“A day, if it comes to a desert crossing. You’ve got a day. Your body can take no more.” They told him stories of Mexican illegals who’d been led into the desert by unscrupulous smugglers and abandoned and how they’d died in horrible agony in just hours at the hottest time of the day.
He pushed ahead, feeling the blood pulsing in his temples. The shirt off and wrapped about his head in the fashion of a turban gave some relief from the heat; he wore only an undershirt over his body. But at each rise he prayed the mountains had moved closer and at each rise he was disappointed.
He pushed ahead.
In the early afternoon, there was a helicopter, low off the horizon.
Always helicopters, he thought, always helicopters.
He ducked quickly into a ravine, opening his wrist on the knifelike leaves of some grotesque plant. The blood spurted. He listened to the roar of the machine, an almost liquid sloshing, the rising pulse.
He crouched into the side of the ravine as the noise grew. He reached inside the pack and touched the Skorpion.
But the noise died.
He climbed and faced the same bright frozen sea of sand and spiny vegetation. His head now ached and the wrist would not stop stinging. In all directions it was the same — the crests of sand, the cacti, the cruel scrub under a broad sky and a fierce sun. In the distance, the mountains. Ulu Beg rose and headed on, facing death.
By midafternoon he began to get groggy. He fell once and didn’t remember falling, only finding himself on his knees at the bottom of a slope. He stood, his knees buckled, he went down again. He got up slowly, breathing hard, stopping to rest with his hands on his knees. He thought he saw that bus, that crazy bus pulling toward him, full of blond Americans, rich and well-fed, their children riding before them on bicycles.
He blinked and it was all gone.
Or was it? Caught in his mind was a memory of the vehicle, the awkwardness of a thing so huge. In its tentativeness, its absurdity — but also its determination — there’d been a memory.
He called it up before him.
They had marched for days down through the mountains to the foothills near Rawāndūz, and set the ambush well, with great patience and cunning. Jardi was with them. No, Jardi was one of them.
There had been thirty of them altogether, with Ulu Beg’s own son Apo along because he’d begged to go. They had the new AKs that Jardi had brought and the RPG rockets that he’d shown them how to use, and a light machine gun; and Jardi had his dynamite, which he’d planted in the road.
They caught the Iraqi convoy in a narrow enfilade in the foothills, men of the 11th Mechanized Brigade who had not a week before razed a Kurdish village, killing everybody. Jardi exploded his dynamite on the lead truck and they’d all fired and thirty seconds later the road was jammed with broken, burning vehicles, mostly trucks.
“Keep firing,” Jardi yelled, for the shooting had trailed off after the initial frenzy.
“But—”
Jardi was a fierce man, crazy in action, a driven man. The Kurds had a phrase: a fool for war. He stood behind them, his eyes dark and angry, gesturing madly, screaming, exhorting them in a language only Ulu Beg could understand, communicating nevertheless out of sheer intensity. Standing now, striding up and down the line, howling like a dog, his turban pushed off so that his short American hair showed, oblivious totally to the bullets that had begun to fly up from the dying convoy at them.
He was in some ways more Kurdish than any of them, a Saladin himself, who could inspire them to heroic deeds by nothing greater than his own ruthless passion. He loved to destroy his enemies.
“Pour it on. Keep pouring it on,” he yelled.
Ulu Beg, firing clip after clip of his AK-47 into the burning trucks and the huddled or fleeing figures, watched as the Kurdish fire devastated the convoy. He could see glass shattering, the canvas of the trucks shredding, the tires deflating. Now and then a smaller explosion and a puff of flame rolled up as one or another of the petrol tanks detonated. And soon no fire came from the trucks.
“Cut,” Jardi yelled.
The Kurdish fire died down.
“Let’s get ’em out of here,” Jardi yelled to Ulu Beg.
“But, Jardi,” Ulu Beg called, “there’s weapons and booty down there.”
“Not enough time,” said Jardi. “Look, that scout car.” He pointed to a Russian vehicle on its side at the head of the convoy. “Look at the aerial on that baby. The jets’ll be here in a few minutes.”
That was Jardi too: in the middle of battle, with bullets flying about, he was coolly noting which vehicles had radios — and estimating what their range was and how soon MiGs would respond to the ambush.
Ulu Beg stood.
“It’s time to flee,” Ulu Beg yelled.
But it was too late. Far down the line he saw three men break cover and begin to gallop toward the crippled vehicles, their weapons high over their heads in exultation.
“
But two more broke from the line and others turned back toward him, frozen in indecision.
“Back,” he shouted.
“We must leave the others,” Jardi said. “The jets’ll be here in seconds.”
But one of the men was Kamran Beg, a cousin, who had been bodyguard to the boy Apo.
Ulu Beg saw his own child rise from the gully and begin to run down the hill.
“What the hell,” said Jardi. “Why the hell did you—”
“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.
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
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: 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.
things
“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
say
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
“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,
“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.