Boulware called Dallas and told Merv Stauffer about the plan. Stauffer relayed the news to Coburn, in code; and Coburn told Simons. Simons vetoed it. If the man is a criminal, Simons pointed out, we can't trust him.
Boulware was annoyed. He had gone to some trouble to set it up--did Simons imagine it was easy to get these people? And if you wanted to travel in bandit country, who else but a bandit would escort you? But Simons was the boss, and Boulware had no option but to ask Mr. Fish to start all over again.
Meanwhile, Sculley and Schwebach flew into Istanbul.
The deadly duo had been on a flight from London to Tehran via Copenhagen when the Iranians had closed their airport again, so Sculley and Schwebach joined Boulware in Istanbul. Cooped up in the hotel, waiting for something to happen, the three of them got cabin fever. Schwebach reverted to his Green Beret role and tried to make them all keep fit by running up and down the hotel stairs. Boulware did it once and then gave up. They became impatient with Simons, Coburn, and Poche, who seemed to be sitting in Tehran doing nothing: why didn't those guys
When Mr. Fish saw the radios he had a fit. It was highly illegal to own a radio transmitter in Turkey, he told Boulware. Even ordinary transistor radios had to be registered with the government, for fear their parts would be used to make transmitters for terrorists. 'Don't you understand how
Boulware agreed to get rid of the radios. The snag about Simons's apparently endless patience was that further delay caused new problems. Now Sculley and Schwebach could not get back into Iran, yet still nobody had any radios. Meanwhile, Simons kept saying no to things. Mr. Fish pointed out that there were two border crossings from Iran to Turkey, one at Sero and the other at Barzagan. Simons had picked Sero. Barzagan was a bigger and more civilized place, Mr. Fish pointed out; everyone would be a little safer there. Simons said no.
A new escort was found to take Boulware to the border. Mr. Fish had a business colleague whose brother-in- law was in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, or MIT, the Turkish equivalent of the CIA. The name of this secret policeman was Ilsman. His credentials would secure for Boulware army protection in bandit country. Without such credentials, Mr. Fish said, the ordinary citizen was in danger not only from bandits but also from the Turkish Army.
Mr. Fish was very jumpy. On the way to meet Ilsman, he took Boulware through a whole cloak-and-dagger routine, changing cars and switching to a bus for part of the journey, as if he were trying to shake off a tail. Boulware could not see the need for all that if they were really going to visit a perfectly upright citizen who just happened to work in the intelligence community. But Boulware was a foreigner in a strange country, and he just had to go along with Mr. Fish and trust the man.
They ended up at a big, run-down apartment building in an unfamiliar section of the city. The power was off--just like Tehran!--so it took Mr. Fish a while to find the right apartment in the dark. At first he could get no answer. His attempt to be secretive fell apart at this point, for he had to hammer on the door for what seemed like half an hour, and every other inhabitant of the building got a good look at the visitors in the meantime. Boulware just stood there feeling like a white man in Harlem. At last a woman opened up, and they went in.
It was a small, drab apartment crowded with ancient furniture and dimly lit by a couple of candles. Ilsman was a short, fat man of about Boulware's age, thirty-five. Ilsman had not seen his feet for many years--he was gross. He made Boulware think of the stereotyped fat police sergeant in the movies, with a suit too small and a sweaty shirt and a wrinkled tie wrapped around the place where his neck would have been if he had had a neck.
They sat down, and the woman--Mrs. Ilsman, Boulware presumed--served tea--just like Tehran! Boulware explained his problem, with Mr. Fish translating. Ilsman was suspicious. He cross-questioned Boulware about the two fugitive Americans. How could Boulware be sure they were innocent? Why did they have no passports? What would they bring into Turkey? In the end he seemed convinced that Boulware was leveling with him, and he offered to get Paul and Bill from the border to Istanbul for eight thousand dollars, in all.
Boulware wondered whether Ilsman was for real. Smuggling Americans into the country was a funny pastime for an intelligence agent. And if Ilsman really was MIT, who was it that Mr. Fish thought might have been following him and Boulware across town?
Perhaps Ilsman was freelancing. Eight thousand dollars was a lot of money in Turkey. It was even possible that Ilsman would tell his superiors what he was doing. After all--Ilsman might figure--if Boulware's story were true no harm would be done by helping; and if Boulware were lying, the best way to find out what he was really up to might be to accompany him to the border.
Anyway, at this point Ilsman seemed to be the best Boulware could get. Boulware agreed to the price, and Ilsman broke out a bottle of scotch.
While other members of the rescue team were fretting in various parts of the world, Simons and Coburn were driving the road from Tehran to the Turkish border.
Reconnaissance was a watchword with Simons, and he wanted to be familiar with every inch of his escape route before he embarked on it with Paul and Bill. How much fighting was there in that part of the country? What was the police presence? Were the roads passable in winter? Were the filling stations open?
In fact there were two routes to Sero, the border crossing he had chosen. (He preferred Sero because it was a little-used frontier post at a tiny village, so there would be few people and the border would be lightly guarded, whereas Barzagan--the alternative Mr. Fish kept recommending-- would be busier.) The nearest large town to Sero was Rezaiyeh. Directly across the path from Tehran to Rezaiyeh lay Lake Rezaiyeh, a hundred miles long: you had to drive around it, either to the north or to the south. The northerly route went through larger towns and would have better roads. Simons therefore preferred the southerly route, provided the roads were passable. On this reconnaissance trip, he decided, they would check out both routes, the northerly going and the southerly on the return.
He decided that the best kind of car for the trip was a British Range Rover, a cross between a jeep and a station wagon. There were no dealerships or used car lots open in Tehran now, so Coburn gave the Cycle Man the job of getting hold of two Range Rovers. The Cycle Man's solution to the problem was characteristically ingenious. He had a notice printed with his telephone number and the message: 'If you would like to sell your Range Rover, call this number.' Then he went around on his motorcycle and put a copy under the windshield wipers of every Range Rover he saw parked on the streets.
He got two vehicles for twenty thousand dollars each, and he also bought tools and spare parts for all but the most major repairs.
Simons and Coburn took two Iranians with them: Majid, and a cousin of Majid's who was a professor at an agricultural college in Rezaiyeh. The professor had come to Tehran to put his American wife and their children on a plane to the States: taking him back to Rezaiyeh was Simons's cover story for the trip.
They left Tehran early in the morning, with one of Keane Taylor's fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline in the back. For the first hundred miles, as far as Qazvin, there was a modern freeway. After Qazvin the road was a two- lane blacktop. The hillsides were covered with snow, but the road itself was clear. If it's like this all the way to the border, Coburn thought, we could get there in a day.
They stopped at Zanjan, two hundred miles from Tehran and the same distance from Rezaiyeh, and spoke to the local chief of police, who was related to the professor. (Coburn could never quite work out the family relationships of Iranians: they seemed to use the word 'cousin' rather loosely.) This part of the country was peaceful, the police chief said; if they were to encounter any problems it would happen in the area of Tabriz.
They drove on through the afternoon, on narrow but good country roads. After another hundred miles they entered Tabriz. There was a demonstration going on, but it was nothing like the kind of battle they had got used to in Tehran, and they even felt secure enough to take a stroll around the bazaar.
Along the way Simons had been talking to Majid and the professor. It seemed like casual conversation, but by now Coburn was familiar with Simons's technique, and he knew that the colonel was feeling these two out, deciding whether he could trust them. So far the prognosis seemed good, for Simons began to drop hints about the real purpose of the trip.
