Ken Follett - On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

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 Etelaat published a scurrilous attack on an exiled clergyman called Ayatollah Khomeini, 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.

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 sportfishing 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 family 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 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 cooperation?"

"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 office."

"They may know that's not true--Fara may even have taken passports down there in the past."

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

"That 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.