The Second Saladin

“I couldn’t, Paul. Keep reading.”

We ran all that day and most of the next. We headed north, farther into the mountains. Our new goal was Turkey, where the border was not heavily guarded. It was a bitter solution to our problem, since the Kurds — and most of the Middle East — hate nothing more than the Turks, who for centuries, in their Ottoman Empire, ruled in corrupt greed.

The plan was then to continue north, into Russia. I knew that in his mind Ulu Beg was retracing the journey of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who fled Iran after the collapse of the Kurdish republic at Mahabad in 1947. Barzani had gone into exile for 11 years in the Soviet Union. The irony of fleeing the Iraqis — who were led and supplied by the Russians — for Turkey and then Russia, did not strike me at the time. Now it seems to illustrate to me a basic principle of Middle Eastern history and politics: ideology means nothing.

Finally, it was the sixth day, in the morning. We had found some caves and at last dared light a fire. We had even found a spring that was not cemented over.

Somebody turned on the radio — it was a standard procedure, for Jardi, as the Kurds called him, had always tried to make his contact with Reza’iyeh in the morning — and suddenly, where for five days there had been nothing, there was a signal.

There was, as I understand, a certain code sequence to be gotten through before communications commenced. I heard Ulu Beg speaking in his awkward English.

“Fred to Tom,” he was saying. “Fred to Tom.”

The radio, a Russian thing like all the equipment Paul had brought, hissed and crackled.

I heard English words — “Tom to Fred, Tom to Fred” — and recognized the voice. It was Paul Chardy’s.

“Do you remember that part, Paul?” she asked.

It was so still in the room. Chardy looked over at her. At last he said, “Yes, I remember,” and turned back to the pages.

We waited in the clearing. The helicopters would come at four, Paul Chardy had said. There would be six of them, and they’d have to make two or three sorties to get everybody out. It had to be orderly, he said, no panic, no crowding, and it would take some time but they’d get everybody out.

The men were praising Allah the Merciful for their deliverance but Ulu Beg said to praise Jardi and his friends from America.

We seemed to wait a year. It was really only a few hours. By now the skies had cleared and the sun was very hot. On higher peaks snowcaps reflected back at us. A few scrub oaks stood about in the clearing.

The people gathered in these few trees and I could see them laughing and lounging about, the bright colors of their clothes showing through the brown branches.

I had gone with Ulu Beg to a ridge above the clearing where we took some cover behind a group of rocks. I asked him if he was expecting trouble.

“I always expect trouble,” he said.

His face was caked with dust. The lips were cracked and almost white, his eyes a tired blue. He had taken his turban off and I was struck by his hair, which was almost a brownish blond. He had very powerful eyes.

He told me to go down below to wait for the helicopters.

“I will stay,” I said.

We heard the helicopters before we saw them. They rose over the crest of the hill. It was an extraordinary sight for me. I stared at them in almost dumb disbelief.

There were, as Paul had promised six of them. They hovered in the sky. On the ground, Amir Tawfiq ignited a green smoke bomb. A pillar of green rose through the trees.

The helicopters were gray things, and had the bull’s-eye Royal Iranian insignia on them. Their noses glittered in the sun because of all the glass or plastic. They were much bigger than I’d imagined. They generated a great deal of noise. They were in a formation of two lines, three each. They lowered themselves from the sky, dark and big. I could see the pilots in helmets and sunglasses behind the windshields.

Their rotors pulled up the dust, which spun and whirled. It rose and stung my eyes. Green smoke whipped through the air. Wind beat against us and I could see the leaves of the trees shaking off.

I could see the two little boys, Apo and Memed, sitting off to one side. I could see Amir Tawfiq and his wife, whose arm was heavily bandaged. I could see Kak Farzanda, the old man, waiting patiently. I could see Haji Ishmail, who had been a porter in Baghdad before leaving to join the fight in the mountains. I could see Sulheya, the old woman, in her black scarf, who had told me stories and myths that I had recorded, and her daughter Nasreen, who did the cooking. I could see … well, I could see them all, people I’d lived with for seven months and grown, as much as is possible for a foreigner, a foreign woman even, to love.

The helicopters hung over the trees and for a while I did not quite understand what was happening. I stood, quite stupidly. There was a commotion in the dust down below.

Ulu Beg had turned and I heard him say, “Russians.”

Men in the helicopter doorways were shooting into the trees. Dust flew. I could see tree branches breaking. Links of color began to spit from the guns the men were shooting. It was as if they were hosing the trees with light. Sparks flew and fires started.

Beside me, Ulu Beg fired with his Russian gun. I could see a helicopter tilt as the glass of the windshield broke. Kill them, I felt myself thinking. The machine began to fall, tilting crazily. It broke up when it hit. Its blade thrashed at the earth. It exploded into a huge oily wave of flame which spilled through the clearing. I was knocked back.

The men in the helicopters were shooting at us. Bullets were hitting rocks and banging off. The stench of burning gasoline reached my nose. I was so mixed up I almost walked into the terrible panorama beneath us, but Ulu Beg grabbed my arm and pulled me down the far side of the ridge to a dark ravine. We tumbled down its side, sliding through the rocks. In my sheer terror, I did not feel any pain. We moved deeper along it until pressed into a dark crevice. I could see a helicopter overhead. It hung there for the longest time. Ulu Beg had his Russian gun ready. But then the helicopter rose from the sky and vanished. Two columns of smoke rose in the sky, one huge and black and the other green.

“Did the Russian tell you about that?” Johanna asked him as he laid down the last page.

“No,” Chardy said. “Not the details.”

“Was the ambush the part of the other thing? Was it part of some larger betrayal? Were you under orders? All those months when I loved you, when you fought with the Kurds — did you know? Did you know how it would end?”

“Of course not.”

“But that was you on the radio?”

Chardy remembered it, but not very well. It was a Soviet LP-56 model, with double amplification and some kind of frequency scanner thing, standard issue in Soviet armored units. He remembered the microphone in his hand, a heavy, blocky thing. They were way behind in radios, he remembered thinking. He had felt so numb.

“What?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He remembered the KGB colonel, Speshnev, had been pleased with his performance.

“Why, Paul?” she said quietly.

“I — it was very important to them to kill or capture Ulu Beg,” he said.

“But why did you help them?”

“I didn’t have any choice.”

“Did they torture you?”

“They had some fun. But it wasn’t that.”

“Tell me, Paul. Why?”

“Johanna, I can’t tell you. And I can’t change a thing now. I guess I’m really here to try and make it up.”

“Nobody made anything up for the Kurds.”

“Johanna, he’s here to kill. Suppose some more children get stuck in the crossfire? Suppose it’s another massacre? Suppose somebody innocent—”

“We armed Ulu Beg. We supported him. We urged him on. Paul, nobody’s innocent.”

“Johanna—”