On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

Coburn looked for ways of flying Paul and Bill out. He poked around warehouses at the airport, toying with the idea of shipping Paul and Bill as freight. He talked to people at each of the airlines, trying to develop contacts. He eventually had several meetings with the chief of security at Pan Am, telling him everything except the names of Paul and Bill. They talked about getting the two fugitives on a scheduled flight wearing Pan Am cabin crew uniforms. The security chief wanted to help, but the airline's liability proved in the end to be an insuperable problem. Coburn then considered stealing a helicopter. He scouted a chopper base in the south of the city, and decided the theft was feasible. But, given the chaos of the Iranian military, he suspected the aircraft were not being properly maintained and he knew they were short of spare parts. Then again, some of them might have contaminated fuel.

He reported all this to Simons. Simons was already uneasy about airports, and the snags uncovered by Coburn reinforced his prejudice. There were always police and military around airports; if something went wrong there was no escape--airports were designed to prevent people wandering where they should not go; at an airport you always had to put yourself in the hands of others. Furthermore, in that situation your worst enemy could be the people escaping: they needed to be very cool. Coburn thought Paul and Bill had the nerves to go through something like that, but there was no point telling Simons so: Simons always had to make his own assessment of a man's character, and he had never met Paul or Bill.

So in the end the team focused on getting out by road.

There were six ways.

To the north was the USSR, not a hospitable country. To the east were Afghanistan, equally inhospitable, and Pakistan, whose border was too far away--almost a thousand miles, mostly across desert. To the south was the Persian Gulf, with friendly Kuwait just fifty or a hundred miles across the water. That was promising. To the west was unfriendly Iraq; to the northwest, friendly Turkey.

Kuwait and Turkey were the destinations they favored.

Simons asked Coburn to have a trustworthy Iranian employee drive south all the way to the Persian Gulf, to find out whether the road was passable and the countryside peaceful. Coburn asked the Cycle Man, so called because he zipped around Tehran on a motorcycle. A trainee systems engineer like Rashid, the Cycle Man was about twenty-five, short, and street-smart. He had learned English at school in California, and could talk with any regional American accent--southern, Puerto Rican, anything. EDS had hired him despite his lack of a college degree because he scored remarkably high marks on aptitude tests. When EDS's Iranian employees had joined the general strike, and Paul and Coburn had called a mass meeting to discuss it with them, the Cycle Man had astonished everyone by speaking out vehemently against his colleagues and in favor of the management. He made no secret of his pro-American feelings, yet Coburn was quite sure the Cycle Man was involved with the revolutionaries. One day he had asked Keane Taylor for a car. Taylor had given him one. The next day he asked for another. Taylor obliged. The Cycle Man always used his motorcycle anyway: Taylor and Coburn were pretty sure the cars were for the revolutionaries. They did not care: it was more important that the Cycle Man become obligated to them.

So, in return for past favors, the Cycle Man drove to the Persian Gulf.

He came back a few days later and reported that anything was possible if you had enough money. You could get to the Gulf and you could buy or rent a boat.

He had no idea what would happen when you disembarked in Kuwait.

That question was answered by Glenn Jackson.

As well as being a hunter and a Baptist, Glenn Jackson was a Rocket Man. His combination of a first-class mathematical brain and the ability to stay calm under stress had got him into Mission Control at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston as a flight controller. His job had been to design and operate the computer programs that calculated trajectories for in-flight maneuvering.

Jackson's unflappability had been severely tested on Christmas Day 1968, during the last mission he worked on, the lunar flyby. When the spacecraft came out from behind the moon, astronaut Jim Lovell had read down the list of numbers, called residuals, which told Jackson how close the craft was to its planned course. Jackson had got a fright: The numbers were way outside the acceptable limits of error. Jackson asked CAPCOM to have the astronaut read them down again, to double-check. Then he told the flight director that if those numbers were correct, the three astronauts were as good as dead: there was not enough fuel to correct such a huge divergence.

Jackson asked for Lovell to read the numbers a third time, extra carefully. They were the same. Then Lovell said: "Oh, wait a minute, I'm reading these wrong ... "