of Struan's inner court and an aspirant to the office of tai-pan. Sergeant Tenzing - Gurkha sent to destroy abandoned CIA listening posts. Hiro Toda - tai-pan of Iran-Toda Shipping joint partnership, appeared in earlier Noble House Massil Tugul - Palestinian air traffic control tower operator based at Kowiss. Jon Tyrer - American helicopter pilot, second-in-command based at Bandar Delam. Ed Vossi - helicopter pilot based at Lengeh. Watanabe - chief engineer of Iran-Toda Shipping joint partnership. Suliman al Wiali - Syrian assassin and head Group Four intelligence agent. Writing Clavell got the idea for a book in 1975 when he visited Iran for the first time. He felt it had the potential to become "a country that seemed likely to become the No. 3 power in the world." Clavell: I toured the country in a helicopter with an old friend of mine who was in the oil business. We went everywhere. I saw how helicopters and an international team of pilots were essential to the oil industry. Immediately, I knew it lent itself to a novel. But I had other projects going so I put it aside. Then the revolution occurred. Now there were all these stories about the horrors of living through someone else's revolution. It all came together in my mind as the story of a multinational group of copter pilots caught up in an ugly revolution. Of course, that's all I knew. I never have a plan before I begin a novel. Clavell was completing Noble House at the time and was preparing to start a sequel to Shogun called Nippon (which became Gai-Jin). But at his wife's urging he put that work on the back burner and took up the Iran book. He says he never told his publisher he had switched topics. They all continued to think I was writing a book about Japan. I never liked anyone to know what I'm doing. It's self-defense. When I was writing 'Shogun,' my publisher was asked at a sales meeting what Clavell was working on and when he said 'A book about 17th Century Japan,' they all roared 'Who the hell's interested in THAT?' If I told them I was writing about Iran, they'd say, 'Oh, another book on the hostage crisis.' But it's not. It's an adventure story that will hopefully tell people a lot they didn't know about the motivations of Moslem fundamentalists. Clavell