Book Read Free

Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt

Page 11

by The Aquitaine Progression [lit]


  dual strip updated versions of the F-4G's and

  A-6A's he had flown years ago.

  It was so easy to slip back, thought Joel, as he

  watched three Phantoms break away from the

  ground formation; they

  66 ROBERT IUDLUM

  would head for the top of the runway, and another

  patrol would be in the skies. Converse could feel his

  hands tense, in his mind he was manipulating the

  thick, perforated shaft, reaching for switches, his

  eyes roaming the dials, looking for right and wrong

  signals. Then the power would come, the surging

  force of pressurised tons beside him, behind him,

  himself encased in the center of a sleek, shining

  beast straining to break away and soar into its

  natural habitat. Final check all in order; cleared for

  takeout: Release the power of the beast, let it free.

  RolU Faster, faster; the ground is a blur, the carrier

  deck a mass of passing "ray, blue sea beyond, blue sky

  above. Let it free! Let me free!

  He wondered if he could still do it, if the lessons

  and the training of boy and man skill held. After the

  Navy during the academic years in Massachusetts

  and North Caroiina, he had frequently gone to small

  airfields and taken up single-engined aircraft just to

  get away from the pressures, to find a few minutes

  of blue freedom, but there were no challenges, no

  taming of all-powerful beasts. Later still, it had all

  stopped for a long, long time. There were no

  airfields to visit on weekends, no playing around

  with trim company planes; he had given his promise.

  His wife had been terrified of his flying. Valerie

  could not reconcile the hours he had flown civilian

  and in combat with her own evaluation of the

  averages. And in one of the few gestures of

  understanding in his marriage, he had given his

  word not to climb into a cockpit. It had not

  bothered him until he knew they knew the

  marriage had gone sour at which point he had

  begun driving out to a field called Teterboro in New

  Jersey every chance he could find and flown

  whatever was available, anytime, any hour. Still,

  even then especially then there had been no

  challenges, no beasts other than himself.

  The ground below disappeared as the 747

  stabilized and began the climb to its assigned

  altitude. Converse turned away from the window

  and settled back in his seat. The lights were abruptly

  extinguished on the NO SMOKING sign, and Joel

  took out a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

  Extracting one, he snapped his lighter, and the

  smoke diffused instantly in the rush of air from the

  vents above. He looked at his watch it was 12:20.

  They were due at Orly Airport at 3:35, French time.

  Allowing for the zones, it was a three-hour flight,

  and during those three hours he would commit to

  memory everything he could about General

  Jacques-Louis Bertholdier if

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 67

  Beale and the dead Halliday were right, the arm of

  Aquitaine in Paris.

  At Helikon he had done something he had never

  done before, something that had never occurred to

  hirn, an indulgence that was generally attributed to

  romantic fiction or movie stars or rock idols. Fear

  and caution had joined with an excess of money, and

  he had paid for two adjoining seats in first class. He

  wanted no one's eyes straying to the pages he would

  be reading. Old Beale had made it frighteningly

  clear on the beach last night: if there was the

  remotest possibility that the materials he carried

  might fall into other hands

  ny other hands he was to destroy them at all

  costs. For they were in-depth dossiers on men who

  could order multiple executions by placing a single

  phone call.

  He reached down for his attache case, the

  leather handle still dark from the sweat of his grip

  since Mykonos early that morning. For the first time

  he understood the value of a device he had learned

  about from films and novels. Had he been able to

  chain the handle of his attache case to his wrist, he

  would have breathed far more comfortably.

  Jacques-Louis Bertholdier, age fifty-nine, only

  child of Alphonse and Marie-Therese Bertholdier,

  was born at the military hospital in Dakar. Father a

  career officer in the French Army, reputedly auto-

  cratic and a harsh disciplinarian. Little is known

  about the mother; it is perhaps significant that

  Bertholdier never speaks of her, as if dismissing her

  existence. He retired from the Army four years ago

  at the age of fifty-five, and is now a director of

  Juneau et Cie., a conservative firm on the Bourse

  des Valeurs, Paris's stock exchange.

  The early years appear to be typical of the life of

  a commanding officer's son, moving from post to

  post, accorded the privileges of the father's rank and

  influence. He was used to servants and fawning mili-

  tary personnel. If there was a difference from other

  officers' sons, it was in the boy himself. It is said that

  he could execute the full-dress manual-of-arms by

  the time he was five and at ten could recite by rote

  the entire book of regulations.

  In 1938 the Bertholdiers were back in Paris, the

  father a member of the General Staff. This was a

  cha

  68 ROBERT LUDLUM

  otictime, as the war with Germany was imminent.

  The elder Bertholdier was one of the few

  commanders aware that the Maginot could not

  hold; his outspokenness so infuriated his fellow

  officers that he was transferred to the field,

  commanding the Fourth Army, stationed along the

  northeastern border.

  The war came and the father was killed in the

  fifth week of combat. Young Bertholdier was then

  sixteen years old and going to school in Paris.

  The fall of France in June of 1940 could be

  called the beginning of our subject's adulthood.

  Joining the Resistance first as a courier, he fought

  for four years, rising in the underground's ranks

  until he commanded the Calais-Paris sector. He

  made frequent undercover trips to England to

  coordinate espionage and sabotage operations with

  the Free French and British intelligence. In

  February of 1944, De Gaulle conferred on him the

  temporary rank of major. He was twenty years of

  age.

  Several days prior to the Allied occupation of

  Paris, Bertholdier was severely wounded in a street

  skirmish between the Resistance fighters and the re-

  treating German troops. Hospitalizaffon relieved

  him of further activity for the remainder of the

  European war. Following the surrender he was

  appointed to the national military academy at

  Saint-Cyr, a compensation deemed proper by De

  Gaulle for the young hero of the underground.

  Upon graduation he
was elevated to the permanent

  rank of captain. He was twenty-four and given

  successive commands in the Dra Hamada, French

  Morocco; Algiers; then across the world to the

  garrisons at Haiphong, and finally the Allied sectors

  in Vienna and West Berlin. (Note this last post with

  respect to the following informaffon on Field

  Marshal Erich Leifhelm. It was where they first met

  and were friends, at first openly but subsequently

  they denied the relationship after both had resigned

  from military service.)

  Putting Erich Leifhelm aside for the moment,

  Converse thought about the young legend that

  was Jacques-Louis Bertholdier. Though Joel was

  as unmilitary as any civilian could be, in an odd

  way he could identify with the military

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 69

  phenomenon described in these pages. Although no

  hero, he had been accorded a hero's return from a

  war in which very few were so acclaimed, these

  generally coming from the ranks of those who had

  endured capture more than they had fought.

  Nevertheless, the attention the sheer

  attention that led to privileges was a dangerous

  indulgence. Although initially embarrassed, one

  came to accept it all, and then to expect it all. The

  recognition could be heady, the privileges soon taken

  for granted. And when the attention began to

  dwindle away, a certain anger came into play; one

  wanted it all back.

  These were the feelings of someone with no

  hunger for authority success, yes; power, no. But

  what of a man whose whole being was shaped by the

  fabric of authority and power, whose earliest

  memories were of privilege and rank, and whose

  meteoric rise came at an incredibly young age? How

  does such a man react to recognition and the

  ever-increasing spectrum of his own ascendancy?

  One did not lightly take away much from such a

  man; his anger could turn into fury. Yet Bertholdier

  had walked away from it all at fifty-five, a reasonably

  young age for one so prominent. It was not

  consistent. Something was missing from the portrait

  of this latter-day Alexander. At least so far.

  Timing played a major part in Bertholdier's ex-

  panding reputation. After posts in the Dra Hamada

  and pre-crisis Algiers, he was transferred to French

  Indochina, where the situation was deteriorating

  rapidly for the colonial forces, then engaged in vio-

  lent guerrilla warfare. His exploits in the field were

  instantly the talk of Saigon and Paris. The troops

  under his command provided several rare but much

  needed victories, which although incapable of alter-

  ing the course of the war convinced the hard-line

  militarists that the inferior Asian forces could be de-

  feated by superior Gallic courage and strategy; they

  needed only the materials withheld by Paris. The

  surrender at Dienbienphu was bitter medicine for

  those men who claimed that traitors in the Quai

  d'Orsay had brought about France s humiliation. Al-

  though Colonel Bertholdier emerged from the defeat

  as one of the few heroic figures, he was wise enough

  or cautious enough to keep his own counsel and did

  not, at least in appearance, join the "hawks."

  . .

  70 R08ERT LUDLUM

  Many say that he was waiting a signal that

  never came. Again he was transferred, serving

  tours in Vienna and West Berlin.

  Four years later, however, he broke the

  maid he had so carefully constructed. In his

  own words, he was 'infuriated and disillusioned"

  by De Gaulle's accords with the

  independence-seeking Algerians; he fled to the

  land of his birth, North Africa, and joined

  General Raoul Salan's rebellious OAS, which

  violently opposed policies it termed betrayals.

  During this revolutionary interim of his life he

  was implicated in an assassination attempt on

  De Gaulle. With Salan's capture in April of

  1962, and the insurrechonists' collapse, once

  again Bertholdier emerged from defeat

  stunningly intact. In what can only be described

  as an extraordinary move and one that has

  never really been understood De Gaulle had

  Bertholdier released from prison and brought

  to the Elysee. What was said between the two

  men has never been revealed, but Bertholdier

  was returned to his rank. De Gaulle's only

  comment of record was given during a press

  conference on May 4, 1962. In reply to a

  question regarding the reinstated rebel officer,

  he said (verbahm translahon): "A great sol-

  dier-patriot must be permitted and forgiven a

  single misguided interlude. We have conferred.

  We are satisfied." He said no more on the

  subject.

  For seven years Bertholdier was stationed at

  various influential posts, rising to the rank of

  general; more often than not he was the chief

  military charge d'affaires at major embassies

  during the period of France's parhcipahon in

  the Military Committee of NATO. He was

  frequently recalled to the Quai d'Orsay,

  accompanying De Gaulle to international

  conferences, always visible in newspaper photo-

  graphs, usually within several feet of the great

  man himself. Oddly enough, although his

  contributions appear to have been considerable,

  after these conferences or summits he was

  invariably sent back to his previous station

  while internal debates continued and decisions

  were reached without him. It was as though he

  was constantly being groomed but never

  summoned for the critical post. Was that

  ultimate

  THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 71

  summons the signal he had been waiting for seven

  years before at Dienbienphu? It is a question for

  which we have no answer here, but we believe it's

  vital to pursue it.

  With De Gaulle's dramatic resignation after the

  rejection of his demands for constitutional reform in

  1969, Bertholdier's career went into an eclipse. His

  assignments were far from the canters of power and

  remained so until his resignation. Research into

  bank and credit-card references as well as passenger

  manifests shows that during the past eighteen

  months our subject made trips to the following:

  London, 3; New York, 2; San Francisco, 2; Bonn, 3;

  Johannesburg, 1; Tel Aviv, 1 (combined with

  Johannesburg). The pattern is clear. It is compatible

  with the rising geographical pressure points of

  General Delavane's operation.

  Converse rubbed his eyes and rang for a drink.

  While waiting for the Scotch he scanned the next

  few paragraphs, his memory of the man now jogged;

  the information was familiar history and not terribly

  relevant. Bertholdier's name had been put forward

  by several ultraconservative factions, hoping to pull

  him
out of the military into the political wars but

  nothing had come of the attempts. The ultimate

  summons had passed him by; it never came.

  Currently, as a director of a large firm on the Paris

  stock exchange, he is basically a figurehead capable

  of impressing the wealthy and keeping the

  socialistically inclined at bay by the sheer weight of

  his own legend.

  He travels everywhere in a company limousine

  (read: staff car), and wherever he goes his arrival is

  expected, the proper welcome arranged. The vehicle

  is a dark-blue American Lincoln Continental, Li-

  cense Plate 100-1. The restaurants he frequents are:

  Taillevent, the Ritz, Julien, and Lucas-Carton. For

  lunches, however, he consistently goes to a private

  club called L'Etalon Blanc three to four times a

  week. It is a very-off-the-track establishment whose

  membership is restricted to the highest-ranking mili-

  tary, what's left of the rich nobility, and wealthy

  72 ROBERT LUDLUM

  fawners who, if they can't be either, put their

  money on both so as to be in with the crowd.

  Joel smiled; the editor of the report was not

  without humor. Still, something was missing. His

  lawyer's mind looked for the lapse that was not

  explained. What was the signal Bertholdier had not

  been given at Dienbienphu? What had the

  imperious De Gaulle said to the rebellious officer,

  and what had the rebel said to the great man? Why

  was he consistently accommodated but only

  accommodated never summoned to power? An

  Alexander had been primed, forgiven elevated, then

  dropped? There was a message buried in these

  pages, but Joel could not find it.

  Converse reached what the writer of the report

  considered relevant only in that it completed the

  portrait, adding little, however, to previous

  information.

  Bertholdier's private life appears barely perti-

  nent to the activities that concern us. His marriage

  was one of convenience in the purest La Rochefou-

 

‹ Prev