The medical students explained the emergency while Hohman swore and fumed, and finally he was allowed to run to his office, where he grabbed a bottle of epinephrine, Benadryl, a bottle of oxygen, and a cardioverter, a device for administering an electrical shock to the heart in case things got really bad. He ran back to the cottage, found Belk unconscious, and injected him with epinephrine. That quickly restored his normal breathing and Belk woke up.
His eyes were swollen shut and he was covered with hives. The guards asked him if he wanted to go to a hospital and Belk said no. He had heard of a hostage taking in Africa where a woman was taken to the hospital and never seen again.
“I’ll stay here with my friends,” he said. Hohman gave him some Benadryl for the hives. The guards brought a mattress in so that Belk could lie down instead of sitting in the chair, and they allowed Hohman to sit beside him. The medic sat up all night monitoring Belk’s pulse and breathing. Hohman had impressed the guards with his competence and quick action and he would be accorded a measure of respect for the remainder of his captivity. Belk felt better in a few days and remained deeply grateful to the young red-haired sergeant who had risked being shot as an escapee in order to save his life.
As the students scrambled to organize themselves for a longer siege, one decision made quickly was to take a small group of hostages away from the embassy, to be held as insurance against a rescue attempt.
One of those chosen to go was Dick Morefield, the balding consul general, who was awakened in the middle of the night.
“Are you Mr. Morefield?” the guard asked.
He was handcuffed and a blanket was draped over his head, then he was led out of the ambassador’s house. He assumed the worst. Since he was one of the highest-ranking members of the embassy staff, he assumed he was being taken out somewhere to be executed.
From the backseat of a car he watched as men in military fatigues led other hostages out of the building. They were all driven someplace else in Tehran and led down to a basement, where they were placed on a bench. A bright light was shone down. Morefield’s hands were cuffed to the men on either side of him.
Then they were all told to lie prone on the cold concrete floor. Out of the bottom of Morefield’s blindfold he could see a drain on the floor. He heard the guards preparing their weapons.
For him the moment was surreal. Three years earlier, in March 1976, his nineteen-year-old son and namesake had been murdered in a holdup at a Roy Rogers restaurant in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was one of the most sensational and cruel murders in the D.C. area in many years. Young Morefield had been one of four workers who were forced to lay prone on the concrete floor of the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. The robbers then methodically shot each three times in the back of the head. It had been an agonizing loss that had left Morefield and his wife and daughter shattered. The pain had created a rift in his marriage, and he had accepted the Iran assignment (after initially turning it down) in part because he felt the need to escape for a while. And here he had managed to place himself in precisely the same predicament as his dead son, facedown on the concrete with a gun over his head. He felt himself entering into his son’s terrified last moments.
The muzzle of the rifle was pressed against the back of his head and he heard the click of the firing mechanism…then nothing. The chamber was empty.
When he was pulled back to his feet he was spent. The shock had been cathartic. He no longer felt as frightened and he knew two things. First, these people meant business and he was unlikely to be freed any time soon; and second, nothing they could do to him from then on could be worse. He was a man acquainted with the random unfairness and cruelty of life and had arrived at a hard-bitten acceptance of it. He calculated his odds of getting out of this alive at about 10 percent, but for him, dead or alive, the worst was over. His fear for himself and his anger at this situation were real, but paled in comparison to the helpless rage he had been carrying around with him for more than three years. If they killed him…well, he had seen his wife and daughter battle through the tragic and senseless loss of his son, so he knew they could cope with his loss if it came to that.
Bob Ode, the eldest of the hostages, seemed to feel the injustice of captivity more deeply than his colleagues. He had signed on for just a short tour in the Tehran consulate, and as the days dragged on, without a rescue or sign of release, his outrage grew. He had struggled briefly with the guards on the first day when they’d confiscated his jewelry, concerned particularly about losing his precious rings, one given to him by his parents on his long-ago twenty-first birthday and his wedding ring—he had met and married his wife, Rita, a fellow foreign service officer, twenty-two years earlier. He clenched his hands into fists and resisted as the guards tried to pry his fingers open.
“Leave him alone,” protested marine guard Rocky Sickmann. “He’s just an old guy.”
At sixty-four, Ode still bristled when he was called “old,” but he was grateful for the marine’s sentiment.
“You’re a bunch of goddamn thieves,” he told the guards, who eventually got his hands open and removed the rings, assuring him that he would get them back.
“Look,” said one, holding up a big yellow envelope with “Odie” written on it.
“You don’t even have my name spelled correctly. How in the hell are you ever going to get these things back to me?”
They took the rings.
“Goddamn thieves,” said Ode.
Ode was tall and thin, with a face that looked like it belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting, long and narrow with a high forehead and a chin that got lost somewhere between his lower lip and his collarbone. He wore big glasses that accentuated the narrowness of his face and magnified his eyes, which gave him, with his big nose, the slightly comical appearance of someone peering into a fish-eye lens. Four years earlier he had been forced out of the State Department because of its mandatory retirement age of sixty. The postwork lifestyle hadn’t suited him, or his family budget. He had gotten himself a real estate license and was making a decent living at that, but he had always been a world traveler, a kind of professional tourist, and selling homes in the Virginia suburbs didn’t excite him. So when the department began offering retirees a chance to take temporary postings around the world, filling in for full-time officers who needed a break, Ode had embarked on a series of foreign adventures. He had gone to Guyana to help out after the messianic preacher Jim Jones and his followers committed mass suicide, and had taken a three-month posting to Jamaica. In Tehran he was filling in for a consular officer who was taking a three-month medical leave. Ode had not even agreed to the full three months. He had stipulated that he would take the job only if he could be home in time for Christmas, so the department had enlisted him for only forty-five days, thirty of which were gone. He had spent his free time in Tehran taking long walks around the city and snapping pictures.
He lost his defiant, seen-it-all attitude only once in the first weeks, when his captors demanded that he tell them where he had been living. He had been using the apartment of the vice consul on leave, and he realized he didn’t know the address. He knew how to walk to the apartment, however, so he drew them a map.
A navy veteran of World War Two, he was so certain in the beginning that President Carter would attempt a rescue that he refused to remove his shoes. They were new ones, Hush Puppy loafers, and were still a little stiff and hard to pull on without a shoehorn. He had taken them off the first night, and it had been such a struggle to get them back on that he kept them on, for fear of being shoeless when the time came to run. He could see how disorganized and amateurish his captors were and figured they would be a pushover for any military unit with the smallest level of discipline and training. Surely somewhere in the multibillion-dollar American military arsenal was a commando unit similar to the Israelis who had made the rescue at Entebbe. He tried to picture in his mind how the attack would happen, how the American force would enter the building, how they would take them out. He was good to go.