shouldn't go out.'
'Thank you,' said Taylor.
They all got into the cars and followed Poche's Range Rover. The guards at the gate were preoccupied, trying to jam a banana clip into a machine pistol that did not take that kind of ammunition, and they paid no attention to the three cars.
The scene outside was scary. Many of the weapons from the armory had found their way into the hands of teenage boys who had probably never handled firearms before, and the kids were running down the hill, yelling and waving their guns, and jumping into cars to tear off along the highway, shooting into the air.
Poche headed north on Shahanshahi, following a roundabout route to avoid roadblocks. At the intersection with Pahlavi there were the remains of a barricade--burned cars and tree trunks across the road--but the people manning the roadblock were celebrating, chanting and firing into the air, and the three cars drove straight through.
As they approached the hideout they entered a relatively quiet area. They turned into a narrow street; then, half a block down, they drove through gates into a walled garden with an empty swimming pool. The Dvoranchik place was the bottom half of a duplex, with the landlady living upstairs. They all went in.
During Monday, Dadgar continued to search for Paul and Bill.
Bill Gayden called Bucharest, where a skeleton staff of loyal Iranians continued to man the phones. Gayden learned that Dadgar's men had called twice, speaking to two different secretaries, and asked where they could find Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. The first secretary had said she did not know the names of any of the Americans, which was a brave lie--she had been working for EDS for four years and knew everyone. The second secretary had said: 'You will have to speak to Mr. Lloyd Briggs, who is in charge of the office.'
'Where is he?'
'Out of the country.'
'Well, who is in charge of the office in his absence?'
'Mr. Keane Taylor.'
'Let me speak to him.'
'He's not here right now.'
The girls, bless them, had given Dadgar's men the runaround.
Rich Gallagher was keeping in touch with his friends in the military (Cathy had a job as secretary to a colonel). He called the Evin Hotel, where most of the military were staying, and learned that 'revolutionaries' had gone to both the Evin and the Hyatt showing photographs of two Americans for whom they were looking.
Dadgar's tenacity was almost incredible.
Simons decided they could not stay at the Dvoranchik house more than forty-eight hours.
The escape plan had been devised for five men. Now there were ten men, a woman, and a dog.
They had only two Range Rovers. An ordinary car would never take those mountain roads, especially in snow. They needed another Range Rover. Coburn called Majid and asked him to try to get one.
The dog worried Simons. Rich Gallagher was planning to carry Buffy in a knapsack. If they had to walk or ride horseback through the mountains to cross the border, a single yap could get them all kitted--and Buffy barked at everything. Simons said to Coburn and Taylor: 'I want you two to lose that fucking dog.'
'Okay,' Coburn said. 'Maybe I'll offer to walk it, then just let it go.'
'No,' said Simons. 'When I say lose it, I mean permanently.'
Cathy was the biggest problem. That evening she felt ill--'Feminine problems,' Rich said. He was hoping that a day in bed would leave her feeling stronger; but Simons was not optimistic. He fumed at the Embassy. 'There are so many ways the State Department could get someone out of the country and protect them if they wanted to,' he said. 'Put them in a case, ship them out as cargo ... if they were interested, it would be a snap.'
Bill began to feel like the cause of all the trouble. 'I think it's insane for nine people to risk their lives for the sake of two,' he said. 'If Paul and I weren't here, none of you would be in any danger--you could just wait here until flights out resume. Maybe Paul and I should throw ourselves on the mercy of the U.S. Embassy.'
Simons said: 'And what if you two get out, then Dadgar decides to take other hostages?'
Anyway, Coburn thought, Simons won't let these two out of his sight now, not until they're back in the U.S.A.
The bell at the street gate rang, and everybody froze.
'Move into the bedrooms, but quietly,' Simons said.
Coburn went to the window. The landlady still thought there were only two people living here, Coburn and Poche-- she had never seen Simons--and neither she nor anyone else was supposed to know that there were now eleven people in the house.
As Coburn watched, she walked across the courtyard and opened the gate. She stood there for a few minutes, talking to someone Coburn could not see, then closed the gate and came back alone.
When he heard her door slam shut upstairs, he called: 'False alarm.'
They all prepared for the journey by looting the Dvoranchik place for warm clothes. Paul thought: Toni Dvoranchik would die of embarrassment if she knew about all these men going through her drawers. They ended up with a peculiar assortment of ill-fitting hats, coats, and sweaters.
After that they had nothing to do but wait: wait for Majid to find another Range Rover, wait for Cathy to get better, and wait for Perot to get the Turkish Rescue Team organized.
They watched some old football games on a Betamax video. Paul played gin with Gayden. The dog got on everyone's nerves, but Coburn decided not to slit its throat until the last minute, in case there was a change of plan and it could be saved. John Howell read
They were all remarkably good-tempered, considering how many of them were crammed into the living room and three bedrooms of the place. The only one to get irritable was--predictably--Keane Taylor. He and Paul cooked a big dinner for everyone, almost emptying the freezer; but by the time Taylor came in from the kitchen, the others had eaten every scrap and there was nothing for him. He cursed them all roundly for a bunch of greedy hogs, and they all laughed, the way they always did when Taylor got mad.
During the night he got mad again. He was sleeping on the floor next to Coburn, and Coburn snored. The noise was so awful that Taylor could not get to sleep. He could not even wake Coburn to tell him to stop snoring, and that made him even madder.
It was snowing in Washington that night. Ross Perot was tired and tense.
With Mitch Hart, he had spent most of the day in a last-ditch effort to persuade the government to fly his people out of Tehran. He had seen Undersecretary David Newsom at the State Department, Thomas V. Beard at the White House, and Mark Ginsberg, a young Carter aide whose job was liaison between the White House and the State Department. They were doing their best to arrange to fly the remaining one thousand Americans out of Tehran, and they were not about to make special plans for Ross Perot.
Resigned to going to Turkey, Perot went to a sporting-goods store and bought himself cold-weather clothes. The leased 707 arrived from Dallas, and Pat Sculley called from Dulles Airport to say that some mechanical problems had surfaced during the flight: the transponder and the inertial navigation system did not work properly, the Number I engine was using oil at twice the normal rate, there was insufficient oxygen aboard for cabin use, there were no spare tires, and the water-tank valves were frozen solid.
While mechanics worked on the plane, Perot sat in the Madison Hotel with Mort Meyerson, a vice-president of EDS.
At EDS there was a special group of Perot associates, men such as T. J. Marquez and Merv Stauffer, to whom he turned for help with matters that were not part of the day-to-day business of computer software: schemes like the prisoners-of-war campaign, the Texas War on Drugs, and the rescue of Paul and Bill. Although Meyerson did not get involved in Perot's special projects, he was fully informed about the rescue plan and had given it his blessing: he
