“How are you?” the man asked quietly.
“Fine. Who is it?”
“Kalp.”
“It’s Koob.”
For the first time since the morning of the takeover, Al Golacinski heard the voice of his assistant, Mike Howland. Golacinski was shocked. He had assumed long ago that Howland, Bruce Laingen, and Vic Tomseth, whom he knew had been at the Foreign Ministry on the day of the takeover, had gotten out. On that day a year ago, Howland had accompanied Laingen instead of Golacinski. The embassy security chief had no idea where his assistant had been for the previous year, but he assumed it had not been spent in prison.
“Mike, that’s the last time you and I are going to have a shift change,” he said.
Kevin Hermening was sitting on the bus when the guards pushed Bob Ode down to the floor. The youngest hostage stood and gave the eldest his seat.
Laingen argued with the guards who tried to take away his small blue bag.
“Don’t you trust us?” one of the guards asked.
Laingen laughed scornfully, but sensing that now was not the time to mount a struggle over insignificant possessions he handed it over.
Marine guard Rocky Sickmann was squeezed into a small place that turned out to be some kind of radiator. He had a hole in the seat of his pants—he had spent most of the past year sitting on a mattress—and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his rump. There was no place for him to move. So he fidgeted on the hot plate. If the bus was taking him home, he could cope.
Michael Metrinko heard people behind him whispering.
“Shut up!” shouted Akmed in English, and then cursed all of them in Farsi.
Metrinko responded in Farsi, “You shut up, you son of a Persian whore.”
The bus ground to a halt. Metrinko was grabbed by the arm and felt himself being pulled from the bus.
He shouted in English, “This is Metrinko and they are taking me off the bus!” Outside he kept bellowing loudly as he was beaten. Metrinko wanted everyone on the bus to know what was happening. The blows didn’t hurt much. The past fifiteen months had toughened him up.
State Department communicator Rick Kupke felt angry at Metrinko. Here he was thinking that he might live through this after all, and this hard case has to pick a fight! He prayed that his colleague would just shut up.
Hermening had to smile. Metrinko was still giving them shit, but then he worried about him. It was the wrong time to rock the boat. The young marine kept trying to tilt his head and see out the bottom of his blindfold. All of them were hopeful but still a little worried. They wanted to believe that this was it, but wouldn’t do so until they were at least in the air on their way out of Tehran.
Golacinski heard the voice of Ann Swift. Feelings were running high. Golacinski could tell this was it and suggested loudly, “Let’s take off our blindfolds.”
He and a number of the others did. Golacinski looked around and saw a large number of his embassy colleagues for the first time in more than a year, and what a worn-out, hairy, ill-clad group they had become! The sight filled him with joy.
“What are you doing?” asked a guard they called Bozo, who was carrying a pistol in each hand.
“Fuck you,” said Golacinski, feeling brazen. “You’re not going to screw this up. We’re on our way.”
He was dragged off the van by Bozo and several other guards and thrown up against a wall. He stood there for a few minutes and then heard the motors start. All of sudden his brazenness drained away.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he shouted, pleading. He was placed back aboard.
Limbert’s bus was so crowded that he had to sit in the toilet stall. When it started to move he was surprised that it didn’t stop. In Tehran’s insanely congested traffic, with mobbed traffic circles and jams at every intersection, driving through the city was always stop and go. The smooth movement of this bus suggested that it had some kind of escort, which implied government authority. They were on their way.
Carter had reluctantly abandoned his plan to fly to Wiesbaden before the inauguration in order to greet the returning hostages, but as the final hours of his presidency ticked away he remained determined to bring the crisis to a satisfactory end on his watch, to exit the White House announcing that the hostages were on their way home.
Christopher and Nabavi finally initialed the agreement very early in the morning on Tuesday, the twentieth. Carter and his staff had been up all night in the Oval Office, its walls stripped bare and the outgoing president’s books and papers in boxes that were being removed, waiting for word that it was done. The Federal Reserve Bank was to transfer the first portion of Iran’s frozen assets to an account in London as soon as the banks opened for business there, and then the Bank of England would move that money into an escrow account controlled by the National Bank of Algiers. When the White House received word about the agreement shortly after five o’clock, Carter immediately placed a call to Reagan. The president-elect, he was informed, did not wish to be disturbed.
The president took the news to the American people. He appeared behind the podium in the White House press room—“looking tired,” as the CBS correspondent noted—to make the announcement. The signatures had just put the release process in motion and, given the dramatic reversals of the previous fifteen months, nobody was going to celebrate yet. Until the hostages were actually aboard the Algerian commercial jets waiting for them on the runway of blacked-out Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, winging their way home, there was still a chance it would all fall apart again.
As a sunny, cold inauguration day dawned over the temporary stage set up in the back porch of the Capitol building, the two stories unfolded simultaneously. Carter maintained a vigil at his desk, fretting to his aides that some last-minute glitch might still derail the process and leave the sensitive matter in his successor’s hands. “I can just see the Iranians delaying for another day, Reagan saying something inflammatory, and our deal going down the drain,” he said. Reagan did call after seven to ask for an update and Carter explained exactly what was going on. When he hung up, Hamilton Jordan asked, “What did he say?”
“What hostages?” Carter quipped.
The departing first couple met the Reagans on the front porch of the White House a few hours later. Carter had cleaned up and sat for a haircut. “We think the Reagans will enjoy their new home,” he told the reporters on the front steps. The two couples sat together for the traditional inauguration morning tea, and Carter was surprised that the president-elect didn’t ask him a thing about the tense situation that had kept him up for the past forty-eight hours. It was as though Reagan wanted nothing to do with it, as though the whole mess belonged to Carter and was going to be swept away with the change of administration. As they rode together in a car to the Capitol, Reagan told jokes.
Carter sat wrapped in a tan trench coat through the pomp of the swearing in, as Reagan stepped out on a bright red carpet and looked out over a sea of spectators, to the grand promenade of the East Mall and the Washington Monument.
“No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women,” Reagan said in his address. “It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.”
Carter wasn’t listening. He was waiting for news from Tehran.
Mehrabad Airport was blacked out because of the Iraqi air raids, but the tarmac where the buses stopped shone under the glare of television lights. The hostages were led one by one off the buses and through a jeering gauntlet of students who had formed two long parallel lines from the buses to the plane.
Sickmann was grabbed from behind by one of the guards and pulled toward the plane. One of his sandals slipped off, and the marine resisted for a moment, stooping to adjust it, then ran toward the plane. He was the first one up the steps. A pretty stewardess greeted him with a smile at the top and he choked up with emotion.
