The Profession (12 page)

Into this vacuum flowed mercenary forces. Ground occupation became outsourced, funded at first by DoD in the interest of national security but before long by corporations or consortiums seeking to secure their investments, exploit contracted-for resources, or protect their personnel and infrastructure. Rates of pay became market driven; overnight, salaries shot to double and triple those of the conventional military. Incentives and bonuses made the sign-up packages even more attractive. The exodus from the army, navy, and Marines was spectacular. Applicants queued by the thousands. And these were quality troops—Airborne, Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers, the cream. Average age was thirty-two. Majors were competing for postings as O-2s. Nor was this groundswell limited to grunts and trigger pullers; staff officers, planners, intelligence, tech, and logistics specialists were throwing elbows, greedy to get in the door.

Merc had ceased to be a four-letter word. In those most overextended, underresourced, and grimly anti-American times, the president and Congress had at last found a means of projecting U.S. power that was (a) mission-effective, (b) cost-effective, and (c) did not run afoul of the extreme risk aversion of the American people.

Were these new for-hire forces alien, treacherous, or unreliable? Hell, no—they were just our same guys, in upgraded uniforms, finally getting paid what they deserved.

The final stroke that made the idea of mercenary forces acceptable to the American public was the inclusion of foreign volunteers. The Probst-Avenal Act of 2021, which provided a path to U.S. citizenship for overseas nationals who had served thirty-six months in for-hire combat billets, brought in the cream of veteran warriors
from every army on the globe and meant that homegrown U.S. casualties would remain low low low.

How good were these contracted forces? Could a mercenary army hold its own in a straight-up fight with the conventional U.S. military? Never. Force Insertion, for all its quality of personnel and latitude of maneuver, couldn’t begin to match the technology and transport; the aerial, naval, satellite, and drone capabilities; the intelligence apparatus or the heavy (read, nuclear) weapons systems that could only be funded by entities on the scale of nation-states. Head to head, a private versus national army clash was a no-go. But in certain arenas, in failed-state warfare, in tribal and ethnic conflicts, in contests where restrictive rules of engagement hamstrung conventional operations … in these areas, a merc force could shine. And since these were the areas an empire needed, pay-to-play forces came to be seen in a fresh, new light. The idea of mercs achieved respectability.

But what of my team now? What’s our mission? Chow time comes and goes. A call from Petrocelli informs us that Salter has been delayed. Ten minutes later a text says he won’t get here for two more days. Patience is the prime virtue of the warrior. Still, my guys are hot for action. They want to know what our job is. Will we reinforce Salter’s armatures in southern Iraq? If so, in what capacity? Where? When? Why has Salter specified this particular crew, in these numbers, under this leadership, in this configuration? And what’s the connection to Tim Hayward?

The two days pass; Salter’s still hung up in Basra and Umm Qasr. A third day. Still no orders. More troops fly out of PSAB. Thousands more fly in.

We train. Fourteen hours a day I rehearse the team and myself. The men are eager and ready. Everyone is excited. Salter has left one top sheet for me—a hand-scrawled Concept of Operation that lists the evolutions he wants us to train in.

SSE is sensitive site exploitation. Raids. DA is direct action. Snatch-and-grabs and assassinations. SERE is escape and evasion. An AT-7 is a shoulder-fired antitank missile; C-6 is a new, super-powerful explosive; an RRM is the latest generation of portable surface-to-air missile.

Fourteen hours a day become sixteen and eighteen for me. It is no easy chore to mold a unit, even of mature, proven professionals. I do it the only way I know how: by working twice as hard as everyone else. I’m awake before the first team member opens his eyes, and I don’t knock off till the last one gets his head down. I know every man’s weapons, IADs, SOPs, and TTPs more thoroughly than he does; I can do every job as well as or better than the man assigned to it—and he knows it. Every operator except the Englishman Coombs, Chris Candelaria, and the UAE Special Forces guys has served with me on multiple deployments. They know I will eat my own liver before I will let them down, and they know I will eat
their
livers if they give me or the team any less than their high-end max. I love them and I tell them. I tell them over and over.

In a war zone, even a staging area like this, I can never sleep. I need pills to close my eyes and pills to pry them open; I gobble tabs to shit and capsules to stop shitting. I take steroids. I drink. The cargo pockets of my trousers are a one-man Walgreen’s. I’m stocked with Percocet, Vicodin, Demerol, OxyContin; Dexedrine, Methedrine, Ritalin. I’ve got reds, white, blacks; Ambien, ephedrine, and a cocktail of my own—Valium, Inderal, and atropine: the first keeps
you calm, the second blocks adrenaline to the heart, the third keeps your hands from sweating; you’re so calm, you can cruise a lie detector test. Quality liquor is wasted in a combat zone. My body likes the cheap stuff anyway. Early Times, Carstairs, any kind of rye or Irish whisky. I shower in it. I brush my teeth with it. We all do.

How do you motivate warriors for hire? You don’t. They’re geeked already. They fight for pay, yeah—but in the shit, money means nothing. They’ve gone way beyond that—past country, past pride, beyond even love for their brothers. They have reached the place, these play-for-pay-ers, where they don’t give a damn about anything and they still give their all.

A civilian might ask, Why do you need to train? Aren’t these professionals prepared already? Yes, they are, but still a thousand and one mission-specific skills and individual and team procedures must be defined and rehearsed. Remember, we are no longer U.S. military with unlimited resources and standardized protocols. We’re privateers, we’re gunslingers. What gear do we have for night operations, for land navigation, for IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace), for communication by FM, VHF, low satellite and high; for ordnance use and disposal? What weapons, rations, medical gear? What’s our casualty treatment and evacuation scheme? If heliborne CASEVAC is out of the question where we’re going (and it probably is), what are our scenarios for mass casualties, for severely wounded individuals, for dead? Communications. Will we have American comm gear or Chinese or Bulgarian or some shit we’ve never heard of? Iridium phones, supersats, IMBTTRs, PSC-8s, and PRC-220s? Task organization. Timeline planning. Under-fire TTP—Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.

The team and every member have to master drills for Driver Down, Team Leader Down, Break Contact drills, Close Quarters Battle drills, Emergency Assault drills. What tech gear have we got? Will we be supported by drones, Ravens, Dragonflies? Have we got
handheld BF Trackers, “confetti” surveillance pods, Falconview imagery software to plan our missions? What’s our flyaway package? What’s the equipment? What are the protocols? What host nation units or individuals will we be working with? What indirect fires can we call on, if any? What air assets? Who brings us in, who gets us out, where the hell are we going in the first place, how do we find it, day or night, and what do we need to know once we get there?

Mission planning: what’s our primary scenario, alternate, contingency, and emergency? What weapons will we have? These all need to be zeroed, laser PESQ-3s and -7s locked down, and the same for night and thermal sights and surveillance gear. What about foreign weapons? Is every team member up to speed on Soviet-era RPKs, PKMs, AKs, and anything else we might stumble onto and have to use? Will we be crossing rivers, deserts, mountains? Mounted or dismounted? Will we be conducting reconnaissance, assaults, or assassinations? Will we be breaching fortified compounds? Will we need greenbacks, gold, interpreters? And when we’ve finally trained for every contingency, what happens when the shit hits the fan and we’re on to Plan B, Plan C, and Plan Z? Combat is a team sport. We have to drill. We have to practice. We have to rehearse.

The final factor we train for is the unexpected. What if we’re snugged down in a hide and innocent children or shepherds stumble onto us? This ethical nightmare has screwed special operators again and again. What if we hook up with our host-country nationals and they turn against us? What if they test us, demand money or the performance of some abhorrent act? What if some grinning, gap-toothed chief puts a pistol in our hands and demands that we execute a luckless local that the leader claims is a traitor? What if he insists that we compromise our security? Leave one of our men with him alone? What if an HC entity tries to make us take some of its booger eaters as part of our team? What if we consent and one is wounded or killed? If we’re captured ourselves, what’s our story?

The team comes together fast. They’re like thoroughbreds at the gate. My only concern is delay. Day seven: the group has reached fighting pitch. I e-mail Salter. He’d better use us fast before we start going dull or worse.

Salter always answers promptly.

See you next stage, w/in 72 hrs. S
.

THREE MINUTES AFTER THIS
text from Salter, a video link comes in from A.D. I click it. Up pops a SkyNews clip of her doing a stand-up on Route 80 north of Kuwait City. Columns of merc transport stream past in the background, heading for Safwan and the border of southern Iraq. The clip is what they call in the news biz a “tail”—an outtake, recorded after the real broadcast piece. Tails are full of profanity and mockery. My estranged bride grins into camera: Eat your heart out, Gent.

She signs “Call me” and “love,” our traditional code.

A follow-up text comes in near midnight. A.D. is safe, rolling north with the troops. She has run into Dimitri and Dimitri, “the Brothers Karamazov”—Russian pilots we knew in East Africa. The pair is flying for Kiril Pachenko, the gunrunner, under contract to Force Insertion. No sign of Salter, says A.D., but she has an interview scheduled tomorrow with Juan-Esteban Echeverria, the former secretary of state whom I met in Scotland. Why is he here? Can I tell her anything? She slates a time for us to talk and signs off.

Dimitri and Dimitri.

I toss on my cot, remembering them—and the first time I met A.D. For some reason, the sight of her in-theater has upset me. This is her job; I understand that. She’s great at it. But war is no place for a woman; I don’t care what you say. I worry about her, and I’m furious at her for making me worry. I blame myself. She should be at home in our kitchen, fat and pregnant.

I take two Ambien.

Outside our hangar, a KC-130 taxis past with its big turbo-props droning. I close my eyes and I’m back in “the Horn” …

East Africa, 2022.

I was still in the Marine Corps then.

The thing about East Africa is there are no roads. You fly everywhere. Pilots are as common as cockroaches in Africa. Every white man, it seems, owns his own small plane or chopper. It’s like having a car in the States.

In Africa you see a lot of Eastern-bloc crews, Soviet-era pilots who left home and wound up working for Alex Martini, Kiril Pachenko, or Teddy Ostrofsky. No pilot in Africa wears a uniform. It’s shorts and shirts. The best you can hope for is the odd flight suit or bomber jacket that the flier wears to keep warm at altitude.

Above the African plains, the number one hazard is birds—pterodactyl-sized vultures that go zinging around like air-to-air missiles. Landing, the peril is wildebeest and zebra migrating across the airstrips. There’s no radio at half the sites, and the weather changes minute by minute.

Every big plane you see in Africa, if it’s not Lufthansa or BEA, belongs to an arms merchant. They’re all flying guns. Most of the planes are antiques from the Soviet days—Ilyushins, Andropovs, and Antonovs that were obsolete before I was born. I can’t begin to guess when the last spare parts for them were manufactured,
but it certainly wasn’t in this century. That was when I met Conrad Hilliaresse. He was one of the few non-Russians flying, and the only nondrunk. He took me on a walkaround of his plane one time, explaining that even these ancient Ilyushins had redundant systems for everything, sometimes four and five contingencies deep. Yes, he acknowledged, those four or five were now defunct, if not absent entirely, but the basic flying platform remained functional. This particular aircraft, he told me, was using orange juice in place of hydraulic fluid.

“Conrad, if you’re not worried, I’m not.”

“Just to be on the safe side though, I shan’t retract the landing gear.”

The way you fly in Africa, as I said, is by hitching rides. Schedules don’t exist. The pilots, no matter how broke they are, won’t let you pay. There’s no pressurization on these aircraft and certainly no heat. And forget talking. The interiors are louder than Super Stallions and the fuselages are so riddled with bullet holes, patched and unpatched, that a gale howls fore to aft like a wind tunnel. On one flight with some Aussie Special Forces, I was watching a black African crewman shouting back and forth to the pilots, in KiSwahili, as he, the African, climbed up and down on cargo boxes tugging on wire cables that ran along the inboard flanks of the fuselage. One of the Aussies piped up. “What the fack ya doin’, mate?”

The African shouted back: “Working the rudder.”

I met Dimitri and Dimitri on a flight like that, from Princeville in Zamibia to Nairobi, on an errand for Salter. The Russians were flying a Tupolev Tu-114, which was the civilian cargo version of the Tu-95 bomber. I don’t know how old that thing was, but it had propellers. I remember in jump school at Fort Benning, guys who got airsick would puke inside their own shirts rather than soil the beautiful clean deck of the army’s C-130s. Nothing like that on this Tupolev; the underfoot was like the floor of a barn. I got so sick on
this flight that they let me go up into the cockpit so I could see the horizon to settle my stomach. The pilots were both about fifty and both drunk as polecats. To navigate they had little tin boxes the size of iPods on the dashboard with a three-by-three window cut into them, like a TV screen, and a long strip of map paper scrolling on the inside. The paper was from a road map, like you’d buy in a gas station. I’m not making this up. The pilots scrolled the map by turning a little knob on the side of the box; they navigated by following the rivers and occasional dirt roads. I asked if they wanted to use my GPS. They said it would only confuse them.