On Wings of Eagles (21 page)

    casual jacket beforehand. In a business suit with a white shirt and a tie

    he felt comfortable and able to assert himself, especially in Tehran, where

    good Western clothing labeled a man as a member of the dominant class in

    society. Simons calmly gave his assent: the most important thing, he said,

    was for everyone to feel comfortable and confident during the operation.

    At the Doshen Toppeh Air Base, from which they planned to leave in an air

    force jet, there were both American and Iranian planes and personnel. The

    Americans would, of course, be expecting them, but what if the Iranian

    sentries at the entrance gave them a hard time? They would all carry forged

    military identity cards, they decided. Some wives of EDS executives had

    worked for the military in Tehran and still had their ID cards: Merv

    Stauffer would get hold of one and use it as a model for the forgeries.

    Throughout all this, Simons was still very low key, Coburn observed.

    Chain-smoking his cigars (Boulware told him: -Don't worry about getting

    shot, you're going to die of cancer"'), he did little more than ask

    questions. The plans were made in a round-table discussion, with everyone

    contributing, and deci-

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 129

sions were arrived at by mutual agreement. Yet Coburn found himself coming

to respect Simons more and more. The man was knowledgeable, intelligent,

painstaking, and imaginative. He also had a sense of humor.

    Coburn could see that the others were also beginning to get the measure of

    Simons. H anyone asked a dumb question, Simons would give a sharp answer.

    In consequence, they would hesitate before asking a question, and wonder

    what his reaction might be. In this way he was getting them to think like

    him.

    Once on that second day at the lake house they felt the fun fbrce of his

    displeasure. It was, not surprisingly, young Ron Davis who angered him.

    They were a bumorous bunch, and Davis was the funniest. Coburn approved of

    that: laughter helped to ease the tension in an operation such as this. He

    suspected Simons felt the same. But one time Davis went too far.

    Simons had a pack of cigars on the floor beside his chair, and five more

    packs out in the kitchen. Davis, getting to like Simons and

    characteristically making no secret of it, said with genuine concern:

    "Colonel, you smoke too many cigars, it's bad for your health.99

    By way of reply he got The Simons Look, but he ignored the warning.

    A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen and hid the five packs of

    cigars in the dishwasher.

    When Simons finished the first pack he went looking for the rem and could

    not find them. He could not operate without tobacco. He was about to get in

    a car and go to a store when Davis opened the dishwasher and said: "I have

    your cigars IM."

    "You keep dim, goddammit," Simons growled, and he went out.

    When he came back with another five packs he said to Davis: "These are

    mine. Keep your goddam hands off them."

    Davis felt like a child who has been put in the comer. It was the first and

    last prank he played on Colonel Simons.

    While the discussion went on, Jim Schwebach sat on the floor, trying to

    make a bomb.

    To smuggle a bomb, or even just its component parts, through Iranian

    customs would have been dangerous-"That's a risk we don't have to take,"

    Simons said--so Schwebach had to design

130 Ken FoUeU

a device that could be assembled from ingredients readily available in

Tehran.

    The idea of blowing up a building was dropped: it was too ambitious and

    would probably lull innocent people. They would make do with a blazing car

    as a diversion. Schwebach knew how to make "instant napalm" from gasoline,

    soap flakes, and a little oil. The timer and the fuse were his two

    problems. In the States he would have used an electrical timer connected

    with a toy rocket motor, but in Tehran he would be restricted to more

    primitive mechanisms.

    Schwebach enjoyed the challenge. He liked fooling around with anything

    mechanical: his hobby was an ugly-looking stripped-down '73 Oldsmobile

    Cutlass that went like a bullet out of a gun.

    At first he experimented with an old-fashioned clockwork stove-top timer

    that used a striker to hit a bell. He attached a phosphorus match to the

    striker and substituted a piece of sandpaper for the bell, to ignite the

    match. The match in turn would light a mechanical fuse.

    The system was unreliable, and caused great hilarity among the rest of the

    team, who jeered and laughed every time the match failed to ignite.

    In the end Schwebach settled on the oldest timing device of all: a candle.

    He test-burned a candle to see how long it took to burn down one inch, then

    he cut another candle off at the right length for fifteen minutes.

    Next he scraped the heads off several old-fashioned phosphorus matches and

    ground up the inflammable material intD a powder. This he packed tightly

    into a piece of aluminum kitchen foil. Then he stuck the foil into the base

    of the candle. When the candle burned all the way down, it heated the

    aluminum foil and the ground-up match heads exploded. The foil was thinner

    at the bottom so that the explosion would travel downward.

    The candle, with this primitive but reliable fuse in its base, was set into

    the neck of a plastic jar, about the size of a hip flask, full of jellied

    gasoline.

    "You light the candle and walk away from it," Schwebach told them when his

    design was complete. "Fifteen minutes later you've got a nice little fire

    going."

    And any police, soldiers, revolutionaries, or passers-by-plus, quite

    possibly, some of the prison guards--would have their

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 131

attention fixed on a blazing automobile three hundred yards up the street

while Ron Davis and Jay Coburn were jumping over the fence into the prison

courtyard.

That day they moved out of the Hilton Inn. Coburn slept at the lake house,

and the others checked into the Airport Marina-which was closer to Lake

Grapevine-all except Ralph Boulware, who insisted on going home to his

family.

    They spent the next four days training, buying equipment, practicing their

    shooting, rehearsing the jailbreak, and further refining the plan.

    Shotguns could be bought in Tehran, but the only kind of ammunition allowed

    by the Shah was birdshot. However, Simons was expert at reloading

    ammunition, so they decided to smuggle their own shot into Iran.

    The trouble with putting buckshot into birdshot slugs would be that they

    would get relatively few shot into the smaller slugs: the ammunition would

    have great penetration but little spread. They decided to use Number 2

    shot, which would spread wide enough to knock down more than one man at a

    time, but had enough penetration to smash the windshield of a pursuing car.

    In case things turned really nasty, each member of the team would also

    carry a Walther PPK in a holster. Merv Stauffer got Bob Snyder, head of

    security at EDS and a man who knew when not to ask questions, to buy the

    PPKs at Ray's Sporting Goods in Dallas. Schwebach had the job of figuring

    out how to smuggle the guns into Iran.

    Stauffer inquired which U.S. airports did not fluoroscope outgoing baggage:

    one was Kennedy.

    Schwebach bought two Vuitton trunks, deeper than ordinary suitcases, with

    reinforced comers and hard sides. With Coburn, Davis, and Jackson, he went

    to the woodwork shop at Perot's Dallas home and experimented with ways of

    constructing false bottoms in the cases.

    Schwebach was perfectly happy about carrying guns through banian customs in

    a false-bottomed case. "If you know how customs people work, you don't get

    stopped," he said. His confidence was not shared by the rest of the team.

    In case he did get stopped and the guns were found, there was a fallback

    plan. He would say the case was not his. He would return to the baggage

    claim area, and there, sure enough, would be another

132 Ken FoUett

Vuitton trunk just like the first, but full of personal belongings and

containing no guns.

    Once the team was in Tehran they would have to communicate with Dallas by

    phone. Coburn was quite sure the Iranians bugged the phone fines, so the

    team developed a simple code.

    GR meant A, GS meant B, GT meant C, and so on through GZ which meant 1;

    then HA meant J, HB meant K, through HR which meant Z. Numbers one through

    nine were IA through U: zero was IJ.

    They would use the military alphabet, in which A is called Alpha, B is

    Bravo, C is Charlie and so on.

    For speed, only key words would be coded. The sentence "He is with EDS"

    would therefore become "He is with Golf Victor Goff Uniform Hotel Kdo. -

    Only three copies of the key to the code were made. Simons gave one to Merv

    Stauffer, who would be the team's contact here in Dallas. He gave the other

    two to Jay Coburn and Pat Sculley, wh"ough nothing was said formally-were

    emerging as his lieutenants.

    The code would prevent an accidental leak through a casual phone tap,

    but-as computer men knew better than anyonesuch a simple letter cipher

    could be broken by an expert in a few minutes. As a further precaution,

    therefore, certain common words had special code groups: Paul was AG, Bill

    was AH, the American Embassy was GC, and Tehran was AU. Perot was always

    referred to as The Chairman, guns were tapes, the prison was The Data

    Center, Kuwait was Oil Town, Istanbul was Resort, and the attack on the

    prison was Plan A. Everyone had to memorize these special code words.

    If anyone were questioned about the code, he was to say that it was used to

    abbreviate teletype messages.

    The code name for the whole rescue was Operation Hotfoot. It was an

    acronym, dreamed up by Ron Davis: Help Our Two Friends Out of Tehran.

    Simons was tickled by that. "Hotfoot has been used so many times for

    operations," he said , and this is the first time it's ever been

    appropriate."

    They rehearsed the attack on the prison at least a hundred times.

    in the grounds of the lake house Schwebach and Davis nailed up a plank

    between two trees at a height of twelve feet, to represent the courtyard

    fence. Merv Stauffer brought them a van borrowed from EDS security.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 133

    Time and time again Simons walked up the "fence" and gave a hand signal;

    Pochd drove the van up and stopped it at the fence; Boulware jumped out of

    the back; Davis got on the roof and jumped over the fence; Coburn followed;

    Boulware climbed on the roof and lowered the ladder into the "courtyard";

    "Paul" and "Bill"-played by Schwebach and Sculley, who did not need to

    rehearse their roles as flanking guards-came up the ladder and over the

    fence, followed by Coburn and then Davis; everyone scrambled into the van;

    and PochA, drove off at top speed.

    Sometimes they switched roles so that each man learned how to do everyone

    else's job. They prioritized tasks so that, if one of them dropped out,

    wounded or for any other reason, they knew automatically who would take his

    place. Schwebach and Sculley, playing the parts of Paul and Bill, sometimes

    acted sick and had to be carried up the ladder and over the fence.

    The advantage of physical fitness became apparent during the rehearsals.

    Davis could come back over the fence in a second and a half, touching the

    ladder twice: nobody else could do it anywhere near that fast.

    One time Davis went over too fast and landed awkwardly on the frozen

    ground, straining his shoulder. The injury was not serious, but it gave

    Simons an idea. Davis would travel to Tehran with his arm in a sling,

    carrying a beanbag for exercise. The bag would be weighted with Number 2

    shot.

    Simons timed the rescue, from the moment the van stopped at the fence to

    the moment it pulled away with everyone inside. In the end, according to

    his stopwatch, they could do it in under thirty seconds.

    They practiced with the Walther PPKs at the Garland Public Shooting Range.

    They told the range operator that they were security men from all over the

    country on a course in Dallas, and they had to get their target practice in

    before they could go home. He did not believe them, especially after T. J.

    Marquez turned up looking just like a Mafia chieftain in a movie, with his

    black coat and black hat, and took ten Walther PPKs and five thousand

    rounds of anummition out of the trunk of his black Lincoln.