On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

'Yes, sir.'

'He has saved American lives and I won't have him hassled when we get to the States.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Call Harry McKillop. Have him fix it.'

'Yes, sir.'

Sculley woke them all at six A.M. He had to drag Coburn out of bed. Coburn was still suffering the aftereffects of Simons's stay-awake pills: ill-tempered and exhausted, he did not care whether he caught the plane or not.

Sculley had organized a bus to take them to Gatwick Airport, a good two-hour journey from Heathrow. As they went out, Keane Taylor, who was struggling with a plastic bin containing some of the dozens of bottles of liquor and cartons of cigarettes he had bought at Istanbul Airport, said: 'Hey, do any of you guys want to help me carry this stuff?'

Nobody said anything. They all got on the bus.

'Screw you, then,' said Taylor, and he gave the whole lot to the hotel doorman.

On the way to Gatwick they heard over the bus radio that China had invaded North Vietnam. Someone said: 'That'll be our next assignment.'

'Sure,' said Simons. 'We could be dropped between the two armies. No matter which way we fired, we'd be right.'

At the airport, walking behind his men, Perot noticed other people backing away, giving them room, and he suddenly realized how terrible they all looked. Most of them had not had a good wash or a shave for days, and they were dressed in a weird assortment of ill-fitting and very dirty clothes. They probably smelled bad, too.

Perot asked for Braniff's passenger-service officer. Braniff was a Dallas airline, and Perot had flown with them to London several times, so most of the staff knew him.

He asked the officer: 'Can I rent the whole of the lounge upstairs in the 747 for my party?'

The officer was staring at the men. Perot knew what he was thinking: Mr. Perot's party usually consisted of a few quiet, well-dressed businessmen, and now here he was with what looked like a crowd of garage mechanics who had been working on a particularly filthy engine.

The officer said: 'Uh, we can't rent you the lounge, because of international airline regulations, sir, but I believe if your companions go up into the lounge, the rest of our passengers won't disturb you too much.'

Perot saw what he meant.

As Perot boarded, he said to a stewardess: 'I want these men to have anything they want on this plane.'

Perot passed on, and the stewardess turned to her colleague, wide-eyed. 'Who the hell is he?'

Her colleague told her.

The movie was Saturday Night Fever, but the projector would not work. Boulware was disappointed: he had seen the movie before and he had been looking forward to seeing it again. Instead, he sat and chewed the fat with Paul.

Most of the others went up to the lounge. Once again, Simons and Coburn stretched out and went to sleep.

Halfway across the Atlantic, Keane Taylor, who for the last few weeks had been carrying around anything up to a quarter of a million dollars in cash and handing it out by the fistful, suddenly took it into his head to have an accounting.

He spread a blanket on the floor of the lounge and started collecting money. One by one, the other members of the team came up, fished wads of banknotes out of their pockets, their boots, their hats, and their shirtsleeves, and threw the money on the floor.

One or two other first-class passengers had come up to the lounge, despite the unsavory appearance of Mr. Perot's party; but now, when this smelly, villainous-looking crew, with their beards and knit caps and dirty boots and go-to-hell coats, spread out several hundred thousand dollars on the floor and started counting it, the other passengers vanished.

A few minutes later a stewardess came up to the lounge and approached Perot. 'Some of the passengers are asking whether we should inform the police about your party,' she said. 'Would you come down and reassure them?'

'I'd be glad to.'

Perot went down to the first-class cabin and introduced himself to the passengers in the forward seats. Some of them had heard of him. He began to tell them what had happened to Paul and Bill.

As he talked, other passengers came up to listen. The cabin crew stopped work and stood nearby; then some of the crew from the economy cabin came along. Soon there was a whole crowd.

It began to dawn on Perot that this was a story the world would want to hear.

Upstairs, the team were playing one last trick on Keane Taylor.

While collecting the money, Taylor had dropped three bundles of ten thousand dollars each, and Bill had slipped them into his own pocket.

The accounting came out wrong, of course. They all sat around on the floor, Indian fashion, suppressing their laughter, while Taylor counted it all again.

'How can I be thirty thousand dollars out?' Taylor said angrily. 'Dammit, this is all I've got! Maybe I'm not thinking clearly. What the hell is the matter with me?'

At that point Bill came up from downstairs and said: 'What's the problem, Keane?'

'God, we're thirty thousand dollars short, and I don't know what I did with all the rest of the money.'

Bill took the three stacks out of his pocket and said: 'Is this what you're looking for?'

They all laughed uproariously.

'Give me that,' Taylor said angrily. 'Dammit, Gaylord, I wish I'd left you in jail!'

They laughed all the more.

4_____

The plane came down toward Dallas.

Ross Perot sat next to Rashid and told him the names of the places they were passing over. Rashid looked out of the window, at the flat brown land and the big wide roads that went straight for miles and miles. America.

Joe Poche had a good feeling. He had felt this way as captain of a rugby club in Minnesota, at the end of a long match when his side had won. The same feeling had come to him when he had returned from Vietnam. He had been part of a good team, he had survived, he had learned a lot, he had grown.

Now all he wanted to make him perfectly happy was some clean underwear.

Ron Davis was sitting next to Jay Coburn. 'Hey, Jay, what'll we do for a living now?'

Coburn smiled. 'I don't know.'

It would be strange, Davis thought, to sit behind a desk again. He was not sure he liked the idea.

He suddenly remembered that Marva was now three months pregnant. It would be starting to show. He wondered how she would look, with a bulging tummy.

I know what I need, he thought. I need a Coke. In the can. From a machine. In a gas station. And Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Pat Sculley was thinking: no more orange cabs.

Sculley was sitting next to Jim Schwebach: they were together again, the short but deadly duo, having fired not a single shot at anyone during the whole adventure. They had been talking about what EDS could learn from the rescue. The company had projects in other Middle Eastern countries and was pushing into the Far East: should there perhaps be a permanent rescue team, a group of troubleshooters trained and fit and armed and willing to do covert operations in faraway countries? No, they decided: this had been a unique situation. Sculley realized he did not want to spend any more time in primitive countries. In Tehran he had hated the morning trial of squeezing into an orange cab with two or three grumpy people, Persian music blaring from the car radio, and the inevitable quarrel with the driver over the fare. Wherever I work next, he thought, whatever I do, I'm going to ride to the office by