The Profession

  “Where’s the smoke?” says Chutes.

  The city looks untouched.

  “There!” Q points.

  Thermal vision goggles don’t just magnify ambient light like the old Iraq-era NVGs; they pick up heat signatures and digitally reconstruct them. In their crimson cast, we can see one sector along the Shatt waterway that looks like it’s been cleaned out by a five-kiloton blast. For what appears to be a square mile, not a stick remains standing. The place is smoking, a leveled plot of wild-cherry-tinted rubble.

  “I don’t get it,” Quinones says. “The city looks cool except for that one Black Hole.”

  El-Masri eyes the moonscape. “Welcome to Shiastan.”

  There’s a desert airstrip north of Basra called Hantush. It has no tower, not even a radio shack. But it does possess two full-length hardened runways, crossing in a shallow X. Corporate jets of Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Petronas used the site in the ’20s, as did the Third Marine Air Wing during Operation Iraqi Freedom in ’03 and Saddam Hussein in his day before that. Our C-130 sets down in pitch darkness, the pilots using TNVGs and riding the glide path set up by a laser comm team on the ground. The field itself appears slightly more hospitable when we waddle off the rear ramp and hump our 120 pounds of gear per man. A line of fire barrels can be glimpsed to the east side of the runway, with at least thirty vehicles, mostly Suburbans, Kodiaks, and Land Rovers, beside them—and a front of chemlight-illuminated tie-downs paralleling the tarmac, with the dark shapes of a half-dozen Black Hawks and Sea Stallions visible in a row. Port and starboard lies raw desert. A ground chief greets me, confirms my identity by three different parameters, including retinal scan, then leads our team on foot toward two parked War Hawks across the sand, on a separate hardstand. “Who’s the company?” I shout over the taxiing 130’s prop wash, indicating the line of civilian vehicles.

  “Sugar men,” says the chief. “Waiting for the boss.”

  We hear something huge and loud approaching. Out of the black drops a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, massive as a Safeway.

  “Salter,” the chief says.

  The plane touches down and rolls fast past our position, toward the north end of the runway. An on-ground combat team protects the aircraft; as soon as the jet’s wheels touch down, three up-armored Humvees, a surface-to-air I-SAM truck and a CAAT antiarmor team roll out to protect it. I see Dainty, Salter’s old security chief from Mosul, and an underaged buck colonel named Klugh, whom I don’t know. I give Dainty a high five, but the colonel stiff-arms me.

  “Hey, fucker,” I tell him, “I was with Salter when you were popping pimples in junior high.”

  “Yeah?” he says. “Well, you ain’t with Salter now.”

  As the security team rolls out, Dainty tries to smooth things over. “Don’t mind Klugh, he can be a bit of hard-on, but he’s aces in a scrap.”

  Team Bravo has reached the tie-downs now. Our War Hawk pilot, Maj. Mark Kelly, whom we know well from briefings at PSAB, comes up, shaking his head.

  “Fucked again, Gent,” he shouts over a rising wind.

  “What?”

  “Show’s off.”

  Chris, Chutes, and Coombs hurry up.

  The operation has been scratched, says Kelly.

  “Just us?”

  “Everything.”

  Kelly tells us the Saudis—our employers, apparently—have gotten cold feet. That’s what went wrong in Basra, that’s why the fighting. He points to the lineup of Suburbans, Kodiaks, and Simooms. “That’s why all these low-rise motherfuckers are here.”

  I’ve heard shit like this so many times that I don’t believe anything anymore.

  Good or bad, nothing is real till it happens or it doesn’t. I convey this to my team in no uncertain terms.

  Everyone, keep your head in the game.

  I make them eat. I make them hydrate. I make them look to their weapons. My cargo pockets hold a cache of airline-mini Johnnie Blacks; I pass them out like Tootsie Rolls. It helps.

  The team stages its gear on the hardstand; Kelly’s crew chief and door gunners are lashing their rotors to little steel X’s countersunk into the tarmac. The flaps of our rucks are snapping in the rising gale. We can see Salter’s Galaxy coming about at the extremity of the runway; already half a dozen VIP motorcades are maneuvering to intercept him as the plane taxis back.

  “Who are these black shoes?” asks Q.

  “Bankers.” Chris Candelaria watches, paintbrushing sand from the receiver of his H&K Q6 over/under. “Each one of those bulletproofs is packing dudes with investments of 5B minimum.”

  “What are they here for?”

  “To make sure Salter doesn’t piss it away.”

  “Saddle up,” I say. “We’re getting in line too.”

  Salter’s C-5 taxis back and comes to a stop. The sugar men’s Suburbans and Kodiaks press around it. I lead our team up too, on foot, bringing Chris and el-Masri and Capt. Coombs, hoping one of us knows somebody who can get us aboard. The Galaxy’s massive nose elevates and its rear doors swing wide, revealing a cavernous interior bathed in red night-vision lights. Salter emerges like he always does—no entourage, just him and his longtime aide, Pete Petrocelli. He wears an M9 pistol in a shoulder holster, in night camo with desert boots and no hat. He looks fit and trim. His hair is cut as high and tight as it was when he was a Marine.

  I try to flag Pete down but it’s impossible. The big shots sweep forward. In moments Salter and Petrocelli are pulled away.

  I’m wriggling through the crush. El-Masri is at my shoulder. Suddenly I spot a familiar profile.

  “Jack!”

  It’s Stettenpohl. In civvies. He’s a third-term congressman now, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee—and already being mentioned as a possible VP.

  We embrace like brothers. I introduce him to el-Masri, to Chris, and to Coombs. He knows Chutes from East Africa. I point out Q, Junk, Mac, and Tony back outside the aft doors. “What are you doing here, man?”

  “Same as you, Gent. Making money!”

  Jack gets us aboard. He has been with Salter, he says, for the past ninety-six hours, through the meat of the whole Saudi-SoIraq fiasco. Our team shuffles up the massive steel boarding ramp to a galley aft; Chutes, Q, Mac, Junk, and our UAE troopers help themselves to Red Bulls, sandwiches, and microwave pizza. The C-5’s scale is colossal, more like a ship than a plane.

  Around the chow trough hovers a flock of youngish, executive-looking Yanks, Brits, Germans, and East Indians, wearing desert boots and sports jackets, several topped with cammie IBAs, individual body armor. Stettenpohl introduces us. These sprouts are hotshot VPs from investment banks and sovereign wealth funds, come to bird-dog their bosses’ money. Chris recognizes two from Credit Suisse; another comes up from Jadwa Investing in Riyadh. We start shaking hands. There are reps from French Total, Menatep Bank in Russia, Onexim, Yukos, and Rossiisky Credit Bank. A guy hands me his card in German: Dresdener Kleinwort Wasserstein.

  Topside on the command deck, the hatch to Salter’s conference cubby is opening. Who emerges but my old buddy from the Highlands, former secretary of state Juan-Esteban Echevarria. He looks old and fat, sweating like a hog in the yards of material that make up his business suit. I have no inclination whatever to catch his eye or speak a word. Let his security team hand him down to his motorcade; I take a step back into shadow so he won’t see me.

  But a few minutes later I glance across the cargo deck and spot the secretary again, slumped against the aft bulkhead in obvious distress, with his team clustered around him.

  He’s sick. His detail is calling for a medical officer. I feel my secret self come forward. I stand and cross straight to Echevarria. The security men block me at first but a quick exchange and the Secy remembers me. “Colonel!” He waves me through.

  “It’s dust,” I say, indicating the rising sandstorm outside. “It fucks everybody up.”

  I pull off my kerchief and douse it with water from a Solaire bottle; I make the secretary pr
ess it over his nose and mouth and breathe through it. “In thirty seconds, you’ll be fine.”

  I sit beside him and talk him through it. He’s scared, that’s all. His ass is so wide, it takes up two seats; he’s so heavy that his heart and lungs are overwhelmed in this heat and dust. I pluck the last airline-size Jack Daniel’s from the cargo pocket of my trousers. The Secy takes it down in one snort; by the time the doc arrives, Echevarria is fine. He’s grateful. I soak the rag again and make him press it to his forehead.

  “So, Colonel, are you still undyingly loyal to your commander?”

  “Will I disappoint you if I say yes?”

  The secretary’s breath is coming easier now. His color returns. “I must tell you,” he says, “I felt for him. The loss of his son—and in such a grisly manner. But by God, he has caught the world by the balls since then!”

  Topside, another group is exiting Salter’s conference compartment. I ask Echevarria what errand has brought him here, to the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. “Not to collect money for another charity?”

  The secretary smiles. “Colonel, I understand that you’re something of an authority on tribes and tribal warfare. You know, then, how the sheikhs and maliks make sure to plant their own trusted men within the power structures of the enemy. That way, no matter who wins, their own and their tribe’s interests are protected.” Echevarria observes that Washington, D.C., is no different. “Such mischief, as I’m sure you were aware, was very much afoot in that hunting lodge where you and I first met. But you have no idea,” he says, “of its daring or its depth.”

  How daring, I ask. How deep? The secretary leans closer.

  “The hour shall come in America, as it has for all empires, when the franchise passes officially from the Many to the Few.”

  “The franchise? You mean the right to vote?”

  “You’re an educated man, Colonel. You’ve read of ‘the Four Hundred’ at Athens. And ‘the Thirty’ under Critias.”

  I stare at the secretary. Is he joking?

  “I’ve trekked here to treat with Salter, Colonel, as Cicero once appealed to Caesar—to make the case that, when this Catalog of the Elect shall be compiled, my name will appear thereupon.”

  Can this be true? Overseas—and by that I mean any place where combat is imminent and the home turf belongs to the enemy—you hear crazier shit than you ever heard in your life. Every dude has a story; 99.9 percent are bullshit. You listen, you shake your head, you keep trucking.

  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.”