Free On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett Page A

four
        hundred plane tickets. Do it today. -
        It had been one of the rare occasions on which his orders were not carried
        out. Everyone had dragged their feet, in Dallas and in Tehran. Not that he
        could blame them. He had lacked determination. If he had been firm they
        would have evacuated that day; but he had not been firm, and the following
        day the passports had been called for.
        He owed Paul and Bill a lot anyway. He felt a special debt of loyalty to
        the men who had gambled their careers by joining EDS when it was a
        struggling young company. Many times he had found the right man,
        interviewed him, got him interested, and offered him the job, only to find
        that, on talking it over with his family, the man had decided that EDS was
        just too small, too new, too risky.
        Paul and Bill had not only taken the chance-they had worked their butts off
        to make sure their gamble paid. Bill had designed the basic computer system
        for the administration of Medicare and Medicaid programs that, used now in
        many American states, formed the foundation of EDS's business. He had
        worked long hours, spent weeks away from home, and moved his family all
        over the country in those days. Paul had been no less dedicated: when the
        company had too few men and very little cash, Paul had done the work of duw
        systems engineers. Perot could remember the company's first contract in New
        York, with Pepsico; and Paul walking from Manhattan across the Brooklyn
        Bridge in the snow, to sneak past a picket line-the plant was on strikeand
        go to work.
    Perot owed it to Paul and Bill to get them out.
        He owed it to them to get the government of the United States to bring the
        whole weight of its influence to bear on the hanians.
    America had asked for Perot's help, once; and he had given
    52 Ken Follett
     
    three years of his life-and a bunch of money-to the prisonersof-war
    campaign. Now he was going to ask for America's help.
        His mind went back to 1969, when the Vietnam War was at its height. Some of
        his friends from the Naval Academy had been killed or captured: Bill
        Leftwich, a wonderfully warm, strong, kind man, had been killed in battle
        at the age of thirty-nine; Bill Lawrence was a prisoner of the North
        Vietnamese. Perot found it hard to watch his country, the greatest country
        in the world, losing a war because of lack of will; and even harder to see
        millions of Americans protesting, not without justification, that the war
        was wrong and should not be won. Then, one day in 1969, he had met little
        Billy Singleton, a boy who did not know whether he had a father or not.
        Billy's father had been missing in Vietnam before ever seeing his son:
        there was no way of knowing whether he was a prisoner, or dead. It was
        heartbreaking.
        For Perot, sentiment was not a mournful emotion but a clarion call to
        action.
        He learned that Billy's father was not unique. There were many, perhaps
        hundreds, of wives and children who did not know whether their husbands and
        fathers had been killed or just captured. The Vietriamese, arguing that
        they were not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention because the
        United States had never declared war, refused to release the names of their
        prisoners.
        Worse still, many of the prisoners were dying of brutality and neglect.
        President Nixon was planning to "Vietnamize" the war and disengage in three
        years' time, but by then, according to CIA reports, half the prisoners
        would have died. Even if Billy Singleton's father were alive, he might not
        survive to come home.
    Perot wanted to do something.
        EDS had good