The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  Ulu Beg reinstructed himself in these lessons as he came down the last hill in the dawn light to the road. He moved swiftly. The distance was but a few twisting miles and the cars that sped by paid him no attention. The houses quickly became thick: small places of cinderblock in the sand and scrub. At each house was a car and in some of them men were leaving for work. Ulu Beg walked along the street. He paused to read the sign: SPEEDWAY, it said. He came to a group of men waiting by a corner. A bus arrived and they climbed aboard. He walked another few blocks and again the same thing happened. At a third corner, he climbed aboard himself.

  “Hey. Fifty cents,” the driver said angrily. Ulu Beg searched his pockets. They had told him about this. Fifty cents was two quarters. He found the coins and dropped them in the box, and took a seat and rode down the Speedway toward the center of the city.

  He got out near the bus station and looked for a hotel.

  “Always stay near bus stations. Small places, dirty rooms, cheap. But a hotel, always a hotel. In a motel, they’ll ask about an automobile. You’ll have to explain that you don’t have one. Why not? they’ll ask. They’ll think you’re mad. In America it is exceedingly odd not to have an automobile. Everybody has an automobile.”

  He chose a place called the Congress—the name proclaimed proudly on a metal frame on the roof—across from a Mexican theater in a crumbling section of the city. It was a four-story building with a bookstore, a barbershop, and a place that sold gems in it, across from the train station and behind the bus station.

  He walked into the dim brown lobby.

  A fat lady looked up when he came to the desk.

  “Yes?”

  “A room. How much?”

  “It’s ten-forty, dear. You get your TV and a bath.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “Just sign here.”

  He signed quickly.

  “One night? Two? A week? I have to put it down.” Her face was powdery and mild.

  “Two, three maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Oh, and hon? You forgot to say where you were from. Here, on the form.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  He knew what to put. He thought of the only American he knew. Jardi. Where had Jardi grown up?

  “Chicago,” he wrote.

  “Chicago, now there’s a nice town.” She smiled. “Now I have to have that money, hon.”

  He gave her a twenty and got his change.

  “You go on up. Those stairs there. Down the hall. It’s in the back, away from all the traffic.”

  He climbed the stairs, went down the dark hall and found the room. He went in, locked the door. He pulled the Skorpion from his pack and set it before him on the bed and waited for the police.

  Nobody came.

  You did it, he thought.

  Kurdistan ya naman.

  4

  Trewitt was nervous. First, so many big shots in the room at one time. The special men, the elect, some of them legends, who ran the place. Then, the equipment. He was not by nature mechanical. He was not good with things. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have brought in some technical wizard to handle this aspect of it? Well, yes, under normal circumstances. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Therefore he’d just have to run the equipment himself.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” Yost Ver Steeg had said.

  And then the slides. They were the key; they had to fall in the right order and he’d just got the last one down from Photographic a few minutes ago—it had been touch and go the whole way—and he wasn’t sure he’d gotten it into the magazine right. He might have had it in backward, which would have had a humorous effect in less intense briefings, but this one was big and he didn’t want to screw up in front of so many important people. And see Miles Lanahan snickering in his corner, removing one point from Trewitt’s tally and awarding it to himself.

  “Trewitt, are we ready?” It was Yost.

  “Yessir, I think so,” he called back, his voice booming through the room—he was miked, he’d forgotten.

  He bent, switched on the projector, beaming a white, pure rectangle onto the wall. So far, so good. If he could just find … yes, there’s the bastard; it was a kind of toggle switch mounted in a cylinder, in turn linked by cord to the projector. Now, if this just works like the instructions say, we’ll be …

  He punched the button and there was a sound like a .45 cocking.

  A face came on the screen, young, tenderly young, say eighteen, eyes wild with joy, crewcut glinting with perspiration, two scrawny straps hooked over two scrawny shoulders.

  “Chardy at eighteen,” Trewitt said. “His high school had just won the Class B Chicago Catholic League championship. March twelfth, nineteen fifty-eight. The picture is from the next day’s Tribune. This is a close-up; you can’t see the trophy, a hideous thing. Anyway, Chardy scored … ah, I have it right here ….”

  “Twenty-one points,” Miles Lanahan called. “Including a free throw with time gone that gave St. Pete’s a one-point win.”

  “Thanks, Miles,” said Trewitt, thinking, you bastard.

  “Anyway,” Trewitt continued, “you can see he’s a hero from way back.”

  Trewitt’s problem was heroes. His vice, his consuming passion, heroism. His deepest secret was that when he walked through the streets and saw his own bland reflection thrown back at him in shopwindows he projected onto it certain extravagances of equipage and uniform: jungle camouflages, dappled and crinkly, bush hats, wicked knives; and the weapons, the implements by which the hardened professionals performed their jobs—the M-16 and AK-47, antagonists of a hundred thousand firefights of the sixties and seventies; or the Swedish K so favored by Agency cowboys in ’Nam; or the compact little MAC-10 or -11, other racy favorites.

  “The real name is C-S-A-R-D-I,” said Trewitt, “Hungarian. His dad was a doctor, an emigré in the thirties. His mom is Irish. A quiet woman who still lives in the apartment in Rogers Park. The dad was a little nuts. He was a drunk, his practice failed, he ended up a company doctor in a steel mill. He went into an institution after he retired, and died there. He was hard-core anticommunist though, and a staunch Catholic. He filled the kid’s head with all kinds of stuff about the Reds. And he wanted him to be tough; he really put him through some hell to make him tough. He—”

  “Jim, let’s move it along.” Yost’s stern voice from out of the darkness.

  “Sure, sorry,” Trewitt said, convinced he heard Lanahan snicker.

  Two quick clicks: Chardy the college athlete; Chardy, hair sheared off, in the denim utilities of a Marine boot.

  “Marine officer training, after college,” Trewitt announced.

  Trewitt had known of Chardy for some time. His job on the Historical Staff, to which he’d so recently been attached, had been to edit the memoirs of retiring officers who were paid by the Agency to stay at Langley an extra year and write, the idea being, first, to allow any impulse toward literature to play itself out under controlled circumstances and second, to compile a history of the means and methods of the secret wars. Aspects or fragments of Chardy kept showing up in these accounts, memories of him echoing through a dozen different sources, sometimes under cryptonyms. He’d been pretty famous in his way.

  “And here he is,” Trewitt announced, clicking his button, “among the Nungs.”

  Chardy had been recruited out of the Marine Corps in Vietnam in the early days, ’63, ’64, where he was for a time a platoon commander and then a company commander and finally, having extended his tour, an intelligence officer, coordinating with South Vietnamese Rangers and running (and occasionally accompanying) long-range recons up near the DMZ. But an Agency hotshot named Frenchy Short talked him into jumping to the Company, which at that time desperately needed jungle-qualified military types.

  The slide on the wall now was a favorite of Trewitt’s, for it seemed to express exactly a certain heroic posture—the two men, Paul and Frenchy, among Chinese mercenaries from the Vietnamese hill country whom
they’d trained and led in a hit-and-run war way out in the deep, beyond the reach of law or civilization.

  “He did two long stretches with the Nungs,” Trewitt said to the men in the quiet briefing room in Langley, Virginia, “with a stay in between at our Special Warfare school in Panama.”

  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.”