The Aquitaine Progression (11 page)
Read The Aquitaine Progression Online
Authors: Robert Ludlum
Joel would laugh at her and say it was all those demons racing around her artist’s head in search of logic. And he would undoubtedly be right. The men out on the boat were probably more up-tight than she was. In a way they were trespassers who had found a haven in sight of hostile natives; one inquiry of the Coast Guard proved it. And that clearance, as it were, was another reason why they had returned to the place where, if not welcome, at least they were not harassed. If Joel were with her, she knew exactly what he would do. He would go down to the beach and shout across the water to their temporary neighbors and ask them to come in for a drink.
Dear Joel, foolish Joel, ice-cold Joel. There were times you were comforting—when you were comfortable. And amusing, so terribly amusing—even when you weren’t comfortable. In some ways I miss you, darling. But not enough, thank you
.
And yet why did the feeling—the instinct, perhaps—persist? The small boat out on the water was like a magnet, pulling her toward it, drawing her into its field, taking her where she knew she did not want to go.
Nonsense!
Demons in search of logic! She was being foolish—
foolish Joel, ice-cold Joel
—stop it, for God’s sake! Be
reasonable!
Then the shiver passed through her again. Novice sailors did not navigate around strange coastlines at night.
The magnet held her until her eyes grew heavy and troubled sleep came.
She woke up again, startled by the intense sunlight streaming through the glass doors, its warmth enveloping her. She looked out at the water. The boat was gone—and she wondered for a moment whether it had really been there.
Yes, it had. But it was gone.
The 747 lifted off the runway at Athens’ Helikon Airport, soaring to the left in its rapid ascent. Below in clear view, adjacent to the huge field, was the U.S. Naval Air Station, permitted by treaty although reduced in size and in the number of aircraft during the past several years. Nevertheless, far-reaching, jet-streamed American craft still roamed the Mediterranean, Ionian and Aegean seas, courtesy of a resentful yet nervous government all too aware of other eyes to the north. Staring out the window, Converse recognized the shapes of familiar equipment on the ground. There were two rows of Phantom F-
4
T’s and A-6E’s on opposite sides of the dual strip—updated versions of the F-
4
G’s and A-6A’s he had flown years ago.
It was so easy to slip back, thought Joel, as he watched three Phantoms break away from the ground formation; they
would head for the top of the runway, and another patrol would be in the skies. Converse could feel his hands tense, in his mind he was manipulating the thick, perforated shaft, reaching for switches, his eyes roaming the dials, looking for right and wrong signals. Then the power would come, the surging force of pressurized tons beside him, behind him, himself encased in the center of a sleek, shining beast straining to break away and soar into its natural habitat.
Final check, all in order; cleared for takeoff. Release the power of the beast, let it free. Roll! Faster, faster; the ground is a blur, the carrier deck a mass of passing gray, blue sea beyond, blue sky above. Let it free! Let me free!
He wondered if he could still do it, if the lessons and the training of boy and man still held. After the Navy, during the academic years in Massachusetts and North Carolina, he had frequently gone to small airfields and taken up single-engined aircraft just to get away from the pressures, to find a few minutes of blue freedom, but there were no challenges, no taming of all-powerful beasts. Later still, it had all stopped—for a long, long time. There were no airfields to visit on weekends, no playing around with trim company planes; he had given his promise. His wife had been terrified of his flying. Valerie could not reconcile the hours he had flown—civilian and in combat—with her own evaluation of the averages. And in one of the few gestures of understanding in his marriage, he had given his word not to climb into a cockpit. It had not bothered him until he knew—they knew—the marriage had gone sour, at which point he had begun driving out to a field called Teterboro in New Jersey every chance he could find and flown whatever was available, anytime, any hour. Still, even then—especially then—there had been no challenges, no beasts—other than himself.
The ground below disappeared as the 747 stabilized and began the climb to its assigned altitude. Converse turned away from the window and settled back in his seat. The lights were abruptly extinguished on the
NO SMOKING
sign, and Joel took out a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Extracting one, he snapped his lighter, and the smoke diffused instantly in the rush of air from the vents above. He looked at his watch; it was 12:20. They were due at Orly Airport at 3:35, French time. Allowing for the zones, it was a three-hour flight, and during those three hours he would commit to memory everything he could about General Jacques-Louis Bertholdier—if
Beale and the dead Halliday were right, the arm of Aquitaine in Paris.
At Helikon he had done something he had never done before, something that had never occurred to him, an indulgence that was generally attributed to romantic fiction or movie stars or rock idols. Fear and caution had joined with an excess of money, and he had paid for two adjoining seats in first class. He wanted no one’s eyes straying to the pages he would be reading. Old Beale had made it frighteningly clear on the beach last night: if there was the remotest possibility that the materials he carried might fall into other hands—
any
other hands—he was to destroy them at all costs. For they were in-depth dossiers on men who could order multiple executions by placing a single phone call.
He reached down for his attaché case, the leather handle still dark from the sweat of his grip since Mykonos early that morning. For the first time he understood the value of a device he had learned about from films and novels. Had he been able to chain the handle of his attaché case to his wrist, he would have breathed far more comfortably.
Jacques-Louis Bertholdier, age fifty-nine, only child of Alphonse and Marie-Thérèse Bertholdier, was born at the military hospital in Dakar. Father a career officer in the French Army, reputedly autocratic and a harsh disciplinarian. Little is known about the mother; it is perhaps significant that Bertholdier never speaks of her, as if dismissing her existence. He retired from the Army four years ago at the age of fifty-five, and is now a director of Juneau et Cie., a conservative firm on the Bourse des Valeurs, Paris’s stock exchange.
The early years appear to be typical of the life of a commanding officer’s son, moving from post to post, accorded the privileges of the father’s rank and influence. He was used to servants and fawning military personnel. If there was a difference from other officers’ sons, it was in the boy himself. It is said that he could execute the full-dress manual-of-arms by the time he was five and at ten could recite by rote the entire book of regulations.
In 1938 the Bertholdiers were back in Paris, the father a member of the General Staff. This was a chaotic
time, as the war with Germany was imminent. The elder Bertholdier was one of the few commanders aware that the Maginot could not hold; his outspokenness so infuriated his fellow officers that he was transferred to the field, commanding the Fourth Army, stationed along the northeastern border.
The war came and the father was killed in the fifth week of combat. Young Bertholdier was then sixteen years old and going to school in Paris.
The fall of France in June of 1940 could be called the beginning of our subject’s adulthood. Joining the Resistance first as a courier, he fought for four years, rising in the underground’s ranks until he commanded the Calais-Paris sector. He made frequent undercover trips to England to coordinate espionage and sabotage operations with the Free French and British intelligence. In February of 1944, De Gaulle conferred on him the temporary rank of major. He was twenty years of age.
Several days prior to the Allied occupation of Paris, Bertholdier was severely wounded in a street skirmish between the Resistance fighters and the retreating German troops. Hospitalization relieved him of further activity for the remainder of the European war. Following the surrender he was appointed to the national military academy at Saint-Cyr, a compensation deemed proper by De Gaulle for the young hero of the underground. Upon graduation he was elevated to the permanent rank of captain. He was twenty-four and given successive commands in the Dra Hamada, French Morocco; Algiers; then across the world to the garrisons at Haiphong, and finally the Allied sectors in Vienna and West Berlin. (Note this last post with respect to the following information on Field Marshal Erich Leifhelm. It was where they first met and were friends, at first openly, but subsequently they denied the relationship after both had resigned from military service.)
Putting Erich Leifhelm aside for the moment, Converse thought about the young legend that was Jacques-Louis Bertholdier. Though Joel was as unmilitary as any civilian could be, in an odd way he could identify with the military
phenomenon described in these pages. Although no hero, he had been accorded a hero’s return from a war in which very few were so acclaimed, these generally coming from the ranks of those who had endured capture more than they had fought. Nevertheless, the attention—the sheer
attention
—that led to privileges was a dangerous indulgence. Although initially embarrassed, one came to accept it all, and then to expect it all. The recognition could be heady, the privileges soon taken for granted. And when the attention began to dwindle away, a certain anger came into play; one wanted it all back.
These were the feelings of someone with no hunger for authority—success, yes; power, no. But what of a man whose whole being was shaped by the fabric of authority
and
power, whose earliest memories were of privilege and rank, and whose meteoric rise came at an incredibly young age? How does such a man react to recognition and the ever-increasing spectrum of his own ascendancy? One did not lightly take away much from such a man; his anger could turn into fury. Yet Bertholdier had walked away from it all at fifty-five, a reasonably young age for one so prominent. It was not consistent. Something was missing from the portrait of this latter-day Alexander. At least so far.
Timing played a major part in Bertholdier’s expanding reputation. After posts in the Dra Hamada and pre-crisis Algiers, he was transferred to French Indochina, where the situation was deteriorating rapidly for the colonial forces, then engaged in violent guerrilla warfare. His exploits in the field were instantly the talk of Saigon and Paris. The troops under his command provided several rare but much needed victories, which although incapable of altering the course of the war convinced the hard-line militarists that the inferior Asian forces could be defeated by superior Gallic courage and strategy; they needed only the materials withheld by Paris. The surrender at Dienbienphu was bitter medicine for those men who claimed that traitors in the Quai d’Orsay had brought about France’s humiliation. Although Colonel Bertholdier emerged from the defeat as one of the few heroic figures, he was wise enough or cautious enough to keep his own counsel, and did not, at least in appearance, join the “hawks.”
Many say that he was waiting for a signal that never came. Again he was transferred, serving tours in Vienna and West Berlin.
Four years later, however, he broke the mold he had so carefully constructed. In his own words, he was “infuriated and disillusioned” by De Gaulle’s accords with the independence-seeking Algerians; he fled to the land of his birth, North Africa, and joined General Raoul Salan’s rebellious OAS, which violently opposed policies it termed betrayals. During this revolutionary interim of his life he was implicated in an assassination attempt on De Gaulle. With Salan’s capture in April of 1962, and the insurrectionists’ collapse, once again Bertholdier emerged from defeat stunningly intact. In what can only be described as an extraordinary move—and one that has never really been understood—De Gaulle had Bertholdier released from prison and brought to the Elysée. What was said between the two men has never been revealed, but Bertholdier was returned to his rank. De Gaulle’s only comment of record was given during a press conference on May 4, 1962. In reply to a question regarding the reinstated rebel officer, he said (verbatim translation): “A great soldier-patriot must be permitted and forgiven a single misguided interlude. We have conferred. We are satisfied.” He said no more on the subject.
For seven years Bertholdier was stationed at various influential posts, rising to the rank of general; more often than not he was the chief military chargé d’affaires at major embassies during the period of France’s participation in the Military Committee of NATO. He was frequently recalled to the Quai d’Orsay, accompanying De Gaulle to international conferences, always visible in newspaper photographs, usually within several feet of the great man himself. Oddly enough, although his contributions appear to have been considerable, after these conferences—or summits—he was invariably sent back to his previous station while internal debates continued and decisions were reached without him. It was as though he was constantly being groomed but never summoned for the critical post. Was that ultimate
summons the signal he had been waiting for seven years before at Dienbienphu? It is a question for which we have no answer here, but we believe it’s vital to pursue it.
With De Gaulle’s dramatic resignation after the rejection of his demands for constitutional reform in 1969, Bertholdier’s career went into an eclipse. His assignments were far from the centers of power and remained so until his resignation. Research into bank and credit-card references as well as passenger manifests shows that during the past eighteen months our subject made trips to the following: London, 3; New York, 2; San Francisco, 2; Bonn, 3; Johannesburg, 1; Tel Aviv, 1 (combined with Johannesburg). The pattern is clear. It is compatible with the rising geographical pressure points of General Delavane’s operation.
