To solve the fuel blivit problem, it was decided that two C-130s carrying the rubber bladders inside would have to land at the first night-chopper refueling point, which meant they needed to find a patch of desert large enough, flat enough, and solid enough to support the large aircraft. The only way to make sure about the firmness of the ground—loose sand would bog down the big planes—would be to send someone into Iran to inspect the location, so plans were put in motion to send a small, daring reconnaissance group to the Iranian desert.
The president canceled his annual trip home to Georgia for the Christmas holidays in order to remain in the White House and deal with the crisis. He ordered that the lights on the White House Christmas tree be left dark.
8. The Cure Is an Airline Ticket Out of Here
On the embassy grounds, in the basement of the warehouse across a narrow hall from the Mushroom Inn, vice consul Richard Queen shared a room with warrant officer Joe Hall. The fluorescent overhead lights hummed day and night, casting enough light to be annoying when they wanted darkness but not enough to comfortably read. Nothing could be heard through the warehouse walls, and it was constantly cold and clammy.
As Christmas approached, they were let outdoors to walk in small circles in the walled courtyard of the ambassador’s residence. Hall was so moved by the fresh cold air, by the direct sunlight, the newly fallen snow, the crows circling in the blue sky overhead, that he wept, but when Queen was offered the same chance he declined. Hall was amazed that anyone would refuse an opportunity to go outside, but his roommate said that for some reason he had begun to feel woozy.
Queen experienced wide mood swings in captivity. He understood some Farsi, and he spent a lot of time eavesdropping on the guards, but he understood only about half of what was spoken and in his anxiety he tended to draw dramatic conclusions, good and bad. Once he thought he had heard two guards discussing plans to shoot all the hostages. He didn’t share the information with Hall, sparing his roommate the fright, but the prospect tormented him night and day. When the guards took away their shoes and replaced them with Iranian-made plastic sandals—with images of elephants embossed on the soles—Queen threw a fit. Hall didn’t understand why his roommate was so upset, but Queen had this image of being lined up in front of a firing squad wearing goofy plastic slippers. The day he had feared passed without incident.
When he thought he’d heard good news, Queen did share it. One day he was convinced that the guards had been discussing the purchase of plane tickets to fly the hostages home. He was sure he’d heard the airlines Alitalia and Lufthansa mentioned. He told Hall and their excitement grew.
As the day approached, Queen was counting down the hours. He woke up on the appointed morning filled with joy. As he returned from his morning wash, he whispered happily to a hostage passing him in the hall, “We’re going home!”
When he got back to the room he asked a guard, “When are they going to take us out?”
“Take you out?” said the guard. “What do you mean?”
“When are we going to be released?”
“You aren’t,” the guard said.
Queen was crushed. He spent the better part of that day motionless on his mattress, his face turned to the wall. He cursed himself for letting his hopes get so high and concluded that the guards were doing it to him on purpose. They knew he spoke some Farsi, but not a lot, and was convinced they were toying with him.
While some of the guards were petty and even cruel, others were kind, in particular a tall, slender guard with a long hook nose, mustache, and sideburns named Akbar. He dropped by and asked Queen and Hall if they would like anything from their apartments. They both made lists. Queen wrote down blue jeans, changes of underwear, his beloved, well-traveled “War Between the States” board game, a Lord of the Rings game, pipes, and tobacco. Hall made up his own list. Weeks later Akbar brought Queen two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a blue sweater, and much-appreciated clean well-fitting underpants—the long-suffering vice consul had been wearing the undersized drawers for weeks. There was nothing for Hall. As he had surmised weeks before, his apartment had been ransacked and all his possessions had vanished. Queen sorted his bounty and shrugged apologetically at his roommate.
The young vice consul wrote a letter to his parents and his brother Alex: “This past week I was hoping, praying, pleading to God so hard that I would be able to return home to you in time for Christmas, but I guess to no avail.”
Queen didn’t mention something troubling that had occurred shortly before Christmas. In the shower one day he noticed that his left arm and hand felt numb, a peculiar sensation he had never felt before. He thought it was probably because he had slept on that side and had curled his arm under his body in an awkward way. When it didn’t go away he mentioned it to Hall.
“You ever have numbness in your hand?” he asked.
“You mean like pins and needles? Like when your circulation is cut off?” said Hall.
“No, more like what you’d feel if you plunged your hand in snow and kept it there for a very long time.”
Hall thought he should ask to have it checked out.
Queen decided to wait. Maybe it would go away. He didn’t connect it with his occasional bouts of wooziness and took neither symptom very seriously. He had no reason to suspect his body would betray him in an important way. He didn’t look it, but Queen was an exceptional athlete. In high school his tall, lean frame had breezed through subminute quarter miles like clockwork. Ailments and injuries had always gone away quickly. But this felt truly odd, unlike anything he had experienced, and over time it didn’t diminish; it worsened. Finally he told a guard about it and they sent a young pharmacy student to look at him. The druggist-in-training diagnosed the numbness as a reaction to a draft coming from a vent over Queen’s space. He arranged to have his mattress moved to a warmer spot and for him to be left unbound—the guards were still using torn bedsheets to tie his hands day and night. When none of the changes helped, Queen was visited by a middle-aged Iranian doctor who claimed to have been trained in the United States. Queen found him unimpressive.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” the doctor said after a cursory examination. He diagnosed a “twisted spine” and predicted that the symptoms would soon vanish. On his way out he asked Hall how he was doing.
“I’m sick, too,” Hall said. “Homesick. The cure is an airline ticket out of here.”
The Mushroom Inn had settled into a dull routine broken only by changes of guard shifts and trips to the bathroom. The shelves that divided each hostage’s cubicle were remnants of the library at the old Iranian-American high school, where in happier days the offspring of embassy workers attended classes, and the books to that library, hundreds of them, were also stored in the basement in boxes. When Queen asked, he was given permission to unpack them and operate a lending library. He brought to the task his delight for careful detail, sorting the hundreds of books by subject matter. There was even a catchall stack of books Queen believed no one would find interesting. Within each subject category he broke them down further into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction was sorted by author, the history chronologically. He arranged the books in vertical piles of fifteen on the floor, with a sign atop each indicating what subject it was.