At the Foreign Ministry, Howland was urging Ahern to hang on.
“Tom, we think you’re more valuable not surrendering,” he said.
Then, outside the vault, the Iranian invaders produced Howland’s boss, Golacinski.
The security chief had been marched through the rain with the others to the ambassador’s residence, where he had briefly been tied to a chair in the dining room with a large number of other captives. The residence was a mansion, with huge rooms designed for entertaining on a grand scale. The dining room was furnished like an old French palace. The Iranian invaders had removed cushions from the chairs and placed them on the floor, where they lounged with their weapons. The hostages all sat on the hard, straight-backed chairs, which in time grew quite uncomfortable. Still, the mood had been surprisingly light. Everyone was talking and joking. The protesters were a little giddy with success. Both they and their captives assumed that government forces would arrive shortly to restore order. But then Golacinski had been taken from his chair and led back out across to the chancery and upstairs to the vault door at the west end of the second floor, the final holdout. He figured that the men inside were still destroying documents and resolved to buy them as much more time as he could.
His captors took off his blindfold and one who spoke English told him to talk his colleagues inside into opening the door.
“There’s nobody in there,” he said, but then they distinctly heard someone shouting on the other side of the door.
“Look, it’s a very thick door,” Golacinski said. “They’ll never hear me.”
He suggested that instead of him shouting through the door that they use a phone.
“No,” said his lead captor.
“Then I can’t talk to them.”
They relented and took him into an office a few steps down the hall. Golacinski said he didn’t remember the phone number, so they searched for an in-house phone book. The guards opened drawers and poked through bookshelves. They could not find anything. Finally, disgusted, they led Golacinski back out to the vault door. They banged on the door and Golacinski shouted in.
He heard Hermening’s voice inside saying, “It’s Mr. Golacinski out there!”
“Al, are you okay?” Hermening asked through the door.
“I’m okay. Everybody is over at the ambassador’s house. These people want you to come out, and they say they won’t hurt you.”
“Do we have some time, Al?” he heard Tom Ahern shout.
“I don’t know,” Golacinski said.
At the Foreign Ministry, where Howland had been talking to Ahern on a phone in a small office downstairs, Howland set the phone down on the desk in order to keep the line open and ran upstairs to Yazdi’s office to confer with Laingen.
He explained that Ahern was ready to open the door and the reasons why he thought it should not be done.
“No, I agree,” said Laingen. “Tell them to hold on.”
Howland ran back downstairs, but when he got there he found the phone on the cradle. Someone had seen it off the hook and hung it up. Howland dialed the number for the vault but he didn’t get through. It was about four o’clock.
He hung up the phone, and seconds later it rang. Howland picked it up and heard an American voice. It was a sergeant calling from Germany who had somehow, in all this confusion, tracked him down to this office inside the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
“How did you—” he started to ask, but the sergeant cut him off. “Hold on for just a minute, sir.”
Then a four-star general was on the phone, asking for a full situation report. Howland was shocked and impressed. He began explaining things to the general.
On his end, when the line went dead, Ahern decided to wait another five minutes and then instructed everyone to make one last check of all the drawers, files, and equipment. Hermening went to work helping Jones and the others destroy heavy “core boards” from the computers. They were as thick as books and had to be cut into pieces with a knife before being fed into the disintegrator, which would loudly break them down further.
Kupke made one more trip to the roof to get rid of the last four shotguns. He slid open the door, pulled himself back up, and sat squatting with two shotguns under each arm. His yellow shirt was wet and filthy, covered with dirt and tar from his belly-crawls on the roof. He dropped down again and moved along the edge of the low wall. There was a din of thousands outside the embassy walls, urged on by voices amplified with loudspeakers.
Downstairs, unaware that Kupke was alone on the roof, Ahern swung open the vault door. On the other side stood an angry, excited, but dumb-founded crowd of young Iranians, one of whom stepped up and drove an elbow hard into Ahern’s ribs. He managed to keep his feet, then was quickly blindfolded and bound. Golacinski was thrown to one side and cracked his head on the wall. He heard the sounds of his colleagues being beaten. Bob Englemann’s black-rimmed glasses were broken and he doubled over with his hands up, trying to protect himself from the blows.
Hermening made one last pass through the vault, gathering up anything left on the tables and floor and throwing them down the disintegrator chute. As he did this he was grabbed from behind by both arms. Two Iranians had hold of him, and one demanded that he put his hand down the chute and retrieve whatever he had thrown in. He refused and was then roughly hauled out of the vault to the hallway.
Barnes saw a tiny Iranian man waving a big gun. As the line of Americans filed out of the vault, the tiny one kicked and punched at them, so Barnes flicked his cigarette to the floor and scooted over as close behind Ward as he could, figuring it would make it harder for Tiny to land a clean blow. It worked.
Hermening was not so fortunate. Held from behind by both arms, one of his captors slapped him hard across the face. The young marine was determined not to cry out or complain. He took the blow and stared furiously back at his attacker, which earned him another hard slap. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Golacinski and some of the others lined up on the floor against one wall. Some were blindfolded and some had bags over their heads. He was pushed down in the same line between Ward and Paul Needham, who thought the bag over his head was a very bad sign. For months they had been seeing pictures of executions, and in most the victims had bags over their heads. There was a lot of shouting in the hallway; the Iranians were going down the line demanding that their newest captives identify themselves and their jobs. Hermening wondered what he should say. He thought, name, rank, and serial number, but he could see right away that this answer was going to get him in trouble. If he didn’t tell them he was a marine guard, they were going to make other damaging assumptions about him. He hadn’t been caught with the other marines, he wasn’t in uniform, and he had been hiding in the secret vault. Was he allowed to tell them his job at the embassy? To his relief, Needham, the air force captain, promptly told them who he was and described his position with the military liaison group. Hermening thought, if an officer can do that, then it’s okay for me to do it, too. When they asked him he said his name and then, “I’m a marine security guard.”
“What’s that?” his questioner shouted.
He did his best to explain, but because he was wearing a blue suit with a vest, he could see that they didn’t believe him.
Still alone on the roof, Kupke was startled when the loud incinerator downstairs suddenly went silent. He hurried back to the door and, looking down, saw a group of Iranian men gathered below. Ahern had opened the door!