On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

'Shit.' Coburn made an effort to look relaxed, to avoid lowering his voice conspicuously or glancing over his shoulder to see whether anyone might be listening: This had to look like a normal friendly visit. 'How many guards are there in this jail?'

'Around twenty.'

'All uniformed, all armed?'

'All uniformed, some armed with handguns.'

'No rifles?'

'Well ... none of the regular guards have rifles, but ... See, our cell is just across the courtyard and has a window. Well, in the morning there's a group of about twenty different guards, like an elite corps, you might say. They have rifles and wear kind of shiny helmets. They have reveille right here; then I never see them for the rest of the day--I don't know where they go.'

'Try and find out.'

'I'll try.'

'Which is your cell?'

'When you go out of here, the window is more or less opposite you. If you start in the right-hand comer of the courtyard and count toward the left, it's the third window. But they close the shutters when there are visitors-- so we can't see women coming in, they say.'

Coburn nodded, trying to memorize it all. 'You need to do two things,' he said. 'One: a survey of the inside of the jail, with measurements as accurate as possible. I'll come back and get the details from you so we can draw a plan. Two: get in shape. Exercise daily. You'll need to be fit.'

'Okay.'

'Now, tell me your daily routine.'

'They wake us up at six o'clock,' Paul began.

Coburn concentrated, knowing he would have to repeat all this to Simons. Nevertheless, at the back of his mind one thought nagged: if we don't know what time of day they exercise, how the hell do we know when to go over the wall?

'Visiting time is the answer,' Simons said.

'How so?' Coburn asked.

'It's the one situation when we can predict they will be out of the actual jail and vulnerable to a snatch, at a definite moment in time.'

Coburn nodded. The three of them were sitting in the living room of Keane Taylor's house. It was a big room with a Persian carpet. They had drawn three chairs into the middle, around a coffee table. Beside Simons's chair, a small mountain of cigar ash was growing on the carpet. Taylor would be furious.

Coburn felt drained. Being debriefed by Simons was even more harrowing than he had anticipated. When he was sure he had told everything, Simons thought of more questions. When Coburn could not quite remember something, Simons made him think hard until he did remember. Simons drew from him information he had not consciously registered, just by asking the right questions.

'The van and the ladder--that scenario is out,' Simons said. 'Their weak point now is their loose routine. We can get two men in there as visitors, with shotguns or Walthers under their coats. Paul and Bill would be brought to that visiting area. Our two men should be able to overpower the colonel and the eavesdropper without any trouble--and without making enough noise to alarm anyone else in the vicinity. Then ...'

'Then what?'

'That's the problem. The four men would have to come out of the building, cross the courtyard, reach the gate, either open it or climb it, reach the street, and get in a car ...'

'It sounds possible,' Coburn said. 'There's just one guard at the gate...'

'A number of things about this scenario bother me,' Simons said. 'One: the windows in the high building that overlook the courtyard. While our men are in the courtyard, anyone looking out of any one of those windows will see them. Two: the elite guard with shiny helmets and rifles. Whatever happens, our people have to slow down at the gate. If there's just one guard with a rifle looking out of one of those high windows, he could pick off the four of them like shooting fish in a barrel.'

'We don't know the guards are in the high building.'

'We don't know they're not.'

'It seems like a small risk--'

'We're not going to take any risks we don't have to. Three: the traffic in this goddam city is a bastard. You just can't talk about jumping in a car and getting away. We could run into a demonstration fifty yards down the street. No. This snatch has got to be quiet. We must have time. What is that colonel like, the one in charge of the place?'

'He was quite friendly,' Coburn said. 'He seemed genuinely sorry for Paul and Bill.'

'I wonder whether we can get to him. Do we know anything at all about him?'

'No.'

'Let's find out.'

'I'll put Majid on it.'

'The colonel would have to make sure there were no guards around at visiting time. We could make it look good by tying him up, or even knocking him out.... If he can be bribed, we can still bring this thing off.'

'I'll get on it right away,' said Coburn.

4___

On January 13 Ross Perot took off from Amman, Jordan, in a Lear jet of Arab Wings, the charter operation of Royal Jordanian Airlines. The plane headed for Tehran. In the baggage hold was a net bag containing half a dozen professional-sized videotapes, the kind used by television crews: this was Perot's 'cover.'

As the little jet flew east, the British pilot pointed out the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. A few minutes later the plane developed hydraulic trouble and had to turn back.

It had been that kind of journey.

In London he had caught up with lawyer John Howell and EDS manager Bob Young, both of whom had been trying for days to get a flight into Tehran. Eventually Young discovered that Arab Wings was flying in, and the three men had gone to Amman. Arriving there in the middle of the night had been an experience all on its own: it looked to Perot as if all the bad guys of Jordan were sleeping at the airport. They found a taxicab to take them to a hotel. John Howell's room had no bathroom: the facilities were right there beside the bed. In Perot's room the toilet was so close to the bath that he had to put his feet in the tub when he sat on the john. And like that ...

Bob Young had thought of the videotapes 'cover.' Arab Wings regularly flew tapes into and out of Tehran for NBC-TV News. Sometimes NBC would have its own man carry the tapes; other times the pilot would take them. Today, although NBC did not know it, Perot would be their bagman. He was wearing a sports jacket, a little plaid hat, and no tie. Anyone watching for Ross Perot might not look twice at the regular NBC messenger with his regular net bag.

Arab Wings had agreed to this ruse. They had also confirmed that they could take Perot out again on this NBC tape run.

Back in Amman, Perot, Howell, and Young and the pilot boarded a replacement jet and took off again. As they climbed high over the desert Perot wondered whether he was the craziest man in the world or the sanest.

There were powerful reasons why he should not go to Tehran. For one thing, the mobs might consider him the ultimate symbol of bloodsucking American capitalism and string him up on the spot. More likely, Dadgar might get to know that he was in town and try to arrest him. Perot was not sure he understood Dadgar's motives in jailing Paul and Bill, but the man's mysterious purposes would surely be even better served by having Perot behind bars. Why, Dadgar could set bail at a hundred million dollars and feel confident of getting it, if the money was what he was after.

But negotiations for the release of Paul and Bill were stalled, and Perot wanted to go to Tehran to kick ass in one last attempt at a legitimate solution before Simons and the team risked their lives in an assault on the