On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

Schwebach enjoyed the challenge. He liked fooling around with anything mechanical: his hobby was an ugly-looking stripped-down '73 Oldsmobile Cutlass that went like a bullet out of a gun.

At first he experimented with an old-fashioned clockwork stove-top timer that used a striker to hit a bell. He attached a phosphorus match to the striker and substituted a piece of sandpaper for the bell, to ignite the match. The match in turn would light a mechanical fuse.

The system was unreliable, and caused great hilarity among the rest of the team, who jeered and laughed every time the match failed to ignite.

In the end Schwebach settled on the oldest timing device of all: a candle.

He test-burned a candle to see how long it took to burn down one inch; then he cut another candle off at the right length for fifteen minutes.

Next he scraped the heads off several old-fashioned phosphorous matches and ground up the inflammable material into a powder. This he packed tightly into a piece of aluminum kitchen foil. Then he stuck the foil into the base of the candle. When the candle burned all the way down, it heated the aluminum foil and the ground-up match heads exploded. The foil was thinner at the bottom so that the explosion would travel downward.

The candle, with this primitive but reliable fuse in its base, was set into the neck of a plastic jar, about the size of a hip flask, full of jellied gasoline.

"You light the candle and walk away from it," Schwebach told them when his design was complete. "Fifteen minutes later you've got a nice little fire going."

And any police, soldiers, revolutionaries, or passersby--plus, quite possibly, some of the prison guards--would have their attention fixed on a blazing automobile three hundred yards up the street while Ron Davis and Jay Coburn were jumping over the fence into the prison courtyard.

That day they moved out of the Hilton Inn. Coburn slept at the lake house, and the others checked into the Airport Marina--which was closer to Lake Grapevine--all except Ralph Boulware, who insisted on going home to his family.

They spent the next four days training, buying equipment, practicing their shooting, rehearsing the jailbreak, and further refining the plan.

Shotguns could be bought in Tehran, but the only kind of ammunition allowed by the Shah was birdshot. However, Simons was expert at reloading ammunition, so they decided to smuggle their own shot into Iran.

The trouble with putting buckshot into birdshot slugs would be that they would get relatively few shot into the smaller slugs: the ammunition would have great penetration but little spread. They decided to use Number 2 shot, which would spread wide enough to knock down more than one man at a time, but had enough penetration to smash the windshield of a pursuing car.

In case things turned really nasty, each member of the team would also carry a Walther PPK in a holster. Merv Stauffer got Bob Snyder, head of security at EDS and a man who knew when not to ask questions, to buy the PPKs at Ray's Sporting Goods in Dallas. Schwebach had the job of figuring out how to smuggle the guns into Iran.

Stauffer inquired which U.S. airports did not fluoroscope outgoing baggage: one was Kennedy.

Schwebach bought two Vuitton trunks, deeper than ordinary suitcases, with reinforced comers and hard sides. With Coburn, Davis, and Jackson, he went to the woodwork shop at Perot's Dallas home and experimented with ways of constructing false bottoms in the cases.

Schwebach was perfectly happy about carrying guns through Iranian customs in a false-bottomed case. "If you know how customs people work, you don't get stopped," he said. His confidence was not shared by the rest of the team. In case he did get stopped and the guns were found, there was a fallback plan. He would say the case was not his. He would return to the baggage claim area, and there, sure enough, would be another Vuitton trunk just like the first, but full of personal belongings and containing no guns.

Once the team was in Tehran they would have to communicate with Dallas by phone. Coburn was quite sure the Iranians bugged the phone lines, so the team developed a simple code.

GR meant A, GS meant B, GT meant C, and so on through GZ which meant I; then HA meant J, HB meant K, through HR which meant Z. Numbers one through nine were IA through II; zero was IJ.

They would use the military alphabet, in which A is called Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie and so on.

For speed, only key words would be coded. The sentence "He is with EDS" would therefore become "He is with Golf Victor Golf Uniform Hotel Kilo."

Only three copies of the key to the code were made. Simons gave one to Merv Stauffer, who would be the team's contact here in Dallas. He gave the other two to Jay Coburn and Pat Sculley, who--though nothing was said formally--were emerging as his lieutenants.