Guests of the Ayatollah

they won’t hurt you.”

“Do we have some time, Al?” he heard Tom Ahern shout.

“I don’t know,” Golacinski said.

At the Foreign Ministry, where Howland had been talking to Ahern on a phone in a small office downstairs, Howland set the phone down on the desk in order to keep the line open and ran upstairs to Yazdi’s office to confer with Laingen.

He explained that Ahern was ready to open the door and the reasons why he thought it should not be done.

“No, I agree,” said Laingen. “Tell them to hold on.”

Howland ran back downstairs, but when he got there he found the phone on the cradle. Someone had seen it off the hook and hung it up. Howland dialed the number for the vault but he didn’t get through. It was about four o’clock.

He hung up the phone, and seconds later it rang. Howland picked it up and heard an American voice. It was a sergeant calling from Germany who had somehow, in all this confusion, tracked him down to this office inside the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

“How did you—” he started to ask, but the sergeant cut him off. “Hold on for just a minute, sir.”

Then a four-star general was on the phone, asking for a full situation report. Howland was shocked and impressed. He began explaining things to the general.

On his end, when the line went dead, Ahern decided to wait another five minutes and then instructed everyone to make one last check of all the drawers, files, and equipment. Hermening went to work helping Jones and the others destroy heavy “core boards” from the computers. They were as thick as books and had to be cut into pieces with a knife before being fed into the disintegrator, which would loudly break them down further.

Kupke made one more trip to the roof to get rid of the last four shotguns. He slid open the door, pulled himself back up, and sat squatting with two shotguns under each arm. His yellow shirt was wet and filthy, covered with dirt and tar from his belly-crawls on the roof. He dropped down again and moved along the edge of the low wall. There was a din of thousands outside the embassy walls, urged on by voices amplified with loudspeakers.

Downstairs, unaware that Kupke was alone on the roof, Ahern swung open the vault door. On the other side stood an angry, excited, but dumb-founded crowd of young Iranians, one of whom stepped up and drove an elbow hard into Ahern’s ribs. He managed to keep his feet, then was quickly blindfolded and bound. Golacinski was thrown to one side and cracked his head on the wall. He heard the sounds of his colleagues being beaten. Bob Englemann’s black-rimmed glasses were broken and he doubled over with his hands up, trying to protect himself from the blows.

Hermening made one last pass through the vault, gathering up anything left on the tables and floor and throwing them down the disintegrator chute. As he did this he was grabbed from behind by both arms. Two Iranians had hold of him, and one demanded that he put his hand down the chute and retrieve whatever he had thrown in. He refused and was then roughly hauled out of the vault to the hallway.

Barnes saw a tiny Iranian man waving a big gun. As the line of Americans filed out of the vault, the tiny one kicked and punched at them, so Barnes flicked his cigarette to the floor and scooted over as close behind Ward as he could, figuring it would make it harder for Tiny to land a clean blow. It worked.

Hermening was not so fortunate. Held from behind by both arms, one of his captors slapped him hard across the face. The young marine was determined not to cry out or complain. He took the blow and stared furiously back at his attacker, which earned him another hard slap. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Golacinski and some of the others lined up on the floor against one wall. Some were blindfolded and some had bags over their heads. He was pushed down in the same line between Ward and Paul Needham, who thought the bag over his head was a very bad sign. For months they had been seeing pictures of executions, and in most the victims had bags over their heads. There was a lot of shouting in the hallway; the Iranians were going down the line demanding that their newest captives identify themselves and their jobs. Hermening wondered what he should say. He thought, name, rank, and serial number, but he could see right away that this answer was going to get him in trouble. If he didn’t tell them he was a marine guard, they were going to make other damaging assumptions about him. He hadn’t been caught with the other marines, he wasn’t in uniform, and he had been hiding in the secret vault. Was he allowed to tell them his job at the embassy? To his relief, Needham, the air force captain, promptly told them who he was and described his position with the military liaison group. Hermening thought, if an officer can do that, then it’s okay for me to do it, too. When they asked him he said his name and then, “I’m a marine security guard.”

“What’s that?” his questioner shouted.

He did his best to explain, but because he was wearing a blue suit with a vest, he could see that they didn’t believe him.

Still alone on the roof, Kupke was startled when the loud incinerator downstairs suddenly went silent. He hurried back to the door and, looking down, saw a group of Iranian men gathered below. Ahern had opened the door!

He slowly slid the door to the roof shut and sat alone, perplexed. Should he give himself up? He looked around him on the roof and saw the shotguns alongside him and those piled next to the shed. Kupke didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to be discovered on the roof with weapons; they would probably assume he had been preparing to open fire. He looked across the compound and saw people in the windows of the tall building across the street. Surely they could see him. It was only a matter of time before they alerted someone.

He cracked open the door to the vault again and listened. If there’s gunfire, he thought, I’m staying put. It was quiet. He reluctantly and slowly descended.

The burn room was empty so he stood there alone for a moment. He tiptoed over to peer into the adjacent room. At the far end were two Iranian men in green army jackets sitting with their backs to him before the destroyed radio equipment. He raised his hands and walked up behind them.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The two jumped up when they heard him and began shouting at him in Farsi.

“Americano,” he said.

One of the two smashed his fist into Kupke’s glasses, right between the eyes. There’s got to be an easier way to surrender, Kupke thought. He dropped to one knee and reached for his glasses, which had broken and scratched him under the eye. He shoved the pieces into his pocket, an instinctive move for which he would later be very glad. Suddenly the small room was filled with irate Iranians. They surrounded him, pulled him to his feet, and began pushing him back and forth. Some took swings at him, hitting him in the back and face. Kupke covered his head and ducked, trying to remember the protective moves he had learned in tae kwon do class. One of the men in the circle was leaning back on one leg and had the other elevated, trying to aim a kick. He was taking up so much space that it allowed Kupke room to dive into a corner with his back to the wall, fending off blows. He was pulled to his feet and dragged back out into the middle of the room, where the beating resumed until somebody slammed him hard from behind, probably with the same two-by-four he had used on the incinerator. It struck him more in the neck than in the head, but the force of the blow momentarily blacked him out. He came to with everything around him swirling in slow motion. He felt no pain.

He could hear the men speaking in Farsi. Most were young, although a few looked middle-aged. With their beards it was hard to tell. Most had guns. Kupke immediately doubted that they would shoot him. There were too many people in the room, for one thing, and they might hit each other. One of the men leveled a handgun at his head and asked, in English, “Where were you? Do you work for the CIA?”

“No, no,” Kupke said. “I was over by the burn machine.”

“No, you weren’t. Tell us who you work for. If you don’t tell us right, I’m going to shoot you.”

He told them the truth. “I work for the State Department,” he said.

The man pulled the trigger and the hammer snapped on an empty chamber. Kupke’s legs gave way. He was pulled back to his feet.

“Open the safe,” the English-speaker demanded.

“I don’t know the combination.”

The Iranian spun the chamber of the revolver and pressed the muzzle to his captive’s left temple. Kupke’s eyes were rolled so far to the left he was afraid they would lock in that position as he strained to see if there were