Read On Wings of Eagles Online
Authors: Ken Follett
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Military, #Espionage, #General, #History, #Special Forces, #Biography & Autobiography
innocence made no difference. But political pressure had failed so far:
neither the U.S. Embassy in Tehran nor the State Department in Washington
had been able to help; and if Kissinger should fail, that would surely be
the end of all hope in that area. What, then, was left?
Force.
The phone rang. Perot snatched up the receiver. "Ross Perot.
"This is Lloyd Briggs."
"Are they out?"
"No."
Perot's heart sank. "What's happening?"
"We spoke to the jail. They have no instructions to release Paul and Bill."
Perot closed his eyes. The worst had happened. Kissinger had failed.
He sighed. "Thank you, Lloyd."
"What do we do next?"
"I don't know," said Perot.
But he did know.
He said good-bye to Briggs and hung up the phone.
He would not admit defeat. Another of his father's principles had been:
take care of the people who work for you. Perot could remember the whole
family driving twelve miles on Sundays to visit an old black man who had
used to mow their lawn, just to make sure that he was well and had enough
to eat. Perot's father would employ people he did not need, just because
they had no job. Every year the Perot family car would go to the county
fair crammed with black employees, each of whom was given a little money to
spend and a Perot business card to show if anyone tried to give him a hard
time. Perot could remember one who had ridden a freight train to California
and, on being arrested for vagrancy, had shown Perot's father's business
card. The sheriff had said: "We don't care whose nigger you are, we're
throwing you in jail. " But he had called Perot Senior, who had wired the
train fare for the man to come back. "I been to California, and I'se back,"
the man said when he reached Texarkana; and Perot Senior gave him back his
job.
Perot's father did not know what civil rights were: this was
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how you treated other human beings. Perot had not known his parents were
unusual until he grew up.
His father would not leave his employees in jail. Nor would Perot.
He picked up the phone. "Get T. J. Marquez."
It was two in the morning, but T.J. would not be surprised: this was not
the first time Perot had woken him up in the middle of the night, and it
would not be the last.
A sleepy voice said: "Hello?"
:'Tom, it doesn't look good."
1"Y? I I
"They haven't been released and the jail says they aren't going to be."
:'Aw, damn."
'Conditions are getting worse over there--did you see the news?"
"I sure did."
:'Do you think it's time for Simons?"
'Yeah, I think it is."
:'Do you have his number?"
'No, but I can get it. "
"Call him," said Perot.
3
Bull Simons was going crazy.
He was thinking of burning down his house. It was an old woodframe
bungalow, and it would go up like a pile of matchwood, and that would be
the end of it. The place was hell to him--but it was a hell he did not want
to leave, for what made it hell was the bittersweet memory of the time when
it had been heaven.
Lucille had picked the place. She saw it advertised in a magazine, and
together they had flown down from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to look it
over. At Red Bay, in a dirt-poor part of the Florida Panhandle, the
ramshackle house stood in forty acres of rough timber. But there was a
two-acre lake with bass in it.
Lucille had loved it.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 95
It was 1971, and time for Simons to retire. He had been a colonel for ten
years, and if the Son Tay Raid could not get him promoted to general,
nothing would. The truth was, he did not fit in the Generals' Club: he had
always been a reserve officer, he had never been to a top military school
such as West Point, his methods were unconventional, and he was no good at
going to Washington cocktail parties and kissing ass. He knew he was a
goddain fine soldier, and if that was not good enough, why, Art Simons was
not good enough. So he retired, and did not regret it.
He had passed the happiest years of his life here at Red Bay. All their
married life he and Lucille had endured periods of separation, sometimes as
much as a year without seeing one another, during his tours in Vietnam,
Laos, and Korea. From the moment he retired they were together all day and
all night, every day of the year. Simons raised hogs. He knew nothing about
farming, but he got the information he needed out of books, and built his
own pens. Once the operation was under way he found there was not much to
do but feed the pigs and look at them, so he spent a lot of time fooling
around with his collection of 150 guns, and eventually set up a little
gunsmithing shop where he would repair his and his neighbors' weapons and
load his own ammunition. Most days he and Lucille would wander, hand in
hand, through the woods and down to the lake, where they might catch a
bass. In the evening, after supper, she would go to the bedroom as if she
were preparing for a date, and come out later, wearing a housecoat over her
nightgown and a red ribbon tied in her dark, dark hair, and sit on his lap
...
Memories like these were breaking his heart.
Even the boys had seemed to grow up, at last, during those golden years.
Harry, the younger, had come home one day and said: "Dad, I've got a heroin
habit and a cocaine habit and I need your help. " Simons knew little about
drugs. He had smoked marijuana once, in a doctor's office in Panama, before
giving his men a talk on drugs, just so that he could tell them he knew
what it was like; but all he knew about heroin was that it killed people.
Still, he had been able to help Harry by keeping him busy, out in the open,
building hog pens. It had taken a while. Many times Harry left the house
and went into town to score dope, but he always came back, and eventually
he did not go into town anymore.
The episode had brought Simons and Harry together again.
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Simons would never be close to Bruce, his elder son; but at least he had
been able to stop worrying about the boy. Boy? He was in his thirties, and
just about as bullheaded as . . . well, as his father. Bruce had found Jesus
and was detennined to bring the rest of the world to the Lord-starting with
Colonel Simons. Simons had practically thrown him out. However, unlike
Bruce's other youthful enthusiasms--dnigs, I Ching, back-to-nature
communes--Jesus had lasted, and at least Bruce had settled down to a stable
way of life, as pastor of a tiny church in the frozen northwest of Canada.
Anyway, Simons was through agonizing about the boys. He had brought them up
as well as he could, for better or worse, and now they were men and had to
take care of themselves. He was taking care of Lucille.
She was a tall, handsome, statuesque woman with a penchant for big hats.
She looked pretty damn impressive behind the wheel of their black Cadillac.
But in fact she was the reverse of formidable. She was soft, easygoing, and
lovable. The daughter of two teachers, she had needed someone to make
decisions for her, someone she could follow blindly and trust completely;
and she had found what she needed in Art Simons. He, in turn, was devoted
to her. By the time he retired they had been married for thirty years, and
in all that time he had never been in the least interested in another
woman. Only his job, with its overseas postings, had come between them; and
now that was over. He had told her: "My retirement plans can be summed up
in one word: you."
They had seven wonderful years.
Lucille died of cancer on March 16, 1978.
And Bull Simons went to pieces.
Every man has a breaking point, they said. Simons had thought the rule did
not apply to him. Now he knew it did: Lucille's death broke him. He had
killed many people, and seen more die, but he had not understood the
meaning of death until now. For thirty-seven years they had been together,
and now, suddenly, she just wasn't there.
Without her, he did not see what life was supposed to be about. There was
no point in anything. He was sixty years old and he could not think of a
single goddam reason for living another day. He stopped taking care of
himself. He ate cold food from cans and let his hair-which had always been
so shortgrow long. He fed the hogs religiously at three forty-five P.m.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 97
every day, although he knew perfectly well that it hardly mattered what time
of day you fed a pig. He started taking in stray dogs, and soon had thirteen
of them, scratching the furniture and messing on the floor.
He knew he was close to losing his mind, and only the iron self-discipline
that had been part of his character for so long enabled him to retain his
sanity. When he first thought of burning the place down, he knew his
judgment was unbalanced, and he promised himself he would wait a year, and
see how he felt then.
His brother Stanley was worried about him, he knew. Stan had tried to get
him to pull himself together: had suggested he give some lectures, had even
tried to get him to join the Israeli Army. Simons was Jewish by ancestry,
but thought of himself as American: he did not want to go to Israel. He
could not pun himself together. It was as much as he could do to live from
day to day.
He did not need someone to take care of him-he had never needed that. On
the contrary, he needed someone to take care of. That was what he had done
all his life. He had taken care of Lucille, he had taken care of the men
under his command. Nobody could rescue him from his depression, for his
role in life was to rescue others. That was why he had been reconciled with
Harry but not with Bruce: Harry had come to him asking to be rescued from
his heroin habit, but Bruce had come offering to rescue Art Simons by
bringing him to the Lord. In military operations Simons's aim had always
been to bring all his men back alive. The Son Tay Raid would have been the
perfect climax to his career, if only there had been prisoners in the camp
to rescue.
Paradoxically, the only way to rescue Simons was to ask him to rescue
someone else.
It happened at two o'clock in the morning on January 2, 1979.
The phone woke him.
"Bull Simons?" The voice was vaguely familiar.
"Yeah."
"This is T. J. Marquez from EDS in Dallas."
Simons remembered: EDS, Ross Perot, the POW campaign, the San Francisco
party . . . "Hello, Tom."
"Bull, I'm sorry to wake you."
"It's okay. What can I do for you?"
98 Ken Folleu
"We have two people in jail in Iran, and it looks like we may not be able
to get them out by any conventional means. Would you be willing to help
us?"
Would he be willing? "Hell, yes," Simons said. "When do we start?"
FoUR
Ross Perot drove out of EDS and turned left on Forest Lane, then right on
Central Expressway. He was heading for the Hilton Inn on Central and
Mockingbird. He was about to ask seven men to risk their lives.
Sculley and Coburn had made their list. Their own names were at the top,
followed by five more.
How many American corporate chiefs in the twentieth century had asked seven
employees to perpetrate a jailbreak? Probably none.
During the night Coburn and Sculley had called the other five, who were
scattered all over the United States, staying with friends and relations
after their hasty departure from Tehran. Each had been told only that Perot
wanted to see him in Dallas today. They were used to midnight phone calls
and sudden summonses-that was Perot's style--and they had all agreed to
come.
As they arrived in Dallas they had been steered away from EDS headquarters
and sent to check in at the Hilton Inn. Most of them should be there by
now, waiting for Perot.
He wondered what they would say when he told them he wanted them to go back
to Tehran and bust Paul and Bill out of jail.
They were good men, and loyal to him, but loyalty to an employer did not
norinally extend to risking your life. Some of them might feel that the
whole idea of a rescue by violence was foolhardy. Others would think of
their wives and children, and for their sakes refu"uite reasonably.
I have no right to ask these men to do this, he thought. I must take care
not to put any pressure on them. No salesmanship
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