They left their meal half-eaten. Rashid talked to the guards, and showed them his letter from the deputy leader. Keane Taylor paid the hotel bill. Rashid had bought a stack of Khomeini posters, and he gave them to Bill to stick on the cars.
They were out of there in minutes.
Bill had done a good job with the posters. Everywhere you looked on the Range Rovers, the fierce, white- bearded face of the Ayatollah glared out at you.
They pulled away, Rashid driving the first car.
On the way out of town Rashid suddenly braked, leaned out of the window, and waved frantically at an approaching taxi.
Simons growled: 'Rashid, what the fuck are you doing?'
Without answering, Rashid jumped out of the car and ran over to the taxi.
'Jesus
Rashid talked to the cabdriver for a minute; then the cab went on. Rashid explained: 'I asked him to show us a way out of town by the back streets. There is one roadblock I want to avoid because it is manned by kids with rifles and I don't know what they might do. The cabby has a fare already, but he's coming back. We'll wait.'
'We won't wait very goddam long,' Simons said.
The cab returned in ten minutes. They followed it through the dark, unpaved streets until they came to a main road. The cabby turned right. Rashid followed, taking the corner fast. On the left, just a few yards away, was the roadblock he had wanted to avoid, with teenage boys firing rifles into the air. The cab and the two Range Rovers accelerated fast away from the corner, before the kids could realize that someone had sneaked past them.
Fifty yards down the road, Rashid pulled into a gas station.
Keane Taylor said to him: 'What the hell are you stopping for?'
'We've got to get gas.'
'We've got three-quarters of a tankful, plenty to jump the border on--let's get
'It may be impossible to get gas in Turkey.'
Simons said: 'Rashid, let's
Rashid jumped out of the car.
When the fuel tanks had been topped up, Rashid was still haggling with the taxi driver, offering him a hundred rials--a little more than a dollar--for guiding them out of town.
Taylor said: 'Rashid, just give him a handful of money and
'He wants too much,' Rashid said.
'Oh, God,' said Taylor.
Rashid settled with the cabby for two hundred rials and got back into the Range Rover, saying: 'He would have got suspicious if I didn't argue.'
They drove out of town. The road wound up into the mountains. The surface was good and they made rapid progress. After a while the road began to follow a ridge, with deep wooded gulleys on either side. 'There was a checkpoint around here somewhere this afternoon,' Rashid said. 'Maybe they went home.'
The headlights picked out two men standing beside the road, waving them down. There was no barrier. Rashid did not brake.
'I guess we'd better stop,' Simons said.
Rashid kept going right past the two men.
'I said stop!' Simons barked.
Rashid stopped.
Bill stared out through the windshield and said: 'Would you look at that?'
A few yards ahead was a bridge over a ravine. On either side of the bridge, tribesmen were emerging from the ravine. They kept coming--thirty, forty, fifty--and they were armed to the teeth.
It looked very like an ambush. If the cars had tried to rush the checkpoint, they would have been shot full of holes.
'Thank God we stopped,' Bill said fervently.
Rashid jumped out of the car and started talking. The tribesmen put a chain across the bridge and surrounded the cars. It rapidly became clear that these were the most unfriendly people the team had yet encountered. They surrounded the cars, glaring in and hefting their rifles, while two or three of them started yelling at Rashid.
It was maddening, Bill thought, to have come so far, through so much danger and adversity, only to be stopped by a bunch of dumb farmers. Wouldn't they just like to take these two fine Range Rovers and all our money? he thought. And who would ever know?
The tribesmen got meaner. They started pushing and shoving Rashid. In a minute they'll start shooting, Bill thought.
'Do nothing,' Simons said. 'Stay in the car, let Rashid handle it.'
Bill decided Rashid needed some help. He touched his pocket rosary and started praying. He said every prayer he knew. We're in God's hands now, he thought; it will take a miracle to get us out of this mess.
In the second car Coburn sat frozen while a tribesman outside pointed a rifle directly at his head.
Gayden, sitting behind, was seized by a wild impulse, and whispered: 'Jay! Why don't you lock the door!'
Coburn felt hysterical laughter bubble up in his throat.
Rashid felt he was on the cliff-edge of death.
These tribesmen were bandits, and they would kill you for the coat on your back: they didn't care. The revolution was nothing to them. No matter who was in power, they recognized no government, obeyed no laws. They did not even speak Farsi, the language of Iran, but Turkish.
They pushed him around, yelling at him in Turkish. He yelled right back in Farsi. He was getting nowhere. They're working themselves up to shoot us all, he thought.
He heard the sound of a car. A pair of headlights approached from the direction of Rezaiyeh. A Land Rover pulled up and three men got out. One of them was dressed in a long black overcoat. The tribesmen seemed to defer to him. He addressed Rashid. 'Let me see the passports, please.'
'Sure,' said Rashid. He led the man to the second Range Rover. Bill was in the first, and Rashid wanted the overcoat man to get bored with looking at passports before he got to Bill's. Rashid tapped on the car window, and Paul rolled it down. 'Passports.'
The man seemed to have dealt with passports before. He examined each one carefully, checking the photograph against the face of the owner. Then, in perfect English, he asked questions: Where were you born? Where do you live? What is your date of birth? Fortunately Simons had made Paul and Bill learn every piece of information contained in their false passports, so Paul was able to answer the overcoat man's questions without hesitation.
Reluctantly, Rashid led the man to the first Range Rover. Bill and Keane Taylor had changed seats, so that Bill was on the far side, away from the light. The man went through the same routine. He looked at Bill's passport last. Then he said: 'The picture is not of this man.'
'Yes, it is,' Rashid said frantically. 'He's been very sick. He's lost weight, his skin has changed color--don't you understand that he's dying? He has to get back to America as quickly as possible so he can have the right medical attention, and you are delaying him--do you want him to die because the Iranian people had no pity for a sick man? Is this how you uphold the honor of our country? Is--'
'They're Americans,' the man said. 'Follow me.'
He turned and went into the little brick hut beside the bridge.
Rashid followed him in. 'You have no right to stop us,' he said. 'I have been instructed by the Islamic Revolution Commandant Committee in Rezaiyeh to escort these people to the border, and to delay us is a counterrevolutionary crime against the Iranian people.' He flourished the letter written by the deputy leader and stamped with the library stamp.
