A Song Called Youth (26 page)

Watson was standing at the mini-terminal where Ellen Mae had stood; across from him Swenson took notes at his mini-terminal.

“We have NATO’s leave,” Watson went on, glancing at his notes, “to establish behind-combat policing bodies in Belgium, France, Norway, Spain, Greece, Italy, and, very soon, Holland. England for the foreseeable future will continue to be administered by the National Front, but—” he smiled “—the distinction is superfluous.” Chuckles around the table. “They’re all doing Our Work . . . ”

Swenson smiled companionably.
Doing Our Work.

“Our Work” meant full control over the countries in which the SA was established. It meant a takeover. It meant the Eclipse project.

“ . . . establishing Our Work in these countries is simply a matter of utilizing each target nation’s nationalist sentiment, a sentiment that is, everywhere, stronger than ever. The scenario is as follows, and I give it to you in a brief, general way with the understanding that the details that will come later are most important:

“Each target country is already in desperate need of order. Like Lebanon in the last century, the targets are unable to police themselves and have requested outside assistance. The SAISC being the only ‘independent’ security force large enough, being multinational, and being essentially a business without political loyalties—”

Here he paused to smile and they were allowed to chuckle again.

“—was awarded the policing contract for the target countries without significant dissent from the United Nations. The majority of our troops were in place as of last Friday midnight. Paris remains an exception; the war has severely damaged logistic channels into France. The troops will be airlifted in as soon as the neutrality agreement is finalized with Moscow. Once we’re in place, the Russians will find out just exactly how ‘neutral’ we are . . . ” Watson paused for another round of polite chuckling. With Crandall there was never a need for the polite response; the group responded to him naturally, liturgically, sincerely. But, of course, Watson was a typical high-military British bore. “ . . . Each target nation has assigned a native liaison to coordinate policing efforts between the SA and the target’s government or provisional government. In every single case, I’m proud to announce, our liaison was placed by the SA’s Advance Services Bureau. The liaison is one of us. In each case it is a man with a public reputation for nationalistic sentiments. The man in France is Le Pen, great grandson of the last century’s famous Front National organizer. The popular sentiment for nationalism has grown in France as in the other nations as a result of the incursion of immigrants, who take jobs away from nationals, and who transform their neighborhoods into something alien; and the Third World War itself, which, of course, has not made the common people pleased with foreigners. Steeped in this sentiment, young Le Pen is one step from the presidency.

“Our procedure in France will be roughly as follows: First, our troops will arrive and restore order. The food rioters, the looters, the bands of thieves, and the various terrorist and radical factions will be arrested, shot, and generally discouraged. Second, we will arrange it so that Le Pen will take credit for the restoration of order. Third, an information campaign will convince the public that Le Pen is in complete control of the SA troops, and that the presence of the troops is equivalent to the triumph of French nationalism. The problem, of course, is that most of the SA troops will be foreigners—the contradiction will be ironed out by inducting increasing numbers of sympathetic French nationalists into SA forces, and by creating the illusion that the SA is the tool of the French people, and completely in their control. Fourth, French troops thoroughly indoctrinated into the SA way of thinking will by degrees completely replace the rank-and-file of street-visible SA troops. But their superiors will ultimately be SA proper. Now . . . ” He paused dramatically, looked up and down the table, and made eye contact. “Now, if we follow this simple formula, and follow through on its one thousand and one necessary details, we will, in less than five years, control every West European country of any significance. To put it bluntly, Europe will be ours. And we will begin to clean it up. The Zionist/neo-Stalinist conspiracy that controls half of the continent, and the Muslim conspiracy that controls the rest, will be eliminated, and eliminated with finality.
The solution is at hand.
”

Hard-Eyes and Jenkins sat side by side in twentieth-century steel-and-wood classroom desks. Jenkins looked fairly miserable. He was too big for the desk. Hard-Eyes felt all right. He was full; they’d just come from lunch. They ate well here, as Steinfeld had promised, and the room was warm, heated by an oil furnace in the basement of the old Paris school, an
école supérieure
; the vents gave out slow-rolling waves of warm air and a faint petroleum scent, a kind of industrial perfume which Hard-Eyes somehow found comforting. He was warm and well-fed. On an age-darkened bulletin board to one side were posters from twenty years before, extolling in French the virtues of democracy for some Parisian civics class. But listening to Steinfeld drone about guerrilla cell organization, Hard-Eyes was alternately mangling his own favorite victim of persecution, his right-hand thumbnail, and with his other hand nervously tracing the scorings of initials carved into the blond wood of the desk top. He felt himself careening, tottering on the edge of the abyss that was his future.

Steinfeld was saying, “Internal cadres organize into cells of three persons, only one of the three interfacing with command or other cells. A cell of three persons is the standard cell formation used in a classic guerrilla movement.” As he spoke he drew a diagram on the blackboard.

And Hard-Eyes kept up an internal dialog with himself.

They are liars, he thought. All intelligence services employ liars, or, make liars of their employees; they have to, it’s a necessary job skill. So Steinfeld might be working for anyone, including the fucking Russians. Who am I really working for?

What difference does it make? You know why you’re doing it. For food and shelter and in the hopes you’ll make contacts that’ll get you back to the States.

Sure, okay, but the Second Alliance could be funding and directing this whole thing, could be behind the resistance to the Second Alliance! Some kind of disinformation system, say; or maybe creating a semblance of a resistance in some way gives them authority to use greater force, which would consolidate their power in the region.

Wha-at? Bullshit! Paranoia! I mean, come on.

Yeah? You can’t
be
too paranoid anymore.

Yes, you can. Paranoia is a skill, neggo.

And then he forced himself to listen to Steinfeld, who was talking about propaganda teams, armed and unarmed. Winning hearts and minds . . . 

A week after that, and they were on a roof, looking down through a sheer, misting rain, at Place Clichy. There were no cars in the
place
that late afternoon. Preparing for the demonstration, the police had rerouted the automotive traffic around the square; the traffic didn’t amount to much anyway, with the gas shortage, and because a quarter of the city’s streets were impassable with rubble from the Russian shellings.

But the square was filled, was overflowing with people. Every age, every profession—but mostly people who had been middle class, and lower middle class, Steinfeld said. All of them white.

Steinfeld was there beside Hard-Eyes and Jenkins and little Jean-Pierre and Hassan . . . Hassan the faintly smiling, who had come from Damascus to join the New Resistance. Sometimes Hassan said that the Muslim Holy Alliance would send troops to help Steinfeld, because the SA had already begun registering Parisian Muslims, and because the Front National wanted to expel all Muslims from France . . . But the Islamic troops never came. Hard-Eyes supposed that they could not bring themselves to take orders from a Jew.

They were crouching in a small space between an ornamental balcony railing—wrought iron, the paint flaked off it, rust burning through—and a dormer window, looking down past the slick, runneling tiles at the demonstration forming up in Place Clichy. There was a statue in the middle of the square, but it was hidden behind bunting and placards and banners and French flags. Hundreds of people in the crowd waved smaller flags; the surface of the crowd had a plumage in the colors of France, as if the collective entity that was the demonstration was a kind of bird showing its tail feathers to declare itself to others of its kind.

In the foreground was a temporary wooden stage, about ten yards wide and two high, erected that morning. The NR operatives were seeing it from behind. Over it was a white awning and it was backed in a sheet of the same white material, so that they couldn’t see the speaker on the stage. But they could hear him; his turgid intonations boomed from the stage PA and echoed off the buildings around the square. And they could see his shadow. Stage lights threw his shadow on the white stage backdrop, outlining him as if for a Japanese shadow play. And the shadow he cast was larger than life, a shadow Goliath waving his arms and gesticulating, pointing a trembling finger at the sky. It was the gigantic shadow of Le Pen, the Front National candidate, great-grandson of Le Pen, who had also been the Front National candidate. When the war situation shifted sufficiently to permit an election, this Le Pen would stand a good chance of being elected. So Steinfeld told them . . . 

Steinfeld translated the speech for Hard-Eyes and Jenkins as it went into its dramatic climax. “He’s saying, ‘And now the diadem of Europe has been crushed; the gem of France lies in its wreckage. Who is to be blamed? Clearly, the Russians are responsible. They began the war, they invaded Allied territory, and they have tried to take Paris! But who is it who has sabotaged the metros, blown up the power stations, burned the Civil Defense headquarters? Those who are the servants of the Russians, the slaves of the new KGB! Where do they come from? The third world, and the Middle East, where the Russians wield control! The foreigners who we welcomed into our nation, and who repaid us with their cultural pollution, with espionage, and sabotage! All
to prepare the ground for the Russian Union’s destruction of our city!
The Muslims, the Jews, the Algerian Communists, the Portuguese Communists—
the poison! The Poison!
’ ”

The crowd’s response was thunderous.

“They really believe that?” Jenkins asked incredulously. “Things break down, so they blame immigrants?”

“You have penetrated the heart of their argument,” Steinfeld said dryly.

For a moment Hard-Eyes wondered if Steinfeld was translating accurately. Maybe he was distorting . . . 

But Hard-Eyes could see genuine rage in the crowd’s fist-shaking, in the excessively energetic way the flags were waved, in their voices, and most of all in the posturing of that enormous shadow . . . That strangely familiar silhouette with its rhythmically gesturing arms . . . 

And he could see the advance SAISC men around the edges of the crowd, and behind the stage, arms crossed over their uniformed chests . . . 

And he knew the truth again, when he saw the Second Alliance reaction to the counter-demonstration arriving from the side street. The counter-demonstration consisted of half a hundred spectacled students and dark-faced Algerians chanting, “
Fascisme? Non! Fascisme? Non!
”

“Brave and stupid.” Steinfeld muttered.

. . . as the SA ran to intercept the counter-demonstration, the security bulls wielding nightsticks, drawing guns. Twenty SA bulls in wedge formation rammed into the counter-demonstration, sticks swinging. The Front National crowd turned to follow them. The candidate shouted something inaudible in the roar of the crowd . . . The regular police, briefed for this, were holding their positions at the street corners . . . 

“If you looked sharply,” Steinfeld said, “you might have seen two members of the counter-demonstration backing out through their own demonstration just before the SA moved in. Provocateurs, setting up the real counter-demonstrators. They’re either SA or Le Pen’s agents. Or both . . . ” He went on with the cool objectivity of a TV commentator talking about the decline and fall of Rome.
And on that same day the barbarians massed outside the gates of Rome
 . . . “What you are seeing is part of the ‘strategy of tension.’ ”

“That was a strategy the old school terrorists used,” Jenkins muttered. He had turned away from the riot in the street below and lit a cigarette. Hard-Eyes continued to watch the riot, fascinated.

“The extremist right-wing propagandists coined the term to speak about the left, yes. But it is the right who most efficiently use terror. Terror and disruption of services creates an atmosphere of tension which sets the stage for a rightist takeover. Provides a rationale for liquidating a leftist threat.
Agents provocateurs
infiltrate the leftists, media for terrorists, bombings, plant evidence, incriminate detainees with their ‘confessions’ . . . There were other, earlier European extremist right-wing terrorist groups. One of them, founded by Stefano Delle Chiaie in the last century, has grown very large, and simply merged itself with the Second Alliance. It wasn’t very well organized in the twentieth century. It didn’t have a centrally coordinated body or even a headquarters. It was loosely structured, a circle of friends, really, neofascists and old-guard Nazis. Sometimes it was assisted by the CIA, because it was so fervently anticommunist. American intelligence recruited and sheltered Nazis after World War Two, you know. Those who were valuable to it. Those Nazis survived and went on to become part of the loose rightist organization. It factionalized, and that kept it from being efficient—until Crandall came along. He has a talent for finding some kind of ideological common denominator. He brought them all together under his umbrella. And now they’re here. Their work is as you see it. Here before you . . . ”

Staring down at the riot, the flags and the bloodied clubs upraised, hearing the dull thud of gunshots now, Hard-Eyes had a revelation; personal, internal revelation. It had been percolating in his mind for days. He’d been asking himself why he did it, why he stayed with Steinfeld. There were rumors of a route to Freezone, and from Freezone it was possible to work your way back to the States. It was risky, but not as risky as staying in Paris. So why did he stay?