On Wings of Eagles (65 page)

twenty-four hours. In the morning we will check with your counterparts at

Gatwick Airport, and we will then get on the Braniff flight to Dallas."

    "I'm afraid we can't do that, sir," said the official. I 'This gentleman

    will have to stay with us until we put him on the plane. 11

"If he stays, I stay," said Perot.

    Rashid was flabbergasted. Ross Perot would spend the night at the airport,

    or perhaps in a prison cell, rather than leave Rashid behind! It was

    incredible. If Pat Sculley had made such an offer, or Jay Coburn, Rashid

    would have been grateful but not surprised. But this was Ross Perot!

    The immigration officer sighed. "Do you know anyone in Great Britain who

    might vouch for you, sit?"

    Perot racked his brains. Who do I know in Britain? he thought. "I don't

    think-no, wait a minute." Of course! One of Britain's great heroes had

    stayed with the Perots in Dallas a couple of times. Perot and Margot had

    been guests at his home in England, a place called Broadlands. "I know Earl

    Mountbatten of Burma,

he said.

    "I'll just have a word with my supervisor," said the officer, and he got

    off the plane.

He was away a long time.

    Perot said to Sculley: "As soon as we get out of here, your job is to get

    us all first-class seats on that Braniff flight to Dallas in the morning."

"Yes, sir," said Sculley-

    The immigration officer came back. "I can give you twenty-four hours," he

    said to Rashid.

    Rashid looked at Perot. Oh, boy, he thought; what a guy to work for!

They checked in to the Post House Hotel near the airport, and Perot called

Merv Stauffer in Dallas.

    "Merv, we have one-Verson here with an Iranian passport and no U.S.

    visa-you know who I'm talking about."

I 'Yes, sir. "

    "He has saved American lives and I won't have him hassled when we get to

    the States."

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 399

"Yes, sir."

"Call Harry McKillop. Have him fix it."

"Yes, sir."

Sculley woke them all at Six A.m. He had to drag Coburn out of bed. Coburn

was still suffering the aftereffects of Simons's stay-awake pills:

ill-tempered and exhausted, he did not care whether he caught the plane or

not.

    Sculley had organized a bus to take them to Gatwick Airport, a good

    two-hour journey from Heathrow. As they went out, Keane Taylor, who was

    struggling with a plastic bin containing some of the dozens of bottles of

    liquor and cartons of cigarettes he had bought at Istanbul Airport, said:

    "Hey, do any of you guys want to help me carry this stuff?"

Nobody said anything. They all got on the bus.

    "Screw you, then," said Taylor, and he gave the whole lot to

the hotel doorman. I

    on the way to Gatwick they heard over the bus radio that China had invaded

    North Vietriam. Someone said: "That'll be our next assignment. "

    "Sure," said Simons. "We could be dropped between the two armies. No matter

    which way we fired, we'd be right."

    At the airport, walking behind his men, Perot noticed other people backing

    away, giving them room, and he suddenly realized how terrible they all

    looked. Most of them had not had a good wash or a shave for days, and they

    were dressed in a weird assortment of ill-fitting and very dirty clothes.

    They probably smelled bad, too.

    Perot asked for Braniffs passenger-service officer. Braniff was a Dallas

    airline, and Perot had flown with them to London several times, so most of

    the staff knew him.

    He asked the officer: "Can I rent the whole of the lounge upstairs in the

    747 for my party?"

    The officer was staring at the men. Perot knew what he was thinking: Mr.

    Perot's party usually consisted of a few quiet, well-dressed businessmen,

    and now here he was with what looked like a crowd of garage mechanics who

    had been working on a particularly filthy engine.

    The officer said: "Uh, we can't rent you the lounge, because of

    international airline regulations, sir, but I believe if your companions go

    up into the lounge, the rest of our passengers won't disturb you too much."

400 Ken Follett

Perot saw what he meant.

    As Perot boarded, he said to a stewardess: "I want these men to have

    anything they want on this plane."

    Perot passed on, and the stewardess turned to her colleague, wide-eyed.

    "Who the hell is he?"

Her colleague told her.

    The movie was Saturday Night Fever, but the projector would not work.

    Boulware was disappointed: he had seen the movie before and he had been

    looking forward to seeing it again. Instead, he sat and chewed the fat with

    Paul.

    Most of the others went up to the lounge. Once again, Simons and Coburn

    stretched out and went to sleep.

    Halfway across the Atlantic, Keane Taylor, who for the last few weeks had

    been carrying around anything up to a quarter of a million dollars in cash

    and handing it out by the fistful, suddenly took it into his head to have

    an accounting.

    He spread a blanket on the floor of the lounge and started collecting

    money. One by one, the other members of the team came up, fished wads of

    bank notes out of their pockets, their boots, their hats, and their

    shirtsleeves, and threw the money on the floor.

    One or two other first-class passengers had come up to the lounge, despite

    the unsavory appearance of Mr. Perot's party; but now, when this smelly,

    villainous-looking crew, with their beards and knit caps and dirty boots

    and go-to-hell coats, spread out several hundred thousand dollars on the

    floor and started counting it, the other passengers vanished.

    A few minutes later a stewardess came up to the lounge and approached

    Perot. "Some of the passengers are asking whether we should inform the

    police about your party," she said. "Would you come down and reassure

    them?"

"I'd be rJad to."

    Perot went down to the first-class cabin and introduced himself to the

    passengers in the forward seats. Some of them had heard of him. He began to

    tell them what had happened to Paul and Bill.

    As he talked, other passengers came up to listen. The cabin crew stopped

    work and stood nearby; then some of the crew from the economy cabin came

    along. Soon there was a whole crowd.

    It began to dawn on Perot that this was a story the world would want to

    hear.

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 401

Upstairs, the team were playing one last trick on Keane Taylor. While

collecting the money, Taylor had dropped, three bundles of ten thousand

dollars each, and Bill had slipped them into his own pocket.

    The accounting came out wrong, of course. They all sat around on the floor,

    Indian fashion, suppressing their laughter, while Taylor counted it all

    again.

    "How can I be thirty thousand dollars out?" Taylor said angrily. "Dammit,

    this is all I've got! Maybe I'm not thinking clearly. What the hell is the

    matter with me?"

    At that point Bill came up from downstairs and said: "What's the problem,

    Keane?"

    "God, we're thirty thousand dollars short, and I don't know what I did with

    all the rest of the money."

    Bill took the three stacks out of his pocket and said: "Is this what you're

    looking for?"

They all laughed uproariously.

    "Give me that," Taylor said angrily. "Dammit, Gaylord, I wish I'd left you

    in jail!"

They laughed all the more.

The plane came down toward Dallas.

    Ross Perot sat next to Rashid and told him the names of the places they

    were passing over. Rashid looked out of the window, at the flat brown land

    and the big wide roads that went straight for miles and miles. America.

    Joe Pocht had a good feeling. He had felt this way as captain of a rugby

    club in Minnesota, at the end of a long match when his side had won. The

    same feeling had come to him when he had returned from Vietnam. He had been

    part of a good team, he had survived, he had learned a lot, he had grown.

    Now all he wanted to make him perfectly happy was some clean underwear.

    Ron Davis was sitting next to Jay Coburn. "Hey, Jay, what'll we do for a

    living, now?"

Coburn smiled. "I don't know.

402 Ken Follett

    It would be strange, Davis thought, to sit behind a desk again. He was not

    sure he liked the idea.

    He suddenly remembered that Marva was now three months pregnant. It would

    be starting to show. He wondered how she would look, with a bulging tummy.

    I know what I need, he thought. I need a Coke. In the can. From a machine.

    In a gas station. And Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Pat Sculley was thinking: no more orange cabs.

    Sculley was sitting next to Jim Schwebach: they were together again, the

    short but deadly duo, having fired not a single shot at anyone during the

    whole adventure. They had been talking about what EDS could learn from the

    rescue. The company had projects in other Middle Eastern countries and was

    pushing into the Far East: should there perhaps be a permanent rescue team,

    a group of trouble-shooters trained and fit and armed and willing to do

    covert operations in faraway countries? No, they decided: this had been a

    unique situation. Sculley realized he did not want to spend any more time

    in primitive countries. In Tehran he had hated the morning trial of

    squeezing into an orange cab with two or three grumpy people, Persian music

    blaring from the car radio, and the inevitable quarrel with the driver over

    the fare. Wherever I work next, he thought, whatever I do, I'm going to

    ride to the office by myself, in my own car, a big fat American automobile

    with air-conditioning and soft music. And when I go to the bathroom,

    instead of squatting over a hole in the damn floor, there will be a clean

    white American toilet.

    As the plane touched down Perot said to him: "Pat, you'll be last out. I

    want you to make sure everyone gets through the formalities and deal with

    any problems."

I 'Sure. 11

    The plane taxied to a halt. The door was opened, and a woman came aboard.

    "Where is the man?" she said.

"Here," said Perot, pointing to Rashid.

Rashid was first off the plane.

Perot thought: Merv Stauffer has all that taken care of.

The others disembarked and went through customs.

    On the other side, the first person Coburn saw was stocky, bespectacled

    Merv Stauffer, grinning from ear to ear. Coburn put his arms around

    Stauffer and hugged him. Stauffer reached into his pocket and pulled out

    Coburn's wedding ring.

    Coburn was touched. He had left the ring with Stauffer for safekeeping.

    Since then, Stauffer had been the linchpin of the

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 403

whole operation, sitting in Dallas with a phone to his ear making everything

happen. Coburn had talked to him almost every day, relaying Simons's orders

and demands, receiving information and advice: he knew better than anyone

how important Stauffer had been, how they had all just relied on him to do

whatever had to be done. Yet with all that happening, Stauffer had remem-

bered the wedding band.

    Coburn slipped it on. He had done a lot of hard thinking about his

    marriage, during the empty hours in Tehran; but now all that went out of

    his mind, and he looked forward to seeing Liz.

    Merv told him to walk out of the airport and get on a bus that was waiting

    outside. Coburn followed directions. On the bus he saw Margot Perot. He

    smiled and shook hands. Then, suddenly, the air was filled with screams of

    joy, and four wildly excited children threw themselves at him: Kim, Kristi,

    Scott, and Kelly. Coburn laughed out loud and tried to hug them all at the

    same time.

    Liz was standing behind the kids. Gently Coburn disentangled himself. His

    eyes filled with tears. He put his arms around his wife, and he could not

    speak.

    When Keane Taylor got on the bus, his wife did not recognize him. Her

    normally elegant husband was wearing a filthy orange ski jacket and a

    knitted cap. He had not shaved for a week and he had lost fifteen pounds.

    He stood in front of her for several seconds, until Liz Coburn said: "Mary,

    aren't you going to say hello to Keane?" Then his children, Mike and Dawn,

    grabbed him.

    Today was Taylor's birthday. He was forty-one. It was the happiest birthday

    of his life.

    John Howell saw his wife, Angela, sitting at the front of the bus, behind

    the driver, with Michael, eleven months, on her lap. The baby was wearing

    blue jeans and a striped rugby shirt. Howell picked him up and said: "Hi,