dual strip updated versions of the F-4G'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
66 ROBERT IUDLUM
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 pressurised 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
takeout: Release the power of the beast, let it free.
RolU Faster, faster; the ground is a blur, the carrier
deck a mass of passing "ray, 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 skill held. After the
Navy during the academic years in Massachusetts
and North Caroiina, 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
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 67
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
hirn, 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
ny 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 attache 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 attache case to his wrist, he
would have breathed far more comfortably.
Jacques-Louis Bertholdier, age fifty-nine, only
child of Alphonse and Marie-Therese Bertholdier,
was born at the military hospital in Dakar. Father a
career officer in the French Army, reputedly auto-
cratic 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 mili-
tary 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
cha
68 ROBERT LUDLUM
otictime, 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 re-
treating German troops. Hospitalizaffon 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 informaffon 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
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 69
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 ex-
panding 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 vio-
lent 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 alter-
ing the course of the war convinced the hard-line
militarists that the inferior Asian forces could be de-
feated 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. Al-
though 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."
. .
70 R08ERT LUDLUM
Many say that he was waiting a signal that
never came. Again he was transferred, serving
tours in Vienna and West Berlin.
Four years later, however, he broke the
maid 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 insurrechonists' 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 Elysee. 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 (verbahm translahon): "A great sol-
dier-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 charge d'affaires at major embassies
during the period of France's parhcipahon 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 photo-
graphs, 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
THE AQUITAINE PROGRESSION 71
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 canters 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.
Converse rubbed his eyes and rang for a drink.
While waiting for the Scotch he scanned the next
few paragraphs, his memory of the man now jogged;
the information was familiar history and not terribly
relevant. Bertholdier's name had been put forward
by several ultraconservative factions, hoping to pull
him
out of the military into the political wars but
nothing had come of the attempts. The ultimate
summons had passed him by; it never came.
Currently, as a director of a large firm on the Paris
stock exchange, he is basically a figurehead capable
of impressing the wealthy and keeping the
socialistically inclined at bay by the sheer weight of
his own legend.
He travels everywhere in a company limousine
(read: staff car), and wherever he goes his arrival is
expected, the proper welcome arranged. The vehicle
is a dark-blue American Lincoln Continental, Li-
cense Plate 100-1. The restaurants he frequents are:
Taillevent, the Ritz, Julien, and Lucas-Carton. For
lunches, however, he consistently goes to a private
club called L'Etalon Blanc three to four times a
week. It is a very-off-the-track establishment whose
membership is restricted to the highest-ranking mili-
tary, what's left of the rich nobility, and wealthy
72 ROBERT LUDLUM
fawners who, if they can't be either, put their
money on both so as to be in with the crowd.
Joel smiled; the editor of the report was not
without humor. Still, something was missing. His
lawyer's mind looked for the lapse that was not
explained. What was the signal Bertholdier had not
been given at Dienbienphu? What had the
imperious De Gaulle said to the rebellious officer,
and what had the rebel said to the great man? Why
was he consistently accommodated but only
accommodated never summoned to power? An
Alexander had been primed, forgiven elevated, then
dropped? There was a message buried in these
pages, but Joel could not find it.
Converse reached what the writer of the report
considered relevant only in that it completed the
portrait, adding little, however, to previous
information.
Bertholdier's private life appears barely perti-
nent to the activities that concern us. His marriage
was one of convenience in the purest La Rochefou-
Robert Ludlum - Aquatain Progression.txt Page 11