The Second Saladin (6 page)

“I did nothing. I—”

Then they saw the tank. It was a Russian T-54, huge as a dragon. It swung into the enfilade. Tanks had never come this high before. Ulu Beg watched as the creature swung along on its tracks, its turret cranking. It moved with awkwardness, tentative even, despite its weight.

“Down!”
Jardi yelled, in the second before the tank fired.

The shell exploded under the first three running men. They were gone in the blast. Others raced up the hill. The machine gun in the turret cut them down.

The small boy lay still on the ground.

Ulu Beg rose to run to him, but something pressed him to the earth.

“No,” somebody hissed in his ear.

Jardi vaulted free and raced down the slope. He had abandoned his rifle and held only a rocket-propelled grenade. He ran crazily, not bothering to veer or dodge. He ran right at the tank.

Its turret swung to him. Machine-gun bullets cut at the earth and Ulu Beg could see them reaching for Jardi, who seemed to slide in a shower of dust as the bullets kicked by him.

He lay still.

The tank began to heave up the ridge toward them.

Ulu Beg saw that they were finished. They couldn’t get back up the slope; the tank would shoot them down. A tank. Where had it come from?

He tried to clear his brain. He could think only of his son, dead on the slope, the brave American, dead on the slope, his men, his tribe, dead on the slope.

But Jardi rose. He was not hit at all. He rose, sheathed in the dust he’d fallen through, and stood, one leg cocked insolently on a stone. A wind came and his jacket billowed. From down the slope they could hear Jardi cursing loudly, almost—the man was crazy—laughing.

The tank turret swung to him again. But Ulu Beg saw that Jardi was close enough now and that the big gun would never reach him in time, and as its barrel swung on to him Jardi fired the RPG one-handed, like a pistol.

The rocket left in a fury of flame, spitting fire as it flew, and struck the tank on the flat part of the hull, just beneath the turret.

The tank began to burn. It fell back on its treads and flames began to pour from its hatch and from its engines. Smoke rose and blew in the breeze.

Jardi threw away his spent launching tube and ran
quickly to the boy. He hoisted him and climbed up to them, but he had no smile.

“Come on, get these guys out of here,” he said. “Come on,” he turned to shout at them, “get going, Jesus, you guys, get
going!
”

The boy was crying.

Ulu Beg was crying.

“You have given my son his life back.”

“Come on, get going,” Jardi urged.

They climbed to the mountains and were over the crest when the first jets arrived.

Ulu Beg smiled in the memory of that day.

Ahead, the mountains loomed.

He reached them at twilight. Toward the end he’d crossed a road and ahead he could see another road, one that crawled up the side of the mountain, but he did not go near it. Cars moved along it. In the falling dark he climbed cold rocks. He found a trickle of water. He tracked it to a pool, and then found the spring. He drank deeply. He sat back. He ate a piece of his dry bread, and drank again. He was in the chill of a shadow but could look out and see the desert, still white and flat and dangerous.

He climbed up. At the top, the city of Tucson lay before him. He saw a city built on sand, on a plain, cupped on all sides by other mountains. A few tall buildings stood in its center but it was mostly a kind of ramshackle newness. It was nothing like Baghdad, which was very, very old, and on a huge river.

God willed it, he thought, and I have made it.

He thought of Jardi and the tank and his son and why he had come to America and he began to weep.

In the morning he rose with the sun. He opened his pack, pushed the machine pistol out of the way, and found his other shirt, a white thing with snap buttons. He pulled the shirt on.

They had prepared him well. But they had also warned him.

“America is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Women walk around with breasts and buttocks exposed. Food and lights everywhere, everywhere. Cars, more cars than you can imagine. And hurry. Americans all hurry. But they have no passion. Any Turk has passion. Among Turks and Mexicans and Arabs, passion runs high. But Americans are even lower, for they feel nothing. They move as though asleep. They do not care for their children or their women. They speak and talk only of themselves.

“In all this, you will be dazzled. Expect it. There is no way we can prepare you for the shock of it all. Even a small city in America is a spectacle. A large one is like a festival of all the peoples of earth. But remember also: the grotesque is common in America. Nobody will notice, nobody will care, nobody will pay you any attention. Nobody will ask you for papers if you are cautious. You need no permits, no licenses. Your face is your passport. You may go anywhere.”

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: S
PEEDWAY
, 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
.

T
rewitt 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.”