Not long after the lead plane departed Masirah, eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters left the Nimitz and moved out over the Arabian Sea in order to reach landfall shortly after sunset. The choppers flew a different route, crossing into Iran between the towns of Jask and Konarak and flying even closer to the ground than the planes. Word of the successful launch reached the lead plane—“Eight off the deck”—as especially welcome news because they had expected only seven. Earlier reports had indicated that the eighth was having mechanical problems. Eight widened the margin of error. They expected breakdowns. In their many rehearsals they had determined that six were essential for carrying all the men and equipment from Desert One to the two hide sites. The load was finely calibrated; every assaulter had an assigned limit and was weighed to make sure he met it. They wouldn’t need all six to haul the hostages and assaulters from the stadium the next night—as few as two would do in a pinch—but they expected some of the aircraft that made it all the way to the hide sites to fail the next morning. If seven was enough, eight provided comfort.
The final decision to launch had come only after Dick Meadows, Delta’s advance man, broadcast a signal from Tehran earlier that day that all was ready. He had returned to the city in his disguise as an Irish businessman and met up with “Fred,” his Iranian-American guide and translator—the same young airman volunteer who had helped the CIA agent code-named “Bob,”—and with two American soldiers who had entered Iran posing as businessmen, one Irish and the other German. They had spent that day personally inspecting all of the various hide sites: the embassy, the Foreign Ministry, and the soccer stadium.
As the lead plane pushed on well into Iran, Major Burruss, Beckwith’s deputy, was on the second C-130, sprawled on a mattress near the front of the plane beside Major Pete Schoomaker, leader of the Red Element. Burruss was still somewhat startled to find himself on the actual mission, although there was still no telling if they were going through with it. One of the things President Carter had insisted upon was the option to call off the raid right up to the last minute, right up to the moment they stormed the embassy walls. A satellite radio and relay system at Wadi Kena had been put in place to make sure they could get real-time instructions from Washington. Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent methods against crowds during the revolution were now exhibit A in Iran’s human rights case against the former regime and America, Carter was understandably concerned about killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile mob formed during the raid that Delta first attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss could appreciate the political logic, but from a practical standpoint he considered it ridiculous. He and his men were going to lay siege to a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than five million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would never get home alive. And Carter had the idea that this desperately tiny, daring, vastly outnumbered force was first going to try holding off the city with methods of nonviolent crowd control? Burruss understood where the president was coming from on this, but with their hides so nakedly on the line, shouldn’t they be free to decide how best to defend themselves? He had complained about the requirement to General Jones, who said he would look into it, but the answer had come back, “No, the president insists.” So Burruss had made his own peace with the requirement. He had with him one tear gas grenade, one, which he intended to throw as soon as necessary and then use its smoke as a marker to call in devastatingly lethal 40mm AC-130 gunship fire.
Burruss was so keenly aware of the risks on this mission that he had a kind of admiration for the navy pilot who had chickened out back in November, the one Beckwith had wanted court-martialed. The man had been kept isolated on an aircraft carrier ever since. He figured it took a special kind of courage to admit you were that afraid, even when the circumstances clearly warranted fear. Burruss was not built that way. Delta was made up of men who would have felt crushed not to be included on this mission, precisely because it was so hazardous. They were ambitious for glory. They had volunteered to serve with Beckwith and had undergone the hardships and trials of the selection process so that they would be included on improbable exploits like this. Men read about wildly heroic feats in history and sometimes wished they had been alive to take part, and here was such a moment, now, without question. If they pulled it off, it would go down as one of the boldest maneuvers in military history. All over America their feat would be cheered in the streets.
The fact that their countrymen would not know who they were made it all the more appealing. It made the heroism pure. They would not be celebrated, only their achievement. None of these men would be in the ticker-tape parades or sitting down for interviews on national TV or have their pictures on the covers of magazines, nor would they be cashing in on fat book contracts. They were quiet professionals. In a world of brag and hype they embodied substance. They would come home and after a few days off go right back to work. Of course, within their own world, they would become legends. For the rest of their lives, behind them knowing soldiers would whisper, “He was on Eagle Claw.” That was honor worth having.
Some men lived for such chances. Burruss was a patriot, first, a man steeped in the rich military history of his native Tidewater, Virginia, and a man blessed with the kind of physical courage and swagger to try anything. As a boy he had talked his cousin into rowing with him in a skiff one and a half miles across the York River to reenact Alexander Hamilton’s successful storming of Redoubt Number Ten at the Yorktown battlefield, then and now a national park. In broad daylight the two boys stormed and retook the fortification, hauled down the vintage British flag, and rowed it back across the river to hang on Burruss’s bedroom wall. He was a rangy, cheerful man with long arms and big hands and an elongated, bony frame, a long straight nose, a mouth that was usually open, and a tendency toward physical belligerence when drunk. Burruss possessed a kind of swagger and playfulness that suggested, despite his size and athleticism, that his most powerful asset was his wit. He had not bothered like some of the men to dye his straight sandy hair, which hung down well over both ears. When they got to Tehran, if they got there, one of his jobs was to coordinate air support from the press box of the soccer stadium. The plan called for him to be one of the last men to leave the stadium, and he had accepted the likelihood that it was where he would die. There wouldn’t be enough helicopters. There were just too many ways for them to fail. He had fought in Vietnam and knew both the beauty and the fragility of those machines. If they managed to get the required six off the ground at Desert One to the hiding places, he felt sure that at least one or two of them wouldn’t restart the next night, and when all hell broke loose in Tehran there was a good chance of losing one or more of those that could fly. Even if the machines had been more reliable, like the other Delta commanders Burruss was wary of the marines piloting them; he was not sure they possessed the calm fatalism that defined this kind of dead-end special ops. A reluctant pilot meant a marginal machine was as good as grounded. At the end of this informed calculation was the probability that they would get only one or two helos into the stadium. If they were fuel-light, that meant they would be able to get all of the hostages aboard, along with a small escort force, but that would leave him and a significant portion of his men behind in the soccer stadium. He and the other men were carrying thousands of dollars worth of cash, most of it in newly minted Iranian rials, and fake passports stamped with fake visas. Burruss had paid strict attention to the E&E (Escape and Evade) classes that taught the men how to hot-wire cars. He had memorized several escape routes out of Tehran. That was the plan. If they were left behind, they would commandeer vehicles and drive like hell toward the border of either Turkey or Afghanistan, a journey of three to four hundred miles, fighting their way out if necessary, possibly calling for air support. The men took this desperate possibility so seriously they had taken the trouble to locate jewelry stores on their way out of the city, where they could grab valuables with which to help bribe their way past roadblocks and border crossings. This could work, but it involved more wishful thinking than a realist like Burruss could summon. In his mind, the more likely scenario was a bloody last stand inside the stadium, where they would take a large number of Iranians with them into the next world. He and his wife had dined with Beckwith and his wife and a few of the other Delta commanders and their wives the night before they departed. Most of them, Beckwith included, had written death letters to be delivered to their spouses in the event they were killed. They were going all the way with this, to victory or to Valhalla.