The Profession (3 page)

The mob gets ten steps and the first 155 blows. It’s the far one, the one closest to the rear gate. The dumb-bastard triggerman has pushed the wrong button. The blast still knocks every one of us flat and annihilates our hearing. I’m in the rear, driving the engineers forward. Everybody’s still alive. My head is ringing like a Chinese gong, but I can still hear the Iranians on the roofline cursing their numb-nuts triggerman. Our gang plunges to cover under the air-conditioning units. Quinones is kneeling between the A/Cs, firing at the V of two tenement rooftops above us. The enemy keeps popping up between clotheslines and satellite dishes. Every time Q pings one and the pink spray blows out of their heads and they drop away out of sight, the engineers yelp with terror and relief. Q and Junk are cross-decking now, firing over each other’s shoulders. We’re halfway to the compound wall, halfway to safety. “Move now!” I shout.

The group bolts to the gate and wall, to Chris, Chutes, and the others. Q and I are dragging one engineer, who has lost sight and hearing from the concussion of the 155, with Junk hopping on one leg and hanging on to one of the security men. We plunge back to safety just as full darkness falls.

Chris’s two Kodiaks, which we had held in reserve two blocks back, have come forward now, ready to take us out. They’re revving in the alley, thirty feet north, in the safe zone shielded by an adjacent building. Enemy 5.56 and 7.62 fire is ripping into the wall above us. Now the rocket rounds start flying; our Lada Nevas and 7-ton truck have to pull back. Someone is helping Junk into the first vehicle. I hear one of Chris’s DSF men shouting in a German accent, “Who? Who’s missing?” For a moment I think they mean Junk. I look over. Junk is okay. Then I realize they’re talking about someone
else. I turn back toward the compound. On the ground beside the air-conditioning units crawls one of our Fijians.

Sonofabitch! The man is in the dirt, clawing his way toward cover. Furious fire rakes the ground around him. I see him scramble face-first into a cooking ditch, just as a full burst from an AK takes him square between the shoulder blades. Both elbows fly rearward, then flop; his neck snaps; he crashes face-first into the dirt. He stops moving. “Brake!” I’m shouting to Chutes. “Q! Chris!”

“Go! Get out!” Chris Candelaria is calling, waving the vehicles to pull back. He has packed Junk’s wound and stripped his own tourniquet, worn lanyard-style around his neck; he’s cinching it around Junk’s thigh as he and the German DSF man help him toward the first Lada Neva.

“We’re going back!” I shout.

“What?”

“The Fijian. We’re not leaving him!”

A shoulder-fired rocket whistles overhead and blows the hell out of a house across Espresso Street. What little hearing I have left is now gone.

“We’re not leaving without him.”

It’s my secret me who’s talking. He has made the decision.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” This is Chutes, my tightest mate and most trusted brother. He sticks his jaw six inches from mine.

“We’re going back,” I tell him.

Junk curses. “He’s not our guy, chief! We don’t even know who the fuck he is!”

“He’s dead!” says Chutes. “There’s two more 155s in there, waiting to blow!”

Other faces stare at me.

“Leave the body,” cries the Fijian team leader. “The man would say so himself if he could!”

I tell the Fijians he’s not theirs, he’s ours.

Chris Candelaria’s two Kodiaks are hauling ass now; they know they’re targets. Iranian rocket gunners are trying to blow down the building that protects our flank. As their rounds scream in, blocks of concrete the size of bowling balls sail a hundred feet into the air and fall back, crashing all around us. We scramble into the slit trench of sewage. Guys are trying to crawl up inside their helmets. I’m peering around the corner, back into the compound.

Chutes clutches my sleeve. “Bro, listen to me. We got the engineers, we got the report … that’s what we came here for.” He points past the gate to the compound, to the fresh enemy streaming in along the rooflines. “We go back in there, somebody’s gonna die.”

There’s no fear in Chutes’s voice. He’s just stating the truth.

I meet his eyes.

“Fuck you,” he says, jamming fresh magazines into his belly rig. “You hear me, bro? Fuck you!”

Back we go. Chris Candelaria comes with us. We can hear the enemy hooting with anticipation. In the interval they have brought up a Russian PKM, which fires Eastern Bloc 7.62 rounds with a nutsack-shriveling
rat-a-tat
sound, and these are tearing the hell out of the open space we have to cross. The foe has got his second wind now. He is going after our Lada Nevas and the 7-ton truck, which have stayed behind to cover us. Rockets are zinging across the compound like Roman candles.

We grab the dead Fijian and haul him facedown from the dirt behind the blown-down cookhouse. The IEDs never blow. Chutes curses me all the way back to the gate, curses me when I bag the security man’s effects and lash them around my waist with 550 cord. And he curses me all the way out of town.

Two hours later, our team has reached safety in Husseinabad, in the fortified compound of an Iranian police chief whose real name is Gholamhossein Mattaki, but whom everyone calls Col. Achmed.
Col. Achmed has his own doctor, his cousin Rajeef. Rajeef has a pharmacy and a little surgical suite in a side building of Col. Achmed’s compound. Rajeef is our team doctor. He supplies all our pills and powders. We call him “Medicare.”

I have driven flat out to Col. Achmed’s, to get Junk (and two engineers whom we discover have been wounded in the dash across the compound) under serious medical care. Our medic Tony is a superb under-fire practitioner, and the DSF tech is good too. But neither one is a surgeon—and neither one has Dr. R’s goody-box of Vicodin and Percoset, Ultram, Fentanyl, OxyContin, and plain old central Asian smack. I also want to bury our Fijian in a site that won’t be desecrated. While our guys rehydrate and wolf down a meal of lamb and lentils, I grab Chutes and Chris Candelaria and organize a powwow with Col. Achmed. We still don’t know who’s invading whom, how dangerous the situation is, or what the hell is happening east in Isfahan and Tehran.

Achmed is not just a police chief and commander in the paramilitary Masij. He is a hereditary tribal leader and a grandson and great-grandson of Harul and Arishi sheikhs; he is responsible for the safety and welfare of several thousand men, women, and children of allied families, clans, and subtribes. He’s a serious man.

“Get out now,” he tells us, in the tone that your favorite uncle would take if he were looking out for you. We are in the third of his four storage buildings. The place looks like Costco. On racks and pallets sit unopened packing boxes of air conditioners and computer printers; cartons of Pennzoil, Pampers, and paper towels. Achmed has cases of Evian water, V8, Gatorade; crates of Nike running shoes, T-shirts, and tracksuits. The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, smuggles in half the goods sold in Iran; the stuff comes in, billions of dollars’ worth, by launch and lighter from Kish and Qeshm, “free trade” islands across the gulf, via the port of Bandar Ganayeh—not to mention whatever the colonel’s minions have
looted from ExxonMobil and BP. Guns and ammo are everywhere, in and out of crates—M4-40s, mortars, boxes of 5.56 and 7.62 NATO cartridges. Col. Achmed’s family, he tells us, is packing up. The women and children will flee to southern Iraq and then to Syria. Achmed’s sons and goons fill the room, armed to the teeth. “Don’t wait even for morning,” the colonel tells me, Chutes, and Chris. “If you do, you and your men will be massacred.”

I ask him who will come after us.

“Me,” he says with a smile. “Everyone.”

Col. Achmed explains.

“They will not be able to help themselves. First they will come for your weapons and everything of yours that they can steal, then for honor, to avenge the humiliation you and your countrymen have inflicted upon our national manhood simply by your presence and your blue eyes. Next they will come to get you before others do, for the greatest honor goes to him who strikes first, while those who hesitate will be accounted cowards.”

I ask him what will happen in the next week or ten days. He gives it to me in Revolutionspeak, but the gist is this: Shiite Iran—meaning those Revolutionary Guardsmen, army colonels, patriots, tribesmen, and true believers who have been biding their time throughout this long, phony war will unite now with their Iraqi Shiite coreligionists and, casting off the yoke of the West and its hirelings, strike east along the arc of the Shiite Crescent that runs from the Dasht-i-Margo—the Afghan Desert of Death—across Iran to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (not coincidentally the swath of real estate that contains the richest petroleum reserves on earth) and purge this land of those who do not belong or believe.

“Do my men and I have time,” I ask, “to finish dinner?”

Achmed’s tribal code mandates hospitality. He helps us bury our Fijian, though he insists, first, on declaring the man a convert to Islam (which Col. Achmed can do, being a mullah as well as a tribal
chief, and to which none of our Fijian’s mates objects under the circumstances), then tops off our fuel tanks and loads us up with Neda spring water and sixteen-ounce cans of Beefaroni. One of Achmed’s sons brings a tray of delicious homemade
sohan
—pistachio candy.

Col. Achmed maps out the safest route to the frontier (the one he’ll be chasing us on) and helps key into our GPSes the sequence of junctures—all unmarked desert and mountain tracks that we could never find without his help. Dr. Rajeef rigs mobile hospital beds for Junk and our two wounded engineers; he stocks us up with two dozen vials of morphine, plus sample packs of Demerol and Dilaudid with sterile syringes and a hundred ampules of methylephidrine, which we all need in our exhausted, postadrenalinized state.

We take our leave over cups of black Persian coffee. It’s midnight. Our engines idle beyond the walls in the night. Achmed and his men leave us alone, for our final prep and words for each other.

“Chief.” It’s Chutes, stepping forward before the others. “I’m sorry for what I said back there in Nazirabad …”

“Forget it.”

He apologizes for refusing, at first, to go back after the Fijian, whose name, we have learned, is Manasa Singh. Chris Candelaria seconds this. I thank them both. It takes guts to speak up in front of the others. The act is not without cost to proud men. I appreciate it and I tell them.

The men surround me in the headlight-lit court. Safety lies two hundred miles east, in the dark, across country none of us knows—back valleys and passes peopled by warriors who will know where we are, how many we are, and where we are heading. Every one of us knows this, and every one feels the fear in his bones.

“Because we went back when we didn’t have to,” I say, “we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. You know now, Chris, that if you fall, I won’t abandon you. I’ll come back, if it
costs me my life—and so will Q and so will Junk and so will Chutes. And we know the same about you.” A bottle makes the rounds.

“The contract we signed says nothing about honor. The company doesn’t give a shit. But I do. I fight for money, yeah—but that’s not why I’m here, and it’s not why any of you are here either.”

From inside the compound, Col. Achmed and his sons listen. Two hours from now they’ll be hunting us as if we were animals. But for this moment they know us as men, and we know them.

“What we did today in Nazirabad,” I tell my brothers, “would earn decorations for valor in any army in the world. You know what I’ll give you for it?”

I grab my crotch.

Chris Candelaria laughs.

Chutes follows. The whole crew shakes their heads and rocks back and forth.

You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t figured it out yet.

MY NAME IS GENTILHOMME
.
Don’t even try to pronounce it. My friends call me Gent. Even my wife does, or did while I still had her.

I’m from Algiers. Not the one in North Africa.

Algiers, Louisiana.

Algiers is technically part of New Orleans, but you’ll never hear anyone from Algiers admit that. In Algiers, you’re from Algiers. Remember the movie
No Mercy
, starring Richard Gere and Kim Basinger? That was shot in Algiers. Algiers is rows of white clapboard houses and parking lots paved with seashells. You get the best muffaletta sandwiches in Algiers and the strongest coffee in the South, straight out of the holds of the ships in the port. Algiers is gang country. Cops are crooked there, and so is everyone else. The town is full of Creoles and Cajuns and long-haired dope-smoking crackers; there’s quite a few Greeks and Turks and lately lots of Russians. Gentrification has not hit Algiers.

Tehran is a lot like Algiers. So are Beirut, Mogadishu, Khartoum. Baghdad is too. Journalists usually compare Baghdad to Los Angeles—the sprawl, the palms, the hellish traffic. But Baghdad
is more like New Orleans. Same heat and humidity, same bridges, same big river swinging through the center of town. When I got to Baghdad in 2016, I felt right at home. Both places are run by gangs. There’s a boss in every neighborhood, and every man, woman, and child knows who he is. They say it’s tribes and religion in Baghdad, and that’s true. But in the end a militia is nothing but a well-armed gang. It may take to the streets in God’s name, but it plays by the rules of gangland.

In Baghdad, the neighborhoods are segregated from one another physically and emotionally, just like in New Orleans. Each one is run by a different mob, and each mob is at war with every other mob. A man from Baghdad doesn’t think of himself as a Baghdadi. He identifies with his
muhalla
, his “kitchen,” his clan, and his tribe. Algiers is just like that. It gets down to specific city blocks. “Where you from, man?” When you hear that on some streets back home, the next thing you hear is a gunshot.