Chardy had been good at it, the reports said, until his misfortune. Danzig had seen and studied the dossier, being not at all surprised at certain things — the military background, the athletics, the temper, the impatience — and stunned at others — the high IQ, for example. And of course he’d seen Sam Melman’s final judgment: unreliable under stress.
Well, perhaps. Yet this Chardy seemed on first glance anything but unreliable. He seemed stolid, effective, prosaic even. The mind would be dull, although focused. He’d be the technical type, wholly uninterested in things beyond his arcane craft. It was hard to see him as one of the Agency glamour boys — a cowboy, they called them — most alive among far-off little people with grudges, in mountains or jungles, amid guns and equipment.
“I’m told, Mr. Chardy, that the most famous Kurd of all time was Salāh-al-Dˉ Yūsuf ibn-Ayyūb, Saladin of the Crusades, who fought against Richard Coeur de Lion and forced the Crusaders to abandon practically all of Palestine except for a few coastal forts. Perhaps giving crusades a bad name that we should have taken cognizance of in our own times, eh? Did you know that, Mr. Chardy?”
“You can’t be around the Kurds without hearing of Saladin,” said Chardy. “Like he was, they are superb soldiers.” He paused. “When they’ve got the right gear.”
“Are they a colorful people? I always expected Arabs to be colorful and they turned out to be simple boors. But what about the Kurds? Were you disappointed in them?”
Another leading question. What capacity would Chardy have to determine what was “colorful,” what was not?
“They’re obsessive. And obsessives are always colorful. Unless it’s you they’re obsessed with.”
Danzig smiled. Chardy insisted on surprising him. He admired the capacity to astonish, which was rare, as opposed to the capacity to be astonished, which was commonplace.
“You respect them, I take it?”
Chardy went blank and would not answer, as if he were holding something back. Danzig could guess what: his outrage, his contempt, his fury, his disappointment over his — Danzig’s — “betrayal” of the Kurds. But Danzig could figure it out. The man had been among them, had known this Ulu Beg, had probably come to identify with them. The process was common. And when the operation had, of every urgent necessity, to be aborted, Chardy, and many others, would have taken great offense.
But Chardy did not express these sentiments directly. He said only, “Yeah, you have to,” turning quickly moody. It was not difficult to calculate why either: Chardy would share with his hard-charging brethren the conviction that the Kurdish thing had been a No-Win situation from the start. Then why get involved, why spend the money, the lives, if you’re not prepared to stick the course? the beef would run. Danzig had no doubt he could draw him out at great length: we needed more weapons, more ammo, SAMs, better commo and logistics, more sophisticated supply techniques, satellite assistance, naval support, germ warfare, psywar, defoliants, another front, tactical nukes. It would go on and on, no end in sight, a funnel down which could endlessly be poured gear and people and hopes and dreams.
“You do not approve of how it ended, I take it?”
The athlete in Chardy spoke. “I hate to lose,” he said.
“Perhaps if you recall, at that precise moment in history certain events were taking place across the world.”
Chardy nodded glumly. No, he wouldn’t recall from living memory, since he’d been in his cell in Baghdad that week. But he would know by now: the Republic of South Vietnam was falling.
“A very complex and difficult time,” Danzig pointed out.
“Yeah.” was all Chardy could manage. His was not a particularly interesting mind. Stilclass="underline" Danzig was attracted. Not to the mind, but to the mind and the man, to the organic whole. Like an athlete who has nothing to say but is fascinating when he runs or shoots or dodges or whatever, that aspect — man-in-action, man-of-will, man-of-force — had a Nietzschean grandeur to it, a fascination, because it was in part how Danzig saw himself, although in a different realm: the man who makes things happen.
Not to declare Chardy a total original, of course. These crypto-military types had their limits, just as surely as they had their uses. Curiously, they almost always had a sports background; at the very heart of their vision of the world was an image of the Playing Field, on which there are certain teams and certain rules, and if A happens, then by all that’s logical B must follow, mustn’t it? and thus to the swift, the strong, the brave, go the spoils. A heavy, masculine, sentimental fascism ran through it all, a painful juvenile strain. It was best summed up by Kipling, the Imperial apologist and poet laureate of nineteenth-century British Steel, when he coined a brilliant term for it which caught at once the athletic component and the masculine component and the sentimental component: the Great Game. It was of course by now a useless, a worthless concept. Especially as the world progressed exponentially in its complexity, became more densely and dangerously packed with oddball nationalist groups, with sects and cults of personality, with zealots, with madly proliferating technology, up to and including nuclear weaponry.
Danzig took instead as his model a more recent metaphor, the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which mandated that in closed systems, randomness, disorder, chaos tended to prevail over the long term. Centers would not hold; all systems disintegrated. A nation was a system; disintegration was its fate. But given this ultimate tendency, this spiral toward collapse (which even the most immense system, the universe itself, would some distant day undergo) small salvations were available within the process itself. It was possible for a clever man to make the law of entropy work for himself — or his nation.
As Clausius demonstrated in 1865, entropy grows out of all proportion to the energy expended in producing it. His famous example is the cue balclass="underline" dispatched into a formation of billiards, it transfers the energy of the cue into the formation of the balls; and while the energy of the system is thus transformed and momentarily increased, the entropy is increased much more, as demonstrated by the balls careening madly across the surface of the table. And that was only in two dimensions! Imagine this concept as applied in three: the complications are incredible, immeasurable!
The Soviets understood this principle instinctively, and built their own mischievous foreign policy around it. But Americans had some difficulty with it; they were not used to exalting disorder; it went against their mindset. But to Danzig it meant that his energy — the stroke of a cue — could drive a ball or a series of balls into various target billiards, and the results in entropy would be remarkable. This was the heart of what the news magazines termed “The Danzig Doctrine,” in whose service the Chardys of this world labored. A series of small engagements could be fought in the Third World; at no one place would the full weight of the nation’s will be committed, as had been done so foolishly in Vietnam; rather in an Angola, a Laos, a Bulgaria, a Yemen, a Kurdistan, a few special men, highly trained, superbly motivated, brave, resourceful — and expendable — would go in and raise a ruckus. The Soviets, like billiard balls driven into fury, would attempt to respond; they could eventually restore the local order, but the effort required resources of personnel, rubles, and effort drawn from other parts of their empire. And when they finally did prevail, a new battleground, in some other sector of the globe, would be found. The cost of these many small Third World battles was far less than any cataclysmic confrontation between the systems themselves, via strategic weaponry.