Bill Belk had been moved away from the medic Don Hohman only after the guards were convinced he wasn’t going to stop breathing again. He was shuffled around from week to week and wound up in a small upstairs room in the ambassador’s house with Malcolm Kalp, the CIA officer. So far the highlight of Belk’s captivity, apart from nearly dying of an allergic reaction to an insect bite, was the day he had inadvertently received two cans of beer with his lunch. The guards always put two cans of soda on the table in his cubicle in the Mushroom Inn, where he had stayed for several weeks. Apparently they didn’t realize the difference in the cans of soda and beer. He said not a word and calmly savored his first alcoholic beverages since the takeover.
Mostly Belk felt bored, and stiff. Some days the only time he stood up was to go to the bathroom or to go eat. For the first month, every time he heard a helicopter his heart leapt.
He and Kalp had mattresses on opposite sides of the room and were not allowed to speak. A guard sat outside the door. Passing notes back and forth, they began to plan an escape. Kalp said he wanted to go, but he didn’t want to hurt anybody doing it. Belk argued with him in the notes.
“That’s no way to feel!” he wrote.
Belk said that if they tried to go, it would have to be all-out, “us or them.” If he had to hurt or even kill somebody, he was ready to do it. The more he thought about it, the more determined he became. He was going to try and, if necessary, he told Kalp, he was going to go alone. If Kalp was going to shrink at jumping a guard, he didn’t want to have him along.
One of the guards always fell asleep soon after his shift started. Two days before Christmas, Belk waited until he nodded off, bundled his blanket on the mattress to make it look somewhat like he was wrapped in it, and walked out the door. He tiptoed down a back stairway toward the kitchen but he heard voices, and peering through the crack of the door he saw that it was full of Iranians. So he walked back up the stairs. From a window in the hallway he could look out over the back of the residence. The first-floor roof extended from the wall out toward a patio and swimming pool. Weeks earlier he had pried off a small blade from a Gillette shaver and hidden it in his shoe. Now he took off the shoe and retrieved it, using it to cut a neat hole in the window screen. He crawled out onto the first-floor roof.
Immediately he was struck by two things he hadn’t considered. It was bitterly cold and the compound was brightly illuminated by spotlights from front to back. It wasn’t usually like that at night, but for some reason, on this night, every damn light was ablaze. He could see armed Iranians walking all over the compound. His heart sank and he considered crawling back inside. He sat there, on the roof over the crowded kitchen, watching his breath trail off in gusts of steam, pulling his sweater tighter around him, expecting alarms to sound and people to shoot at him, but nothing happened. None of the Iranians looked up. So far so good. He decided to push his luck. He scouted around the edge of the roof and found a place where he could lower himself into the back patio by stepping down on an air-conditioning unit that protruded from a window. There were some large gas bottles on the ground beneath that fed the kitchen stoves and he dropped among them and squatted out of sight. The bottles were warm, so it was comfortable. He stayed there for about an hour.
The patio was enclosed by high walls. If he tried to climb over he would immediately be spotted. The gate was padlocked and the only other one had a guard posted alongside. He figured that gate was his only way out. He waited until a group of about six students emerged from the kitchen and proceeded through the gate, laughing and talking, absorbed in their conversation, and with his heart pounding Belk stood up and fell in behind them, drawing his sweater up over his head like he was pulling it on and adjusting it as he passed the guard. He stepped out of the gate and turned immediately to his right and kept walking.
He followed a fence that ran from the back of the ambassador’s house over toward the warehouse. There was a break in the fence ahead that opened into the spacious pine woods in front of the residence, and he was making for them when he heard over his shoulder, “East!,” which meant, “Stop!”
It was a female voice, one of the guards. He turned and saw her standing right over him on a small platform, pointing a rifle. She repeated excitedly, “East! East!”
He grabbed her and her weapon, twisting the barrel up and reaching for the switch that released its ammo magazine. The guard got off one shot into the sky before Belk managed to eject it. He knew she still had one more round in the chamber. She fired that one into the air, too, and Belk ran.
He headed back toward the residence, then heard another shot. Someone else was now shooting! He sprinted across the compound toward the tennis courts and a point on the back wall where there were steps leading up, a place where he could climb up and look over the top. He heard another shot snap, the round passing close as he bounded up the steps. He planned to pull himself up and over the wall, but when he peered over it he saw two policemen in the alley who had obviously been alerted by the shots inside. He stopped himself so abruptly that he lost his balance and fell off the stairs and twisted his right knee when he hit the hard ground. When he stood the knee buckled. He couldn’t run. Right beside the stairs was a metal container, about the size of a big ice cooler. It didn’t look large enough for a man to hide inside but Belk had no choice. He raised the lid and wiggled his six-foot frame inside.
It was filled with ice-cold water. The lid to the container didn’t close tightly, so he could see out across the compound, where guards were now running toward him from all directions. When they got close, they split up and fanned out to search back across the compound without bothering to look inside the cooler. Belk sat there in the freezing water trying not to breathe. He tried to raise himself to climb out once the guards had left that spot, but now his knee hurt even worse and he was also frightened. He thought if he raised the lid and tried to climb out he would be shot. So he stayed.
Soon a group of twelve guards reconvened at the stairs carrying flashlights and began conferring in rapid- fire Farsi. Belk could have reached out and touched them, they were that close. If they would just move again, Belk thought, maybe he could summon the strength to climb out and over the wall. The icy water had numbed him so he no longer felt any pain in his knee. He would head for Bert Moore’s house at the end of the alley immediately outside the compound. Maybe he could hide there through the day, and then hijack a car and drive toward Turkey. Or maybe he would try for the British or Canadian embassies. He stayed still for several long minutes until one of the guards looked down and noticed something.
“Oh!” he said, and jumped backward. Immediately all the guards pointed their weapons at the cooler. Belk slowly opened the lid and tried to stand. He was grabbed under both arms and hauled out. One of the guards slapped him and then pulled the wet sweater up over his head, pinning his arms. Then he clapped his arm around Belk’s head in a wrestling hold. The others slapped and kicked at the captive and hit him with their guns. He couldn’t stand because of the knee, so he was dragged to a car, thrown in the backseat, and driven to the chancery, where he was hauled into a first-floor room, what had been Bert Moore’s office. They threw blankets over him, handcuffed him, and began to berate him and to question him.
“There is no escape!” one of them told him. “Allah is against you!”
“You are CIA and you were taking a message for Malcolm Kalp,” his questioner said. “Who were you going to see?”
“No way,” said Belk. “I was just going home for Christmas.”
“What is your code name?”
His questioner reached down and tightened his handcuffs and then leaned on them, digging the steel into his wrists.
“It hurts!” Belk protested.
“It doesn’t matter,” the interrogator said.
Belk was left alone for the remainder of that evening. The cuffs were so tight his hands swelled and ached. In the room next door he heard Joe Subic and Kevin Hermening talking. It sounded like they were planning some sort of Christmas party and talking about getting out their Christmas cards! One of them was working a typewriter. It seemed weirdly incongruous to Belk, who was wet, cold, frightened, and in pain.
The next day six students came in and questioned him again, asking him about Kalp and where he had planned to go. When Belk told them the truth, that he had left by himself and didn’t know where he was going to go, they kicked his injured leg and hit him several times over the head.
“People that try to escape get shot,” one of them said.
One put a .45 caliber pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. Belk heard the hammer snap and at that point didn’t care. He begged them to remove the handcuffs. His hands had turned a faint blue and the pain was intense.
