the steel doors of the building, he ordered the marines inside to join the civilians in the vault. There he made them pile their weapons in a corner, and ordered everyone to surrender as soon as possible.
Eventually Sullivan himself went into the vault, leaving the army attache and an interpreter outside.
When the attackers reached the second floor, Sullivan opened the vault door and walked out with his hands over his head.
The others--about a hundred people--followed him.
They were all herded into the waiting room of the executive suite and frisked. There was a confused dispute between two factions of Iranians, and Sullivan realized that the Ayatollah's people had sent a rescue force-- presumably in response to the phone calls by Charlie Naas and the army attache--and the rescuers had arrived on the second floor at the same time as the attackers.
Suddenly a shot came through the window.
All the Americans dropped to the floor. One of the Iranians seemed to think the shot had come from within the room, and he swung his AK-47 rifle wildly at the tangle of prisoners on the floor; then Barry Rosen, the press attache, yelled in Farsi: 'It came from outside! It came from outside!' At that moment Sullivan found himself lying next to the two journalists who had been in his outer office. 'I hope you're getting all this down in your notebooks,' he said.
Eventually they were taken out into the courtyard, where Ibrahim Yazdi, the Ayatollah's new Deputy Prime Minister, apologized to Sullivan for the attack.
Yazdi also gave Sullivan a personal escort, a group of students who would henceforth be responsible for the safety of the U.S. Ambassador. The leader of the group explained to Sullivan that they were well qualified to guard him. They had studied him, and were familiar with his routine, for until recently their assignnent had been to assassinate him.
Late that afternoon Cathy Gallagher called from the hospital. She had been given some medication that solved her problem, at least temporarily, and she wanted to rejoin her husband and the others at Lou Goelz's house.
Joe Poche did not want any more of the Clean Team to leave the house, but he also did not want any Iranians to know where they were; so he called Gholam and asked him to pick up Cathy at the hospital and bring her to the corner of the street, where her husband would meet her.
She arrived at around seven-thirty that evening. She was feeling better, but Gholam had told her a horrifying story. 'They shot up our hotel rooms yesterday,' she said.
Gholam had gone to the Hyatt to pay EDS's bill and pick up the suitcases they had left behind, Cathy explained. The rooms had been wrecked, there were bullet holes everywhere, and the luggage had been slashed to ribbons.
'Just our rooms?' Howell asked.
'Yes.'
'Did he find out how it happened?'
When Gholam went to pay the bill, the hotel manager had said to him: 'Who the
Howell wondered what had so enraged the revolutionaries that they had smashed up the rooms. Perhaps Gayden's well-stocked bar offended their Muslim sensibilities. Also left behind in Gayden's suite were a tape recorder used for dictation, some suction microphones for taping phone conversations, and a child's walkie-talkie set. The revolutionaries might have thought this was CIA surveillance gear.
Throughout the day, vague and alarming reports of what was happening at the Embassy reached Howell and the Clean Team through Goelz's houseman, who was calling friends. But Goelz returned as the others were having dinner, and after a couple of stiff drinks he was none the worse for his experience. He had spent a good deal of time lying on his ample belly in a corridor. The next day he went back to his desk, and he came home that evening with good news: evacuation flights would start on Saturday, and the Clean Team would be on the first.
Howell thought: Dadgar may have other ideas about that.
4_______
In Istanbul, Ross Perot had a dreadful feeling that the whole operation was slipping out of control.
He heard, via Dallas, that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been overrun by revolutionaries. He also knew, because Tom Walter had talked to Joe Poche earlier, that the Clean Team had been planning to move into the Embassy compound as soon as possible. But after the attack on the Embassy, almost all telephone lines to Tehran had been disconnected, and the White House was monopolizing the few lines left. So Perot did not know whether the Clean Team had been in the Embassy at the time of the attack, nor did he know what kind of danger they might be in even if they were still at Goelz's house.
The loss of phone contact also meant that Merv Stauffer could not call Gholam to find out whether the Dirty Team had sent 'a message for Jim Nyfeler' saying either that they were okay or that they were in trouble. The whole seventh-floor crew in Dallas was at work pulling strings to get one of the few remaining lines so they could talk to Gholam. Tom Walter had got on to A.T.&T. and spoken to Ray Johnson, who handled the EDS phone account. It was a very big account--EDS's computers in different parts of the U.S.A. talked to one another along telephone lines--and Johnson had been keen to help a major customer. He had asked whether EDS's call to Tehran was a matter of life and death. You bet it is, said Tom Walter. Johnson was trying to get them a line. At the same time, T. J. Marquez was sweet-talking an international operator, trying to persuade her to break the rules.
Perot had also lost touch with Ralph Boulware, who was supposed to meet the Dirty Team on the Turkish side of the border. Boulware had last been heard from in Adana, five hundred miles from where he was supposed to be. Perot presumed he was now on his way to the rendezvous, but there was no way of telling how far he had got or whether he would make it on time.
Perot had spent most of the day trying to get a light plane or a helicopter with which to fly into Iran. The Boeing 707 was no use for that, because Perot would need to fly low and search for the Range Rovers with 'X' or 'A' on their roofs, then land on tiny, disused airfields or even on a road or in a meadow. But so far his efforts had only confirmed what Boulware had told him at six o'clock that morning: it was not going to happen.
In desperation Perot had called a friend in the Drug Enforcement Agency and asked for the phone number of the agency's man in Turkey, thinking that narcotics people would surely know how to get hold of light planes. The DEA man had come to the Sheraton, accompanied by another man who, Perot gathered, was with the CIA; but if they knew where to get a plane they weren't telling.
In Dallas, Merv Stauffer was calling all over Europe looking for a suitable aircraft that could be bought or rented immediately and flown into Turkey: he, too, had failed so far.
Late in the afternoon Perot had said to Pat Sculley: 'I want to talk to the highest-ranking American in Istanbul.'
Sculley had gone off and raised a little hell at the American Consulate, and now, at ten-thirty P.M., a Consul was sitting in Perot's suite at the Sheraton.
Perot was leveling with him. 'My men aren't criminals of any kind,' he said. 'They're ordinary businessmen who have wives and children worrying themselves to death back home. The Iranians kept them in jail for six weeks without bringing any charges or finding any evidence against them. Now they're free and they're trying to get out of the country. If they're caught, you can imagine how much chance they'd have of justice: none at all. The way things are in Iran now, my men may not get as far as the border. I want to go in and get them, and that's where I need your help. I have to borrow, rent, or buy a small aircraft. Now, can you help me?'
'No,' said the Consul. 'In this country it's against the law for private individuals to have aircraft. Because it's against the law, the planes aren't here even for someone who's prepared to break the law.'
'But you must have aircraft.'
'The State Department has no aircraft.'
Perot despaired. Was he to sit and do
