Carlen and his crew fiddled with the controls for a while; then Carlen sighed and said: "Would you get Ross up here, Paul?"
Paul fetched Perot.
Carlen said: "Mr. Perot, I think we ought to take this thing and land it as soon as we can." He explained again why they could not cross the Atlantic with a faulty pressure system.
Paul said: "John, I'll be forever grateful to you if we don't have to land in Germany."
"Don't worry," said Carlen. "We'll head for London, Heathrow."
Perot went back to tell the others. Carlen called London Air Traffic Control on the radio. It was one in the morning, and he was told Heathrow was closed. This is an emergency, he replied. They gave him permission to land.
Paul could hardly believe it. An emergency landing, after all he had been through!
Ken Lenz began to dump fuel to reduce the plane below its maximum landing weight.
London told Carlen there was fog over southern England, but at the moment visibility was up to half a mile at Heathrow.
When Ken Lenz shut off the fuel-dump valves, a red light that should have gone out stayed on. "A dump chute hasn't retracted," said Lenz.
"I can't believe this," said Paul. He lit a cigarette.
Carlen said: "Paul, can I have a cigarette?"
Paul stared at him. "You told me you quit smoking ten years ago."
"Just give me a cigarette, would you?"
Paul gave him a cigarette and said: "Now I'm really scared."
Paul went back into the passenger cabin. The stewardesses had everyone busy stowing trays, bottles, and baggage, securing all loose objects, in preparation for landing.
Paul went into the bedroom. Simons was lying on the bed. He had shaved in cold water and there were bits of stickum tape all over his face. He was fast asleep.
Paul left him. He said to Jay Coburn: "Does Simons know what's going on?"
"Sure does," Coburn replied. "He said he doesn't know how to fly a plane and there's nothing he can do, so he was going to take a nap."
Paul shook his head in amazement. How cool could you get?
He returned to the flight deck. Carlen was as laid-back as ever, his voice calm, his hands steady; but that cigarette worried Paul.
A couple of minutes later the red light went out. The dump chute had retracted.
They approached Heathrow in dense cloud and began to lose height. Paul watched the altimeter. As it dropped through six hundred feet, then five hundred, there was still nothing outside but swirling gray fog.
At three hundred feet it was the same. Then, suddenly, they dropped out of the cloud and there was the runway, straight ahead, lit up like a Christmas tree. Paul breathed a sigh of relief.
They touched down, and the fire engines and ambulances came screaming across the tarmac toward the plane; but it was a perfect safe landing.
Rashid had been hearing about Ross Perot for years. Perot was the multimillionaire, the founder of EDS, the business wizard, the man who sat in Dallas and moved men such as Coburn and Sculley around the world like pieces on a chessboard. It had been quite an experience for Rashid to meet Mr. Perot and find he was just an ordinary-looking human being, rather short and surprisingly friendly. Rashid had walked into the hotel room in Istanbul, and this little guy with the big smile and the bent nose just stuck out his hand and said: "Hi, I'm Ross Perot," and Rashid had shaken hands and said: "Hi, I'm Rashid Kazemi," just as natural as could be.
Since that moment he had felt more than ever one of the EDS team. But at Heathrow Airport he was sharply reminded that he was not.
As soon as the plane taxied to a halt, a vanload of airport police, customs men, and immigration officials boarded and started asking questions. They did not like what they saw: a bunch of dirty, scruffy, smelly, unshaven men, carrying a fortune in various currencies, aboard an incredibly luxurious airplane with a Grand Cayman Islands tail number. This, they said in their British way, was highly irregular, to say the least.
However, after an hour or so of questioning, they could find no evidence that the EDS men were drug smugglers, terrorists, or members of the PLO. And as holders of U.S. passports, the Americans needed no visas or other documentation to enter Britain. They were all admitted--except for Rashid.
Perot confronted the immigration officer. "There's no reason why you should know who I am, but my name is Ross Perot, and if you would just check me out, maybe with U.S. Customs, I believe you will conclude that you can trust me. I have too much to lose by trying to smuggle an illegal immigrant into Britain. Now, I will assume personal responsibility for this young man. We will be out of England in twenty-four hours. In the morning we will check with your counterparts at Gatwick Airport, and we will then get on the Braniff flight to Dallas."
"I'm afraid we can't do that, sir," said the official. "This gentleman will have to stay with us until we put him on the plane."
"If he stays, I stay," said Perot.
Rashid was flabbergasted. Ross Perot would spend the night at the airport, or perhaps in a prison cell, rather than leave Rashid behind! It was incredible. If Pat Sculley had made such an offer, or Jay Coburn, Rashid would have been grateful but not surprised. But this was Ross Perot!
The immigration officer sighed. "Do you know anyone in Great Britain who might vouch for you, sir?"
Perot racked his brains. Who do I know in Britain? he thought. "I don't think--no, wait a minute." Of course! One of Britain's great heroes had stayed with the Perots in Dallas a couple of times. Perot and Margot had been guests at his home in England, a place called Broadlands. "I know Earl Mountbatten of Burma," he said.
"I'll just have a word with my supervisor," said the officer, and he got off the plane.
He was away a long time.
Perot said to Sculley: "As soon as we get out of here, your job is to get us all first-class seats on that Braniff flight to Dallas in the morning."
"Yes, sir," said Sculley.
The immigration officer came back. "I can give you twenty-four hours," he said to Rashid.
Rashid looked at Perot. Oh, boy, he thought; what a guy to work for!
They checked in to the Post House Hotel near the airport, and Perot called Merve Stauffer in Dallas.
"Merv, we have one person here with an Iranian passport and no U.S. visa--you know who I'm talking about."
"Yes, sir."
"He has saved American lives and I won't have him hassled when we get to the States."
"Yes, sir."
"Call Harry McKillop. Have him fix it."
"Yes, sir."
Sculley woke them all at six A.M. He had to drag Coburn out of bed. Coburn was still suffering the aftereffects of Simons's stay-awake pills: ill-tempered and exhausted, he did not care whether he caught the plane or not.
Sculley had organized a bus to take them to Gatwick Airport, a good two-hour journey from Heathrow. As they went out, Keane Taylor, who was struggling with a plastic bin containing some of the dozens of bottles of liquor and cartons of cigarettes he had bought at Istanbul Airport, said: "Hey, do any of you guys want to help me carry this stuff?"
Nobody said anything. They all got on the bus.
"Screw you, then," said Taylor, and he gave the whole lot to the hotel doorman.
On the way to Gatwick they heard over the bus radio that China had invaded North Vietnam. Someone said: "That'll be our next assignment."
"Sure," said Simons. "We could be dropped between the two armies. No matter which way we fired, we'd be right."
At the airport, walking behind his men, Perot noticed other people backing away, giving them room, and he suddenly realized how terrible they all looked. Most of them had not had a good wash or a shave for days, and they were dressed in a weird assortment of ill-fitting and very dirty clothes. They probably smelled bad, too.
Perot asked for Braniff's passenger-service officer. Braniff was a Dallas airline, and Perot had flown with them to London several times, so most of the staff knew him.
&nb
sp; He asked the officer: "Can I rent the whole of the lounge upstairs in the 747 for my party?"
The officer was staring at the men. Perot knew what he was thinking: Mr. Perot's party usually consisted of a few quiet, well-dressed businessmen, and now here he was with what looked like a crowd of garage mechanics who had been working on a particularly filthy engine.
The officer said: "Uh, we can't rent you the lounge, because of international airline regulations, sir, but I believe if your companions go up into the lounge, the rest of our passengers won't disturb you too much."
Perot saw what he meant.
As Perot boarded, he said to a stewardess: "I want these men to have anything they want on this plane."
Perot passed on, and the stewardess turned to her colleague, wide-eyed. "Who the hell is he?"
Her colleague told her.
The movie was Saturday Night Fever, but the projector would not work. Boulware was disappointed: he had seen the movie before and he had been looking forward to seeing it again. Instead, he sat and chewed the fat with Paul.
Most of the others went up to the lounge. Once again, Simons and Coburn stretched out and went to sleep.
Halfway across the Atlantic, Keane Taylor, who for the last few weeks had been carrying around anything up to a quarter of a million dollars in cash and handing it out by the fistful, suddenly took it into his head to have an accounting.
He spread a blanket on the floor of the lounge and started collecting money. One by one, the other members of the team came up, fished wads of banknotes out of their pockets, their boots, their hats, and their shirtsleeves, and threw the money on the floor.
One or two other first-class passengers had come up to the lounge, despite the unsavory appearance of Mr. Perot's party; but now, when this smelly, villainous-looking crew, with their beards and knit caps and dirty boots and go-to-hell coats, spread out several hundred thousand dollars on the floor and started counting it, the other passengers vanished.
A few minutes later a stewardess came up to the lounge and approached Perot. "Some of the passengers are asking whether we should inform the police about your party," she said. "Would you come down and reassure them?"
"I'd be glad to."
Perot went down to the first-class cabin and introduced himself to the passengers in the forward seats. Some of them had heard of him. He began to tell them what had happened to Paul and Bill.
As he talked, other passengers came up to listen. The cabin crew stopped work and stood nearby; then some of the crew from the economy cabin came along. Soon there was a whole crowd.
It began to dawn on Perot that this was a story the world would want to hear.
Upstairs, the team were playing one last trick on Keane Taylor.
While collecting the money, Taylor had dropped three bundles of ten thousand dollars each, and Bill had slipped them into his own pocket.
The accounting came out wrong, of course. They all sat around on the floor, Indian fashion, suppressing their laughter, while Taylor counted it all again.
"How can I be thirty thousand dollars out?" Taylor said angrily. "Dammit, this is all I've got! Maybe I'm not thinking clearly. What the hell is the matter with me?"
At that point Bill came up from downstairs and said: "What's the problem, Keane?"
"God, we're thirty thousand dollars short, and I don't know what I did with all the rest of the money."
Bill took the three stacks out of his pocket and said: "Is this what you're looking for?"
They all laughed uproariously.
"Give me that," Taylor said angrily. "Dammit, Gaylord, I wish I'd left you in jail!"
They laughed all the more.
4_____
The plane came down toward Dallas.
Ross Perot sat next to Rashid and told him the names of the places they were passing over. Rashid looked out of the window, at the flat brown land and the big wide roads that went straight for miles and miles. America.
Joe Poche had a good feeling. He had felt this way as captain of a rugby club in Minnesota, at the end of a long match when his side had won. The same feeling had come to him when he had returned from Vietnam. He had been part of a good team, he had survived, he had learned a lot, he had grown.
Now all he wanted to make him perfectly happy was some clean underwear.
Ron Davis was sitting next to Jay Coburn. "Hey, Jay, what'll we do for a living now?"
Coburn smiled. "I don't know."
It would be strange, Davis thought, to sit behind a desk again. He was not sure he liked the idea.
He suddenly remembered that Marva was now three months pregnant. It would be starting to show. He wondered how she would look, with a bulging tummy.
I know what I need, he thought. I need a Coke. In the can. From a machine. In a gas station. And Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Pat Sculley was thinking: no more orange cabs.
Sculley was sitting next to Jim Schwebach: they were together again, the short but deadly duo, having fired not a single shot at anyone during the whole adventure. They had been talking about what EDS could learn from the rescue. The company had projects in other Middle Eastern countries and was pushing into the Far East: should there perhaps be a permanent rescue team, a group of troubleshooters trained and fit and armed and willing to do covert operations in faraway countries? No, they decided: this had been a unique situation. Sculley realized he did not want to spend any more time in primitive countries. In Tehran he had hated the morning trial of squeezing into an orange cab with two or three grumpy people, Persian music blaring from the car radio, and the inevitable quarrel with the driver over the fare. Wherever I work next, he thought, whatever I do, I'm going to ride to the office by myself, in my own car, a big fat American automobile with air-conditioning and soft music. And when I go to the bathroom, instead of squatting over a hole in the damn floor, there will be a clean white American toilet.
As the plane touched down Perot said to him: "Pat, you'll be last out. I want you to make sure everyone gets through the formalities and deal with any problems."
"Sure."
The plane taxied to a halt. The door was opened, and a woman came aboard. "Where is the man?" she said.
"Here," said Perot, pointing to Rashid.
Rashid was first off the plane.
Perot thought: Merv Stauffer has all that taken care of.
The others disembarked and went through customs.
On the other side, the first person Coburn saw was stocky, bespectacled Merv Stauffer, grinning from ear to ear. Coburn put his arms around Stauffer and hugged him. Stauffer reached into his pocket and pulled out Coburn's wedding ring.
Coburn was touched. He had left the ring with Stauffer for safekeeping. Since then, Stauffer had been the linchpin of the whole operation, sitting in Dallas with a phone to his ear making everything happen. Coburn had talked to him almost every day, relaying Simons's orders and demands, receiving information and advice: he knew better than anyone how important Stauffer had been, how they had all just relied on him to do whatever had to be done. Yet with all that happening, Stauffer had remembered the wedding band.
Coburn slipped it on. He had done a lot of hard thinking about his marriage, during the empty hours in Tehran; but now all that went out of his mind, and he looked forward to seeing Liz.
Merv told him to walk out of the airport and get on a bus that was waiting outside. Coburn followed directions. On the bus he saw Margot Perot. He smiled and shook hands. Then, suddenly, the air was filled with screams of joy, and four wildly excited children threw themselves at him: Kim, Kristi, Scott, and Kelly. Coburn laughed out loud and tried to hug them all at the same time.
Liz was standing behind the kids. Gently Coburn disentangled himself. His eyes filled with tears. He put his arms around his wife, and he could not speak.
When Keane Taylor got on the bus, his wife did not recognize him. Her normally elegant husband was wearing a filthy orange ski jacket and a knitted cap. He had not sh
aved for a week and he had lost fifteen pounds. He stood in front of her for several seconds, until Liz Coburn said: "Mary, aren't you going to say hello to Keane?" Then his children, Mike and Dawn, grabbed him.
Today was Taylor's birthday. He was forty-one. It was the happiest birthday of his life.
John Howell saw his wife, Angela, sitting at the front of the bus, behind the driver, with Michael, eleven months, on her lap. The baby was wearing blue jeans and a striped rugby shirt. Howell picked him up and said: "Hi, Michael, do you remember your daddy?"
He sat next to Angie and put his arms around her. It was kind of awkward, on the bus seat, and Howell was normally too shy for public displays of affection, but he kept right on hugging her because it felt so good.
Ralph Boulware was met by Mary and the girls, Stacy and Kecia. He picked Kecia up and said: "Happy birthday!" Everything was as it should be, he thought as he embraced them. He had done what he was supposed to do, and the family was here, where they were supposed to be. He felt as though he had proved something, if only to himself. All those years in the air force, tinkering with instrumentation or sitting in a plane watching bombs drop, he had never felt his courage was being tested. His relations had medals for ground fighting, but he had always had the uncomfortable feeling that he had an easy role, like the guy in the war movies who slops out the food at breakfast time before the real soldiers go off to fight. He had always wondered whether he had the right stuff. Now he thought about Turkey, getting stuck in Adana, and driving through the blizzard in that damn '64 Chevy, and changing the wheel in Blood Alley with the sons of Mr. Fish's cousin; and he thought about Perot's toast, to the men who said what they were going to do, then went out and did it; and he knew the answer. Oh, yes. He had the right stuff.
Paul's daughters, Karen and Ann Marie, were wearing matching plaid skirts. Ann Marie, the littlest, got to him first, and he swept her up in his arms and squeezed her tight. Karen was too big to be picked up, but he hugged her just as hard. Behind them was Ruthie, his biggest little girl, all dressed in shades of honey and cream. He kissed her long and hard, then looked at her, smiling. He could not have stopped smiling if he had wanted to. He felt very mellow inside. It was the best feeling he had ever known.
Emily was looking at Bill as if she did not believe he was really there. "Gosh," she said lamely, "it's good to see you again, sweetie."