down to the courthouse in Dallas; then they put everything in an envelope and you carry it to New Orleans, where they issue the passport. It's just a plain government envelope sealed with Scotch tape, so you could open it on the way to New Orleans, take out the photographs, replace them with photographs of Paul and Bill--which we have-- reseal the envelope, and, bingo, you've got passports for Paul and Bill in false names. But it's against the law.'
'So what did you do instead?'
'I told all the evacuees that I had to have their passports in order to get their belongings shipped over from Tehran. I got a hundred or two hundred passports, and I picked the best eight. I bogused up a letter from someone in the States to someone here in Tehran saying: 'Here are the passports you asked for us to return so you could deal with the immigration authorities,' just so that I've got a piece of paper to show if I'm asked why the hell I'm carrying eight passports.'
'If Paul and Bill use those passports to cross a frontier, they'll be breaking the law anyway.'
'If we get that far, we'll break the law.'
Perot nodded. 'It makes sense.'
His flight was called. He said goodbye to Gayden and to Taylor, who had driven him to the airport and would take Gayden to the Hyatt. Then he went off to discover the truth about the stop list.
He went first through a 'Passengers Only' gate, where his boarding pass was checked. He walked along a corridor to a booth where he paid a small sum as airport tax. Then, on his right, he saw a series of passport-control desks.
Here the stop list was kept.
One of the desks was manned by a girl who was absorbed in a paperback book. Perot approached her. He handed over his passport and a yellow exit form. The form had his name at the top.
The girl took the yellow sheet, opened his passport, stamped it, and handed it back without looking at him. She returned to her book immediately.
Perot walked into the departure lounge.
The flight was delayed.
He sat down. He was on tenterhooks. At any moment the girl could finish her book, or just get bored with it, and start checking the stop list against the names on the yellow forms. Then, he imagined, they would come for him, the police or the military or Dadgar's investigators, and he would go to jail, and Margot would be like Ruthie and Emily, not knowing whether she would ever see her husband again.
He checked the departures board every few seconds: it just said
He sat on the edge of his chair for the first hour.
Then he began to feel resigned. If they were going to catch him, they would, and there was nothing he could do about it. He started to read a magazine. Over the next hour he read everything in his briefcase. Then he started talking to the man sitting next to him. Perot learned that the man was an English engineer working in Iran on a project for a large British company. They chatted for a while, then swapped magazines.
In a few hours, Perot thought, I'll be in a beautiful hotel suite with Margot--or in an Iranian jail. He pushed the thought from his mind.
Lunchtime went by, and the afternoon wore on. He began to believe they were not going to come for him.
The flight was finally called at six o'clock.
Perot stood up. If they come for me now ...
He joined the crowd and approached the departure gate. There was a security check. He was frisked, and waved through.
I've almost made it, he thought as he boarded the plane. He sat between two fat people in an economy seat--it was an all-economy flight. I think I've made it.
The doors were closed and the plane began to move.
It taxied onto the runway and gathered speed.
The plane took off.
He had made it.
He had always been lucky.
His thoughts turned to Margot. She was handling this crisis the way she had handled the prisoners-of-war adventures: she understood her husband's concept of duty and she never complained. That was why he could stay focused on what he had to do, and block out negative thoughts that would excuse inaction. He was lucky to have her. He thought of all the lucky things that had happened to him: good parents, getting into the Naval Academy, meeting Margot, having such fine children, starting EDS, getting good people to work for him, brave people like the volunteers he had left behind in Iran ...
He wondered superstitiously whether an individual had a certain limited quantity of luck in his life. He saw his luck as sand in an hourglass, slowly but steadily running out. What happens, he thought, when it's all gone?
The plane descended toward Kuwait. He was out of Iranian airspace--he had escaped.
While the plane was refueling he walked to the open door and stood there, breathing the fresh air and ignoring the stewardess who kept asking him to return to his seat. There was a nice breeze blowing across the tarmac, and it was a relief to get away from the fat people sitting on either side of him. The stewardess eventually gave up and went to do something else. He watched the sun go down. Luck, he thought; I wonder how much I've got left?
Eight
1____
The rescue team in Tehran now consisted of Simons, Coburn, Poche, Sculley, and Schwebach. Simons decided that Boulware, Davis, and Jackson would not come to Tehran. The idea of rescuing Paul and Bill by frontal assault was now dead, so he did not need such a big team. He sent Glenn Jackson to Kuwait, to investigate that end of the southerly route out of Iran. Boulware and Davis went back to the States to await further orders.
Majid reported to Coburn that General Mohari, the man in charge of the Gasr Prison, was not easily corruptible, but had two daughters at school in the United States. The team briefly discussed kidnapping the girls and forcing Mohari to help Paul and Bill escape; but they rejected the idea. (Perot hit the roof when he learned they had even discussed it.) The idea of sneaking Paul and Bill out in the trunk of a car was put on the back burner for a while.
For two or three days they concentrated on what they would do if Paul and Bill were released under house arrest. They went to look at the houses the two men had occupied before the arrest. The snatch would be easy unless Dadgar put Paul and Bill under surveillance. The team would use two cars, they decided. The first car would pick up Paul and Bill. The second, following at a distance, would contain Sculley and Schwebach, who would be responsible for eliminating anyone who tried to tail the first car. Once again, the deadly duo would do the killing.
The two cars would keep in touch by shortwave radio, they decided. Coburn called Merv Stauffer in Dallas and ordered the equipment. Boulware would take the radios to London: Schwebach and Sculley went to London to meet him and pick them up. While in London, the deadly duo would try to get hold of some good maps of Iran, for use during the escape from the country, should the team have to leave by road. (No good maps of the country were to be found in Tehran, as the Jeep Club had learned in happier days: Gayden said Persian maps were at the 'Turn left by the dead horse' level.)
Simons wanted also to prepare for the third possibility--that Paul and Bill would be released by a mob storming the prison. What should the team do in that eventuality? Coburn was continuously monitoring the situation in the city, calling his contacts in U.S. military intelligence and several trustworthy Iranian employees: if the prison were overrun he would know very quickly. What then? Someone would have to look for Paul and Bill and bring them to safety. But a bunch of Americans driving into the middle of a riot would be asking for trouble: Paul and Bill would be safer mingling inconspicuously with the crowd of escaping prisoners. Simons told Coburn to speak to Paul about this possibility the next time he visited the jail, and instruct Paul to head for the Hyatt Hotel.
However, an Iranian could go looking for Paul and Bill in the riots. Simons asked Coburn to recommend an Iranian employee of EDS who was really street-smart.
