Follett, Ken - On Wings of Eagles.txt Read online

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 t
ime 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

  escalated, and seventy people were killed in two more days of disturbances.

  The clergy organized a memorial procession for the dead forty days later in

  accordance with Islamic tradition. There was more violence during the

  procession, and the dead were commemorated in another memorial forty days

  later.... The processions continued, and grew larger and more violent,

  through the first six months of the year.

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 21

  With hindsight Paul could see that calling these marches "funeral

  processions" had been a way to circumvent the Shah's ban on political

  demonstrations. But at the time he had had no idea that a massive political

  movement was building. Nor had anyone else.

  In August 1978 Paul went home to the States on leave. (So did William

  Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran.) Paul loved all kinds of water

  sports, and he had gone to a sports fishing tournament in Ocean City, New

  Jersey, with his cousin Joe Porreca. Paul's wife, Ruthie, and the children,

  Karen and Ann Marie, went to Chicago to visit Ruthie's parents. Paul was a

  little anxious because the Ministry of Health still had not paid EDS's bill

  for the month of June; but it was not the first time they had been late

  with a payment, and Paul had left the problem in the hands of his

  second-in-command, Bill Gaylord, and he was fairly confident Bill would get

  the money in.

  While Paul was in the U.S. the news from Iran was bad. Martial law was

  declared on September 7, and the following day more than a hundred people

  were killed by soldiers during a demonstration in Jaleh Square in the heart

  of Tehran.

  When the Chiapparone fan-dly came back to Iran the very air seemed

  different. For the first time Paul and Ruthie could hear shooting in the

  streets at night. They were alarmed: suddenly they realized that trouble

  for the Iranians meant trouble for them. There was a series of strikes. The

  electricity was continually being cut off, so they dined by candlelight and

  Paul wore his topcoat in the office to keep warm. It became more and more

  difficult to get money out of the banks, and Paul started a check-cashing

  service at the office for employees. When they got low on heating oil for

  their home Paul had to walk around the streets until he found a tanker,

  then bribe the driver to come to the house and deliver.

  His business problems were worse. The Minister of Health and Social

  Welfare, Dr. Sheikholeslamizadeh, had been arrested under Article 5 of

  martial law, which permitted a prosecutor to jail anyone without giving a

  reason. Also in jail was Deputy Minister Reza Neghabat, with whom Paul had

  worked closely. The Ministry still had not paid its June bill, nor any

  since, and now owed EDS more than four million dollars.

  For two months Paul tried to get the money. The individuals he had dealt

  with previously had all gone. Their replacements usually did not return his

  calls. Sometimes someone would promise to look into the problem and call

  back: after waiting a

  22 Ken Follett

  week for the call that never came, Paul would telephone once again, to be

  told that the person he had spoken to last week had now left the Ministry.

  Meetings would be arranged, then canceled. The debt mounted at the rate of

  $1.4 million a month.

  On November 14 Paul wrote to Dr. Heidargholi Emrani, the Deputy Minister in

  charge of the Social Security Organization, giving formal notice that if

  the Ministry did not pay up within a month EDS would stop work. The threat

  was repeated on December 4 by Paul's boss, the president of EDS World, at

  a personal meeting with Dr. Emrani.

  That was yesterday.

  If EDS pulled out, the whole Iranian social-security system would collapse.

  Yet it was becoming more and more apparent that the country was bankrupt

  and simply could not pay its bills. What, Paul wondered, would Dr. Emrani

  do now?

  He was still wondering when Jay Coburn walked in with the answer.

  At first, however, it did not occur to Paul that the attempt to steal his

  passport might have been intended to keep him, and therefore EDS, in Iran.

  When Coburn had given him the facts he said: "What the hell did they do

  that for?"

  "I don't know. Majid doesn't know, and Fara doesn't know."

  Paul looked at him. The two men had become close in the last month. For the

  rest of the employees Paul was putting on a brave face, but with Coburn he

  had been able to close the door and say, Okay, what do you really think?

  Coburn said: "The first question is, What do we do about Fara? She could be

  in trouble."

  "She has to give them some kind of an answer."

  "A show of cooperationT I

  "She could go back and tell them that Nyfeler and Bucha are no longer

  resident . . . "

  "She already told them."

  "She could take their exit visas as proof."

  "Yeah," Coburn said dubiously. "But it's you and Bill they're really

  interested in now."

  "She could say that the passports aren't kept in the offic
e."

  "They may know that's not true-Fara may even have taken passports down

  there in the past."

  ON WINGS OF EAGLES 23

  "Say senior executives don't have to keep their passports in the office."

  "'Mat might work."

  "Any convincing story to the effect that she was physically unable to do

  what they asked her."

  "Good. I'll discuss it with her and Majid.- Coburn thought for a moment.

  "You know, Bucha has a reservation on a flight out tomorrow. He could just

  go. "

  "He probably should--they think he's not here anyway."

  "You could do the same."

  Paul reflected. Maybe he should get out now. What would the Iranians do

  then? They might just try to detain someone else. "No, " he said. " If

  we're going, I should be the last to leave.

  "Are we going?" Coburn asked.

  "I don't know." Every day for weeks they had asked each other that

  question. Coburn had developed an evacuation plan that could be put into

  effect instantly. Paul had been hesitating, with his finger on the button.

  He knew that his ultimate boss, back in Dallas, wanted him to evacuate-but

  it meant abandoning the project on which he had worked so hard for the last

  sixteen months. "I don't know," he repeated. "I'll call Dallas."

  That night Coburn was at home, in bed with Liz, and fast asleep when the

  phone rang.

  He picked it up in the dark. "Yeah?"

  "This is Paul."

  "Hello." Coburn turned on the light and looked at his wristwatch. It was

  two A.M.

  "We're going to evacuate," Paul said.

  "You got it.-

  Coburn cradled the phone and sat on the edge of the bed. In a way it was a

  relief. There would be two or three days of frantic activity, but then he

  would know that the people whose safety had been worrying him for so long

  were back in the States, out of reach of these crazy Iranians.

  He ran over in his mind the plans he had made for just this moment. First

  he had to inform 130 families that they would be leaving the country

  within. the next 48 hours. He had divided the city into sectors, with a

  team leader for each sector: he would call the leaders, and it would be

  their job to call the families. He had drafted leaflets for the evacuees

  telling them where to go and