: This way! There had been some construction work on that section of the wall--a building seemed to be going up on the far side--and there was a steel door in the wall to allow access to the site. Looking more closely, Bill could see that the waving Iranian had got the steel door open.

"Hey--look over there!" said Bill.

"Let's go," said Paul.

They ran over. Several other prisoners followed. They went through the door--and found themselves trapped in a kind of cell without doors or windows. There was a smell of new cement. Builders' tools lay around. Someone grabbed a pickaxe and swung it at the wall. The fresh concrete crumbled quickly. Two or three others joined in, hacking away with anything that came to hand. Soon the hole was big enough: they dropped their tools and crawled through.

They were now between the two prison walls. The inner wall, behind them, was the high one-twenty-five or thirty feet. The outer wall, which stood between them and freedom, was only ten or twelve feet high.

An athletic prisoner managed to get up onto the top of the wall. Another man stood at its foot and beckoned. A third prisoner went forward. The man on the ground pushed him up, the one on top pulled, and the prisoner went over the wall.

It happened very quickly then.

Paul took a run at the wall.

Bill was right behind him.

Bill's mind was a blank. He ran. He felt a push, helping him up; then a pull; then he was at the top, and he jumped.

He landed on the pavement.

He got to his feet.

Paul was right beside him.

We're free! thought Bill. We're free!

He felt like dancing.

Coburn put down the phone and said: "That was Majid. The mob has overrun the prison."

"Good," said Simons. He had told Coburn, earlier that morning, to send Majid down to Gasr Square.

Simons was very cool, Coburn thought. This was it--this was the big day! Now they could get out of the apartment, get on the move, activate their plans for "getting out of Dodge." Yet Simons showed no signs of excitement.

"What do we do now?" said Coburn.

"Nothing. Majid is there, Rashid is there. If those two can't take care of Paul and Bill, we sure as hell won't be able to. If Paul and Bill don't turn up by nightfall, we'll do what we discussed: you and Majid will go out on a motorcycle and search."

"And meanwhile?"

"We stick to the plan. We sit tight. We wait."

There was a crisis at the U.S. Embassy.

Ambassador William Sullivan had got an emergency call for help from General Gast, head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group. MAAG Headquarters was surrounded by a mob. Tanks were drawn up outside the building and shots were being exchanged. Gast and his officers, together with most of the Iranian general staff, were in a bunker underneath the building.

Sullivan had every able-bodied man in the Embassy making phone calls, trying to find revolutionary leaders who might have the authority to call off the mob. The phone on Sullivan's desk was ringing constantly. In the middle of the crisis he got a call from Undersecretary Newsom in Washington.

Newsom was calling from the Situation Room in the White House, where Zbigniew Brzezinski was chairing a meeting on Iran. He asked for Sullivan's assessment of the current position in Tehran. Sullivan gave it to him in a few short phrases, and told him that right at that moment he was preoccupied with saving the life of the senior American military officer in Iran.

A few minutes later Sullivan got a call from an Embassy official who had succeeded in reaching Ibrahim Yazdi, a Khomeini sidekick. The official was telling Sullivan that Yazdi might help when the call was overridden and Newsom came on the line again.

Newsom said: "The National Security Advisor has asked for your view of the possibility of a coup d'etat by the Iranian military to take over from the Bakhtiar government, which is clearly faltering."

The question was so ridiculous that Sullivan blew his cool. "Tell Brzezinski to fuck off," he said.

"That's not a very helpful comment," said Newsom.

"You want it translated into Polish?" Sullivan said, and he hung up the phone.

On the roof of Bucharest, the negotiating team could see the fires spreading uptown. The noise of shooting was also coming closer to where they stood.

John Howell and Abolhasan returned from their meeting with Dadgar. "Well?" Gayden said to Howell. "What did that bastard say?"

"He won't let them go."

"Bastard."

A few minutes later they all heard a noise that sounded distinctly like a bullet whistling by. A moment later the noise came again. They decided to get off the roof.

They went down to the offices and watched from the windows. They began to see, in the street below, boys and young men with rifles. It seemed the mob had broken into a nearby armory. This was too close for comfort: it was time to abandon Bucharest and go to the Hyatt, which was farther uptown.

They went out and jumped into two cars, then headed up the Shahanshahi Expressway at top speed. The streets were packed, and there was a carnival atmosphere. People were leaning out of windows yelling "Allahar Akbar!" God is great! Most of the traffic was headed downtown, toward the fighting. Taylor drove straight through three roadblocks, but nobody minded: they were all dancing.

They reached the Hyatt and assembled in the sitting room of the eleventh-floor corner suite that Gayden had taken over from Perot. They were joined by Rich Gallagher's wife, Cathy, and her white poodle, Buffy.

Gayden had stocked the suite with booze from the abandoned homes of EDS evacuees, and he now had the best bar in Tehran; but no one felt much like drinking.

"What do we do next?" Gayden asked.

Nobody had any ideas.

Gayden got on the phone to Dallas, where it was now six A.M. He reached Tom Walter and told him about the fires, the fighting, and the kids on the streets with their automatic rifles.

"That's all I got to report," he finished.

In his slow Alabama drawl, Walter said: "Other than that a quiet day, huh?"

They discussed what they would do if the phone lines went down. Gayden said he would try to get messages through via the U.S. military: Cathy Gallagher worked for the army and she thought she could swing it.

Keane Taylor went into the bedroom and lay down. He thought about his wife, Mary. She was in Pittsburgh, staying with his parents. Taylor's mother and father were both past eighty and in failing health. Mary had called to tell him his mother had been rushed to the hospital: it was her heart. Mary wanted Taylor to come home. He had spoken to his father, who had said ambiguously: "You know what you have to do." It was true: Taylor knew he had to stay here. But it was not easy, not for him or for Mary.

He was dozing on Gayden's bed when the phone rang. He reached out to the bedside table and picked it up. "Hello?" he said sleepily.

A breathless Iranian voice said: "Are Paul and Bill there?"

"What?" said Taylor. "Rashid--is that you?"

"Are Paul and Bill there?" Rashid repeated.

"No. What do you mean?"

"Okay, I'm coming, I'm coming."

Rashid hung up.

Taylor got off the bed and went into the sitting room. "Rashid just called," he told the others. "He asked me if Paul and Bill were here."

"What did he mean?" said Gayden. "Where was he calling from?"

"I couldn't get anything else out of him. He was all excited, and you know how bad his English is when he gets wound up."

"Didn't he say any more?"

"He said: 'I'm coming,' then he hung up."

"Shit." Gayden turned to Howell. "Give me the phone." Howell was sitting with the phone to his ear, saying nothing: they were keeping the line to Dallas open. At the other end an EDS switchboard operator was listening, waiting for someone to speak. Gayden said: "Let me talk to Tom Walter again, please."

As Gayden told Walter about Rashid's call, Taylor wondered what it meant. Why would Rashid imagine Paul and Bill might be at the Hyatt? They were in jail--weren't they?

A few minutes later Rashid burst into the room, dirty, smelling of gunsmoke, with clips of G3 ammunition falling out of his pockets, talking a mile a minute so that nobody could understand a word. Taylor calmed him down. Eventually he said: "We hit the prison. Paul and Bill were gone."

Paul and Bill stood at the foot of the prison wall and looked around.

The scene in the street reminded Paul of a New York parade. In the apartment buildings across from the jail everyone was at the windows, cheering and applauding as they watched the prisoners escape. At the street corner a vendor was selling fruit from a stall. There was gunfire not far away, but in the immediate vicinity nobody was shooting. Then, as if to remind Paul and Bill that they were not yet out of danger, a car full of revolutionaries raced by with guns sticking out of every window.

"Let's get out of here," said Paul.

"Where do we go? The U.S. Embassy? The French Embassy?"

"The Hyatt."

Paul started walking, heading north. Bill walked a little behind him, with his coat collar turned up and his head bent to hide his pale American face. They came to an intersection. It was deserted: no cars, no people. They started across. A shot rang out.

Both of them ducked and ran back the way they had come.

It was not going to be easy.

"How are you doing?" said Paul.

"Still alive."

They walked back past the prison. The scene was the same: at least the authorities had not yet got organized enough to start rounding up the escapees.

Paul headed south and east through the streets, hoping to circle around until he could go north again. Everywhere there were boys, some only thirteen or fourteen, with automatic rifles. On every corner was a sandbagged bunker, as if the streets were divided up into tribal territories. Farther on they had to push their way through a crowd of yelling, chanting, almost hysterical people: Paul carefully avoided meeting people's eyes, for he did got want them to notice him, let alone speak to him--if they were to learn there were two Americans in their midst they might turn ugly.

The rioting was patchy. It was like New York, where you had only to walk a few steps and turn a corner to find the character of the district completely changed. Paul and Bill went through a quiet area for half a mile, then ran into a battle. There was a barricade of overturned cars across the road and a bunch of youngsters with rifles shooting across the barricade toward what looked like a military installation. Paul turned away quickly, fearful of being hit by a stray bullet.

Each time he tried to turn north he ran into some obstruction. They were now farther from the Hyatt than they had been when they started. They were moving south, and the fighting was always worse in the south.

They stopped outside an unfinished building. "We could duck in there and hide until nightfall," Paul said. "After dark nobody will notice that you're American."

"We might get shot for being out after curfew."

"You think there's still a curfew?"

Bill shrugged.

"We're doing all right so far," Paul said. "Let's go on a little longer."

They went on.

It was two hours--two hours of crowds and street battles and stray sniper fire--before at last they could turn north. Then the scene changed. The gunfire receded, and they found themselves in a relatively affluent area of pleasant villas. They saw a child on a bicycle, wearing a T-shirt that said something about southern California.

Paul was tired. He had been in jail for forty-five days, and during most of that time he had been sick: he was no longer strong enough to walk for hours. "What do you say we hitchhike?" he asked Bill.

"Let's give it a try."

Paul stood at the roadside and waved at the next car that came along. (He remembered not to stick out his thumb the American way--this was an obscene gesture in Iran.) The car stopped. There were two Iranian men in it. Paul and Bill got in the back.

Paul decided not to mention the name of the hotel. "We're going to Tajrish," he said. That was a bazaar area to the north of the city.

"We can take you part of the way," said the driver.

"Thanks." Paul offered them cigarettes, then sat back gratefully and lit one for himself.

The Iranians dropped them off at Kurosh-e-Kabir, several miles south of Tajrish, not far from where Paul had lived. They were in a main street, with plenty of traffic and a lot more people around. Paul decided not to make himself conspicuous by hitchhiking here.

"We could take refuge in the Catholic Mission," Bill suggested.

Paul considered. The authorities presumably knew that Father Williams had visited them in Gasr Prison just two days ago. "The Mission might be the first place Dadgar looks for us."

"Maybe."

"We should go to the Hyatt."

"The guys may not be there any longer."

"But there'll be phones, some way to get plane tickets..."

"And hot showers."

"Right."

They walked on.

Suddenly a voice called: "Mr. Paul! Mr. Bill!"

Paul's heart stopped. He looked around. He saw a car full of people moving slowly along the road beside him. He recognized one of the passengers: it was a guard from the Gasr Prison.

The guard had changed into civilian clothes, and looked as if he had joined the revolution. His big smile seemed to say: don't tell who I am, and I won't tell who you are.

He waved; then the car gathered speed and passed on.

Paul and Bill laughed with a mixture of amusement and relief.

They turned into a quiet street, and Paul started to hitchhike again. He stood in the road waving while Bill stayed on the sidewalk, so that motorists might think there was only one man, an Iranian.

A young couple stopped. Paul got into the car and Bill jumped in after him.

"We're headed north," Paul said.

The woman looked at her man.

The man said: "We could take you to Niavron Palace."

"Thank you."

The car pulled away.

The scene in the streets changed again. They could hear much more gunfire, and the traffic became heavier and more frantic, with all the cars honking continually. They saw press cameramen and television crews standing on car roofs taking pictures. The mob was burning the police stations near where Bill had lived. The Iranian couple looked nervous as the car inched through the crowd: having two Americans in their car could get them into trouble in this atmosphere.

It began to get dark.

Bill leaned forward. "Boy, it's getting a bit late," he said. "It sure would be nice if y'all could take us to the Hyatt Hotel. We'd be happy to, you know, thank you and give you something for taking us there."

"Okay," said the driver.

He did not ask how much.

They passed the Niavron Palace, the Shah's winter residence. There were tanks outside, as always, but now they had white flags attached to their antennae: they had surrendered to the revolution.

The car went on, past wrecked and burning buildings, turned back every now and again by street barricades.

At last they saw the Hyatt.

"Oh, boy," Paul said feelingly. "An American hotel."

They drove into the forecourt.

Paul was so grateful that he gave the Iranian couple two hundred dollars.

The car drove off. Paul and Bill waved, then walked into the hotel.

Suddenly Paul wished he were wearing his EDS uniform of business suit and white shirt, instead of prison dungarees and a dirty raincoat.

The magnificent lobby was deserted.

They walked to the reception desk. After a moment someone came out from an office.

Paul asked for Bill Gayden's room number.

The clerk checked, then told him there was no one of that name registered.

"How about Bob Young?"

"No."