The Second Saladin (7 page)

The two of them, the younger, leaner Chardy, his black Irish face furious and pale, and the older Frenchy, a stumpy man with a crewcut, thick but not fat, his raw bulk speaking more of power than sluggishness. They wore those vividly spotted non-reg jungle camouflage outfits—called tiger suits—and were hatless. Paul had an AK-47 and a cigarette dangled insolently from his lip; Frenchy was equipped with a grease gun and a smile. They were surrounded by their crew of Chinese dwarfs, tiger-suited too, a collection of sullen Mongolian faces that in their impassive toughness seemed almost Apache. Wiry little men, with carbines, grenades, a Thompson or two, a gigantic BAR—this was before the fancy black plastic M-16s arrived in Vietnam. The picture had a nineteenth-century feel to it: the two white gods surrounded by their yellow killers, yet in subtle ways that the photograph managed
to convey, the white men were turning wog themselves, going native in the worst possible way.

“God, old Frenchy Short,” somebody said; Trewitt thought it might have been Sam Melman. “He was a piece of work, wasn’t he? Jesus, I remember when he nailed Che in Bolivia. He went all the way back to Korea. He was one of the guys we had ashore at the Bay of Pigs, one of the first in and one of the last out.”

“Frenchy was something,” somebody else agreed, and Trewitt recognized Yost Ver Steeg’s voice. “I had no idea he went so far back with Paul.”

“It was Frenchy who got Paul reinstated after he punched Cy Brasher,” another voice offered.

“Paul’s finest moment in the Agency,” somebody—Sam?—said, and there was laughter.

It’s true, thought Trewitt. Chardy was thin-skinned as well as brave and tough, and especially vulnerable to pedants and bureaucratic snipers of the sort intelligence agencies tend to attract in great number. Both his stateside tours, routine administrative pit stops that all career-track officers are expected to pull, had been disasters. And in Hong Kong, Chardy came up against Cy Brasher (Harvard ’49, as he was fond of telling people) in what was referred to still as the Six-Second War. This was 1971, when Chardy was coming off his second long, terrible tour among the Nungs.

Brasher was an imperious, lofty man, cursed with a need to correct everybody. He was widely loathed but exceedingly well connected
(the
Brashers) and had skated without apparent effort to Head of Station in Hong Kong. During the first three seconds of his war with Chardy, he suffered a broken nose and the loss of two teeth; in the second three seconds he took several savage body blows which broke two of his ribs.

“I still worry about this guy, Yost,” somebody said.
“Lord knows I despised Cy Brasher as much as anybody. But junior personnel just can’t go around slugging station chiefs, no matter how fatuous an ass the
station
chief is. And if we have to rely on a guy like Chardy, then we are in rather desperate straits.”

“We
are
in rather desperate straits,” said Yost. “Trewitt?”

Trewitt obediently tripped the button, and a picture of Joseph Danzig appeared on the screen.

“The year,” Trewitt said, “is nineteen seventy-three. The year of the operation called Saladin Two.”

Danzig’s famous face filled the room. There’s no reason to show it, really, thought Trewitt, for they all know what he looks like, and all of them will remember what the Agency was like in those days, those Danzig days.

It had been his fiefdom, his ego extension; it existed only to serve his will. He had repaid this fealty, this slavish obedience with contempt and derision.

All of the men in this room had felt his influence, worked in his shadow or under his supervision, tried to guess what he wanted. Joseph Danzig, formerly of Harvard University and then the Rockefeller Advisory Board on Foreign Affairs, had been, under a certain President, Secretary of State. He was almost as famous, in his own way, as that other paradigm of academic-cum-international kingmaker and unmaker, Henry Kissinger, his contemporary at Harvard and in many ways his rival and his equal. Their beginnings were even similar: Kissinger born a German Jew, Danzig, whose family name had been simplified from something unpronounceable to that of the city of his origin by an American Immigration officer, born a Polish one.

But Saladin II and Danzig are linked, Trewitt realized, just as tightly in their way as Saladin II and Chardy. Without
Danzig there would have been no Saladin II. It was shaped to his specifications, blueprinted to his calculations, implemented at his whim, and aborted by his will.

“Most of you are aware of Saladin Two,” said Yost Ver Steeg, the host of this meeting. “Those who aren’t are shortly to be so. Everything that happens now happens because of what happened then. This crisis we’ve got comes to us courtesy of that famous gent up there.”

“Famous gent”—an uncharacteristic attempt at levity by Yost, who is normally, Trewitt reflected, about as amusing as a fish. Perhaps it’s his nervousness, for he’s the man whose job it is to stop the Kurd from doing whatever the men in this room are so terrified he’ll do. And they are plenty terrified, except for Miles, who isn’t terrified of
anything
.

Yost began to summarize what Trewitt already knew. Saladin II was pressure. It was pressure here to tilt this
that
way and that
this
way, a Rube Goldberg contraption of stresses and springs and gizmos that had as its only real purpose the spirit of keeping the Soviet Union off balance. Not included in the higher calculus of the design—and this too was a Danzig trademark—was a cost in human lives.

Saladin II had its origins in a complaint to an American President by the late Shah of Iran about difficulties with his obstreperous Arab neighbor, the radically pro-Soviet regime of Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr in Iraq. What, wondered the Shah, could be done to put the squeeze on the aggressive Iraqis and their new T-54 tanks and SAMs and pesky Russian infantry and intelligence advisers?

Part of the answer lay in the fact that spread throughout much of the contested region of northern Iraq and northern Iran were a people called the Kurds, who dreamed of a mythical kingdom called Kurdistan. They are a fierce Indo-European race of great independence and cunning,
descended from the fearsome Medes of antiquity and said also to carry the genes of Alexander’s legions, which might explain the astonishing presence among them of blue eyes and upturned little noses and blond heads and freckles, an island of northern fairness in the swarthy sea of darker Mediterraneanness. The Kurds were forced to traffic with whoever would have them—they are a cynical people, expecting little of the world; one of their bleak proverbs is “Kurds have no friends”—and their ambitions must be seen as pitifully tiny against the designs of the superpowers: they wanted only their own schools, their own language, their own literature, and to be ignored by the outside world. They wanted a country, in other words, of their very own, which they would call Kurdistan.

The Shah did not like them but he saw a use for them. The Kurds have a violent history of insurrection against—against nearly everybody. In their time they have fought Turk and Persian and Iraqi with equal vehemence.

The answer then to everybody’s problems, as suggested by Joseph Danzig, American Secretary of State, and implemented at his specific request by the Special Operations Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, was, in the language of the trade, a “covert action.” In plainer words: a little war.

Trewitt clicked his button.

The new face was blurry, out of focus, taken from absolute zero angle without consideration of the esthetics. Its subject looked like a victim. The face, even with the startled eyes from the unexpected flash, was young and smooth. It sported a huge moustache, a batwing thing that pulled the features down tragically, and the Adam’s apple was prominent. The eyes were sharp and bright and small.

“We think,” said Trewitt, “that this is Ulu Beg. Chardy will be able to confirm for us tomorrow. At any
rate, in one of Chardy’s early Saladin Two reports he mentioned that somebody had told him the Kurd had been to the American University of Beirut. He evidently learned his English at an American high school near the Kirkūk oil fields—there was a good one there. This would have been courtesy of an A.I.D. scholarship. In those days A.I.D. educated half the Middle East.”

“And of course
we
fund A.I.D., so in effect
we
taught him his English,” Yost amplified.

“We believe this is Ulu Beg at nineteen, during his one year at AUB. We went to a great deal of trouble to get this photo—it’s from Lebanese police files. He was arrested late in his first year for membership in a Kurdish literary club—for which you may substitute ‘revolutionary organization.’ This is the picture the Lebanese cops got of him, at the request of Iraqi officials. He escaped the Lebanese pretty easily, and nobody ever touched him again until Saladin Two.”

The face glared at them.

Trewitt tried to read it. It did not look particularly Middle Eastern. It was just a passionate young man’s face, caught in the harsh light of a police strobe. He was probably scared when they got this; he didn’t know what was going on, what would happen. He looked a little spooked; but he also looked mad. The cheekbones were so high—they gave his face an almost Oriental look. And the nose was a blade, even photographed straight on, a huge, bony hunk.

“The key document,” said Yost, “from this point onward is ‘AFTACT Report Number two-four-three-three-five-two-B-slash Saladin Two.’ I urge any of you unfamiliar with it to check it out of the Operations Archive. You can also call on your computer terminals if you’re Blue Level cleared.”

“It sounds familiar,” said a well-modulated, cheerful voice, to a small whisper of laughter.

Trewitt recognized the voice of Sam Melman, who, in the dismal aftermath of Saladin II, had compiled “AFTACT 243352-B,” when he was Director of the Missions and Programs Staff in the Operations Directorate and had therefore committed his name to the document, for it was known in the vernacular (by the few that knew
of it)
as “The Melman Report.”

The men who laughed with Sam would be his current staff, an Agency elect themselves, for Sam was now Deputy Director of Operations.

Trewitt had seen the report himself. It was a sketchy thing, a few dismal sheets of typewritten red paper (to prevent photocopying), such a tiny artifact for what must have been an extraordinary occurrence.

“You’re not going to read us the whole thing?” somebody in the dark wanted to know. “I agree we’ve got a crisis, but nothing is worth
that.”

Sam’s laughter was loudest.

“No,” said Yost. “But we thought you should have the context at least available.”

But Trewitt couldn’t let it pass from consciousness so easily. It haunted him, just as Chardy, the fallen hero, in his way haunted him. Chardy’s performance before Melman, for one thing, was so strange. Trewitt had read it over and over, trying to master its secrets, the secret weight of the messages between the words. But there were none. Poor Chardy: Melman just barbecued him. Chardy had so little to offer in his defense, and on the stand, under oath, was vague and apologetic, either deeply disturbed or quite stupid or … playing a deeper game than anybody could imagine.

He confessed so easily to all the operational sins, all
the mistakes, the failures in judgment, the follies in action. Trewitt could almost remember verbatim:

“Trewitt. Trewitt!”

“Ah. Yessir.” Caught dreaming again. “The next slide.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He punched the button and the Kurd disappeared.

Somebody whistled.

“Yes, she’s a fine-looking woman, isn’t she?” Yost said.

“Chardy wouldn’t talk about her at the hearings,” Melman said. “He said it was private; it wasn’t our business.”

The picture of Johanna was recent. Her face was strong, fair, and somehow bold. The nose a trifle large, the chin a trifle strong, the mouth a trifle straight. Her blond
hair was a mess, and it didn’t matter. She was all earnest angles. Her eyes were softened behind large circular hornrims and a tendril of hair had fallen across her face. She looked a bit irritated, or late or just grumpy. She’s also beautiful, Trewitt realized, in an odd, strong way, an unconventional collection of peculiarities that come together in an unusual and appealing way. Jesus, she’s good-looking.

“One of the Technical Services people got this just last week in Boston, where she teaches at Mr. Melman’s alma mater,” Yost said.

“The Harvard staff didn’t look like that when I was there.” Sam again.

“Somehow Miss Hull managed to get into Kurdistan,” Yost continued. “We don’t know how. She wouldn’t speak to State Department debriefers when she finally got back. But she’s the key to this whole thing. Chardy had a ‘relationship’ with her, in the mountains.”

The word “relationship,” coming at Trewitt through the vague dark in which Yost was just a shape up front, sounded odd in the man’s voice; Yost didn’t care, as a rule, to speculate on a certain range of human behavior involving sexual or emotional passion; he was a man of facts and numbers. Yet he said it anyway, seemed to force it out.

“Chardy will love her still,” Miles Lanahan said. The sharpness of his voice cut through the air. “He’s that kind of guy.”

The woman on the wall regarded them with icy superiority. She was wearing a turtleneck and a tweed sports coat. The shot must have been taken from half a mile away through some giant secret lens, for the distance was foreshortened dramatically and behind her some turreted old hulk of a house, with keeps and ramparts and dozens of gables, all woven with a century’s worth of
vines, loomed dramatically. It’s so Boston, so Cambridge, thought Trewitt.