The Profession (19 page)

El-Masri’s partner, Ajmal, bellowed through a bullhorn in Pashto: “Bring us the body of the American!” Avi hissed into his headset mike. The first blast went up at the foot of the slope. The concussion equaled four thousand-pound bombs. It felt like the whole mountain had exploded. In seconds, massive clouds of black dust engulfed the gorge. Shingle was raining like shrapnel. I could hear women screaming and goats bleating.

“Bring us the body of the American!”

I waited twenty seconds, then nodded to Avi. The second blast made my brain rattle in its pan. I spit blood. A roar that felt like thunder times ten rolled upslope from the gorge. Stone houses, scores of tons, were plunging into the river.

Avi was right; the violence of the explosions was more than human senses could endure. The concussion unmanned you at the
cellular level. Our team was two hundred yards uphill from the blast site, shielded by blockwall upon blockwall of megatonnage stone, and still our internal organs felt bruised and battered.

“Bring us the body of the American!”

Armed shapes appeared upslope from the square. I saw muzzles flash. I dove for cover.

Avi detonated the third charge. We all plunged behind walls. Slides started on the west end of the village; half the mountain was coming down. The firing from upslope stopped. El-Masri, Tim Hayward, and I peered cautiously from our hides.

A form stepped forward.

A tribesman—an elder, about fifty—appeared across the stone square. On one side of the site was the mountain, climbing straight up for a thousand feet; on the other three sides squatted the as-yet-undestroyed upper houses of the village. Ajmal shouted to the man to give us the American’s body. Our Pashtuns scurried forward, reinforcing me and el-Masri. More armed tribesmen appeared in the shadows.

The chief started toward me, hands above his head. I set my M4–40 on the ground and did the same. “What’s he saying?” I was shouting into my headset.

El-Masri: “Loosely translated: ‘Eat shit and die.’ ”

I closed to ten feet from the chief. From its sheath behind my shoulder, I drew an East Indian planter’s knife, the kind used to cut sugar cane. The weapon was two-thirds the size of a machete and as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. With one swipe, I opened the chief’s throat from ear to ear. I snatched him by the beard, to keep his weight from plunging. Howls of shock and horror pealed from the muj. With two backhand blows, I hacked off the chief’s head. Blood spurted from the void of his neck, painting the front of my
shalwar kameez
trousers.

Avi hit the next trigger.

What was our plan? To create terror. Visceral, cellular terror. No lesser force could compel these proud, primordial tribal warriors. Death meant nothing to them; they would send themselves and everyone they loved to hell in the name of pride and honor.

Evil, unholy, animal terror. Only that would make them crack.

Avi’s fourth blast blew me sideways into a stone wall. The chief’s head vanished; I never saw it or his body again. I felt as if my shoulders had been wrenched from their sockets. My knees were jelly. I couldn’t see or hear or think.

Somehow I got to my feet. Chutes and Tim Hayward were lifting me. Two boys of the village, naked and burned black, were crawling toward us upslope across the square. Blood was sheeting from their ears, eyes, and mouths. Their hands, raw as pulped meat, pled for mercy.

They were dragging a plastic sack.

In the sack was Rob’s body.

El-Masri and one of our Pashtuns took it; they peered inside. “Where’s the head, you sons of whores?” The boys staggered back down the slope; they returned in moments with a skull. The rest of the bag was bones. Later, on the outmarch, I carried this parcel myself. Its weight was that of a doll.

Our air controller was pumping his fist up and down, meaning hurry, he’s got our chopper on the way to take us out.

Avi came up beside me.

“How many charges left?” I asked.

Eight, he said. His expression asked,
What should I do?

“Blow down the whole mountain.”

2145z 3 SEPTEMBER 2032
,
a warning order comes from Pete Petrocelli. Our group—now officially Team Bravo—is to be ready to move out from PSAB in six hours. Aircraft and pilots have been assigned to us; we will not wait for rotation or for force availability; we’ll have our own birds and our own flyers. With Coombs, Chutes, and el-Masri, I spend till 0400 staging our gear in the hangar we’ve taken for our own and the rest of the night in the Air Control Center, going over plans and contingencies with the rotary- and fixed-wing pilots who will take us out of Prince Sultan and to our destination, which, we are told, could be any of four different sites requiring six different insertion schemes—nor have we been informed of the real geo location of the landing zones; we are given only sector maps with Americanized overlay code names (MSR Miami, Hill 321). We still don’t know what country, or even what region, we’re dropping into.

This is Salter’s doing. He has become, since Rob’s death and the Senate hearings nine years ago, a chess player on levels beyond those customarily occupied by military commanders. He lets others know the minimum necessary to perform their missions, nothing more.
Every scrap of information is meted out with multiple objects in mind—and for the eyes and ears of multiple audiences. Salter has taught himself how to leak and how to conceal, how to let specific individuals find out what he wants them to know when he wants them to know it, and how to keep them in the dark until a moment of his own choosing—all for his own purposes, which he reveals to no one.

He never speaks of Rob again. He attends the funeral alone. I’m not there. I’m with Tim Hayward, Chutes, and Q in the military hospital of the Israeli air base at Ramat David, losing three toes to frostbite and part of a lung to complications from pneumonia. I have lost twenty-seven pounds in eleven days. El-Masri and two of our Pashtuns are recovering in a separate ward from exposure, dehydration, and dysentery. Escape has taken not four hours as planned, but most of two weeks, on the ground, fighting all the way. I’m still in hospital—the Fifteenth Scottish General, in Gibraltar, by then—when Rob’s body finally arrives home.

The funeral is at Arlington. Rob is a Silver Star recipient, along with three Bronze Stars with combat Vs and two Purple Hearts. That rates full military honors. Gen. Salter attends in civilian clothes. A.D. covers the event for
Topix
, the London mega-zine. The day is overcast with snow flurries and an icy wind off the Potomac. Mrs. Cole arrives early, alone. Two ex-senators (but no current ones) and four congressmen stand in the ranks. The remaining mourners are friends, family, and military. Reporters—of whom there are no fewer than fifty—are kept at a discreet distance by a Marine guard detachment.

Salter reads a single passage from Marcus Aurelius. He speaks not a word to the press. Maggie Cole comes no nearer to Salter than fifty feet. The pair makes no eye contact, nor does any intermediary pass a note or verbally convey a sentiment. Mrs. Cole leaves, driving her own gray Land Rover. Salter departs in a chauffeur-driven Lincoln
town car, which spirits him directly to Dulles, where he boards a private jet—all this is A.D.’s reporting—with flight documents filed for Stensted, London. The aircraft is leased to Force Insertion.

When I return to the States in late February, a package is waiting for me. Inside are two Naval Academy rings—one from 1992, Salter’s; and one from 2016, Rob’s. A note in Salter’s handwriting says this only:
In a hundred lifetimes, I can never repay you
.

A.D. has a second envelope for me with a return address from Lausanne, Switzerland. Two mornings later, a man flies in from that city to take me to breakfast. When he flies out, I have become the holder of an account in which resides $2.7 million.

Mrs. Cole sends a car to bring me for dinner, alone, at her farm in Middleburg, Virginia. She has two long letters from Salter, portions of which she allows me to read. She’s emotional. Rob’s death and its cynical exploitation by Salter’s enemies, along with Salter’s own departure under such conditions of disgrace, have devastated her.

Salter, she tells me, is in London. He has assumed command of all Force Insertion field units.

He has become a mercenary.

I remember at that time feeling sorry for Salter. What species of “assignment” was he likely to be honchoing for Force Insertion in some third world cesspit? Supporting the Spetsnaz on cross-border assaults into Kyrgyzstan? Protecting platinum extraction sites in Central Africa? Salter was a Marine; this shit must be hell to him.

But when I’d run into Salter in the field—by 2024 I was working these merc gigs myself—he looked lean and hard and even more charismatic as a privateer than he had been as a USMC three-star. He was a man on a mission, Chutes said once, though none of us could say exactly what the mission was. Salter moved like a deposed heavyweight champ, who trains and trains in his private camp in the mountains, waiting for a return shot at the title, which he knows will come again and which, this time, he’ll be ready for.

I flew a dust-off with him one morning over Khartoum, in the middle of the north-south secession struggle in ’23, when John Milnes of Fox/BBC wrote that “the confluence of the Blue and White Nile has become the Red Nile, incarnadined with the blood of innocents.” Salter’s old Jump CP—his mobile command post—remained intact, with Gunny Dainty and other vets now serving as contractors pulling down half a mill apiece. But there was an additional unit that none of us had seen before. The troops called them “sugar men.” They brought the money. They were civilians—Yanks and Brits, but also Germans and Russians, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans, and Chinese. They had Salter’s ear when the rest of us couldn’t get near him.

I never asked where the $2.7 million came from that wound up in my bank account. But you had to wonder: if that much cash is flowing to me, how much more is being lavished on players in the echelons above? And since when did former Marine generals own the savvy to stash cash in numbered accounts in Geneva and Lausanne? Me, I’d never even heard of these fucking places.

Salter turned to the sugar men; they wrote the checks. Was all this
dinero
coming from just our employers? Nobody asked, least of all me.

Force Insertion’s field strength at that time was six armatures with all supporting arms: sixty-seven thousand soldiers for hire. Elements were under assignment across seventeen separate theaters, employed by state, corporate, and humanitarian entities (including five for the UN) on every continent except North America and Antarctica. Overall direction of the firm remained, then, in the hands of its founder, Gen. Pietter van Arden. When the eighty-one-year-old visionary died twelve months later of pancreatic cancer, F.I.’s board put Salter in charge of the whole show.

That’s where he remains now, a decade later, as Team Bravo—with me and el-Masri reunited—at last boards its first-leg transport craft,
a leased Air Martiale C-130, and trundles down the runway at PSAB, eager to connect with its commander and be briefed by him on its assignment.

The flight is supposed to take us directly to Basra, a staging point en route to our ultimate destination, but halfway there something goes wrong up ahead. We’re rerouted to Kuwait City. When we get there, the tower won’t let us land. The pilots take us out over the gulf and start circling. “What the fuck’s going on?” says Chutes.

We’re all thinking: Salter’s armatures control Basra and the southern Iraqi oil fields; what’s the problem?

A C-130 is a lumbering, big-bellied turboprop. Our team of twelve is crowded forward, on canvas seats along the port bulkhead, just aft of the ladder that mounts to the flight deck. The rest of the cargo bay is taken up by a single 7-ton truck, two bladders of fuel, and a dozen pallets of ammunition, rations, and Solaire spring water—not for us, for delivery in Basra. While Chutes climbs to the cockpit to get the latest skinny, the team collects around Iranian FARS-TV, which Coombs is bringing in on his handheld. FARS is playing cell-phone and skycam video of street carnage in the Shatt al-Arab section of Basra. Force Insertion’s assault elements are leveling the area, block by block, against fierce resistance by fighters that FARS and English-language al-Jazeera (we’re switching back and forth) identify as local militias, possibly Fadhila; possibly JAM, Jaysh al-Mahdi, the old Madhi Army.

“I thought the fix was in,” says Q, impressed by the fury of the resistance. “Who told these assholes to put up a fight?”

Nobody knows. I try to reach Pete Petrocelli. I even try Jack Stettenpohl. No one’s reachable. What I know—what we all know—is that Iraq, since the close of the second Iran-Iraq war, has been the bulwark of stability in the Middle East. Oil is why. Big-time
fields have come online or been revitalized down south: West and East Qurna, Zubayr, the colossal Majnoon field with thirteen billion barrels, the Halfaya field. By 2029, three years ago, southern Iraq was producing fourteen million barrels a day, equal to Saudi Arabia, even with its own two monster new fields at Shaybah and Khurais. The country had stabilized. Royal Dutch Shell is heavily invested, along with Malaysia’s Petronas, Kogas from South Korea, Occidental, Italy’s Eni conglomerate, and Norway’s Statoil. I know these because our contracts are with them.

Originally, soldiers for hire only signed with the military contractor—Force Insertion, the Legion, DynCorp, whatever—which itself held the underlying contract with the end employer, the EE. But after the 2024 DynCorp mutiny at Khartoum, that changed. EEs began requiring individual mercs to sign contracts with them as well, including the infamous “forfeiture of all shares” clause. The second thing they insisted on was that contractors be paid only a tenth of their fee in cash; the rest was in stock or incentive bonuses, in contracts of marque or what we called “spec jobs,” meaning you got what you could get in the form of resources—diamonds, oil, platinum—from the country itself.