The Profession

  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.”

  13

  COMMANDER’S INTENT

  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.

  “Gent, you and I have never spoken, have we, about Rob’s death … and what you and Tim and el-Masri did to get my son’s body back?”

  “We haven’t, sir.”

  Salter tries to continue. He can’t. He turns his face away. I feel his hand reach out and touch mine. Every hair on my body stands up.

  “I would have drained my blood for you, sir. We all would’ve—and we will now.”

  Salter still can’t speak. He curses and blows snot from his nose. He straightens and turns back.

  “You are my sons,” he says.

  He coughs and spits and swears again. He peers out into the night.

  “What I say now,” Salter begins, “is among us four only. When I’m finished, each of you is free to back out, with no hard feelings and your full fee paid.”

  I don’t need to glance to the others; I know they’re thinking the same thing I am. Nothing can make us pull out. This is what we live for.

  “I want to install Razz, the son, in place of his old man as head of state of Tajikistan. Your job, Tim, is to eliminate the father. Gent, you and el-Masri will grab the son. Your two teams will be operating hundreds of miles apart, depending on changing circumstances, but you both have to strike at precisely the same hour, so that one team’s mov
e doesn’t compromise the other’s. It ain’t gonna be easy. Gent, I want Razz alive. You’ll have to babysit him. He’s a handful.” Salter tells us not to worry; the fix is in. “He’ll go for this deal like a shark for a ham sandwich.”

  I glance to Tim and el-Masri. I love it that Salter can so casually declare, I want to install so-and-so as head of state of such and such a sovereign nation—and not only mean it but fully intend to carry it off, for reasons that he isn’t about to confide in me, Hayward, or el-Masri—and about which none of us gives a damn anyway. Salter knows this. It’s why he picked us.

  “I know you’re wondering,” Salter says, “what I want from Razz and whether or not he can be trusted. The answer is I don’t want anything and I don’t care what he does. Just get him installed. One more thing: I may have to withhold information from each of you. Orders may change. Be ready for it. You yourselves may have to misdirect your men. Prepare them for that too.

  “If the operation goes south, you’ll have to make your escape on your own. I won’t be able to help. In fact, I’ll disavow all knowledge of your existence. I’m sorry but I can’t tell you more. And I can’t give you any glorious reason for hanging your asses so far over.”

  Salter meets our eyes, each in turn.

  “You understand,” he says, “that I wouldn’t send any of you on a mission that I would hesitate to undertake myself.”

  We understand.

  I understand.

  “Two questions,” I say.

  First, why Tajikistan?

  “Remember that briefcase,” says Salter, “that you delivered to Maggie Cole in Scotland? It contained a geoengineering report about a newly discovered field at a place called Kooh-e-Khushruhi—‘Beautiful Mountain’—in eastern Tajikistan. That field is as big as Ghawar. A second Saudi Arabia. The most massive find in seventy-five years.”

  In other words, Salter says, out with Razz’s father (who, if he’s allowed to live, will no doubt sell the oil to the Russians), and in with Razz who, we hope, will make a deal with us.

  I’m impressed.

  “This is world changing,” says Salter.

  He asks for my second question.

  I tell Salter that, since Scotland, I’ve had the feeling that I’ve been followed—and that the sensation has doubled and tripled since Cairo and PSAB.

  “Russians,” he says. “Gazprom probably, or Lukoil or the government, which amounts to the same thing.”

  From his expression, Salter has clearly anticipated this element; it is integral, apparently, to his design. “The Russians know you’re working for me and they know you don’t know anything yet. That’s why you’re still alive.”

  El-Masri nods appreciatively. “May I ask, sir? How many moves ahead do you plan?”

  “As many as I can when men’s lives are at stake. And it’s never enough.”

  14

  THE MERCENARY CODE

  THE LAST THING TEAM Bravo does out of Hantush is sign contracts and make out our wills.

  I’ve been through this drill with half a dozen outfits. The process is always the same: a rote speech delivered by some shaved-skull ex-colonel in an airless and sweltering (or freezing) Winnebago; then a short, lamely produced video hyping the (totally bogus) traditions of the company. There’s an oath you swear and an appeal to your pride and self-respect. You promise you’ll be loyal to your employer and won’t bolt for Neptune the first time a bullet whizzes past your ear.

  This time it’s different. The contract with Salter has no talk and no video. It’s one page. Each man signs individually. Then there’s a group contract, which you all sign together, like the Declaration of Independence. It’s meant to be emotional and it is.

  We part from Team Alpha, then load up and board.

  The two War Hawks take us on our first leg, south to Shatt-al-Arab (the town is still stinking from incinerated cement and human flesh). There we transfer to longer-range craft for the main haul—across the gulf and over portions of southern Iran to a hidden landing ground in the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan, northeast of Kabul. The first plane is a Russian An-24, which we had preloaded forty-eight hours earlier at PSAB. This will carry all the team gear, plus Coombs, Q, and Chutes with the UAE commandos and five Tajik mercenaries who’ve been added at the last minute by Pete Petrocelli. The second is an ancient PBY Catalina, which will carry me, el-Masri, Junk, and Chris Candelaria. The split-up into two elements is to ensure that the mission can carry on in the event of a mishap to one component.

  A PBY is what they used to call a flying boat. Ours is a bona fide antique, complete with a brass WWII service plaque—rebuilt God knows how many times over the years and leased now to Force Insertion from one of its Bulgarian subcontractors, Teddy Ostrofsky’s TulipCo, but owned and operated by an Alabaman who calls himself C.C. Ryder and copiloted by a corpulent cracker who C.C. claims is his son but who is obviously the same age he is, if not older. The purpose of using a seaplane is to defeat Iranian radar by flying so close to the surface of the gulf, says C.C., “that a boy can hang his dick out the hatch and drag the knob in salt water.”

  It’s night and he’s wearing Iraq-era NODs, notorious for their blunting of all depth perception. After the third unplanned skip off the surface at 140 knots, el-Masri unbuckles and crabwalks forward to the cockpit, where he attempts to incentivize C.C. to increase his altitude. When the pilot tells him to return to his seat because his fat ass is upsetting the trim of the ship, el-Masri bumps his offer to outright purchase of the aircraft. “How much are those Bulgarians paying you for this piece of shit?”

  C.C. shoots him a baleful eye. “If you don’t stem from the U.S. of A., partner … fuck off.”

  The plane’s two engines are set close together on the wings, which themselves are mounted above the crown of the fuselage, so that the aircraft can make a water landing without the props churning into the sea. This setup provides exceptional visibility (PBYs had been search-and-reconnaissance planes during the war in the Pacific). You look down and see everything. This scares the snot out of el-Masri, who can discern only too clearly the whitecaps skimming a few feet below our boat-shaped prow, into which the dry-landing wheels are retracted and rattling around with an unreassuring clamor.

  To check in with Petrocelli via satphone, I have to crawl forward past the pilots to what had been the observation bubble. This is a single-seat perch, where a hood ornament would be, so cramped that you have to breathe through your nose to keep your breath from fogging the plexiglass.

  Sure enough, Pete has bad news. Our target, Razz, is no longer in the torture house in Dushanbe, where intel had said he was. His Islamists have tried to break him out. His father’s secret police have fought these attackers off and spirited Razz away, Pete says, just before the whole hideout blew up.

  “Where is Razz now?” I ask.

  “No one knows.”

  I ask Pete about Salter and the Saudis. Any sign of reconciliation?

  “I forgot,” he says. “You haven’t heard.”

  “What?”

  “The boss just told the whole world to go fuck itself.”

  Salter had assembled his warriors, we will learn later, on the parade square before the Ministry of Justice in central Basra. This was four hours after we left him at Hantush airstrip. Those present on the square represented less than a twentieth of the deployed mercenary forces (the rest being occupied fighting or preparing to fight), but the cameras and video feeds of Fox/BBC, Trump/CNN, FARS, al-Arabiya, and al-Jazeera carried the pictures live to the full contingent—and to every street corner and public square around the world.

  Men who were there said Salter showed no anger. He was cool. Nothing about him had altered.

  He addressed the troops, standing on the hood of an I-SAM missile truck, amid a half-brigade-sized amphitheater composed of MRAPs, AA-11s, and Iraq-era Marine War Pigs. Apaches and Black Hawks streaked overhead. The show looked like a video game. It was a gun geek’s wet dream.

  In the
center stood Salter, with his M9 pistol in its shoulder harness and his skull shaved high and tight.

  Salter told his mercenary troops that their employers had gotten cold feet and had ordered the operation discontinued. Pressure from the United States and the European powers, from Russia and China and India and Iran, from the UN and world opinion, not to mention panic in the global oil and stock markets, had induced the venture’s backers to agree to a cease-fire in place.

  We troops on the ground, Salter said, have received orders to halt all offensive operations. We will advance to no farther phase lines and seize no additional objectives. United Nations peacekeepers will arrive within ten days. At that time, we are to surrender our posts and our weapons and deliver ourselves into the custody of such wardens and keepers as the world community shall appoint over us.

  At these words, the first groan ascended. Salter held up his hands; the square quieted. Salter spoke into a hand mike. Huge rock-concert speakers had been erected behind him.

  “Who would be a warrior for hire? What kind of man would hazard his precious life for something as coarse and easily acquired as money? Only a fool or a madman. That’s what I am—and that’s what you are too, brothers, or you wouldn’t be here with me. But there is wisdom in our lunacy and cunning within our folly. For war, we have learned, is the crucible within which all that is base and unworthy is purged from our impure and polluted hearts. The god of strife sees to that. I worship him. He is my teacher.

  “What principles has this divinity taught me? To hold true to my brothers, to subordinate my self to the greater whole, to donate freely the last drop of my blood—and to ask nothing in return.

  “We are warriors. Our trade stands a handbreadth from that of the murderer and the assassin. Perhaps in another lifetime, you and I have committed grave crimes. This life now may be our purgatory. How do I absolve myself of those transgressions, which I cannot even remember? By sacrificing my ego, my greed, my fear, my hesitation, and my selfishness on the altar of strife.