The Second Saladin by Stephen Hunter

the hardened professionals performed their jobs—the M-16 and AK-47, antagonists of a hundred thousand firefights of the sixties and seventies; or the Swedish K sofavored by Agency cowboys in ’Nam; or the compact little MAC-10 or -11, other racy favorites.
    “The real name is C-S-A-R-D-I,” said Trewitt, “Hungarian. His dad was a doctor, an emigré in the thirties. His mom is Irish. A quiet woman who still lives in the apartment in Rogers Park. The dad was a little nuts. He was a drunk, his practice failed, he ended up a company doctor in a steel mill. He went into an institution after he retired, and died there. He was hard-core anticommunist though, and a staunch Catholic. He filled the kid’s head with all kinds of stuff about the Reds. And he wanted him to be tough; he really put him through some hell to make him tough. He—”
    “Jim, let’s move it along.” Yost’s stern voice from out of the darkness.
    “Sure, sorry,” Trewitt said, convinced he heard Lanahan snicker.
    Two quick clicks: Chardy the college athlete; Chardy, hair sheared off, in the denim utilities of a Marine boot.
    “Marine officer training, after college,” Trewitt announced.
    Trewitt had known of Chardy for some time. His job on the Historical Staff, to which he’d so recently been attached, had been to edit the memoirs of retiring officers who were paid by the Agency to stay at Langley an extra year and write, the idea being, first, to allow any impulse toward literature to play itself out under controlled circumstances and second, to compile a history of the means and methods of the secret wars. Aspects or fragments of Chardy kept showing up in these accounts, memories of him echoing through a dozen different sources, sometimes under cryptonyms. He’d been pretty famous in his way.
    “And here he is,” Trewitt announced, clicking his button, “among the Nungs.”
    Chardy had been recruited out of the Marine Corpsin Vietnam in the early days, ’63, ’64, where he was for a time a platoon commander and then a company commander and finally, having extended his tour, an intelligence officer, coordinating with South Vietnamese Rangers and running (and occasionally accompanying) long-range recons up near the DMZ. But an Agency hotshot named Frenchy Short talked him into jumping to the Company, which at that time desperately needed jungle-qualified military types.
    The slide on the wall now was a favorite of Trewitt’s, for it seemed to express exactly a certain heroic posture—the two men, Paul and Frenchy, among Chinese mercenaries from the Vietnamese hill country whom they’d trained and led in a hit-and-run war way out in the deep, beyond the reach of law or civilization.
    “He did two long stretches with the Nungs,” Trewitt said to the men in the quiet briefing room in Langley, Virginia, “with a stay in between at our Special Warfare school in Panama.”
    The two of them, the younger, leaner Chardy, his black Irish face furious and pale, and the older Frenchy, a stumpy man with a crewcut, thick but not fat, his raw bulk speaking more of power than sluggishness. They wore those vividly spotted non-reg jungle camouflage outfits—called tiger suits—and were hatless. Paul had an AK-47 and a cigarette dangled insolently from his lip; Frenchy was equipped with a grease gun and a smile. They were surrounded by their crew of Chinese dwarfs, tiger-suited too, a collection of sullen Mongolian faces that in their impassive toughness seemed almost Apache. Wiry little men, with carbines, grenades, a Thompson or two, a gigantic BAR—this was before the fancy black plastic M-16s arrived in Vietnam. The picture had a nineteenth-century feel to it: the two white gods surrounded by their yellow killers, yet in subtle ways that the photograph managedto convey, the white men were turning wog themselves, going native in the worst possible way.
    “God, old Frenchy Short,” somebody said; Trewitt thought it might have been Sam Melman.