Deep State

by Walter Jon Williams

  Dagmar looked at him. “The Russians use planes to ram?”

  Lloyd nodded. “They train for it. Even now.”

  Dagmar blinked.

  “That’s hard-core,” she said.

  Lloyd nodded. “Glad we never had to fight those guys.”

  The video made the tactic clearer. The flying wedge brought down a whole series of target drones. Usually the wedge tumbled for a second or two but righted itself. On a couple occasions the wedge lost control and crashed.

  Dagmar had encountered miniturbine-powered drones before—she remembered the thing hovering over her in the humid night, the hydrocarbon smell of its breath. She thought for a moment, then looked at Lloyd.

  “This all seems very sophisticated,” she said. “But what we’re supposed to be leading is a grassroots rebellion springing spontaneously from the population. If we start flying machinery this complex against them, it’s going to be clear that someone’s behind it.”

  “This was discussed,” Lincoln remarked, from behind Dagmar’s shoulder. Dagmar gave a little jump at the unexpected sound.

  “The wedge is made from generic materials,” Lloyd said. “The miniturbine arrays are available by mail-order. Even the fly-by-wire software is available from hobbyists online—I was kind of amazed to discover that it actually works.”

  “Hm.” Dagmar looked at the screen, saw flying wedges hit drones time after time.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess it all seems fine.”

  Lloyd offered a satisfied smile.

  “Now,” he said, “we need to coordinate the air force with your teams.”

  “Ha,” Dagmar said. “As if my job wasn’t complex enough.”

  Lloyd smiled. “I’ll do most of the work, if that’s all right with you.”

  Dagmar could think of no objection to this.

  “I was thinking,” Lloyd said, “that we might want to give the air unit a name.”

  “Free Turkish Air Force?” Lincoln said. “Atatürk Air Force?”

  “Royal Chatsworth Air Force?” said Dagmar, with a look at Lincoln. He returned the compliment.

  “Briana’s Airmen?”

  “My policy is to remain anonymous,” Dagmar said. “How about the Anatolian Skunk Works?”

  Lincoln thought about that for a moment.

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Words,” Dagmar said. “They’re my job.”

  Over the next two days Dagmar’s teams gradually improved their performance. The camera teams shot videos of birds, of the model helicopters, of tractors rolling down country roads, of freighters cruising along the blue Mediterranean horizon. Until Team C’s cameras lost their uplink all at once and they failed to reestablish contact.

  Dagmar turned to Byron.

  “You handled this last time, right?” she said.

  He looked up at her.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll try to talk them through the fix.”

  This failed, even with Lloyd interpreting. Dagmar turned to Byron again.

  “Can you go north and help them?”

  He looked up at her, eyes glittering in his pinched face.

  “No way!” he said. “The north side of the island is run by the people we’re trying to subvert. I’m not going over there.”

  “It’ll be very inconvenient,” Dagmar pointed out, “to have to send all Team C back and their gear through the checkpoints in Nicosia.”

  Angry Man flushed. “It’ll be even more inconvenient if I’m picked up by the Turkish Cypriot police and tortured,” Byron said. He pointed down the corridor, toward Lincoln’s office.

  “Ask Chatsworth,” he said. “I don’t have to go over the Green Line.”

  “I’m not ordering you,” Dagmar said.

  Byron folded his arms.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Orders or not, I’m not going. It’s in my contract.”

  Dagmar paused and felt everyone in the ops room looking at her. She sensed that her authority was teetering on the brink of an undefined precipice.

  She knew she wasn’t any good at being a tyrant. She owned a company, but she wasn’t an authoritarian boss—rather than imposing her will on her subordinates, she relied on shared enthusiasm to achieve results—and so she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with Byron’s defiance, especially if he was right.

  “Well,” she said lightly. “If it’s a contract, and you can’t be tortured over there, then we’ll have to find a way to torture you here.” She looked at him for a moment, long enough to see him shift uneasily in his chair, and then she nodded.

  “Try and fix their problem again,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, try a third time.”

  It took an afternoon, and eventually Magnus and Helmuth were both called in. It was Magnus who solved the crisis, by moving a certain jumper from its slave to its master setting. It was a nice piece of long-distance diagnosis, and Magnus seemed very pleased with himself for providing the answer.

  So much, Dagmar thought, for Byron’s claim that Kilt Boy wasn’t able to think on his feet.

  “Yes,” Lincoln said later, when Dagmar reported the problem and its solution. “It is in Byron’s contract—and Magnus’s, too—that they’re not to be deployed in the field. In fact, it’s Company policy not to use American citizens in situations where they might be in jeopardy.”

  “Okay,” Dagmar said. “I didn’t know that.”

  Lincoln swiveled his Aeron chair toward his safe. Keeping his body between Dagmar and the digital lock, he opened the safe door.

  “You’re not cleared to view their contracts,” he said. “So that’s understandable.” He looked over his shoulder. “Plus you’ve seen all those spy movies, where sinister Agency masterminds put ordinary people in deadly situations over and over.”

  “Is there anything else,” Dagmar asked, “that I need to know that’s in documents I’m not cleared for?”

  Lincoln swung his chair toward his desk. “I’m sure there is,” he said cheerfully. “That’s how our business works.”

  “Terrific.”

  Lincoln opened the safe, then took the day’s papers and portable memory and locked them away. Dagmar heard bolts chunking home. An LED on the door turned from green to red. Lincoln straightened and looked at her.

  “Buy you dinner?” he offered.

  “Sure,” Dagmar said. “Why not?”

  It wasn’t like she had a more exciting evening planned.

  Dinner was takeout from an Indian place just outside Akrotiri’s gates. Lincoln found a parking place overlooking the Mediterranean, and the two balanced paper containers of vindaloo and steaming-hot samosas on lichen-scarred boulders while white surf boomed against the ruddy, broken cliff beneath their feet.

  Dagmar slurped her mango lassi.

  “When I met him that time,” she said, “Bozbeyli said that the army generals who led previous coups all returned to the barracks.”

  Lincoln tilted his hat to the west, the better to intercept the sun, and nodded.

  “They did,” he said.

  “So why are we doing this, then?” she said. “Why aren’t we waiting for the junta to just go home?”

  “Bozbeyli’s different,” Lincoln said. “The previous military governments were composed of genuine patriots who believed they were acting in the country’s best interests. You didn’t see them behaving like military rulers elsewhere—after their retirement, they weren’t living in palaces, they weren’t hanging out with movie stars, and they didn’t have big Swiss bank accounts.”

  “But Bozbeyli’s in it for the money.”

  Lincoln cut a samosa with his plastic knife and fork, then thoughtfully chewed a piece. Dagmar caught a whiff of cumin on the wind.

  “When Atatürk first created the country,” he said, “he called it the Republic of Turks and Kurds. But over time the Kurds got sort of left out, and the government decided as more or less official policy that everyone in Turkey was a Turk by definition. The Kurds, according to this
scheme, were just Turks who hadn’t quite learned to be Turks yet, and so they had to be made to be proper Turks, and they were to be educated in Turkish and forbidden to speak their own language.” He waved his plastic fork. “Just as all Turkish Muslims were, by definition, Sunni Muslims—which left out a very large minority of Alevi Muslims… Christians and Jews can have churches and synagogues, but the Alevis can’t have mosques and have to meet in private homes, because all Muslims are officially Sunni, and so are all the mosques.”

  He looked up suddenly. “Are you following this?” he asked.

  “What are Alevis?” Dagmar asked.

  Lincoln flapped a hand. “Too complicated.”

  Dagmar reflected that this was not unlike everything else in Turkey.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I was talking about the Kurds, anyway,” Lincoln said. “So—given that the Turks were trying to extinguish their language and culture—a lot of them were less than pleased with the situation, and back in the nineties there was a genuinely dangerous Kurdish insurgency led by a party called the PKK. Which was mainly financed by Syria but also in part by Kurdish heroin dealers who were importing Afghan and Iranian narcotics along the traditional drug highway to the West. The Turkish authorities didn’t see why the heroin money should go to the insurrection, so they sent right-wing gangsters and the Gray Wolves and government assassins to kill the heroin dealers and take over their networks—and they largely succeeded. And then the heroin money started percolating up into the system, and before long the war was just too profitable to allow it to end, even after the insurgency had been crushed through the usual deportations, killings, and random acts of terror.

  “After which”—waving a bit of tikka masala on his plastic fork—“there was the Susurluk incident, where a Mercedes truck squashed an auto that held a police chief, a wanted heroin dealer and assassin, and a Kurdish member of parliament, along with the gangster’s mistress, drugs, and a hell of a lot of firearms. And the heroin dealer was carrying ID issued by the minister of the interior, which showed that both sides of the insurrection were hip deep in collusion. After that it was clear that the war was just being continued for all the drug money, and the Deep State was exposed and faded away, along with the war. For a while.”

  But the money, Lincoln continued, was still there. And the heroin was still there. And it became impossible for either the PKK or the authorities to resist all that, and so the war picked up again, and this time the death squads were killing moderate Kurds, anyone who suggested compromise was possible… the elected moderate Islamic government kept trying to make peace on terms that were unacceptable to the military, such as admitting that Kurds are Kurds and not Turks… and then the government started making remarkably clumsy efforts to assert its control of the military, by promoting Islamists to field command. And the result was a series of bombings and assassinations that served as the provocation for Bozbeyli and his clique to take command and restore order, essentially by canceling the chaos they themselves had provoked…

  “I don’t think the junta’s going back to the barracks,” Lincoln said. “Their profits are too big, and they’re finding life pretty easy right now.” He gestured toward the booming vastness of the sea. “Bozbeyli and his gang are the last of their kind—Turkey’s right on the verge of becoming a glorious twenty-first-century success, and I don’t want it devolving into a narco-terrorist state on NATO’s southern flank. So that’s why we’re here.”

  “Yeah, well,” Dagmar said. “I’m good with all that.”

  “I’m simplifying enormously,” said Lincoln.

  “I figured.”

  “And besides,” Lincoln said, “what we’re going to do is genuinely cool.”

  Dagmar nodded. “I got that, too.”

  How many people have to die, she wondered, before it all stops being cool?

  The jukebox in the officers’ club was playing Carl Perkins’s “Dixie Fried.” It was the end of Happy Hour and the place was full: Dagmar and her crew hadn’t been able to get a large enough table, so all six were clumped around a small, round table barely large enough to hold their drinks.

  Ismet, Tuna, and Rafet had returned after four days on the other side of the Green Line, working there with the camera teams and the Anatolian Skunk Works. Judy and the Turkish-speaking intern, Lloyd, had also come along. Rafet and Judy were sipping their soft drinks; the rest had lager.

  Dagmar looked at Ismet and Tuna.

  “Have you been working for Li—for Chatsworth all along?” she asked.

  Ismet seemed surprised by the question.

  “You mean, during the Stunrunner game?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No. We got recruited later.”

  Tuna put a big fist around his pint glass. “I think, uh, Chatsworth decided we were politically sound.”

  Certainly, Dagmar thought, during Stunrunner they had both demonstrated opposition to the regime. And they knew a lot of people and could bring other recruits into the scheme.

  And, of course, that meant no highly trained Company employee would be put at risk: only Turkish natives would be in danger. They were completely expendable. It was this realization that made Dagmar feel as if her ribs were closing in on her heart.

  “My boss was willing to let me take leave,” Ismet said. “He’s not doing that well anyway, since firms with contacts in the government are getting most of the business.”

  Dagmar cast a glance at Judy and Rafet: they seemed to be having a quiet conversation on their own, inaudible over Perkins’s vocal. She turned to Lloyd.

  The Air Force Brat was a quiet dark-haired young man, dressed in a soft chambray shirt and cords.

  “How did you learn to speak Turkish?” she asked.

  Lloyd seemed a little surprised to be included in the conversation.

  “I’m, uh—not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”

  “He speaks with an American accent,” Tuna offered.

  “Well,” Lloyd said. “My father is from Turkey, but I was born in the States.”

  “Do you have dual citizenship, then?” Dagmar asked.

  “I have a Turkish passport,” Lloyd said, “but I’ve never used it.”

  He was so clearly uncomfortable with the questions that Dagmar decided to change the subject. She looked at Ismet.

  “You said your grandmother was raised a nomad,” she said.

  Ismet adjusted his spectacles. “Yes. She was a Yörük. There are nomads in Turkey, even now.”

  “Why do they… do what they do? Keep on the move?”

  “They follow their herds. In the winter they’re on the south coast near Konya—actually most of them now have regular winter houses—but in the summer the sun cooks the grazing, so they move up to the high pastures in the Tauros Mountains and live in big black goatskin tents.” He took a sip of his lager. “They’re very poor, but then they need very little they can’t provide for themselves.”

  Lloyd spoke, surprising Dagmar.

  “Some nomads,” he added, “travel because they’re poor—they don’t own any land of their own; they have to keep on the move, and graze their animals on the highway right-of-way or places that no one actually owns.”

  Dagmar remembered that this was a country where every city was surrounded by illegal settlements, lived in by poverty-stricken refugees from the country. She turned back to Ismet.

  “And your grandmother married out?”

  “She had an arranged marriage with the son of a merchant. The son was able to give the Yörük access to things they needed, and the Yörük provided the merchant with a steady supply of cheese, butter, hides, kilims, and so on.”

  Dagmar asked if he still had nomad relatives.

  “Yes, certainly. I used to visit them during my school breaks.” He gave a nostalgic smile. “That’s really the old Turkish lifestyle, isn’t it? Living in a tent, lying on carpets, eating meat and cheese and milk, cooking everything on a brazier. Our ancestors lived that w
ay for thousands of years.”

  “Sounds like an ideal vacation for a boy.”

  Ismet shrugged. “I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should have—I missed my rap music and the Internet. And I’m afraid I was bored looking after the sheep.” He smiled again. “I enjoyed riding the horses, though. I’d shoot my toy bow from horseback and pretend I was a Gazi.”

  “I’d like to meet your nomad relatives,” Dagmar said.

  Ismet absorbed this with interest, eyes bright behind his spectacles.

  “Once the generals are gone,” he said, “I’d be happy to introduce you.”

  “I wish I was up in the mountains now,” Tuna said. “It’s so bloody hot here.” He pressed his pint glass to his forehead but then took the glass away and scowled at it—the lager, not very cool to begin with, was by now room temperature.

  “At least you’re getting away from Akrotiri now and again,” Dagmar said. “I’m tired of being cooped up here within smelling distance of the runway.”

  “If you have free time,” Ismet said, his eyes still bright, “I have a car. I can take you out to see the sights.”

  Dagmar felt a warm current of pleasure at the thought of Ismet and his car and the whole Island of Aphrodite to lose themselves in.

  “Are you all right,” Dagmar asked, “here on the Greek side of the line?”

  Tensions at the moment were high. Cyprus was still divided into the official, UN-recognized Greek south and the Turkish north, the latter of which since the invasion of 1974 had been organized as a republic recognized only by Turkey. Persistent attempts to solve the crisis on the part of the UN and the EU had resulted in a certain softening of attitudes: the situation hadn’t been resolved, but it had grown more blurry, more complex, more nuanced.

  But General Bozbeyli’s regime had hardened things again, had thrown all of Cyprus into stark light and shadow. Though the situation technically hadn’t changed, though no agreements had been abrogated, a series of belligerent proclamations by the military government had heartened the Turkish nationalists and driven the Greeks into a frenzy of resentment. Both sides were demonstrating. No one was brandishing guns yet, but it was clear that guns could be brandished, that shots could be fired, armies and navies mobilized, the whole of the region brought into bloody chaos.