LUCKY BASTARD
By Charles McCarry
Random House, 385 pages, $24.95
THE BLACK TULIP
By Milt Bearden
Random House, 321 pages, $24.95
Living isn’t always that easy even in summertime. So as the days grow longer I find myself piling large amounts of new thrillers onto my reading table. When the burdens of work and the heat of real life get to be too much, I’ll always have a couple of good new novels of intrigue close at hand to lose myself in.
Except that with the best of thrillers, you often find such keen analysis of the real world that escape becomes hopeless. Take the new Charles McCarry novel, for example. McCarry, an old master, has written some of the best espionage fiction around, as well as having been the co-author of books by a couple of men–Alexander Haig and Donald Regan–who served in high government places. In “Lucky Bastard,” he seems to meld the two modes, turning out a spy thriller that takes us into the heart of American politics.
His new novel borrows its premise from Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” that of the enemy-trained sleeper agent who burrows into the American center only to be reawakened for nefarious duty some years down the road. In this case, the sleeper is an American politician named John Fitzgerald Adams. Jack Adams is a genial, opportunistic young fellow, very attractive to women and fixated by the notion that he is the love child of John F. Kennedy and a Navy nurse. Agents of a rogue branch of the KGB pick him up while he’s still at college and begin grooming him for political office. He has the winning smile and persuasive personality, the pheromones of an elk in heat and the energy of an atomic power plant. The Russians eventually supply him with an attractive wife, who is a dedicated Stalinist agent in place, and a nearly unlimited supply of cash for his political campaigns.
Telling us this story is Adams’ Russian control, an enormously sophisticated and utterly dedicated spymaster with the mien, as one of his other American dupes tells him, of Lenin. ” `The faintly–forgive me–Mephistophelean regard,’ ” an acolyte (soon to become a dead man, in the service of the cause of furthering young Adams’ career) says. ” `The cheekbones, the forehead. . . .’ “
It’s actually McCarry who’s something like the real Mephistophelean. He offers us a delicious plot and sharply drawn characters who move through a nasty world of double-dealing, political and financial intrigue, and cheerfully described sexual encounters galore. In exchange we have to admire his uncanny ability, as Adams draws closer and closer to the White House, to make us draw parallels, without much straining, between Adams and his wife and Bill and Hillary Clinton. This wickedly Republican tilt to the novel adds enormously to its success.
In “The Black Tulip,” much-decorated CIA officer Milt Bearden, a veteran of the agency’s department of clandestine services, trades on his experience in the field in Afghanistan during the mid-’80s, the time of the anti-Soviet resistance. Of course only he and the CIA censors who pored over the manuscript prior to its publication can know what in these pages is authentic and what is concocted. What matters to the reader is what works and what doesn’t.
As a veteran reader, I can fully attest that the battlefield lore and scenes of military engagement between the Afghan rebels and the regular Russian army are more than enough to carry the book along. It’s the plot that’s a bit worrisome. Espionage agent Alexander Fannin, the book’s major character, retires from the CIA under a bit of a cloud, only to be called back to duty by his friend and then director of the agency, Bill Casey. Casey doesn’t care about the inferences floated by one of Fannin’s rivals that the Russian-speaking spy may be the legendary Soviet mole in the CIA. He asks Fannin to go on special assignment in Afghanistan, working with the Muslim tribesmen who want to eject the Russians from their territory.
This is where things get a bit hokey. It seems that Fannin has an expatriate Russian wife who has a Soviet cousin who turns out to be the KGB agent in charge of Kabul. An abduction by Afghan rebels of a young Soviet officer brings Fannin into contact with the KGB man. Eventually he flies his wife into Afghanistan to confront her cousin in the hope of tilting him into passing information about the progress of the Russian war effort, or lack of it, to the CIA. Just before their confrontation, Fannin shows her a video of himself and the KGB man in negotiation over the release of the Soviet officer. She recognizes him immediately, though she has never met him before. ” `I knew it from the first close-up,’ ” she says. ” `The eyes and the face. I thought I was looking at a brother I don’t have. Then I saw the mark on his forehead just below the hairline. It seems that we all have that strawberry mark somewhere. But I can’t believe that you and this colonel, my mother’s nephew, my only cousin, are standing there in this incredible setting. Things don’t happen that way.”
That’s what I thought too. In terms of the plot, “The Black Tulip” doesn’t have anything remotely resembling the spark and dazzle of McCarry’s work. But when Bearden sticks to the descriptions of Fannin’s activities in the field with his Afghan warriors, his book shows off a little spark and dazzle of its own. The ambush of a Russian general in a jet high above the mountains, the story of how a Muslim leader metes out punishment to a group of wild-catting North African irregulars, the scenes from KGB life–all this makes the book a lively enterprise and well worth reading despite the flaws.
