On Wings of Eagles (2 page)

    reprimanded for just speaking to Coburn's family.

    The landlord had not suddenly started hating Americans. One evening he had

    proved that he still cared for the Coburns. There had been a shooting

    incident in the street: one of his sons had been out after curfew, and

    soldiers had fired at the boy as he ran home and scrambled over the

    courtyard wall. Coburn and Liz had watched the whole thing from their

    upstairs verandah, and Liz had been scared. The landlord had come up to

    tell them what had happened and to reassure them that all was well. But he

    clearly felt that for the safety of his family he could not be seen to be

    friendly with Americans: he knew which way the wind was blowing. For Coburn

    it was yet another bad sign.

16 Ken FoUett

    Now, Coburn heard on the grapevine, there was wild talk in the mosques and

    bazaars of a holy war against Americans beginning on Ashura. It was five

    days away, yet the Americans in Tehran were surprisingly calm.

    Coburn remembered when the curfew had been introduced: it had not even

    interfered with the monthly EDS poker game. He and his fellow gamblers had

    simply brought their wives and children, turned it into a slumber party,

    and stayed until morning. They had got used to the sound of gunfire. Most

    of the heavy fighting was in the older, southern sector where the bazaar

    was, and in the area around the University; but everyone heard shots from

    tune to tune. After the first few occasions they had become curiously

    indifferent to it. Whoever was speaking would pause, then continue when the

    shooting stopped, just as he might in the States when a jet aim-raft passed

    overhead. It was as if they could not imagine that shots might be aimed at

    them.

    Coburn was not blas6 about gunfire. He had been shot at rather a lot during

    his young life. In Vietnam he had piloted both helicopter gunships, in

    support of ground operations, and trooptsupply-carrying ships, landing and

    taking off in battlefields. He had killed people, and he had seen men die.

    In those days the army,gave an Air Medal for every twenty-five hours of

    combat flying: Coburn had come home with thirty-nine of them. He also got

    two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Silver Star, and a bullet in the

    calf---the most vulnerable part of a helicopter pilot. He had learned,

    during that year, that he could handle himself pretty well in action, when

    there was so much to do and no time to be frightened; but every time he

    returned from a mission, when it was all over and he could think about what

    he had done, his knees would shake.

    in a strange way he was grateful for the experience. He had grown up fast,

    and it had given him an edge over his contemporaries in business life. It

    had also given him a healthy respect for the sound of gunfire.

    But most of his colleagues did not feel that way, nor did their wives.

    Whenever evacuation was discussed they resisted the idea. They had time,

    work, and pride invested in EDS Corporation Iran, and they did not want to

    walk away from it. Their wives had turned the rented apartments into real

    homes, and they were making p1m for Christmas. The children had their

    schools, their friends, their bicycles, and their pets. Surely, they were

    telling themselves, if we just lie low and hang on, the trouble will blow

    over.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 17

    Coburn had tried to persuade Liz to take the kids back to the States, not

    just for their safety, but because the time might come when he would have

    to evacuate some 350 people all at once, and he would need to give that job

    his complete undivided attention, without being distracted by private

    anxiety for his own family. Liz had refused to go.

    He sighed when he thought of Liz. She was funny and feisty and everyone

    enjoyed her company, but she was not a good corporate wife. EDS demanded a

    lot from its executives: if you needed to work all night to get the job

    done, you worked all night. Liz resented that. Back in the Stite~, working

    as a recruiter, Coburn had often been away from home Monday to Friday,

    traveling all over the country, and she had hated it. She was happy in

    Tehran because he was home every night. If he was going to stay here, she

    said, so was she. The children liked it here, too. It was the first time

    they had lived outside the United States, and they were intrigued by the

    different language and culture of Iran. Kim, the eldest at eleven, was too

    full of confidence to get worried. Kristi, the eight-year-old, was somewhat

    anxious, but then she was the emotional one, always the quickest to

    overreact. Both Scott, seven, and Kelly, the baby at four, were too young

    to comprehend the danger. ,

    So they stayed, like everyone else, and waited for things to get better--or

    worse.

    Coburn's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at the door, and Majid walked

    in. A short, stocky man of about fifty with a luxuriant mustache, he had

    once been wealthy: his tribe had owned a great deal of land and had lost it

    in the land reform of the sixties. Now he worked for Coburn as an

    administrative assistant, dealing with the Iranian bureaucracy. He spoke

    fluent English and was highly resourceful. Coburn liked him a lot: Majid

    had gone out of his way to be helpful when Coburn's family arrived in Iran.

"Come in," Coburn said. "Sit down. What's on your mind?"

"It's about Fara."

    Coburn nodded. Fara was Majid's daughter, and she worked with her father-

    Her job was to make sure that all American employees always had up-to-date

    visas and work permits. "Some problem?" Coburn said.

    "The police asked her to take two American passports from our files without

    telling anyone."

Coburn frowned. "Any passports in particular?"

18 Ken Follett

"Paul Chiapparone's and Bill Gaylord's.-

    Paul was Coburn's boss, the head of EDS Corporation Iran. Bill was

    second-in-command and manager of their biggest project, the contract with

    the Ministry of Health. "What the hell is going on?" Coburn said.

    "Fara is in great danger," Majid said. "She was instructed not to tell

    anyone about this. She came to me for advice. Of course I had to tell you,

    but I'm afraid she will get into very serious trouble."

    "Wait a minute, let's back up," Coburn said. "How did this happen?"

    "She got a telephone call this morning from the Police Department,

    Residence Permit Bureau, American Section. They asked her to come to the

    office. They said it was about James Nyfeler. She thought it was routine.

    She arrived at the office at eleven-thirty and reported to the head of the

    American Section. First he asked for Mr. Nyfeler's passport and residence

    permit. She told him that Mr. Nyfeler is no longer in Iran. Then he asked

    about Paul Bucha. She said that Mr. Bucha also was no longer in the

    country."

'Did she?"

'Yes. 11

    Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought.

    Bucha had been resident here, had left the country, and had come back in,

    briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.

    Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone

    alsoT Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which

    other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had

    just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The

    officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr.

    Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it

    quietly, not to cause alarm."

"What did she say?" Coburn asked.

    "She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring

    them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this,

    and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."

"This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.

"If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them-"

"We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 19

wondefing whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on

demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later

been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the

passports?"

"They did not. "

    Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was

    that a clue? Coburn did not know.

    Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going

    to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul

    Chiapparone and get back to you."

On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He,

too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the

wall, and a lot on his mind.

    Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight,

    mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick

    black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem

    social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.

    In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary socialsecurity system,

    which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud

    that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness.

    When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in

    oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran

    Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran

    they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to

    each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so

    that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for

    benefits. The whole system would be nin by computers-EDS's specialty.

    The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States

    and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between

    making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with

    all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not

    have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed

    to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in

    Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it

    was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in

    any case not due until fardah--usually translated "tomorrow," in practice,

    "some time in the future."

20 Ken Follett

    Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and

    determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found

    schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical

    faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades.

    Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the

    early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new

    contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into

    one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The

    Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly

    when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more

    Iranians capable of top management.

    He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.

    When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar

    boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year

    an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest

    was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule

    of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President

    Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.

    For a while Paul did not take much notice of local politics. He knew there

    were rumblings of discontent, but that was true of just about every country

    in the world, and the Shah seemed to have as firm a grip on the reins of

    power as any ruler. Like the rest of the world, Paul missed the

    significance of the events of the first half of 1978.

    On January 7 the newspaper Eteldat published a scurrilous attack on an

    exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomemi, alleging, among other things,

    that he was homosexual. The following day, eighty miles from Tehran in the

    town of Qom---the principal center of religious education in the

    country---outraged theology students staged a protest sit-in that was

    bloodily broken up by the military and the police. The confrontation