On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

When the real numbers came through, it turned out that the maneuver had been almost perfect.

All that was a long way from busting into a prison.

Still, it was beginning to look like Jackson would never get the chance to perpetrate a jailbreak. He had been cooling his heels in Paris for a week when he got instructions from Simons, via Dallas, to go to Kuwait.

He flew to Kuwait and moved into Bob Young's house. Young had gone to Tehran to help the negotiating team, and his wife, Kris, and her new baby were in the States on vacation. Jackson told Malloy Jones, who was Acting Country Manager in Young's absence, that he had come to help with the preliminary study EDS was doing for Kuwait's central bank. He did a little work for the benefit of his cover story, then started looking around.

He spent some time at the airport, watching the immigration officers. They were being very tough, he soon learned. Hundreds of Iranians without passports were flying into Kuwait: they were being handcuffed and put on the next flight back. Jackson concluded that Paul and Bill could not possibly fly into Kuwait.

Assuming they could get in by boat, would they later be allowed to leave without passports? Jackson went to see the American Consul, saying that one of his children seemed to have lost a passport, and asking what was the procedure for replacing it. In the course of a long and rambling discussion the Consul revealed that the Kuwaitis had a way of checking, when they issued an exit visa, whether the person had entered the country legally.

That was a problem, but perhaps not an insoluble one: once inside Kuwait, Paul and Bill would be safe from Dadgar, and surely the U.S. Embassy would then give them back their passports. The main question was: assuming the fugitives could reach the south of Iran and embark on a small boat, would they be able to land unnoticed in Kuwait? Jackson traveled the sixty-mile length of the Kuwait coast, from the Iraqi border in the north to the Saudi Arabian border in the south. He spent many hours on the beaches, collecting seashells in winter. Normally, he had been told, coastal patrols were very light. But the exodus from Iran had changed everything. There were thousands of Iranians who wanted to leave the country almost as badly as Paul and Bill did; and those Iranians, like Simons, could look at a map and see the Persian Gulf to the south with friendly Kuwait just across the water. The Kuwait Coast Guard was wise to all this. Everywhere Jackson looked, he saw, out at sea, at least one patrol boat; and they appeared to be stopping all small craft.

The prognosis was gloomy. Jackson called Merv Stauffer in Dallas and reported that the Kuwait exit was a no-no.

That left Turkey.

Simons had favored Turkey all along. It involved a shorter drive than Kuwait. Furthermore, Simons knew Turkey. He had served there in the fifties as part of the American military and program, training the Turkish Army. He even spoke a little of the language.

So he sent Ralph Boulware to Istanbul.

Ralph Boulware grew up in bars. His father, Benjamin Russell Boulware, was a tough and independent black man who had a series of small businesses: a grocery store, real-estate rentals, bootlegging, but mostly bars. Ben Boulware's theory of child-raising was that if he knew where they were, he knew what they were doing, so he kept his boys mostly within his sight, which meant mostly in the bar. It was not much of a childhood, and it left Ralph feeling that he had been an adult all his life.

He had realized he was different from other boys his age when he went to college and found his contemporaries getting all excited about gambling, drinking, and going with women. He knew all about gamblers, drunks, and whores already: he dropped out of college and joined the air force.

In nine years in the air force he had never seen action, and while he was on the whole glad about that, it had left him wondering whether he had what it took to fight in a shooting war. The rescue of Paul and Bill might give him the chance to find out, he had thought; but Simons had sent him from Paris back to Dallas. It looked as though he was going to be ground crew again. Then new orders came.

They came via Merv Stauffer, Perot's right-hand man, who was now Simons's link with the scattered rescue team. Stauffer went to Radio Shack and bought six five-channel two-way radios, ten rechargers, a supply of batteries, and a device for running the radios off a dashboard cigar lighter. He gave the equipment to Boulware and told him to meet Sculley and Schwebach in London before going on to Istanbul.

Stauffer also gave him forty thousand dollars in cash, for expenses, bribes, and general purposes.