Read On Wings of Eagles Online
Authors: Ken Follett
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Military, #Espionage, #General, #History, #Special Forces, #Biography & Autobiography
Everyone had gone to great lengths to hide Perot in Tehran, for fear that
Dadgar-seeing a far more valuable hostage than Paul or Bill-would arrest
him and throw him in jail. Yet here he was, heading for the jail of his own
ftee will, with his own passport in his pocket for identification.
His hopes were pinned on the notorious inability of government everywhere
to let its right hand know what its left was doing. The Ministry of Justice
might want to arrest him, but it was the military who ran the jails, and
the military had no interest in him.
Nevertheless, he was taking precautions. He would go in with a group of
people-Rich Gallagher and Jay Coburn were on the bus, as well as some
Embassy people who were going to visit an American woman in the jail--and
he was wearing casual clothes and carrying a cardboard box containing
groceries, books, and warm clothing for Paul and Bill.
Nobody at the prison would know his face. He would have to give his name as
he went in, but why would a minor clerk or prison guard recognize it? His
name might be on a list at the airport, at police stations, or at hotels;
but the prison would surely be the last place Dadgar would expect him to
turn up.
Anyway, he was determined to take the risk. He wanted to boost Paul's and
Bill's morale, and to show them that he was
200
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 201
willing to stick out his neck for them. It would be the only achievement of
his trip: his efforts to get the negotiations moving had come to nothing.
The bus entered Gasr Square and he got his first sight of the new prison.
It was formidable. He could not imagine how Simons and his little rescue
team could possibly break in there.
In the square were scores of people, mostly women in chadors, making a lot
of noise. The bus stopped near the huge steel doors. Perot wondered about
the bus driver he was Iranian, and he knew who Perot was ...
They all got out. Perot saw a television camera near the prison entrance.
His heart missed a beat.
It was an Amefican crew.
What the hell were they doing there?
He kept his head down as he pushed his way duough the crowd, carrying his
cardboard box. A guard looked out of a small window set into the brick wall
beside the gates. The television crew seemed to be taking no notice of him.
A minute later a little door in one of the gates swung open, and the
visitors stepped inside.
The door clanged shut behind them.
Perot had passed the point of no return.
He walked on, through a second pair of steel doors, into the prison
compound. It was a big place, with streets between the buildings, and
chickens and turkeys running around loose. He followed the others through
a doorway into a reception room.
He showed his passport: The clerk pointed to a register. Perot took out his
pen and signed -H. R. Perot" more or less legibly.
The clerk handed back the passport and waved him on.
He had been right. Nobody hem had heard of Ross Perot.
He walked on into a waiting room--aiid stopped dead.
Standing there, talking to an Iranian in general's uniform, was someone who
knew perfectly well who Ross Perot was.
It was Ramsey Clark, a Texan who had been U.S. Attorney General under
President Lyndon B. Johnson. Perot had met him several times and knew
Clark's sister Mimi very well.
For a moment Perot froze. That explains the television cameras, he thought.
He wondered whether he could keep out of Clark's sight. Any moment now, he
thought, Ramsey will see me and say to the general: "Lord, them's Ross
Perot of EDS,- and if I look as if I'm trying to hide, it will be even
worse.
202 Ken Follett
He made a snap decision.
He walked over to Clark, stuck out his hand, and said: "Hello, Ramsey, what
are you doing in jail?"
Clark looked down--he was six foot three---and laughed.
They shook hands.
"How's Mimi?" Perot asked before Clark had a chance to perform
introductions.
The general was saying something in Farsi to an underling.
Clark said: "Mimi's fine."
"Well, good to see you," Perot said, and walked on.
His mouth was dry as he went out of the waiting room and into the prison
compound with Gallagher, Coburn, and the Embassy people. That had been a
close shave. An hmm in colonel's uniform joined them: he had been assigned
to take care of them, Gallagher said. Perot wondered what Clark was saying
to the general now ...
Paul was sick. The cold he had caught in the first jail had recurred. He was
coughing persistently and had pains in his chest. He could not get warm, in
this jail or in the old one: for three whole weeks he had been cold. He had
asked his EDS visitors to get him warm underwear, but for some reason they
had not brought any.
He was also miserable. He really had expected that Coburn and the rescue
team would ambush the bus that brought him and Bill here from the Ministry
of Justice, and when the bus had entered the impregnable Gasr Prison he had
been bitterly disappointed.
General Mohari, who ran the prison, had explained to Paul and Bill that he
was in charge of all the jails in Tehran, and he had arranged for their
transfer to this one for their own safety. It was small consolation: being
less vulnerable to the mobs, this place was also more difficult, if not
impossible, for the rescue team to attack.
The Gasr Prison was part of a large military complex. On its west side was
the old Gasr Ghazar Palace, which had been turned into a police academy by
the Shah's father. The prison compound had once been the palace gardens. To
the north was a military hospital; to the east an army camp where
helicopters took off and landed all day.
The compound itself was bounded by an inner wall twentyfive or thirty feet
high, and an outer wall twelve feet high. Inside
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 203
were fifteen or twenty separate buildings, including a bakery, a mosque, and
six cell blocks, one reserved for women.
Paul and Bill were in Building Number 8. It was a two-story block in a
courtyard surrounded by a fence of tall tron bars covered with chicken
wire. The environment was not bad, for a jail. There was a fountain in the
middle of the courtyard, rose bushes around the sides, and ten or fifteen
pme aves. The prisoners were allowed outside during the day, and could play
volleyball or Ping-Pong in the courtyard. However, they could not pass
through the courtyard gate, which wag manned by a guard.
The ground floor of the building was a small hospital with twenty or so
patients, mostly mental cases. They screamed a lot. Paul and Bill and a
handful of other prisoners were on the first floor. They had a large cell,
about twenty feet by thirty, which they shared with only one other
prisoner, an Iranian lawyer in his fiffies who spoke English and French as
well as Farsi. He had showed them pictures of his villa in France. There
was a TV set in the cell.
Meals were prepared by some of the prisoners-who were paid for this by the
others-and eaten in a separate dining room. The food here was better than
at the first jail. Extra privileges could be bought, and one of the other
inmates, apparently a hugely wealthy man, had a private room and meals
brought in from outside. The routine was relaxed: there were no set times
for getting up and going to bed.
For all that, Paul was thoroughly depressed. A measure of extra comfort
meant little. What he wanted was freedom.
He was not much cheered when they were told, on the morning of January 19,
that they had visitors.
There was a visiting room on the ground floor of Building Number 8, but
today, without explanation, they were taken out of the building and along
the street.
Paul realized they were headed for a building known as the Officers' Club,
set in a small tropical garden with ducks and peacocks. As they approached
the place he glanced around the compound and saw his visitors coming in the
opposite direction.
He could not believe his eyes.
"My God!" he said delightedly. "It's Ross!"
Forgetting where he was, he turned to ran over to Perot: the guard jerked
him back.
"Can you believe this?" he said to Bill. "Perot's herel"
204 Ken Folktt
The guard hustled hun through the garden. Paul kept looking back at Perot,
wondering whether his eyes were deceiving him. He was led into a big
circular room with banqueting tables around the outside and walls covered
with small triangles of mirrored glass: it was like a small ballroom. A
moment later Perot came in with Gallagher, Coburn, and several other
people.
Perot was grinning broadly. Paul shook his hand, then embraced him. It was
an emotional moment. Paul felt the way he did when he listened to "The Star
Spangled Banner": a kind of shiver went up and down his spine. He was
loved, he was cared for, he had friends, he belonged. Perot had come
halfway across the world into the middle of a revolution just to visit him.
Perot and Bill embraced and shook hands. Bin said: "Ross, what in the world
are you doing here? Have you come to take us home?"
'Not quite," Perot said. "Not yet."
The guards gathered at the far end of the room to drink tea. The Embassy
staff who had come in with Perot sat around another table, talking to a
woman prisoner.
Perot put his box on a table. "There's some long underwear in here for
you," he said to Paul. "We couldn't buy any, so this is mine, and I want it
back, you hear?"
"Sure," Paul grinned.
"We brought you some books as well, and groceries-peanut butter and tuna
fish and juice and I don't know what. " He took a stack of envelopes from
his pocket. "And your mail."
Paul glanced at his. There was a letter from Ruthie. Another envelope was
addressed to "Chapanoodle. " Paul smiled: that would be from his friend
David Behne, whose son Tommy, unable to pronounce "Chiapparone," had dubbed
Paul "Chapanoodle." He pocketed the letters to read later, and said: "How's
Ruthie?"
"She's just fine, I talked to her on the phone," Perot said. "Now, we have
assigned one man to each of your wives, to make sure everything necessary
is done to take care of them. Ruthie's in Dallas now, Paul, staying with
Jun and Cathy Nyfeler. She's buying a house, and Tom Walter is handling all
the legal details for her."
He turned to Bill. "Emily has gone to visit her sister Vickie in North
Carolina. She needed a break. She's been working with Tim Reardon in
Washington, putting pressure on the State Department. She wrote to Rosalynn
Carter-you know, as one
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 205
wife to another-she's trying everything. Matter of fact, we're all trying
everything . . . "
As Perot ran down the long list of people who had been asked to help-from
Texas congressmen all the way up to Henry Kissinger-Bill realized that the
main purpose of Perot's visit was to boost his and Paul's morale. It was
something of an anticlimax. For a moment back there, when he had seen Perot
walking across the compound with the other guys, grinning all over his face,
Bill had thought: here comes the rescue party-at last they've got this damn
thing solved, and Perot is coming to tell us personally. He was
disappointed. But he cheered up as Perot talked. With his letters from home
and his box of goodies, Perot was like Santa Claus; and his presence here,
and the big grin on his face, symbolized a tremendous defiance of Dadgar,
the mobs, and everything that threatened them.
Bill was worried, now, about Emily's morale. He knew instinctively what was
going on in his wife's mind. The fact that she had gone to North Carolina
told him she had given up hope. It had become too much for her to keep up
a faqade of normality with the children at her parents' house. He knew,
somehow, that she had started smoking again. That would puzzle little
Chris. Emily had given up smoking when she went into the hospital to have
her gall bladder removed, and she had told Chris then that she had had her
smoker taken out. Now he would wonder how it had got back in.
"If all this fails," Perot was saying, "we have another team in town who
will get you out of here by other methods. You'll recognize all the members
of the team except one, the leader, an older man."
Paul said: "I have a problem with that, Ross. Why should a bunch of guys