Read On Wings of Eagles Online
Authors: Ken Follett
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Military, #Espionage, #General, #History, #Special Forces, #Biography & Autobiography
They handed them over. Paul kept back a hundred dollars.
To you know where the jail is?" Paul asked Abolhasan.
'You're going to a Temporary Detention Facility at the Ministry of Justice
on Khayyam Street."
-Get back to Bucharest fast and give Lloyd Briggs all the details. "
"Sure.
One of the plain-clothes policemen held the door open. Bill looked at Paul.
Paul shrugged.
They went out.
The policemen escorted them downstairs and into a little car. "I guess
we'll have to stay in jail for a couple of hours," Paul said. "It'll take
that long for the Embassy and EDS to get people down there to bail us out."
'They might be there already," Bill said optimistically.
The bigger of the two policemen got behind the wheel. His colleague sat
beside him in the front. They pulled out of the courtyard and onto
Eisenhower Avenue, driving fast. Suddenly they turned into a narrow one-way
street, heading the wrong way at top speed. Hill clutched the seat in front
of him. They swerved in and out, dodging the cars and buses coming the
other way, other drivers honking and shaking their fists.
They headed south and slightly east. Bill thought ahead to their arrival at
the jail. Would people from EDS or the Embassy be there to negotiate a
reduction in the bail so that they could go home instead of to a cell?
Surely the Embassy staff would be outraged at what Dadgar had done.
Ambassador Sullivan would intervene to get them released at once. After
all, it was iniquitous to put two Americans in an Iranian jail when no
crime had '6een committed and then set bail at thirteen million dollars.
The whole situation was ridiculous.
Except that here he was, sitting in the back of this car, silently looking
out of the windows and wondering what would happen next.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 43
As they went farther south, what he saw through the window frightened him
even more.
In the north of the city, where the Americans lived and worked, riots and
fighting were still an occasional phenomenon, but here-Bill now
realized--4hey must be continuous. The black hulks of burned buses
smoldered in the streets. Hundreds of demonstrators were running riot,
yelling and chanting, setting fires and building barricades. Young
teenagers threw Molotov cocktails--bottles of gasoline with blazing rag
fuses-at cars. Their targets seemed random. We might be next, Bill thought.
He heard shooting, but it was dark and he could not see who was firing at
whom. The driver never went at less than top speed. Every other street was
blocked by a mob, a barricade, or a blazing car: the driver turned around,
blind to all traffic signals, and raced through side streets and back
alleys at breakneck speed to circumvent the obstacles. We're not going to
get there alive, Bill thought. He touched the rosary in his pocket.
It seemed to go on forever-then, suddenly, the little car swung into a
circular courtyard and pulled up. Without speaking, the burly driver got
out of the car and went into the building.
The Ministry of Justice was a big place, occupying a whole city block. In
darkness-the streedights were all off-Bill could make out what seemed to be
a five-story building. The driver was inside for ten or fifteen minutes.
When he came out he climbed behind the wheel and drove around the block.
Bill assumed he had registered his prisoners at the front desk.
At the rear of the building the car mounted the curb and stopped on the
sidewalk by a pair of steel gates set into a long, high brick wall.
Somewhere over to the right, where the wall ended, there was the vague
outline of a small park or garden. The driver got out. A peephole opened in
one of the steel doors, and there was a short conversation in Farsi. Then
the doors opened. The driver motioned Paul and Bill to get out of the car.
They walked through the doors.
Bill looked around. They were in a small courtyard. He saw ten or fifteen
guards armed with automatic weapons scattered around the courtyard. In
front of him was a circular driveway with parked cars and trucks. To his
left, up against the brick wall, was a single-story building. On his right
was another steel door.
The driver went up to the second steel door and knocked. There was another
exchange in Farsi through another peephole. Then the door was opened, and
Paul and Bill were ushered inside.
44 Ken Folleu
They were in a small reception area with a desk and a few chairs. Bill
looked around. There were no lawyers, no Embassy staff, no EDS executives
here to spring him from jail. We're on our own, he thought, and this is
going to be dangerous.
A guard stood behind the desk with a ball-point pen and a pile of forms. He
asked a question in Farsi. Guessing, Paul said: "Paul Chiapparone," and
spelled it.
Filling out the forms took close to an hour. An Englishspeaking prisoner
was brought from the jail to help translate. Paul and Bill gave their
Tehran addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, and listed their
possessions. Their money was taken away and they were each given two
thousand rials, about thirty dollars.
They were taken into an adjoining room and told to remove their clothes.
They both stripped to their undershorts. Their clothing and their bodies
were searched. Paul was told to get dressed again, but not Bill. It was
very cold: the heat was off here, too. Naked and shivering, Bill wondered
what would happen now. Obviously they were the only Americans in the jail.
Everything he had ever read or heard about being in prison was awful. What
would the guards do to him and Paul? What would the other prisoners do?
Surely any minute now someone would come to get him released.
"Can I put on my coat?" he asked the guard.
ne guard did not understand.
"Coat," Bill said, and mimed putting on a coat.
The guard handed him his coat.
A little later another guard came in and told Bill to get dressed.
They were led back into the reception area. Once again, Bill looked around
expectantly for lawyers or friends; once again, he was disappointed.
They were taken through the reception area. Another door was opened. They
went down a flight of stairs into the basement.
It was cold, dim, and dirty. There were several cells, all crammed with
prisoners, all of them Iranian. The stink of urine made Bill close his
mouth and breathe shallowly through his nose. The guard opened the door to
Cell Number 9. Paul and Bill walked in.
Sixteen unshaven faces stared at them, alive with curiosity. Paul and Bill
stared back, horrified.
The cell door clanged shut behind them.
TWO
1
Until this moment life had been extremely good to Ross Perot.
On the morning of December 28, 1978, he sat at the breakfast table in his
mountain cabin at Vail, Colorado, and was served breakfast by Holly, the
cook.
Perched on the mountainside and half-hidden in the aspen forest, the "log
cabin" had six bedroorns, five bathrooms, a thirty-foot living room, and an
apr6s-ski "recuperation room" with a Jacuzzi pool in front of the
fireplace. It was just a holiday home.
Ross Perot was rich.
He had started EDS with a thousand dollars, and now the shares in the
company-more than half of which he still owned personally-were worth
several hundred million dollars. He was the sole owner of the Petrus Oil
and Gas Company, which had reserves worth hundreds of millions. He also had
an awful lot of Dallas real estate. It was difficult to figure out exactly
how much money he had-a lot depended on just how you counted it-but it was
certainly more than five hundred million dollars and probably less than a
billion.
. In novels, fantastically rich people were portrayed as greedy, power-mad,
neurotic, hated, and unhappy-always unhappy. Perot did not read many novels.
He was happy.
He did not think it was the money that made him happy. He believed in
money-making, in business and profits, because that was what made America
tick; and he enjoyed a few of the toys money could buy--the cabin cruiser,
the speedboats, the helicopter; but rolling around in hundred-dollar bills
had never been one of his daydreams. He had dreamed of building a
successful business that would employ thousands of people; but his greatest
45
46 Ken Follen
dream-come-true was right hem in front of his eyes. Running around in
thermal underwear, getting ready to go skiing, was his family. Here was Ross
Junior, twenty years old, and if there was a finer young man in the state of
Texas, Perot had yet to meet him. Here were four-count 'em, four--daughters:
Nancy-, Suzanne, Carolyn, and Katherine. They were all healthy, smart, and
lovable. Perot had sometimes told interviewers that he would measure his
success in life by how his children turned out. If they grew into good
citizens with a deep concern for other people, he would consider his life
worthwhile. (The interviewers would say: "Hell, I believe you, but if I put
stuff like that in the article the readers will think I've been bought off!"
And Perot would just say: "I don't care. I'll tell you the truth-you write
whatever you like.") And the children had turned out just exactly how he had
wished, so far. Being brought up in circumstances of great wealth and
privilege had not spoiled them at all. It was almost miraculous.
Running around after the children with ski-lift tickets, wool socks, and
sunscreen lotion was the person responsible for this miracle, Margot Perot.
She was beautiful, loving, intelligent, classy, and a perfect mother. She
could, if she had wanted to, have married a John Kennedy, a Paul Newman, a
Prince Ranier, or a Rockefeller. Instead, she had fallen in love with Ross
Perot from Texarkana, Texas; five feet seven with a broken nose and nothing
in his pocket but hopes. All his life Perot had believed he was lucky. Now,
at the age of forty-eight, he could look back and see that the luckiest
thing that ever happened to him was Margot.
He was a happy man with a happy family, but a shadow had fallen over them
this Christmas. Perot's mother was dying. She had bone cancer. On Christmas
Eve she had fallen at home: it was not a heavy fall, but because the cancer
had weakened her bones, she had broken her hip and had to be rushed to
Baylor Hospital in downtown Dallas.
Perot's sister, Bette, spent that night with their mother, then, on
Christmas Day, Perot and Margot and the five children loaded the presents
into the station wagon and drove to the hospital. Grandmother was in such
good spirits that they all thoroughly enjoyed their day. However, she did
not want to see them the following day: she knew they had planned to go
skiing, and she insisted they go, despite her illness. Margot and the
children left for Vail on December 26, but Perot stayed behind.
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 47
There followed a battle of wills such as Perot had fought with his mother
in childhood. Lulu May Perot was only an inch or two, over five feet, and
slight, but she was no more fi-ail than a sergeant in the marines. She told
him he worked hard and he needed the holiday. He replied that he did not
want to leave her. Eventually the doctors intervened, and told him he was
doing her no good by staying against her will. The next day he joined his
family in Vail. She had won, as she always had when he was a boy.
One of their battles had been fought over a Boy Scout trip. There had been
flooding in Texarkana, and the Scouts were planning to camp near the
disaster area for three days and help with relief work. Young Perot was
determined to go, but his mother knew that he was too young-he would only
be a burden to the scoutmaster. Young Ross kept on and on at her, and she
just smiled sweetly and said no.
The time he won a concession from her: he was allowed to go and help pitch
tents the first day, but he had to come home in the evening. It wasn't much
of a compromise. But he was quite incapable of defying her. He just had to
imagine the scene when he would come home, and think of the words he would
use to tell her that he had disobeyed her---and he knew he cotdd not do it.
He was never spanked. He could not remember even being yelled at. She did
not rule him by fear. With her fair hair, blue eyes, and sweet nature, she
bound him-and his sister, Beft-in chains of love. She would just look you
in the eye and ten you what to do, and you simply could not bring yourself