On Wings of Eagles (22 page)

    After a little practice they could all shoot reasonably well except Davis.

    Simons suggested he try shooting lying down, since that was the position he

    would be in when he was in the courtyard; and he found he could do much

    better that way.

134 Ken Follett

    It was bitterly cold out in the open, and they all huddled in a little

    shack, trying to get warm, while they were not shootingall except Simons,

    who stayed outside an day long, as if he were made of stone.

    He was not made of stone-when he got into Merv Stauffer's car at the end of

    the day he said: "Jesus Christ it's cold."

    He had begun to needle them about how soft they were. They were always

    talking about where they would go to eat and what they would order, he

    said. When he was hungry he would open a can. He would laugh at someone for

    nursing a drink: when he was thirsty he would fill a tumbler with water and

    drink it all straight down, saying: "I didn't pour it to look at it." He

    showed them how he could shoot, one time: every bullet in the center of the

    target. Once Coburn saw him with his shirt off. his physique would have

    been impressive on a man twenty years younger-

    It was a tough-guy act, the whole performance. What was peculiar was that

    none of them ever laughed at it. With Simons, it was the real thing.

One evening at the lake house he showed them the best way to kill a man

quickly and silently.

    He had ordered--and Merv Stauffer had purchased--Gerber knives for each of

    them, short stabbing weapons with a narrow two-edged blade.

    "It's kind of small," said Davis, looking at his. "Is it long enough?"

    "It is unless you want to sharpen it when it comes out the other side,"

    Simons said.

    He showed them the exact spot in the small of Glenn Jackson's back where

    the kidney was located. "A single stab, right there, is lethal," he said.

:'Wouldn't he scream?" Davis asked.

'It hurts so bad he can't make a sound."

    While Simons was demonstrating, Merv Stauffer had come in, and now he stood

    in the doorway, openmouthed, with a McDonald's paper bag in either arm.

    Simons saw him and said: "LA)ok at this guy--he can't make a sound and

    nobody's stuck him yet.'9

    Merv laughed and started handing round the food. "You know what the

    McDonald's girl said to me, in a completely empty

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 135

restaurant, when I asked for thirty hamburgers and thirty orders of fries?"

    "'Wbat?"

    "What they always say-'Is this to eat here or to goT

Simons just loved working for private enterprise.

    One of his biggest headaches in the army had always been supplies. Even

    planning the Son Tay Raid, an operation in which the President himself was

    personally interested, it had seemed as if he had to fill in six

    requisition forms and get approval from twelve generals every time he

    needed a new pencil. Then, when all the paper work was done, he would find

    that the items were out of stock, or there was a four-month wait for

    delivery, or-worst of all-when the stuff came it did not work. Twentytwo

    percent of the blasting caps he ordered misfired. He had tried to get night

    sights for his Raiders. He learned that the army had spent seventeen years

    trying to develop a night sight, but by 1970 all they had were six

    hand-built prototypes. Then he discovered a perfectly good British-made

    night sight available from the Armalite Corporation for $49.50, and that

    was what the Son Tay Raiders took to Vietnam.

    At EDS there were no forms to be filled out and no permissions to be

    sought, at least not for Simons: he told Merv Stauffer what he needed and

    Stauffer got it, usually the same day. He asked for, and got, ten Walther

    PPKs and ten thousand rounds of ammunition; a selection of holsters, both

    left-handed and right-handed, in different styles so the men could pick the

    kind they felt most comfortable with; shotgun-ammunition reloading kits in

    twelve-gauge, sixteen-gauge and twenty-gauge; and cold-weadier clothes for

    the team including coats, mittens, shirts, socks, and woolen stocking caps.

    One day he asked for a hundred thousand dollars in cash: two hours later T.

    J. Marquez arrived at the lake house with the money in an envelope.

    It was different from the army in other ways. His men were not soldiers who

    could be bullied into submission: they were some of the brightest young

    corporate executives in the United States. He had realized from the start

    that he could not assume command. He had to earn their loyalty.

    These men would obey an order if they agreed with it. If not, they would

    discuss it. That was fine in the boardroom, but useless on the battlefield.

They were squeamish, too. The first time they talked about

136 Ken Follett

setting fire to a car as a diversion, someone had objected on the grounds

that innocent passers-by might get hurt. Simons needled them about their Boy

Scout morality, saying they were afraid of losing their merit badges, and

calling them "you Jack Armstrongsafter the too-good-to-be-true radio

character who went around solving crimes and helping old ladies cross the

road.

    They also had a tendency to forget the seriousness of what they were doing.

    There was a lot of joking and a certain amount of horseplay, particularly

    from young Ron Davis. A measure of humor was useful in a team on a

    dangerous mission, but sometimes Simons had to put a stop to it and bring

    them back to reality with a sharp remark.

    He gave them all the opportunity to back out at any time. He got Ron Davis

    on his own again and said: "You're going to be the first one over that

    fence-don't you have some reservations about that?"

"Yeah. -

    "Good thing you do, otherwise I wouldn't take you. Suppose Paul and Bill

    don't come right away? Suppose they figure that if they head for the fence

    they'll get shot? You'll be stuck there and the guards will see you. You'll

    be in bad trouble."

'Yeah. "

    "Me, I'm sixty years old, I've lived my life. Hell, I don't have a thing to

    lose. But you're a young man--wd Marva's pregnant, isn't she?"

"Yeah. -

"Are you really sure you want to do this?"

'Yeah. "

    He worked on them all. There was no point in his telling them that his

    military judgment was better than theirs: they had to come to that

    conclusion themselves. Similarly, his tough-guy act was intended to let

    them know that from now on such things as keeping warm, eating, drinking,

    and worrying about innocent bystanders would not occupy much of their time

    or attention. The shooting practice and the knife lesson also had a hidden

    purpose: die last thing Simons wanted was any killing on this operation,

    but learning how to kill reminded the men that the rescue could be a

    life-and-death affair.

    The biggest element in his psychological campaign was the endless

    practicing of the assault on the jail. Simons was quite sure that the jail

    would not be exactly as Coburn had described it, and that the plan would

    have to be modified. A raid never

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 137

went precisely according to the scenario-as he knew better than most.

    The rehearsals for the Son Tay Raid had gone on for weeks. A complete

    replica of the prison camp had been built, out of two-by-four timbers and

    target cloth, at Eglin Air Base in Florida. The bloody thing had to be

    dismantled every morning before dawn and put up again at night, because the

    Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 355 passed over Florida twice every

    twenty-four hours. But it had been a beautiful thing: every goddarn tree

    and ditch in the Son Tay prison camp had been reproduced in the mock-up.

    And then, after all those rehearsals, when they did it for real, one of the

    helicoptms--the one Simons was in-had landed in the wrong place.

    Simons would never forget the moment he realized the mistake. His

    helicopter was taking off again, having discharged the Raiders. A startled

    Vietnamese guard emerged from a foxhole and Simons shot him in the chest.

    ShootinZ broke out, a flare went tip, and Simons saw that the buildings

    surrounding him were not the buildings of the Son Tay camp. "Get that

    fucking chopper back in here!" he yelled to his radio operator. He told a

    sergeant to turn on a strobe light to mark the landing zone.

    He knew where they were: four hundred yards from Son Tay, in a compound

    marked on intelligence maps as a school. This was no school. There were

    enemy troops everywhere. It was a barracks, and Simons realized that his

    helicopter pilot's mistake had been a lucky one, for now he was able to

    launch a preemptive attack and wipe out a concentration of enemy troops who

    might otherwise have jeopardized the whole operation.

    That was the night he stood outside a barracks and shot eighty men in their

    underwear.

    No, an operation never went exactly according to plan. But becoming

    proficient at executing the scenario was only half the purpose of

    rehearsals anyway. The other half-and, in the case of the EDS men, the

    important half-was learning to work together as a team. Oh, they were

    already terrific as an inteUectual team-4ve them each an office and a

    secretary and a telephone, and together they would computerize the worl"ut

    working tDgedier with their hands and their bodies was different. When they

    had started, on January 3, they would have had trouble launching a rowboat

    as a team. Five days later they were a machine.

138 Ken Folktt

And that was all that could be done here in Texas. Now they had to take a

look at the real-life jail. It was time to go to Tehran. Simons told

Stauffa he wanted to meet with Perot again.

    3

While the rescue team was in training, President Carter got his last chance

of preventing a bloody revolution in Iran.

And he blew it.

This is how it happened ...

Ambassador William Sullivan went to bed content on the night of January 4 in

his private apartment within the large, cool residence in the Embassy

compound at the comer of Roosevelt and Takht-e-Jamshid avenues in Tehran.

    Sullivan's boss, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, had been busy with the

    Camp David negotiations all through November and December, but now he was

    back in Washington and concentrating on Iran--and boy, did it show.

    Vagueness and vacillation had ended. The cables containing Sullivan's

    instructions had become crisp and decisive. Most importantly, the United

    States at last had a strategy for dealing with the crisis: they were going

    to talk to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

    It was Sullivan's own idea. He was now sure that the Shah would soon leave

    Iran and Khomeini would return in triumph. His job, be believed, was to

    preserve America's relationship with Iran through the change of government,

    so that when it was all over, Iran would still be a stronghold of American

    influence in the Middle East. The way to do that was to help the Iranian

    armed forces to gay intact and to continue American military aid to any new

    regime.

    Sullivan had called Vance on the secure telephone line and told him just

    that. The U.S. should send an emissary to Paris to see the Ayatollah,

    Sullivan had urged. Khomeini should be told that the main concern of the

    U.S. was to preserve the territorial integrity of Iran and deflect Soviet

    influence; that the Americans did not want tc~see a pitched battle in Iran

    between the army and the Islamic revolutionaries; and that once the

    Ayatollah was in

    ON WINGS OF EAGLES 139

    power, the U.S. would offer him the same military assistance and arms

    sales it had given the Shah.

    It was a bold plan. There would be those who would accuse the U.S. of

    abandoning a friend. But Sullivan was sure it was time for the

    Americans to cut their losses with the Shah and look to the future.

    To his intense satisfaction, Vance had agreed.

    So had the Shah. Weary, apathetic, and no longer willing to shed blood

    in order to stay in power, the Shah had not even put up a show of

    reluctance.

    Vance had nominated, as his endssary to the Ayatollah, Theodore H.

    Eliot, a senior diplomat who had served as economic counselor in Tehran

    and spoke Farsi fluently. Sullivan was delighted with the choice.

    Ted Eliot was scheduled to arrive in Paris in two days' time, on

    January 6.

    In one of the guest bedrooms at the ambassadorial residence, Air Force

    General Robert "Dutch" Huyser was also going to bed. Sullivan was not