It’s late in the day, but to all you veterans, thank you for your service. Slackers like me owe you big.

The Second Saladin, it appears to me, marks a milepost on author Stephen Hunter’s journey toward finding his niche as a novelist. Some of the elements that will make his Bob/Earl Swagger books so compelling are already there, but he hasn’t yet shaken off a tendency to demonstrate his realism through grim pessimism.

Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book. Though published in 1982 and set in that same time period, the centrality of Kurdistan to the plot makes the whole business remarkably relevant more than two decades later.

Back in the 1970s, the CIA sent agents to train and supply Kurdish insurgents who were trying to throw off Iraqi rule. Then, due to changes in the international geopolitical situation, the support was pulled. The Kurds were left to fend for themselves, a development they’d seen many times before.

Leading the CIA operation (in this story) was a legendary American operative named Paul Chardy. He grew close to a Kurdish leader named Ulu Beg, and saved his son’s life, in return for which Ulu Beg swore him brotherhood. He also fell in love with an American woman named Johanna, a do-gooder who’d gone to Kurdistan to change the world and found herself in over her head.

Then the betrayal came. Betrayal all around. Ulu Beg’s people were massacred, and Chardy was captured and tortured by the Russians.

As this book begins, Ulu Beg enters the United States on a mission of vengeance, trained and supplied by agents of shadowy forces.

And Paul Chardy, now emotionally broken and retired, is called out of his quiet life to intercept him.

His first task—to find Johanna and talk her into helping him stop their old friend.

You can pretty much predict how this book ought to turn out, but you’d probably be mistaken. The whole thing gets very convoluted, secret on secret, betrayal on betrayal. In fact, I’d say Hunter kinks the twists a little too tightly, forcing so many direction changes (and killing off so many sympathetic characters) that the story loses momentum.

Still, I enjoyed it quite a lot.

But I didn’t come away from it in a cheerful state of mind.