At first, however, it did not occur to Paul that the attempt to steal his passport might have been intended to keep him, and therefore EDS, in Iran.
When Coburn had given him the facts he said: 'What the hell did they do that for?'
'I don't know. Majid doesn't know, and Fara doesn't know.'
Paul looked at him. The two men had become close in the last month. For the rest of the employees Paul was putting on a brave face, but with Coburn he had been able to close the door and say, Okay, what do you really think?
Coburn said: 'The first question is, What do we do about Fara? She could be in trouble.'
'She has to give them some kind of an answer.'
'A show of cooperation?'
'She could go back and tell them that Nyfeler and Bucha are no longer resident ...'
'She already told them.'
'She could take their exit visas as proof.'
'Yeah,' Coburn said dubiously. 'But it's you and Bill they're really interested in now.'
'She could say that the passports aren't kept in the office.'
'They may know that's not true--Fara may even have taken passports down there in the past.'
'Say senior executives don't have to keep their passports in the office.'
'That might work.'
'Any convincing story to the effect that she was physically unable to do what they asked her.'
'Good. I'll discuss it with her and Majid.' Coburn thought for a moment. 'You know, Bucha has a reservation on a flight out tomorrow. He could just go.'
'He probably should--they think he's not here anyway.'
'You could do the same.'
Paul reflected. Maybe he should get out now. What would the Iranians do then? They might just try to detain someone else. 'No,' he said. 'If we're going, I should be the last to leave.'
'Are we going?' Coburn asked.
'I don't know.' Every day for weeks they had asked each other that question. Coburn had developed an evacuation plan that could be put into effect instantly. Paul had been hesitating, with his finger on the button. He knew that his ultimate boss, back in Dallas, wanted him to evacuate--but it meant abandoning the project on which he had worked so hard for the last sixteen months. 'I don't know,' he repeated. 'I'll call Dallas.'
That night Coburn was at home, in bed with Liz, and fast asleep when the phone rang.
He picked it up in the dark. 'Yeah?'
'This is Paul.'
'Hello.' Coburn turned on the light and looked at his wristwatch. It was two A.M.
'We're going to evacuate,' Paul said.
'You got it.'
Coburn cradled the phone and sat on the edge of the bed. In a way it was a relief. There would be two or three days of frantic activity, but then he would know that the people whose safety had been worrying him for so long were back in the States, out of reach of these crazy Iranians.
He ran over in his mind the plans he had made for just this moment. First he had to inform 130 families that they would be leaving the country within the next 48 hours. He had divided the city into sectors, with a team leader for each sector: he would call the leaders, and it would be their job to call the families. He had drafted leaflets for the evacuees telling them where to go and what to do. He just had to fill in the blanks with dates, times, and flight numbers, then have the leaflets duplicated and distributed.
He had picked a lively and imaginative young Iranian systems engineer, Rashid, and given him the job of taking care of the homes, cars, and pets that would be left behind by the fleeing Americans and--eventually-- shipping their possessions to the U.S. He had appointed a small logistics group to organize plane tickets and transportation to the airport.
Finally he had conducted a small-scale rehearsal of the evacuation with a few people. It had worked.
Coburn got dressed and made coffee. There was nothing he could do for the next couple of hours, but he was too anxious and impatient to sleep.
At four A.M. he called the half-dozen members of the logistics group, woke them, and told them to meet him at the 'Bucharest' office immediately after curfew.
Curfew began at nine each evening and ended at five in the morning. For an hour Coburn sat waiting, smoking and drinking a lot of coffee and going over his notes.
When the cuckoo clock in the hall chirped five he was at the front door, ready to go.
Outside there was a thick fog. He got into his car and headed for Bucharest, crawling along at fifteen miles per hour.
Three blocks from his house, half a dozen soldiers leaped out of the fog and stood in a semicircle in front of his car, pointing their rifles at his windshield.
'Oh, shit,' Coburn said.
One of the soldiers was still loading his gun. He was trying to put the clip in backward, and it would not fit. He dropped it and went down on one knee, scrabbling around on the ground looking for it. Coburn would have laughed if he had not been scared.
An officer yelled at Coburn in Farsi. Coburn lowered the window. He showed the officer his wristwatch and said: 'It's after five.'
The soldiers had a conference. The officer came back and asked Coburn for his identification.
Coburn waited anxiously. This would be the worst possible day to get arrested. Would the officer believe that Coburn's watch was right and his was wrong?
At last the soldiers got out of the road and the officer waved Coburn on.
Coburn breathed a sigh of relief and drove slowly on.
Iran was like that.
2_____
Coburn's logistics group went to work making plane reservations, chartering buses to take people to the airport, and photocopying handout leaflets. At ten A.M. Coburn got the team leaders into Bucharest and started them calling the evacuees.
He got reservations for most of them on a Pan Am flight to Istanbul on Friday, December 8. The remainder-- including Liz Coburn and the four children--would get a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt that same day.
As soon as the reservations were confirmed, two top executives at EDS headquarters, Merv Stauffer and T. J. Marquez, left Dallas for Istanbul to meet the evacuees, shepherd them to hotels, and organize the next stage of their flight back home.
During the day there was a small change in plan. Paul was still reluctant to abandon his work in Iran. He proposed that a skeleton staff of about ten senior men stay behind, to keep the office ticking over, in the hope that Iran would quiet down and EDS would eventually be able to resume working normally. Dallas agreed. Among those who volunteered to stay were Paul himself, his deputy Bill Gaylord, Jay Coburn, and most of Coburn's evacuation logistics group. Two people who stayed behind reluctantly were Carl and Vicki Commons: Vicki was nine months pregnant and would leave after her baby was born.
On Friday morning Coburn's team, their pockets full of ten-thousand-rial (about $140) notes for bribes, virtually took over a section of Mehrabad Airport in western Tehran. Coburn had people writing tickets behind the Pan Am counter, people at passport control, people in the departure lounge, and people running baggage-handling equipment. The plane was overbooked: bribes ensured that no one from EDS was bumped off the flight.
There were two especially tense moments. An EDS wife with an Australian passport had been unable to get an exit visa because the Iranian government offices that issued exit visas were all on strike. (Her husband and children had American passports and therefore did not need exit visas.) When the husband reached the passport- control desk, he handed over his passport and his children's in a stack with six or seven other passports. As the
