rounds in the chamber. The trigger was pulled and the hammer snapped. The blow to the head had dazed him, so the sound reached him in a slow-motion haze. He was not consciously afraid. He was more worried about being put back into the circle and being kicked and beaten again. But what happened next did scare him, knock on the head and all.
Kupke was thrown to the floor and one of the older Iranians, a short fat man, sat on his stomach. Others grabbed his feet and pinned his arms. Kupke could smell the man sitting on him as he leaned close with a knife.
“I’m going to cut your eyes out,” he said. “I’m going to ask you some questions.” He tapped the flat of the blade against Kupke’s left eye. “I want you to open these safes, and if you don’t open them I’m going to cut out this eye first. Then, I’m going to cut out this eye,” he said, tapping Kupke’s right eye.
“You’ve got to believe me,” said Kupke, pleading now. “I work here in the coms center. I send and receive messages for the embassy! If I knew the combination to the safe, I would open it right now. I don’t want my eyes cut out!”
The man got up and led Kupke into the hallway where Jones was standing blindfolded against the wall, looking disheveled, with his hands tied behind his back.
“Charles,” Kupke blurted. “If you know how to open the safe, open it.”
Jones knew the combinations. The Iranians grabbed him by the necktie and choked him, but he refused to help. He was terrified but something in him balked at the threats, and he was convinced beyond reason that this wasn’t real, that it would all be over soon and things would be back to normal. He was more concerned about protecting his jewelry, which he kept in a drawer in one of the vault’s safes, figuring it was the safest place on the compound. When they had begun emptying the safes earlier, Jones decided to put on all his valuables—he had heard that in the February embassy invasion none of the Iranians had patted down the embassy personnel—so he had put it all on, three chains, seven rings, three watches. Before Ahern opened the vault door, he had reached under his collar and removed one of the chains, which held a golden Star of David, a gift from the years he had spent assigned to Israel. Figuring it was a symbol that might provoke his captors, he had hidden it under one of the counters.
Mostly, Jones was angry about getting roughed up. When they had first taken him, he had been blindfolded and led out into the corridor.
“Hey, who’s next to me?” asked the man next to him, who was Ahern.
“It’s me, Charles,” said Jones, at which point an Iranian had slammed his head against the wall. The man had snatched a chain off Jones’s neck, and then knocked him to the floor and kicked him. In the process he had stepped on his hand, which hurt.
Now, as he was being choked by his necktie, Jones was angry and determined to be unhelpful.
“What’s wrong with you?” Kupke pleaded. “Man, they’re bouncing me off the walls in the other room, Charles.”
Jones was pushed to the ground, beaten and kicked again.
Englemann was ordered to open the safes, which he did not know how to do. Instead he led some of his captors out of the vault and down the hall to his own office. He had already emptied his safes of anything sensitive and fed his files into the disintegrator, so in a great show of helpfulness he spun the combination locks and opened them. Inside were unimportant files and a pile of picture books. They seemed pleased.
Hermening was pulled to his feet and led back into the vault. One of the Iranians now pressed the barrel of a pistol hard into his temple, right beside his eye.
“Open the safe!” he demanded.
“I don’t know the combination,” Hermening protested. He was shaking.
“Open the safe!” the man shouted again.
“I don’t know the combination. I don’t even work in this office.”
“Sure,” the Iranian said. “Then what were you doing in here?”
Hermening had never been so scared. He didn’t know the combination, and he was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to convince the man with the gun that he was telling the truth.
“If I did know it, what good is it going to do for you to shoot me?” he said. “Then you’ll never get the combination.”
Eventually he was led back out to the hall and a gas mask bag was pulled over his head. He heard someone being beaten in the room behind him.
Golacinski was on the floor with them, blindfolded again, his head still ringing, when he saw out of the bottom of the blindfold that one of the Iranians was unscrewing a wall socket.
“We’re going to burn you,” he said. They were still trying to force someone to open the safes for them.
Golacinski spoke up to his colleagues in a loud voice, “If any of you can open the safes, open the damn safes!”
Everyone still refused. Golacinski was taken into the vault and ordered to open them.
“None of us can,” he said. “All of the combinations were written down and they have been destroyed. They burned them all.”
In the midst of all this conflict over the safes, a group of young Iranians showed up with food—bread and eggs and pickles. It was strange; one minute Hermening had a gun pressed to his head and in the next an Iranian was offering him an egg salad sandwich. How was he supposed to feel like eating?
He refused the food and was taken to one of the offices down the hall. The door was shut behind him. When the bag was taken off his head he faced several protesters seated in the office chairs and on the desk. The office had been ransacked, the drawers pulled out, pictures were crooked on the walls. Framed photos of President Carter and Secretary of State Vance had been thrown to the floor and their glass covers smashed. He thought it was his turn to be beaten and his tough marine mask crumbled. He was instead a frightened nineteen- year-old, and he started to cry.
“I don’t know the combinations!” he pleaded. “I’m just a security guard!”
One of his captors was clearly in charge. He told Hermening in English that unless he was more helpful, the others were going to be “turned loose” on him. The marine fought to free his hands so that he could fend off the blows, but apparently he had managed to convince his questioner that he knew nothing. He was not assaulted. Instead, he was led downstairs.
“We want to see where you work,” the Iranian told him.
On the foyer floor downstairs he saw the American flag, scuffed and dirty. One of the protesters was sitting in a chair at the front entrance guard post wearing a marine helmet. Scattered around were the half-burned newspaper torches the protesters had used to battle the tear gas. He was taken into Gunnery Sergeant Mike Moeller’s office, where earlier he had been working on the meal accounting. Hermening showed them the money box and the papers he had been working on and explained what he had been doing. Then they took him to the guard post’s electric switchboard, which controlled locks for various portions of the building. They had been unable to open a door that led to the east-side hallway on the first floor. They told him to push the right buttons to release the locks. Hermening reached under the switchbox, where they could not see his hands, and yanked out the wires that connected the switches to the electric locks. Then he pushed buttons at random. Of course, nothing happened.
He looked up with a confused expression. “It’s always worked before,” he said.
11. Gaptooth
Kupke’s pockets were emptied of cash and jewelry and he was taken down the hall to Laingen’s office, where he had the distinction of being the first American hostage to meet Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam, a skinny young man with a dreamy, distracted manner, a thick unruly mop of curly black hair, and a full black beard, a radical filled with the absolute certainty of divine purpose, whose occasional sweetness itself was in service of a brutal righteousness. He was missing his left front tooth, and the hostages, who would come to know him well, called him “Gaptooth,” or “Snaggle-tooth.” Because he spoke perfect English, he would become for them the most visible
