Guests of the Ayatollah

smuggling gasoline. It didn’t seem likely that they would go to the police, and if they did, what sense would be made of their story? A plane landed in the desert and attacked them? Even if it was investigated, the effort would take the better part of a day, at least, and by then it would be too late to interfere with the mission.

Desert One was now looking more like an airport, and Carney’s men were busy directing traffic, preparing for the arrival of the helicopters. Shortly after midnight, all four bladder birds were parked and positioned. The communications plane stayed, but the two lead planes, having delivered their cargo, took off for their rendezvous with the airborne tankers and the return flight to Masirah.

The unloading had gone pretty much as planned. The second C-130 had landed a few thousand feet farther off the landing zone than expected, so the job of hauling the camouflage netting from it was a correspondingly bigger job. The netting would be draped over the helicopters at the hide site at daylight. It was not an especially warm night in the desert, but all the men were overdressed, wearing layers of clothing and body armor, and they were sweating heavily with exertion. Moving through the loose sand made it an even more difficult task. The air force crews struggled to unfurl hundreds of pounds of hoses from the parked tankers, positioning them to receive the choppers. The bus had to be moved, so all the passengers were herded back on and it was repositioned.

“What is the status of the choppers?” Beckwith asked the commanders at Wadi Kena.

The command station at Masirah responded by relaying a request from the lead chopper for conditions at Desert One.

“Visibility five miles with negative surface winds,” reported Colonel Kyle, who was with Beckwith in the desert.

Then they heard from the lead chopper. “Fifty minutes out and low on fuel.”

It was a satisfying moment. The fuel crews had practiced the routine like pit crews at the Indy 500, and had the whole exercise down so well that it took only ten minutes to refill a landed chopper and send it on its way. Everything was behind schedule, however, which meant that even if the refueling and loading operations were done perfectly, the choppers would not arrive at the two hide sites before the crack of dawn. That posed only a small risk. The sites were in mountains outside the city, the choppers had been painted the same colors as Iranian army choppers, and it would still not be full daylight when they arrived. Still, if they didn’t land soon, they would be arriving at the hiding places in daylight. Burruss asked one of his men to check their maps for a gully or natural depression where they might be able to sit the choppers short of the planned hide site.

There was nothing to do then but wait. Most of the force had been on the ground for more than two hours. The sandstorms stirred by the aircraft whipped around the men and stung their faces, making it difficult to see. The choppers were late and getting later. They had been late in every one of the rehearsals, too, so no one was surprised.

5. What the Hell Is This?

Already the eight Sea Stallions had become six.

The original formation of eight had crossed into Iran flying at two hundred feet, and then moved down to one hundred feet. They were just behind the planes, as scheduled. When they had departed the Nimitz, more than five thousand crew members had come on deck to salute them. It had been deeply moving. On the deck of the carrier, with the last light of the dying day splayed behind it in the direction of faraway home, thousands of American sailors stood at attention, saluting the courage and skill of these soldiers off to rescue their countrymen. Major Jim Schaefer, in the third Sea Stallion to launch, had tears in his eyes.

Their approach over water was right on target. As they crossed Iran’s coast, several of the marine crews had spotted the single lead Hercules overhead moving at twice their airspeed. Two of the choppers were having difficulty with their navigation equipment, but flying that close to the ground they could steer by landmarks and by staying with the formation. They were not allowed to communicate by radio, lest they be overheard by Iranian defenses, but they had practiced flashing lights as signals; a quick one, two meant that there was a problem, and then the second sequence of lights indicated the nature of the problem. They flew in a staggered line of four pairs. Not long after crossing into Iran the marine crews spotted part of the trailing formation of C-130s, which confirmed they were heading the right way. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Seiffert, the flight leader and pilot of the lead chopper, felt relaxed enough to take a break and eat his packed lunch.

The formation made it only one hundred and forty miles into Iran, however, before one of the choppers had trouble. A warning light came on in the cockpit of the sixth in formation indicating that one of the blades had been hit by something or had cracked, a potentially fatal problem. The pilot immediately landed, followed by another, the trailing chopper, and after determining that one rotor blade was in fact cracked badly, they abandoned the aircraft, removing all of the classified documents inside and climbing into helo eight, flown by Captain Jimmy Linderman. It lifted off, gave chase, and eventually caught up with the others.

As they burned off fuel, the choppers picked up speed. They were closing in on Desert One faster and faster, 120 knots and accelerating. About two hundred miles into Iran they saw before them what looked like a wall of talcum powder. They flew right into it. Seiffert realized it was suspended dust when he tasted it and felt it in his teeth. If it was penetrating his cockpit, it was penetrating his engines. The temperature inside rose to one hundred degrees. But before it became a problem, the cloud vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. They had flown right through it.

Looming ahead was the second, much larger haboob, but Seiffert didn’t know it. Kyle’s warning had not been relayed; radio blackout conditions and the necessity for transmitting everything in code had defeated the C-130 flight crews’ efforts, that and the assumption that the hazy patches did not pose a severe problem.

This may have been the most serious miscalculation of the night, because the formation passed into the second cloud assuming that it would dissipate as quickly as the first. This one grew thicker and thicker, and soon Seiffert could no longer see the other choppers in the formation or on the ground. The choppers had to turn on their outside red safety lights, and off in the haze there were now indistinct halos of red strung out at varying distances. When the fuzzy beacons themselves vanished, Seiffert and his wingman made a U-turn, flew back out of the cloud, and landed. None of the other five choppers had seen them go down. Seiffert had hoped they would all follow him down to confer and decide on a strategy. Now he had no choice but to take off and wade back into the soup trying to catch up.

Seiffert’s manuever had placed Schaefer in the lead position. One moment Seiffert’s aircraft had been in front of him, and the next moment it was gone. One by one, the indistinct red suns in the milky haze had grown dimmer and dimmer and then they were gone. How could I lose them? Schaefer thought. He could see nothing and he heard nothing but the sounds of his own engines. All around was a smothering cloak of whiteness. He executed a “lost plane” maneuver, turning fifteen degrees off course for a few minutes, and then turning back on course, hoping to pick up the formation again. Even as low as two hundred feet he could not see the ground.

“Is this fog?” he asked his crew.

His crew chief said, “Lick your finger and stick it out the window.”

He did. When he pulled his hand in, it was covered with white dust.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

He climbed to one thousand feet and was still in the cloud. Inside the chopper it was hot and getting hotter. They descended, this time below two hundred feet. Schaefer could see the ground only intermittently. For three hours they flew like this on instruments, a series of small blue panels alongside the dials. In training for instrument flying, the pilots always flew in teams, with one aircraft blacked out and the other not. And there was always the option, when things got hairy, of removing the blackout screens. Now Schaefer had nothing to go on but the glowing blue panels, and his faith was being sorely tested. The cockpit was overheated and the men in it were both hot and increasingly tense.

“Is there anything in front of us?” Schaefer asked his copilot, Les Petty.

“Well, there’s a six-thousand-foot mountain in front of us,” he said.

“How soon?” asked Schaefer.