The spectacle of Salter’s congressional testimony set new records for television and Web viewership. The general had never cultivated political partisans or put himself forward for office, yet thousands of placard-wielding supporters demonstrated on his behalf outside Congress, with adherents including two senators and half a dozen congressmen urging that he be taken seriously as a candidate for president.
Salter was the kind of warrior-statesman, Senator Groomes of Montana declared, that this country had once possessed in Patton and MacArthur—and whose fearless leadership it desperately needed right now. Salter’s partisans revered him because he wasn’t afraid to speak the truth or to kick our enemies in the ass. Salter would have nuked Tehran after 11/11, or Islamabad or both, they believed (I didn’t share their opinion)—and that was all right with them.
Against these campaigners marched equally rabid prosecutors who declared Salter the updated counterpart of the Burt Lancaster character in Seven Days in May and who swore that hip-shooting buckaroos like him were the reason the world had come to fear and despise the United States in the first place.
There was never any doubt, legally speaking, that Salter in East Africa had ignored protocols, violated rules of engagement, and disobeyed direct orders.
On the stand he would not back down. “If you’re asking me to recant, Senator,” he told Avery Drummond of Colorado, “you and this committee can go straight to hell.”
The story consumed the air, the Web, and the satfeeds for weeks. Salter was depicted by his admirers as a twenty-first-century Caesar, dwarfing his contemporaries. His enemies called him “a wannabe Caligula” and “Napoleon in a Crackerjack box.” Throughout this fortnight of folly (Ariel Caplan’s phrase), Salter refused to pander or apologize. The online New York Post ran a cartoon of him crucified with spikes made of his own quotes: “I was obeying a more ancient law” and “Name the price and I’ll pay it.”
His most notorious quote, which was replayed endlessly on TV and the Web and handhelds everywhere, was his call for universal service. A draft.
“If you don’t want men like me taking affairs into our own hands, then step up and put this country’s youth in harm’s way—not 1 percent as the case stands now, but 100 percent. No exceptions. Blind. Paraplegic. Everybody. Does the nation have vital overseas interests? Then, godammit, defend them! When you do, I’ll shut up and you’ll never hear from me again.”
Before the Senate committee Salter asked rhetorically how many infantry lieutenants and captains from Ivy League schools were currently serving in the Marine Corps. “Seven,” he said. “We should have seventy. We should have seven hundred.”
How many sons and daughters of congressmen are serving now in combat billets? “Four—and three of those are from one family. I call that a national disgrace. Don’t stick me and my warriors alone on an island, then pillory us for acting like warriors.”
The usual hawks and red-staters rallied to Salter’s cause. But those in shades of pink found something to like too. Even along the Hudson, Trotskyite Westsiders were lining up behind the general.
John Milnes, in a piece for Fox/BBC, wrote this:
What has been lost amidst the histrionics of this Beltway lynching is the fact that General Salter’s actions in East Africa, while they may have been unorthodox, even brutal, when judged by the parlor-room standards of Georgetown or the East Side of Manhattan, were in fact measured, practical and above all effective. They worked. They saved lives. They brought order out of chaos. Salter demonstrated no personal agenda and no private ambitions for himself, the Marine Corps, or the United States. He was trying to help the people and, in my opinion, doing a damn outstanding job.
For a moment it looked as if Salter’s charisma and the sudden groundswell of support might actually pluck his chestnuts from the fire. Then came the bombshell on CyberLeaks and the mil/blog, the Courtemanche Report.
Both sites broke the story of the massacre of the Brown Bombers. Somehow DeMartin White, the CyberLeaks CEO, and Eric Lavalle Courtemanche, the radical blogger, had gotten their hands on a draft of an internal Marine Corps report. The document named Rob Salter as the initiator of the outrage. For some reason, Jack Stettenpohl’s name and mine either did not appear or had been redacted. The leakers weren’t after us, or even Rob. Their target was Gen. Salter.
The story exploded. Salter came forward at once and took responsibility for issuing the orders that led to the massacre.
It was too late. The cause was picked up by the fire-breathing congressman from Montana, Jake Fallon. He led the torch-and-pitchfork brigade. Rob’s career was finished. His life was ruined. He faced prosecution for war crimes. He could go to prison or even face a firing squad.
There’s an unofficial military communications channel, as I mentioned before, called AKOP. The system had been put in place in the early teens to expedite resupply of forward units from bases in the States, but various geeks and gamers had figured out how to hack into and tweak it so that one serviceman could contact another, by text in the notepad section, through their All Force Trackers.
I jumped on this channel now, straight to Rob. It was eleven in the morning in Quantico, where I was—twelve thirty at night (with the half-hour drop east of Kabul) in Paktia. Rob had seen enough of the news to reckon the scale of the catastrophe; he had talked to his dad; he knew how bad it was, not only for himself and his father but for the Marine Corps and for the whole country. No one from higher, he told me, had contacted him yet; he still commanded his three TacOps teams. “What’s next?” I typed.
“Fuck ’em.” Rob’s text ticked back in real time. “I got a job to do and I’m gonna do it.”
An army COP, a combat outpost on the Pakistani border, was under attack at that moment. Rob took two of his teams and went in.
The Bomber fiasco had turned my life and A.D.’s upside down too. I prepared a letter confessing my role. My wife begged me not to send it. I’d be taking down not only myself but Jack Stettenpohl and his wife, not to mention further opening the can of worms that led to every other Marine who had taken part that night. Besides, A.D. said, she smelled a deeper story, a giant rat of a story, in the leaking of the report and then, twenty-four hours later, its mysterious deletion from all Marine Corps databases. She wanted that story.
We fought. I hated myself. I hated being safe in Quantico. I should be with Rob in Paktia. I should be backing up Gen. Salter before Congress.
A.D. and I kept fighting. Three nights after my AKOP talk with Rob, she and I got into a real wall-banger. At the height of emotion, the phone rang. I picked it up, ready to unload on whoever was calling.
A female voice identified herself as a journalist for the Associated Press. Did I have a comment on the death of Robert Salter?
“What?”
Major Robert Enslow Salter, the reporter said, had been killed in Pakistan twelve hours earlier, apparently in an unauthorized cross-border raid. His body—or what militants claimed was his body—was, in the enemy’s words, “in the hands of the innocents he and his gang of murderers had attacked” and would be put on video display within the next twenty-four hours.
I got off the phone and started AKOPing everyone I knew. Had Gen. Salter heard? What would he do? I phoned Jack Stettenpohl but couldn’t find him. Online and by satellite I connected with other friends who had known Rob in East Africa and Yemen. More kept breaking in. I’d have one Marine on the land line, one on text, another on cell, and a fourth on Skype. Around nine I picked up probably the thirtieth call of the night.
“Captain Gilbert Gentilhomme?”
The voice was southern and female and pronounced my name correctly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is Maggie Cole. I apologize for phoning you at such an hour, but I must speak with you on a matter of some urgency.”
“Maggie Cole?” I said. “Margaret Rucker Cole?”
“It’s about General Salter, Captain. Will you help me? What I’m about to ask must be k
ept in the strictest of confidence.”
Forty minutes later, I was speeding into Delta’s Short Term Lot at Richmond International Airport, having cinched my divorce from A.D. by refusing to let her ride with me.
This was my introduction to Margaret Rucker Cole. She was then the wife of the president of the United States. The first lady. She was also, I was beginning to understand, a longtime friend of Gen. Salter. While I was racing to Richmond International, A.D. was keeping up a running commentary via Bluetooth. She was scouring her databases. She came up with half a dozen TPIs, time-and-place intersects, between Salter’s stations of duty and Maggie Cole’s former addresses.
Salter, Mrs. Cole had told me, had booked a flight to Pakistan. He was defying his congressional subpoena. He didn’t give a damn what anyone did to him; he had to try to get Rob’s body back. Mrs. Cole had been unable to stop him. Salter’s transatlantic flight connected at Richmond. My job was to intercept him and keep him off that plane, even if I had to physically overpower him. These were Margaret Cole’s instructions. She would connect with me in person as quickly as she could. Two teams of “security specialists” were at RIC already, primed to stop Salter. But Mrs. Cole wanted to employ such impersonal means only as a last resort.
“You must bring him back, Gilbert, as a friend.”
Baggage claim was packed with late travelers. Businessmen and sales guys were snatching their bags and rolling away to the taxi stands and rental car counters. I was scanning the crowd when I noted one pale old dude struggling with two heavy nylon flight bags, the old-fashioned kind without wheels. I was thinking, Man, I hope I never get that old.
Then I realized it was Salter.
I dashed around the carousel, straight up to the general.
“Sir, let me take those.”
I grabbed one bag, but Salter fought me for the other. He looked like death. “Gent?” he said.
“Godammit, sir, gimme the fucking bag.”
I took him straight home to the apartment A.D. and I were renting in Alexandria. Mrs. Cole had sent a doctor over. Salter strode right past him. He and I wound up killing a fifth of Black Label at a table in the apartment’s galley-sized kitchen. A.D. had diplomatically cleared out.
Twenty-four hours passed. The first lady couldn’t get away; the gossip sphere would run wild if she were spotted with Salter. But she managed to phone midday on a White House secure line; she and the general talked for ninety minutes. Salter had switched from Scotch to coffee. Then, that midnight, he and I were watching English-language DAWN-TV out of Islamabad, when a grainy, handheld video came on, showing a young Western male’s naked, mutilated corpse, strung upside down in a Pakistani mountain village. Jubilant mujahideen posed beside it. The body, the newscast said, was that of an American.
Salter stood up.
His eyes were the color of blood; his neck had blown up to twice its size. I made him sit. He couldn’t speak. I was afraid his heart would explode right in his chest.
The phone rang. It was Maggie; she was downstairs. The story had hit all over. She came up. Two agents of her Secret Service detail came with her; others waited outside. They would protect us, Maggie said. No one would breathe a word. We drove to Baileys Crossroads, so Salter could get some air. Already I knew what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.
Salter and Maggie started walking. It was one in the morning and raining. I caught up with them outside an Amazon bookstore. The place was totally deserted.
Salter was telling Maggie he would get on a plane for Pakistan tonight; she was clutching his shoulders in both hands, rattling off all the reasons why he couldn’t. I came up beside them.
“I need a million bucks for expenses,” I said, “and a team of ten to twelve men that I’ll request by name.”
Salter and Maggie turned toward me. I told them I’d need air and ground transport, weapons, papers and IDs, overflight clearances—and another three million, in cash or electronic equivalent, on call if I needed it.
“What,” Maggie said, “are you talking about?”
“I can be in Peshawar in two days and on the border in four. I’ll have Rob’s body back in a week.”
11
C-6
THE STRIKE TEAM WENT in from the Pakistan side, across the mountains, using the same ratlines that Saudi volunteers, Syrian martyr-wannabes, and Haqqani and Peshawar Taliban used to infiltrate into Regional Command East via the passes through the Zazi Valley. The place was like the Ho Chi Minh trail; after dark, the footpaths were so crowded with infiltrators, you could find your way simply by the dust and the trash of the mob ahead of you.
We were twelve men in one team—me; Tim Hayward; el-Masri (who was fluent in Dari and Pashto but had brought along a second interpreter who knew the local dialect); Chutes, Junk, and Q; three Afghan Moumand tribesmen of the Konar who had been trained by U.S. Special Forces; an American TAC—tactical air controller—to handle helo extraction and emergency CAS—close air support, and an Israeli demolitions expert, Avigdor “Avi” Donen (son of the famous general Levi “Lebo” Donen), to instruct the team and supervise its use of C-6 molecular explosive.
This package had come together not via the conventional military, but financed by and under the personal sponsorship of the mercenary general Pietter van Arden. One phone call to him and all doors opened. Van Arden (who was fatally ill, with less than a year to live) had his own agenda. He had labored for decades to build Force Insertion into a credible warfighting entity. The enterprise had lacked only one element—a charismatic field commander on the level of a James Salter. There was more to it, of course. Van Arden had known Rob Salter for years and had mentored him since he was a boy. The men respected and loved each other.
Team personnel came together fast, with no individual hesitating and no element asking questions. I learned later that the behind-the-scenes support team for this strike totaled 232 people in twenty-seven countries. Intel, supply, and transport came from the United States and England, South Africa, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, with in-country aid and backup coming from all these plus the British SAS, UAE Special Forces, and Special Operations commands from the Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. We even got help from the Pakistani army and the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence).
The village that held Rob’s body was called Tel Amal. By midnight, seventy-two hours after assembly at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, the team had reached the ridge overstanding the site. Everyone wore beards and hajji-flage. By tribal courier, from the related Pashtun kin groups across the border in Ali Khel, an offer of three million dollars cash had been tendered for the return of Rob Salter’s body. This had been refused. If an attempt was made to retrieve the body by force, the defenders of the fastness vowed, those criminals caught or captured would pray to heaven that their mothers had never given them birth.
We found a vantage and scoped the village, or that portion we could see from a hundred feet above the trail. The colony clung to the mountainside, snaking up from a river gorge several hundred feet below along lanes so narrow that two men could barely pass abreast. Houses were unmortared stone and shingle, stacked atop one another so that one family’s roof was the next household’s entry court and set back against the mountainside like a Zuni pueblo. The stonework was spectacular. Each house was an impregnable redoubt. The village as a whole constituted a masterfully articulated fortress, with ascending and reinforcing platforms of defense and interlocking fields of fire. The place could’ve withstood Alexander in 333 B.C. It could certainly stand off American drone strikes and thousand-pound JDAMs today.
I called the team up. Avi Donen, our ex-Israeli Defense Forces demolitions expert, had given us a hurry-up class back at Bahrain. “C-6 is C-4 squared.” It was molecular explosive, he explained, that was armed with dime-sized, wireless, push-in detonators called “thumbtacks.” As many as twenty bricks could be daisy-chained together and set for individual, simultaneous, or sequential explosions. The trigg
er was a cell phone with an app. “Four squares the size of Hershey bars,” Avi said, “are the equivalent of a thousand-pound bomb.” He told us that his demolition team in Israel had once set four charges at the corners of a half-acre orange orchard. “After we blew it, there was nothing left but ash. Not a stump, not a leaf.”
In Bahrain, our own team had not had access to a demo range, so none of us had used the stuff yet or seen with our own eyes what it could do.
Avi warned us now. “Plant the charges low, at the centerline of the buildings. We’ll blow ’em individually from the bottom of the village up. When you hear ‘Fire in the hole!,’ get behind something as fast as you can. Don’t count on your plugs or your headset to protect your ears. Cover your eyes and open your mouth. If you don’t, the disparity between internal and external pressure from the concussion will bust up your insides. After my team blew that orchard, I was pissing blood for ten days. If you can’t get on the ground or behind cover, get the fuck away from any drop-offs because, believe me, this stuff will pick you up and lay you down. Hang on to your composure. The power of C-6 is that it scares the shit out of you. Human senses can’t stand the violence of it; it’s too extreme. That’s why it’s never used in the IDF by troops, only by demolition engineers.” Questions. “Dogs?”
“Silence ’em.”
“Kids?”
“Chase ’em.”
“Muj?”
“Kill ’em.”
We went in fast in two teams of four and one team of three, with our air controller topside keeping contact with the bird that, we hoped, would haul us out when this was over. In five minutes, twelve charges had been laid. The teams rallied on a stone square at the top of the village. Two firefights had already erupted, from which our guys had broken contact. Alarm bells were ringing all over the village. AK-armed forms darted in the shadows. We had seconds, not minutes, to make this work.