The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  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:

  M: And you actually crossed into Kurdistan and led combat operations? Against all orders, against all policies, against every written or unwritten rule of the Agency. You actually led combat operations, disguised as a Kurd?

  C: Uh. Yeah. I guess I did.

  M: Mr. Chardy, one source even places you at an ambush site deep in Iraq, near Rawāndūz.

  C: Yeah. I got a tank that day. Really waxed that—

  M: Mr. Chardy. Did it ever occur to you, while you were playing cowboy, how humiliating it would have been to this country, how embarrassing, how degrading, to have one of its intelligence operatives captured deep within a Soviet-sponsored state with armed insurgents?

  C: Yeah. I just didn’t think they’d get me. (Laughs)

  “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.

  “Chardy had no brief to cross into Kurdistan. This woman had no right. But they both were there, in the absolute middle of it, with Ulu Beg. They were there for the end. In a sense they were the end.”

  Yost is discreet in his summary, Trewitt thought. The prosaic truth is that sometime in March of 1975 the Shah of Iran, at Joseph Danzig’s urging and sponsorship, signed a secret treaty with Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr of Iraq. The Kurdish revolution, which was proceeding so splendidly, became expendable. Danzig gave the order; the CIA obeyed it.

  The Kurds were cut off, their matériel impounded; they were exiled from Iran.

  Chardy, Beg, the woman Hull: they were caught on the wrong side of the wire.

  Chardy was captured by Iraqi security forces; Beg and Hull and Beg’s people fled extreme Iraqi military pressure. Fled to where? Fled to nowhere. Trewitt knew that Yost wouldn’t mention it, that even the great Sam Melman wouldn’t mention it. But one passage from Chardy’s testimony before Melman came back to haunt him, now in this dark room among Agency elect, his own career suddenly accelerating, his own membership on the staff of an important operation suddenly achieved.

  C: But what about the Kurds?

  M: I’m sorry. The scope of this inquiry doesn’t include the Kurds.

  The last details are remote, Trewitt knew. Nobody has ever examined them, no books exist, no journalists have exhumed it. Only the Melman report exists, and its treatment is cursory. Joseph Danzig himself has not commented yet. In the first volume of his memoirs, Missions for the White House, he promised to deal with the Kurdish situation at some length; but he has not yet published his second volume and somebody has said he may never. He’s making too much money giving speeches these days.

  The fates of the three principals were, however, known: Chardy, captured, was taken to Baghdad and interrogated by a Russian KGB officer named Speshnev. His performance under pressure, Trewitt knew, was a matter of some debate. Some said he was a hero; some said he cracked wide open. He would not discuss it with Melman.

  He was returned to the United States after six months in a Moscow prison.

  Johanna Hull showed up in Rezā’iyeh by methods unknown in April of 1975 and returned to the United States, and her life at Harvard. She had lived quietly ever since. Except that three times she had tried to commit suicide.

  Ulu Beg, one source reported, was finally captured by Iraqi security forces in May of 1975 and was last seen in a Baghdad prison.

  The fate of his people—his tribe, his family, his sons—was unknown.

  “Lights,” Yost said.

  Trewitt fumbled a second too long for the switch but finally clicked it on.

  The brightness flooded the room and men blinked and stretched after so long in the dark.

  Yost stood at the front of the room.

  “Briefly, that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you informed. Chardy arrives tomorrow.”

  “Lord, you’re bringing him here?”

  “No, not to the Agency. We’re running this operation out of a sterile office in Rosslyn, just across the river from Georgetown.”

  “Yost, I hope you can control this Chardy. He can be a real wild man.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Miles Lanahan said.

  He smiled, showing dirty teeth. He was a small young man with a reputation for ruthless intelligence. He was no sentimentalist; the “old cowboy” stuff wouldn’t cut anything for him. He’d started out as a computer analyst working in “the pit,” Agency jargon for the video display terminal installation in the basement of Langley’s main bu
ilding, and worked his way out in a record two years. Everybody was a little afraid of him, especially Trewitt.

  “All right, Miles,” said Yost, “that’s enough.”

  Down, boy, thought Trewitt.

  But Miles had one more comment.

  “The plan,” he said, “is not to control him.”

  5

  Chardy sometimes thought only the game had kept him sane. At the end of Saladin II, the worst time in the cellar, he thought not of Johanna or the Kurds or his country or his mission; they’d all ceased to sustain him. He thought of the game. He shot imaginary jumpers from all over a huge floor and willed them through the hoop. Magic, they floated and fell and never touched metal. The game expanded to fill his imagination, to push out all the dark corners, the cobwebs, the spooky little doubts. Later the game had become, if anything, bigger. Into it he poured all his energy, his natural fierceness, his frustrations and dissatisfactions, his resentment: his hate. The game, more loyal than any human or institution on this earth, absorbed them—and him.

  And now, on the night before what he knew was the most important day of his life, the game was especially kind to him. For of late his shots would not fall, his legs had been thick and numb, his fingers clumsy. But all that was a memory: tonight he could not miss. From outside, inside, but usually from the baseline with no backboard for margin of error, he shot, the ball spinning to the rafters and dropping cleanly through. It was only a Y-league game, mostly ex-college jocks like himself, or black kids with no college to go to; and it took place in a dim old gym that smelled of sweat and varnish and sported a shadowy network of old iron girders across the ceiling.

  But for Chardy there was nothing but basketball court, no outside world, no Speights or Melmans or Ulu Begs. It was an absolute place: you shot; it went in or it didn’t. There was no appeal, no politics, no subtle shading of results. It was a bucket or it wasn’t.

  Toward the end even the cool black kids were working the ball to him, just to watch it fall.

  “Man, you hot,” one called.

  “Put it down,” another yelled.

  He hated to see it end, but it did. The team he played for, which represented a manufacturer of surgical instruments, easily vanquished a team that represented a linoleum installer; the margin was twenty-eight points and could have been greater. A buzzer sounded and the bodies stopped hurtling about. Somebody slapped him on the ass and somebody clapped him on the back and somebody shook his hand.

  “You had it tonight,” somebody said.

  “Couldn’t miss, could I?”

  “No way, man, no way.”

  Chardy took a last glance toward the floor—two other teams, the Gas Stations and the Ice Cream Stores, were warming up. It meant nothing, but Chardy hated to leave it. A ball came spinning his way and he bent to scoop it up. He held it, feeling its skin springy to his fingers. He looked at the hoop and saw that it was about fifty feet away.

  Shoot it, he thought.

  But a black man came galloping up to him and without a word Chardy tossed him the ball, and off he went. Chardy pulled on his jacket and headed for the doors and what lay beyond.

  6

  He stared at the picture. Yes. Ulu Beg. Years younger, but still Ulu Beg.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good. Getting it was no easy thing,” said Trewitt, the young one, a wispy pseudo-academic type who was tall and thin and vague.

  “Once upon a time,” Chardy said. “Years and years ago.”

  “Okay,” said Trewitt. “Now this one.”

  The projector clicked and projected upon the screen on the wall of a glum office in Rosslyn a plumpish face, prosperous, solid.

  “I give up,” said Chardy.

  “Look carefully,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “This is important.”

  I know it’s important, Chardy thought irritably.

  “I still don’t—oh, yeah. Yeah.”

  “It’s an artist’s projection of Ulu Beg now. Twenty years later, a little heavier, ‘Americanized.’”

  “Maybe so,” said Chardy. “But I last saw him seven years ago. He looked”—Chardy paused. Words were not his strong point; he could never get them to express quite what he wanted—“fiercer, somehow. This guy was in a war for twenty years. He was a guerrilla leader for nearly ten. You’ve got him looking like a Knight of Columbus.”

  A harsh note of laughter came from the other young one, Miles something-Irish. It was a caustic squawk of a laugh; Miles was a kind of Irish dwarf, an oily little jerk, but he’d know what a Knight of Columbus was.

  “Well,” Trewitt said defensively, “the artist had a lot of experience on this sort of thing. He worked all night. We just got the picture in yesterday. It’s the only one of Ulu Beg extant.”

  “Try this one, Paul,” said Yost Ver Steeg.

  Johanna. Chardy stared at her. The face could have been spliced out of any of a thousand of his recent nights’ worth of dreams. It meshed perfectly with all those nights of memory and struck him with almost physical force.

  “It’s very recent,” said Yost.

  Chardy stared at the image projected against the wall. He felt as if he were in a peep-show booth for a quarter’s worth of pointless thrill with other strange men in a dark place.

  “A week ago, I think. Is that right, Miles?” Yost said.

  “Tuesday last.” Miles’s voice was sure and smug and had a recognizable Chicago tang to it.

  “Has she changed much in seven years?”

  “No,” was all Chardy could think to say, offended by the ritual he knew the shot to represent: some seedy little man from Technical Services, up there with a motor-driven Nikon with a 200-millimeter lens, parked blocks away in his car or van, shooting through one-way glass after three days’ stalk.

  Chardy rubbed his dry palms together. He glanced over at the three shapes with whom he shared Johanna’s image: Yost, almost a still life, a man of deadness, and the two younger fellows, dreamy Trewitt and the loathsome Miles What-was-it?, the dumpy little Irish guy from Chicago.

  “Did you know”—Miles spoke from the comer—“that in the years she’s been back she’s tried to kill herself three times?”

  A kind of pain that might have been grief seemed to work up through Chardy’s knees. He swallowed once, feeling his heart beat hard, or seem to, at any rate. He clenched his fists together.

  “I didn’t know that. I don’t know anything about what happened to her.”

  Chardy could almost feel Miles smile in the dark. He’d only glimpsed him in the hurried introductions—Speight had said something about a computer whiz—and remembered a short, dark, splotchy man, a boy really, not quite or just barely thirty, with unruly oily black hair. He had the look to him of a priest’s boy, the one in every parish who’d seek a special relationship from the father or the mother superior and draw power off it for years. He’d seen it at Resurrection too, and maybe elsewhere; maybe it wasn’t Catholic at all.

  “Once in ’seventy-seven, wrists,” Lanahan amplified, “once in ’seventy-nine, pills, and a real bad one last year, pills again. She almost went the distance.”

  Chardy nodded, keeping his eyes sealed on the woman’s image before him.

  Johanna, why?

  But he knew why.

  “The university has had her in and out of various shrink programs,” Lanahan continued. “We got the records. It wasn’t easy.”

  But Chardy was not listening. He looked at his own wrists. He’d cut them open in April of 1975 after his lengthy interrogation by the KGB. He knew the feeling of comfort: the blood draining away and with it all the problems of the world. An immense light-headedness fills you, seductive, gratifying. You think you’re going to beat them. He remembered screaming at the officer who had supervised his interrogation, “Speshnev, Speshnev, I’m going to win.” But they’d saved him.

  “Is that it?” Trewitt asked.

  “Yes,” said Ver Steeg, and the image vanished. Trewitt pulled the curtains open a
nd light flooded the room.

  Chardy stared at the wall from which her image had disappeared. Then he turned back to the others.

  “So—Paul. May I call you Paul?” Yost asked. Chardy could not see his eyes behind the pink-framed semi-academic glasses he wore, a style beloved of high-level government administrators.

  “Please,” Chardy said.

  “Ulu Beg knows only two people in the United States. You and Johanna Hull. And it seems unlikely he’d come to you—for help.”

  Chardy nodded. Yes, it seemed unlikely Ulu Beg would come to him—for help.

  “That leaves this woman.”

  “You think he’ll go to her?”

  “I don’t think anything. I see only probabilities. It seems probable that he’s aware how difficult it would be to operate in this country without some kind of base. It seems probable, then, that he’d try and obtain one. It seems probable that he’d be drawn to somebody he felt he could trust, somebody who shared his sentiments about the Kurds. It seems probable, finally, that he’d go to her. That’s all.”

  “You could try and anticipate his target,” said Chardy.

  “You could. And if you anticipated wrong you might put yourself into a posture you’d never get out of. We have no data to operate on at this point as to his target; there are no probabilities. That may change; until it does I’ve decided to concentrate on the probabilities.”

  Chardy nodded.

  “So we have to wonder, Paul,” Yost continued It was a freak of optics that kept his eyes hidden behind the twin pools of light reflected in his lenses. “You’re our authority. You know them both. Is it feasible he’d approach her? To you, I mean. Does that feel right? And if so, how would she react? And finally, would she cooperate with us? Or, more to the point, with you?”

  Miles spoke before Chardy could form an answer.