I’m watching this on Chutes’s laptop. “Are you sure these are our guys?”
Pete laughs. “I’m bringing in Trump/CNN right now to interview ’em.” He asks me have I got the kid, meaning Razz.
“In the seat in front of me.”
“Tell him the TV station’s blown. He’s gotta do the palace.”
Petrocelli and I trade ninety seconds of coded instructions, by the end of which I have a new timeline and GPS coordinates for extraction and a new mission.
Pete clicks off. I turn to Coombs, Q, Chris, and el-Masri.
“Remember Mussolini on the balcony?”
They don’t get it.
“According to Pete, there’s a hundred thousand crazed Tajiks massing right now in front of the presidential palace.” I indicate Razz in the passenger seat. “Our boy’s gonna address ’em.”
Eight in the morning and the palace has been looted to bare bones. The hundred thousand mad Tajiks have turned into three hundred thousand. At least five hundred pack the royal edifice; a bodyguard of bandits clamors around Razz, ecstatically swearing fealty. El-Masri is jabbering with them in Tajik. The outlaws pound Team Bravo’s backs and thrust bottles of anise liquor into our fists. They will erect statues of us. We have brought them their prophet.
Razz climbs out of his Adidas tracksuit, which he has decided is not presidential enough. One thug donates his pettu and shalwar kameez; another chips in boots and a Doctor Zhivago wolfskin hat. Someone hands Razz an AK. Razz tugs me aside. Grimly: “You know what you must do?”
“Do your thing first.”
We squander the next hour, struggling to satisfy the aesthetic caprices of the camera crews from Trump/CNN, SkyNet, and Fox/BBC. They don’t like Razz’s beard. They don’t like the balconies. The sun isn’t right on the first one, sound is lousy for the second, there’s no angle for the cameras on the third.
Petrocelli is back on the wire to me, demanding that we get on-air ASAP. The time difference to London and the States is critical. “This has to go live, Gent.”
“What am I, Pete, a TV producer?”
“Gent, get the dude on the air!”
I tell him I’m a warrior, not Captain Kangaroo. I turn to Razz, who has been slugging Stoli Cristal from the bottle for the past forty minutes. “You’re on, Mr. President.”
Razz spits a mouthful onto the floor. “You don’t set the timetable, asshole,” he tells me. “I do.”
“Please,” I say. “Pretty please.”
The virus of acquiring real power has only infected Razz for the past four hours; already he has become Tito, Saddam Hussein, and OBL. His royal guard of mountain mujahideen has been augmented by an armed-to-the-teeth posse of city gangsters, tribal man-killers, and narco hoodlums.
I turn to Chutes, who’s got the INMARSAT radio. “How close is the bird?”
“Here in twenty.”
I tell Chutes to have the chopper that will extract us set down directly behind the palace, on the paved plaza. And keep its rotors cranking.
A TV producer waves Razz forward, onto the balcony. The heir steps up to a battery of mikes. An ovation ascends.
“He’s the fucking pope,” says Q.
El-Masri and I move back out of the cameras’ sight line. The office and its balcony belong to the Ministry of Agriculture. Pillagers have looted everything, down to the curtains, even the poles.
Razz begins speaking. El-Masri translates. Razz is talking about oil. The new find at Beautiful Mountain will be “a second Saudi Arabia.” Its wealth will restore Tajikistan to its ancient glory.
A bark of approval rises, then a low rolling cheer. Razz cranks up the emotion. He’s good. Like Hitler, his rhythm is mesmerizing.
“The motherland possesses wealth,” Razz declares, “on a scale beyond imagining. But we will not let it be stolen this time. Not by my father, may his soul find peace despite his crimes and greed, who would make deals with the Russians and steal for himself whatever was left over … not by the Russians themselves, who would make us their slaves if we let them … nor by the Chinese, whose lust for the property of others knows no limits and whose armies will be massing on our borders in a matter of days if not hours.”
Ecstatic applause ascends. I eye the Western cameramen. They’re zeroed on Razz like a school of piranha. History. They are recording it. They are making it.
Razz ratchets the rhetoric higher. Tajikistan’s riches, he swears, will not be plundered by native criminals either. He himself will stand guard over it, night and day, unsleeping, to ensure that each Tajik warrior, each family, each clan, each tribe gets its fair share.
“Neither, brothers, will the insatiable Americans thieve our bounty. I have manipulated the friendship of General James Salter and his mercenary armies to the purposes of our God, our nation, our freedom, and our glory. He will make us rich, but we will not bow to him. We thank you for your assistance, friends”—he gestures to me and Team Bravo—“and now begone!”
At this erupts the mightiest cheer yet. Razz’s muj and narco-underworld posse brandish their AKs and S7s at us, whooping and jigging.
Three hundred thousand Tajiks surge beneath the balcony. Razz calls down the blessings of heaven upon them and their countrymen. He dedicates himself, body and soul, to their service. The crowd goes orgiastic. With a flourish, Razz vacates the podium, sweeps back inside, pushes through the ecstatic embrace of his worshippers, and marches straight up to me.
“Now,” he says with blood in his eye, “finish it.”
I turn to Chris and Chutes, indicating el-Masri. They seize him. The Egyptian goggles in bewilderment. I level my shotgun at his solar plexus.
Razz is waving his bodyguards back.
El-Masri understands. “You motherfuckers,” he says.
Chris and Chutes react, as thunderstruck as he is.
“Orders,” I say.
“Salter,” says el-Masri.
Razz leads us down the stairs, into an office off a rear hall. He bolts the door, leaving his posse packing the corridor. “Do it now,” he commands me.
El-Masri shakes free of Chris and Chutes, with an expression that says, You don’t need to hold me, I can face death on my own. Coombs, Q, and Junk cover him reluctantly with their weapons. They know nothing either. It’s all me. I’m the only one who has received the orders.
“Prison,” says el-Masri to Razz. “That’s why.”
“I rule Central Asia now. No one may know the things you know of me.”
“You were a bitch then and you’re a bitch now.”
Razz backhands el-Masri across the mouth.
The Egyptian wallops him back.
Chris and Chutes seize el-Masri again. I raise the shotgun.
The Egyptian meets my eyes. “Once I called you sentimental, Gent. But I’m the guilty one. I believed you were my brother.”
I release the safety.
“Do him now!” shouts Razz, wiping blood.
I raise the muzzle and pull the trigger.
Point-blank the blast has no range to disperse. The pellets hit Razz’s chest in a tight group. Lungs, heart, and dorsal spine explode out of his back. His body blows rearward and crashes to the floor like a wad of dirty laundry. El-Masri and the others gape in befuddlement.
“Change of orders,” I say.
El-Masri’s knees are wobbling. He grabs my shoulder. “You scared the shit out of me, bro.”
Sixty seconds later Team Bravo is piling into the waiting War Hawk. The mass of Tajiks take half that time to grasp what has happened. That’s our head start.
In twenty minutes our chopper has set down at Kurkan, the abandoned strip where we originally landed. Ninety seconds more and we’re wheels-up aboard an L-100 piloted by Dimitri and Dimitri, climbing over the cotton country west of Dushanbe, bound for Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Tashkent, on our first leg back to Basra.
I can’t raise Petrocelli on satellite or AKOP. Someone’s jamming all transmissions. It takes an hour, till we’re clear
of Tajik airspace, before I get through to Pete’s stateside counterpart, Tim Mattoon. Mattoon has monitored Razz’s speech and the hysteria in the aftermath of his assassination live on FARS, Trump/CNN, and Interfax.
“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.”
BOOK
SEVEN
POTOMAC
17
PLAYERS
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:
GENT
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 the
n, 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.