The Profession (26 page)

“Well done,” he says.

I’m more than a little sickened by the act I’ve committed—and I still don’t understand its purpose.

Col. Mattoon tells me to key the encryption tab on my handheld. I do. Onscreen appears a live feed from ITV-Moskva.

“Those are T-79 tanks,” Mattoon says, “rolling south from Mother Russia through Kyrgyzstan and across the Tajik frontier. Three Chinese armored divisions will be crossing from their own border within twenty-four hours. The Russians and Chinese will be fighting over Tajik oil for the next twenty years.”

Now I’m completely confused. “That’s why we took out Razz and his old man?”

“You mean you haven’t seen SkyNet?”

I tell Mattoon that we’ve been a little preoccupied, trying to save our own asses.

He keys in a patch for me. My screen flickers. Into focus comes a live feed of Salter leading a column of I-SAMs—state-of-the-art mobile antiaircraft batteries—along a desert highway with a massive petroleum-processing complex in the background.

“While your team was in Tajikistan,” Col. Mattoon says, “Salter struck at the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.”

“What?”

“He just took the Saudi oil fields. We’ve got Ghawar, Shaybah, and Khurais. Force Insertion is sitting on fifty-seven billion barrels. Fifty years’ worth of crude.”

I LAND AT DULLES
International Airport at 10:37
P.M.
, 13 September 2032. A.D. is waiting, standing next to a limo driver with a handwritten sign:

My wife had flown back from Basra two days earlier; she and I have been communicating by handheld throughout all three of my flights home. She won’t tell me what has pulled her off such a hot story. It can only be one thing—an even hotter story.

For thirty-six hours the news has been wall-to-wall Salter and the Saudi oil fields. The coup is so brilliant (and so bloodless) that the U.S. press doesn’t know whether to react with outrage or exultation. The presidential campaign has been body slammed; the blow is a blind-side hit to the oil, credit, and stock markets, the banks, and the economy. At one stroke, Salter and Force Insertion have turned the world on its head, and no one knows when or if it will ever be right side up again. Our mercs have wired half the globe’s oil, ready
to blow it to kingdom come if any force attempts to wrest it from them. I confess I didn’t see this coming either. All Salter has done is misdirect the world’s attention for a few days to Iraq, Iran, and Tajikistan, then turn loose his seventeen thousand troops at PSAB. The columns waltzed to Ghawar, Shaybah, and Khurais and took them in a day without firing a shot.

I descend the escalator at Dulles to discover A.D., beaming. A big kiss and we’re off for the limo.

“Come on,” she says. “We’re going to Maggie Cole’s.”

The flight from Amman to Heathrow has been aboard an Air Martiale business 767. Ninety percent of the passengers are Force Insertion legionnaires and tech and psyops guys out of Prince Sultan. As for me, I’ve had no time to shower or change since Karshi-Khanabad, Basra, and PSAB, the three prior legs. When I board at Queen Alia, it’s in the same hajji-flage I’ve been stinking in since Dushanbe. Jack Stettenpohl is on the flight too. I grab him for thirty seconds, before he squirts away to meet with a gaggle of mil/industrial types in the rear of the aircraft.

My question: Why am I here?

Why did Salter pull me away from my team and put me on these flights home?

Jack answers as we stride aft. The plane has no conventional seating; it’s divided into conference areas and sleeping compartments along one bulkhead, like a European train. “There’s only one issue right now,” says Jack, “and that’s keeping Salter safe. We need ten days and the deal’s done.”

“What deal?”

“Gent, you might not realize it, but you’re about to become a player.”

“Me? Why?”

“Because Salter trusts you.”

There’s an inner circle, Jack is saying, of under a hundred. Himself and a number of other congressmen, senators, and Pentagon people, media, lobbyists, the brain trust. “And Maggie and her connections, of course.”

I, if I want to, am about to see things I never knew existed.

“What,” I ask, “are we trying to do?”

“Change the world.”

Stettenpohl hurries off, promising to catch up with me later. I make my way to the sit-down bar. Along the bulkheads are three thousand-channel 3-Ds—one tuned to Trump/CNN, one to Fox/BBC, and one to English-language al-Jazeera. No one is paying attention; they all have their iSats and Skyscreens tuned to mil/nets, FARS, and raw feeds from combat comms.

Two American and one Chinese aircraft carrier group have taken station in the Gulf. Between the missile cruisers and other screening vessels, not to mention the nuclear subs, there’s so much naval hardware, a TV analyst says, that there’s not enough blue water to hold it.

I run into Cam Holland at the bar—Salter’s longtime protégé and my old battalion intelligence officer from East Africa. Holland is drinking vodka tonics with a former Special Ops colonel named Broussard, from Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s Broussard who honchoed infil and exfil for Alpha and Bravo over Tajikistan. I thank him for getting us out in one piece. He’s an ol’ coon-ass cracker; in two minutes he and I have become blood homies.

The obvious question, now, is will all this carrier air go after Salter.

“Not the Chinks,” says Broussard. “That’ll be World War III.”

Our own guys?

“The navy’ll fly five hundred sorties but they won’t drop a single
munition. Salter’s troops may be mercs but they’re still American boys. What U.S. politician has the nuts to say, ‘Take ’em out?’ ”

The Iranians and Syrians won’t make a move, I know, even though they’ve got plenty of armor and more than enough incentive. The Eastern mind is so tribal, so inured to systems of patronage and blood influence, that it can’t conceive that a venture of this scale could be mounted without the full knowledge and approval of the United States at the highest level. The major powers will believe the same. Even Salter’s inflammatory speech, broadcast live to the world, will be viewed as brilliant theater, a sham that the global players are too shrewd to be taken in by. The only credible threat, I say, is the Russians.

“Not anymore,” says Holland, shoving a Black Label in front of me. “You and your guys took care of that with your little stunt in Tajikistan.”

Sure enough, FARS and ITV-Moskva are broadcasting cell-phone video of the presidential palace in Dushanbe, being leveled by Russian rockets and M-79 tanks. Columns of Russian armor are rolling over the Kyrgyzstan border in the north, while two Chinese armies are invading from the east. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” says Holland. “Particularly when that vacuum is smack on top of the second-biggest oil find in the world.”

That was Alpha and Bravo’s mission, Holland says. To create chaos. He clinks my glass. “To you and Tim Hayward!”

World opinion, Broussard says, will pile onto Moscow and Beijing for this aggression, eliminating whatever thin sliver of moral high ground might remain, from which the Russians or the Chinese could have expressed outrage at any action of Salter’s—that is, seizing the Saudi oil fields—and, more important, ending all possibility of either power launching a
second
intervention, this time against Salter.

Stettenpohl comes back and joins our group just as Trump/CNN London begins speculating on this precise scenario. Reliable reports, the network declares, have Salter’s forces wiring the complexes at Ghawar, Shaybah, and Khurais with high explosives. If the mercs blow up the pumping stations and processing facilities, it will take a decade to rebuild them. By then, says the news, ocean trade will be by sail and land transport will be horse and wagon.

Which way will Salter jump? Trump/CNN reports him negotiating right now with India, Japan, the EU, and South Korea—and communicating by back channels with Russia and China. ITV-Moskva runs a clip of Koverchenko, the Russian premier, landing in Riyadh. BP is there already, along with ExxonMobil, Sinopec, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, Lukoil, and CNOOC, with ConocoPhillips and Petrobras jetting in. Salter is dining, a report says, with the same Saudi princes who had left him in the lurch four days earlier. It goes without saying that all existing oil contracts are null and void.

How, exactly, has Salter taken the oil fields? Jack and Cam Holland confirm what Broussard and I have guessed. The Saudi army is more a family affair than a true national defense force; regiments are loyal to their commanders only, and these give fidelity to whichever faction of the royal family their network of influence dictates. Only the Royal Saudi Air Force, a few elite Special Ops and counterterrorism units, and the corps of royal bodyguards are true professional formations. The main of these have vigorously opposed the cabal of young princes who staged the initial coup—meaning these units are, if not exactly on Salter’s side, then at least realistic enough not to stand in his way.

What Salter has done is simply to hold back more troops in Saudi Arabia than he dispatched to southern Iraq.

In other words, the base at PSAB was a Trojan horse.

The Gulf region right now, Jack tells us, is major-league madness.
Southern Iraq has broken away from the central Baghdad government, as will the Kurdish north momentarily, triggering who-knows-what response from the Turks. There are Russian tanks in the streets of Dushanbe and Chinese armored columns steaming west from the Tajikistan-Peoples Republic border. The whole world is howling in outrage, and no one has the slightest clue what to do.

Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, and the European Union are dispatching brokers and diplomats to Riyadh, eager to kiss ass for the next big contracts. But there’s nothing left in Riyadh. Salter holds the fields and he’s taking orders from no one. No one knows whom he’s negotiating with or what tricks he’s got up his sleeve. His weaknesses are logistics, keeping his men fed and supplied and making sure that no force gets the jump on him. “He’s holding jacks over nines,” says Stettenpohl. “And that may just be good enough to take the whole pot.”

“What I still don’t understand,” I tell Jack, “is why I’m here and not back in the fight.”

“This
is
the fight, Gent. And you’re here to be a player. You’re here to make plays.”

In the movies, limos always have a bar in back, stocked with liquor and ice. Now, speeding out of Dulles with A.D., this one’s got warm Fiji water and G-7 Gatorade. “Can I smoke?” I ask the driver.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Gent, will you knock it off and listen to me?”

A.D. is wearing tight leather pants and a pair of $3,000 come-fuck-me heels that I bought her at Cesare Pacciotti on Fifth Avenue with my first bonus from Iran-Iraq II. Her blouse is black silk, one of those see-through numbers that can pass as business-casual only if it’s night and you’ve got a chest like she does.

“Gent, stop staring at my tits.”

“I missed you, baby …”

A.D. switches off the news, which has been reporting poll figures for the upcoming presidential election. The incumbent President Murchison and the challenger, Senator Dodd, are splitting 40 percent of the vote. Salter, whose name isn’t even on the ballot, stands at nearly 50 percent—trouncing them both combined.

I reach for the fly front of A.D.’s leathers. It’s not the most sophisticated move, I know, but my estranged bride has been known to let her guard down, on occasion, in the backseats of vehicles driven by others.

She swats my hand and slams her thighs shut tight enough to crush a walnut. “This is serious, Gent! Will you listen to me?”

A.D. tells me Maggie Cole wants her to write an article. About Salter.

“Not ‘wants,’ ” A.D. says. “ ‘Commands.’ ”

The article will be what they call a “lead piece.” Ten thousand words. It’ll have the cover of
Apple imPress
next week. Mrs. Cole will see to that. In addition to first-generation exposure (“1gen,” as they say in the biz) from the virtual mag and its online and HoloNet hooks, tweets, and links, the piece will generate massive “wraparound” on the mil and pol blogs, Politico, SinoNet, rChive, not to mention on-camera time on all the beltway talk shows. A.D. personally will be part of the story, Maggie Cole has made clear by way of incentivizing her, “because that Lord Jim hit piece you wrote was the one that originally took Salter down.”

“In other words,” A.D. has asked Mrs. Cole, “I’m recanting.”

“You’re reporting with your customary fearlessness and objectivity.”

We speed east on 267. I’m grilling A.D. about the poll figures. Can Salter run? Is it too late to get his name on the ballot? Does he even want to run?

“Whether he runs or not doesn’t matter. Salter’s holding every
card. The only questions are how long can he hold them and what deal can he drive.”

“I thought you hated this shit, A.D. I thought Salter was Caligula.”

“He’s Caesar, or wants to be.” Her expression becomes sober. “Maybe that’s what this country needs.”

A.D. admits that Maggie Cole scares her. Players are coming out of the woodwork; established powers are jockeying for position like warlords in Kabul. The world is shifting on its axis, A.D. says, and no one knows who’ll be on top when it finally settles.

“I feel like, if I tell Maggie no, I’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

My bride lights a Pall Mall. When the driver says she can’t smoke in the car, A.D. tells him she’ll put the cigarette out on his face if he gives her any more shit. I can see the dude’s glance flick to me in the rearview.

“She’s got ’em like this, Jack.”

He laughs and keeps driving.

A.D. briefs me about the event at Maggie’s place this evening—who’ll be there, how I’ll recognize them, what is expected of me. A.D.’s skin flushes when she gets hot with ambition. I can smell the Chanel No. 22 steaming between her breasts.

“What are my chances,” I ask, “of getting laid?”