The Profession (21 page)

How else can I take this? A former secretary of state (whom I have no reason to disbelieve) has just told me that a plan exists to heave the democracy of the United States into the shitcan. Yeah thanks, Mister Secretary. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got real business to take care of.

Topside, another delegation is lining up to see Salter. I stand and extend my hand to Echevarria. Don’t breathe outside in this dust, I tell him. Keep a wet rag over your nose and mouth. “And send your boys to scout up a few more Jack Daniel’s!”

I won’t let the secretary rise to shake my hand; he’s still too wobbly. But as his ham-sized fist reaches up to take mine, I find myself feeling surprising affection for the old gaffer.

“Take care of yourself, Colonel. I hope we can resume our new friendship under more civilized circumstances.”

Back at the chow trough, Chris and Jack Stettenpohl have hit it off like lifetime chums. They’re talking finance. Meanwhile Coombs has run into a mate from Cambridge, which is apparently a hotbed of recruitment for the SAS, at least for a certain type of adventure-craving blue-blooded undergraduate.

My concern as team leader is to get to Salter ASAP and not let any of this extraneous bullshit bleed away our focus or resolve. It’s impossible of course. We’re stuck at a cocktail party and the gossip is flying.

How did this Iraq/Arabia operation get going in the first place? Coombs’s Cambridge mate, Gillie, puts us in the picture.

“The whole stunt,” says our new pal, whose full name is Fothergill, “was initiated a decade ago by a single individual—an Iraqi expatriate named Hussein Sayyid Assami. It was his idea to break Shiastan off from Iraq and take it public.”

Fothergill explains how this expat made the rounds of wealthy investors in London, Riyadh, Dallas, Beijing, and twenty other petrocentric enclaves. “He positioned himself as a Western-friendly businessman—which he was—who possessed the tribal and political connections to broker a deal for the new al-Arish field, as well as taking a shot at Majnoon, Umm Qasr, and Rumayla. At the time these were badly underproducing, but Assami produced substrata projections that showed the fields were prime candidates for HPNI, high-pressure nitrogen injection. Assami was a petroleum engineer as well as an investment banker. When he talked, you were mesmerized. My uncle hosted an evening for him at the Chelsea Club. Assami made no attempt to disguise his ambition; he wanted to be the Man in southern Iraq.”

Jack Stettenpohl confirms this. Assami put together over half a billion from various players to create an enterprise that would exploit these fields toward his own advantage. The deal was hot. In came the heavies—Goldman Sachs, Passport, Carlyle, CIC, and others. Chris backs this up. “I was working at Carlyle then; they recruited me because I had been here on the ground as a SEAL. Half a billion became two, then five. Then came the backstabbing, the inevitable revelations of fraud, self-dealing, and so forth. Soon the lawsuits started flying.”

“By this time,” Coombs’s friend continues, “Sayyid Assami was history. The big guns didn’t need him anymore. By now, a boatload of global banks and sovereign wealth funds had come on board, not to mention the energy conglomerates. Italian Eni was in for 4 billion,
Kogas put up 3.2; Petronas and Royal Dutch Shell were already operating the supergiant Majnoon field, but now they added 3.6 billion for HPNI; Occidental had 2 billion sunk in West Qurna. Statoil jumped in from Norway, with OAO and Lukoil, as well as the Iraqi government itself with South Oil and Missan Oil.”

El-Masri squints around. “No wonder Salter can afford this battleship.”

Force Insertion had been hired originally only to provide field and pipeline security. “Then,” says Jack, “the Saudis got into the mix. With their cash, a whole army could be put into the field. The show went from an oil deal to a freaking invasion.”

Everyone on the aircraft is waiting for Salter. We watch one frenetic party shuttle into his conference room on the third deck. “The Iranian foreign minister,” says my new pal from Dresden. Two Slavic-looking groups follow, recognized by no one—Poles maybe, or Russians.

Finally Petrocelli tramps down. He’s smoking, something I’ve never seen him do.

“Gent, can you hang for a few more? The boss is dying to get you topside.”

He turns to speak to another group; I catch his sleeve.

“What’s going on, Pete?”

“Cold feet.”

I ask what that means.

“The money people behind this show. They just bailed.”

“The Saudis,” says el-Masri. “I told you they would turn pussy.”

We wait. Topside in the tech bays, comm boards are lit up like New Year’s. Kodiaks and Yukons keep rolling up outside in the dark, discharging fresh bods in various stages of hysteria. Chris comes back from palavering with a clique of his high-finance homies.

Indeed, he reports, the Saudis have yielded to world pressure.

“What’s happening now,” says Chris, “is every oil player on the planet is having a near-death experience. The lines are ringing off the hooks in Riyadh and London and Abu Dhabi. In Moscow, Koverchenko’s head just exploded. Every satellite feed on the globe has some governmental spokesperson condemning ‘this act of naked aggression’ and demanding that the Saudis—meaning Salter—roll back every inch of real estate they’ve taken, like the Israelis did with the Sinai in ’73.”

“Will we?” Chutes asks.

“Beats the shit outa me,” says Chris. “It’s Salter’s call.”

For two hours, our team does nothing but knock back Red Bulls and monitor combat feeds. Scattered fighting is still going on—not between Force Insertion and the southern Iraqis, as the press is reporting, but between F.I. elements allied with the southern Iraqis against Iranian units, main force and fedayeen, which have crossed the border. It’s no contest. The Waeli brothers have appeared on Fox/BBC, al-Jazeera, Trump/CNN, and Al-Arabiya declaring the independence of the sovereign Islamic Republic of Shiastan. Within ninety minutes, twenty-one oil-ravenous states have recognized the new nation.

I’m starting to get it. The key players behind these Big Oil and Big Bucks machinations are apparently a confederation of disenchanted Saudi royals—the young princes. The rising against the crown began with them. Their goal was power, not for their own advantage, but to preserve the kingdom and the House of Saud, which in their view was being sold down the river by the geriatric generation, who did not grasp or appreciate the threat from nuclear-armed Iran and its allies, including China and Russia, for whom the establishment of a Shiite Crescent composed of Iran, a Shia-dominated Iraq, Syria, and others was a desired end-state to counter the Saudi/U.S. alliance that had stood since the end of
World War II but that increasingly, from the Saudi perspective, was becoming a liability.

The princes were desperate to stop Iran. They couldn’t employ force themselves; they had no real army and no authentic commander. But they saw a chance, by employing Salter and Force Insertion’s four in-country armatures, to piggyback onto an existing operation and turn it into a miniblitz that would simultaneously thwart Iran, bring the world’s second-largest oil reserves under Saudi control, and outflank their own brain-dead elders. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But now, in the face of blistering outrage from the world’s military and financial powers, the princes have found themselves isolated and alone.

They are caving.

Instructions, apparently, are coming in right now over Salter’s encrypted comm terminals, ordering him to stand down, back off, lie down, and die.

“We will learn now,” says el-Masri, “what size balls our friend Salter possesses.”

On this cue, Petrocelli appears topside along the rail. He waves us up.

The aircraft is configured into three levels; you climb up by a ladderwell. Level Three has two conference rooms, with a full kitchen, showers, and sleeping cubbies.

Salter appears. With him is Tim Hayward. Salter greets Coombs first, then Chris. El-Masri and I are the trailers.

“At last,” he says, “my bandits.”

Salter embraces us like a father. “Godammit, Gent, this whole fucking circus is worth it, just to work with you again.”

He takes my hand and el-Masri’s. He’s thinking of Rob, I see it in his eyes. I ask him what’s going on. Has the plug been pulled? Is our mission scrubbed?

“Fuck no, bro,” he says. “You’re going.”

THE MISSION, SALTER TELLS
us, is a snatch-and-grab of the next head of state of Tajikistan.

Two teams. Alpha, under Tim Hayward, will eliminate the old boss. Bravo—my team—will install the new.

I glance to Chris, Coombs, and el-Masri. I’d be lying if I said my dick wasn’t stiff.

“Who,” I ask, “is Bravo’s target?”

Salter gives me a look that says he’s sure we’ve sussed this out long ago. “Qazi Ahmed Razaq, our old friend ‘Razz.’ ”

Petrocelli hands us our orders packets, which we skim as Pete briefs us. Qazi Ahmed Razaq is the son of Habibullah Mohammed Razaq, the legendary Tajik warlord and current president and head of state of Tajikistan.

He—Razz—is the young Takfiri with whom el-Masri was imprisoned in Egypt in the early teens, whose life el-Masri saved by killing the guard Ephur. It is Razz who went on, seven years later, to become a warlord and drug trafficker on a scale even greater than his father. It is Razz who, many believe, was the funding source behind
the 11/11 dirty-bomb attack on the port of Long Beach. And it is Razz, on that account, whom our TacOps team was pursuing in the mountains of northern Yemen when we were ambushed and Salter performed his “crawling man” heroics.

Today, more than another decade gone, Razz is the mullah/mass murderer/messiah of the IMT, the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, the country’s most militant insurgent faction—and the most passionate and dangerous enemy of his own father, who, in Razz’s eyes, has sold out his people and his faith by becoming a stooge of the Russians.

Petrocelli affixes satellite and UAV surveillance photos to the whiteboard on the bulkhead, along with topo maps marked with mission-specific GPS grids and site nomenclature. Dupes, he says, are in our orders packets. Ground zero of the satellite imagery is a fortified compound—a torture house, Pete tells us—on the outskirts of Dushanbe, the Tajik capital.

“Sometime within the past six days,” Pete says, “the target has been captured and taken into custody by agents of the Sekorstat, the Tajik secret police. Reliable Intel—and I use that word advisedly—has Razz being held at this site. The situation looks grim. Our young friend is days, if not hours, away from public decapitation, if not worse, at the hands of his old man, unless Team Bravo can haul his miserable, U.S.-hating, smack-dealing ass outa there.”

Bravo will have as assets, Pete tells us, significant host-country assistance. A team will meet us, guide us in, get us out.

Coombs will be our political representative; he’ll handle whatever negotiations and undertakings of surety (meaning cash) are necessary to secure an alliance between Salter and Razz. El-Masri will be our interpreter and personal link. I’ll run the tactical show and handle coordination with Tim Hayward and Team Alpha.

Petrocelli conveys this to us in under five minutes, while Salter looks on, saying nothing. The briefing takes place not in the aircraft’s
conference area (which is packed with suits and uniforms burning up the broadband), but in the galley immediately aft of the flight deck. Salter stands by the exit hatch, with a red fire ax on the bulkhead behind him and the rest of us jammed in anywhere we can. Jack Stettenpohl attends as well, along with our old battalion S-2 from East Africa, Cam Holland, both with dark circles under their eyes from too many nights without sleep. Salter himself, Pete has told me, has been going nonstop longer than anyone, but he looks flush with energy and resolve.

Now he steps forward.

“Gentlemen, events have propelled Bravo’s—and Alpha’s—mission to a level of supreme urgency. If you feel that I’m asking more than you’re ready to give, speak up now.”

Salter lays out the situation with the Saudis. Force Insertion’s funding has been pulled, along with 99 percent of its political cover and 100 percent of its logistics and resupply.

Coombs asks how this affects Team Bravo’s mission. Hasn’t the Saudis’ betrayal cut us off at the knees?

“Fuck ’em,” Salter says. He is cold sober. “The world is witnessing a scenario it hasn’t seen in four hundred years. A mercenary army has invaded a sovereign state and not only taken it over but convinced its indigenous constituents to support and embrace it.”

“But can we carry on, sir, without the backing of our employers?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. We’re the power on the ground, not them.”

The hair on my neck stands up.

Salter’s voice has altered. I’ve never heard this tone before. It’s electrifying.

The briefing finishes. Faces turn toward the exit.

“Wait a minute, Gent. Stick around.”

Aides and principals take off. Salter dismisses Chris and Coombs. He leads me, Hayward, and el-Masri down the ladder to the aircraft’s
second deck, to a waist-high hatch along the inner curve of the airframe. “Let’s get some air,” he says.

Salter wriggles ahead; we follow.

We emerge outside, onto the wing.

El-Masri is shaking his head and grinning. He’s never stood on the wing of an airplane. Neither have I. I didn’t even know you could go here. “Sorry,” Salter says, indicating the AVFUEL stencils beneath our feet, “the smoking lamp is not lit.”

We sit cross-legged in a half circle where the fuselage slopes up from the wing. A part of my brain is still spinning from what Echevarria confided. That part wants to quiz Salter for the full story. What’s really going on, what’s the big picture, what do you know, sir, that you’re not telling the rest of us? But no one can ask that. The whole concept of a chain of command is that the boss gives the orders and the troops carry them out without question.

Then, too, there’s awe. Though it’s Salter’s gift to make you feel like he’s your pal and best buddy, closer to you than your own father, you can never forget who he is. Standing next to Salter is like standing beside Patton or Rommel or MacArthur. He’s as near as your own flesh and as remote as Hannibal or Caesar.