The Profession
“Why?”
“Because you might get answers.”
Chris tells me I don’t understand how important I am to Salter. “Gent, you don’t realize the exalted place you occupy in his heart. Salter loves you, man.”
“What are you talking about?”
“To him you’re the pure warrior—the man who fights for the fight alone. In a way, I think you’ve replaced his son. Or maybe he sees you as who he himself used to be before—”
“Before what?”
“Before he had to become what everybody becomes when they rise beyond a certain level. Politics. He doesn’t want you contaminated with that shit.”
“Then why did he send me to D.C.?”
“He sent you as a warrior, Gent. He knew he could trust you. He knew you loved him as much as—”
A flyblown turnout appears on the left. Chris pulls in. The lot is untended and unpaved. Rolling grassland rises inland toward a range of foothills. There’s a sixty-foot obelisk and a crumbling monument that looks like it came out of a 1954 Cecil B. DeMille movie.
“What is this place?”
“Gaugamela.”
Chris tells me and el-Masri that this site is where Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia in 331 B.C.
“This is what you brought us here for?”
“This is a cosmic place, dude! Gaugamela was—”
“I don’t give a fuck about some ancient battle, Chris. I want to know what’s going on now. Hayward’s back in D.C., waxing people. I want to know who gave the order!”
Chris brakes at the crest of a rise and kills the engine. He turns toward me.
“Gent, I don’t know Hayward and I don’t wanna know him. But I do know that anything can be bought. You and me are contractors. So are ten thousand guys stateside.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means this is high-stakes chess, baby. Salter’s moving multiple pieces around multiple boards—”
“I get it.”
“—and you and I are players.”
“We’re pawns.”
El-Masri leans in from the back, sets his hand on my shoulder. “My friend, this is why you must always ask for double. Because guys like you and me … we will always get fucked in the end.”
I turn to Chris. I see in his eyes that he’s told me all he knows.
“All right,” I say. “Show us the fucking battlefield.”
Now, in D.C., the capital is nearing its breaking point. Only four days have passed since I flew out, with Salter’s repatriation looking like a gimme. Suddenly, resistance has doubled and redoubled, not only inside the Beltway but from scores of power centers around the country.
ITV HuffPost calls the general’s return “de facto despotism,” “a crypto-coup,” and “the end of the republic as we know it.” Its editors vow to shutter the office and take their outrage to the streets. On the same day, no fewer than eleven political action groups made up of lawmakers, business leaders, and concerned citizens take out above-the-fold banners on the NYGT, WSJ/CBS, the WikiWashington Post, Politix, and FaceTime—all declaring the proposed amendment to the Emergency Powers Act unconstitutional. Salter’s poll numbers have plunged fourteen points.
A powerful, organized resistance has arisen, led by a significant minority of senators, oddly enough from both sides of the aisle; a triad of ex-presidents; and numerous representatives of the retired military and the diplomatic corps, the most prominent and outspoken of whom is former secretary Echevarria. A number of legal challenges are being mounted, the press reports, not only to the proposed amendment but to the Emergency Powers Act itself.
On the second Monday after Labor Day, the House of Representatives votes on, but fails to pass a motion stripping Salter of American citizenship. On Tuesday an unnamed Justice Department source is quoted in the WSJ stating that the attorney general is in fact drawing up an indictment for treason. The story is retracted online two hours later, but not before the blogs and pol/boards short out on tens of thousands of rabid posts, pro and con.
Chaos in the Gulf is driving the country nuts. Will the U.S. lose its oil? A story on MurdochNet has Salter meeting in Abu Dhabi with Vitaly Salaquin of Gazprom, aiming to sell “our” Saudi oil to Russia. Fox/BBC broadcasts file video of Salter with premier Koverchenko during the Ingushettia crisis of ’27 when he, Salter, had hired out a Force Insertion armature to protect the pipeline and other Russian interests.
What is the truth? No one knows. Salter has sealed the kingdom to the press and all outsiders. In place of news, rumors abound. Trump/CNN publishes a schematic purporting to depict the high-explosive wiring rigged by Salter’s mercs across the entire Saudi pumping/pipelining/processing infrastructure. This act, which may or may not be fiction, prompts a photo-op denunciation by a phalanx of congressmen, mostly from Texas and Louisiana, who declare Salter no better than a terrorist. Nuke the bastard! Send in the Marines! Two carrier battle groups continue to cruise the Gulf. Hellfire-packing Predators circle over Salter’s head. Nuclear-missile subs remain on-station; B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s from Diego Garcia do racetrack runs 24/7.
A thousand inflammatory fables ricochet around the blogosphere, from which they are tweeted and retweeted, rChived, HoloTubed, magnified, inflated, and bloviated, before metastasizing onto the mainstream airwaves. Salter, the myths declare, has concluded a pact with Revolutionary Guard Iran; he now has nuclear weapons. He is in bed with China, India, Brazil. One story tells of a deal with Japan. Tokyo, flush with Salter’s promise of limitless oil, is preparing demands for the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands; the Japanese want Pearl Harbor. Salter, other sources proclaim, has orchestrated a giveback to the Saudis. He has converted to Islam, taken a Saudi bride, and been adopted into the royal family.
A.D’s article comes out—the lead piece of a double issue of Apple imPress. The story is unapologetically pro-Salter, portraying him as a misunderstood patriot, a champion of vision and virtue who has been stabbed in the back by envious, craven, and careerist colleagues. A.D. makes the rounds of talk shows. Could this article bring her third Pulitzer nom? She blogs and pens op-eds. This one, posted on zenpundit.com, goes instantly viral. It is titled “Coalition of the Bewildering.”
The nation hasn’t seen a figure as populist or as polarizing as Salter since Andrew Jackson. “Strange bedfellows” doesn’t begin to sum up his partisans. Where he is loved, he is worshipped, and where he is suspected, he is abhorred. Start on the left. At the same time that Gen. Salter is feared and loathed as a warmonger and Lone Horseman of the Apocalypse, he is admired by equally rabid elements of the pink who see him as perhaps the last serious military/political intellectual, a writer and thinker on a par with John F. Kennedy and, to some, Lincoln (not to mention National Book Award–winning author of In the Shadow of Appomattox), and the sort of thinking man’s ass kicker who possesses sufficient street cred to make accommodations abroad without squandering what little armed-force capital the republic still retains.
On the right, Salter’s enemies include throngs of conservative Christians and “values voters” whose alarm is monumental at his indifference to (not to say boredom with) the social issues that are near and dear to them. Wall Street hates him. Big Oil is terrified. He is vilified by true-believer patriots for whom he is and always will be a renegade and turncoat, if not an outright traitor. For them, the 2021 photo of Salter with Premier Evgeny Koverchenko never fails to elicit blood-boiling rage. And yet, last weekend, when Agence France-Presse journalist Ariel Caplan and I attended a stock car race in western Pennsylvania, we counted hundreds of SALTER NOW stickers (and several tattoos) on the fenders of biker babes and Rolling Rock–guzzling truckers.
Gas prices have hit fourteen bucks a gallon. Desperation mounts. The United States teeters on the brink of collective hysteria.
Then comes September 27, 2032.
Crown Prince Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, speaking for his father, King Nayif bin Abdul Aziz, Guardian of the Two Holy Mosques and Soverei
gn of the Kingdom and the House of Saud, appears on forty-seven international nets simultaneously to announce that the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources has finalized a contract with ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips for 66.6 percent of Saudi crude for the next forty years. It will all go to the United States. The other 33 percent will be reserved for the people of Saudi Arabia.
Salter is not on the platform for the announcement. No officer of Force Insertion is available for comment. But every prime minister and head of state, every president and premier, crown prince, magnate, mogul, CEO, every Peterbilt-driving cracker waiting to fill up his saddle tanks … they all know whose hand is on the wheel.
Salter has made peace between the princes and their elders—and between both royal factions and the commons. He has taken nothing for himself and nothing for his legionnaires beyond their promised pay and bonuses.
Two days later the Financial Times announces a 50/50 split of the natural gas field at Takhar in Afghanistan between Royal Dutch Shell and Russian Lukoil, also for forty years—and a matching deal for thirty-three years for the Umm Qasr, Majnoon, and Rumayla fields in Iraq with BP, Russian Gazprom, and Inpex from Japan. According to the Wall Street Journal, Salter has also taken under his protection the LNG fields in Qatar and occupied with thirty-five hundred mercenaries and forty I-SAM, surface-to-air missile trucks the Ras Laffan gas plant, from whose offshore terminal, R-LOT, the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Ali Hassan bin Jamad bin Salem, signs contracts with Unocal, US Shell, and Pacific Richfield for a hundred billion cubic meters per year.
In other words, thanks to Salter, U.S. markets for the next two generations have locked up nearly 40 percent of the crude oil and gas from seven of the largest and most productive fields on the planet and, because the deals are tied to Russia, the EU, India, and Japan, they are stable and, theoretically at least, proof against incursion, overthrow, and insurrection. The Dow takes off on a rocket ride. Overnight, Uncle Sam’s national manhood soars from broke dick to world-class stud.
I’m driving home from a Wizards game (a meeting on Kurdish oil), on the phone to Jack Stettenpohl, when the Saudi announcement breaks. What does this mean for the Emergency Powers Act amendment?
“It’ll take a couple of weeks,” says Jack. “Opponents need time to shape-shift and cover their asses.”
“But this thing is happening?”
“Slam dunk, bro. Salter is about to be anointed emperor.”
I sign off, about to speed-dial Ariel. She phones first.
“Log on to page 22,” she says, “in tomorrow’s Post.”
“What is it?”
“Fallon. The Third Amigo. Dead in his condo at Rehoboth Beach.”
23
MAGGIE’S FARM
IT’S ELEVEN THIRTY BUT Maggie’s awake. She leads me into her kitchen. We sit. I tell her what Ariel has told me.
“And you think,” Maggie says, “that I know something about this.”
“If you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Cole, not much happens inside the Beltway or out that you don’t know something about.”
The former first lady pours Johnnie Blues. Her Secret Service detail hovers but, at a sign from her, the nearest two agents withdraw.
“Gilbert,” Maggie says. “Are you still my nephew?”
“Are you still my aunt?”
Mrs. Cole declares that she’s aware of my encounter with Colonel Hayward and of the suspicions I harbor concerning him. “What I want to know is what you intend to do about it.”
I repeat the events as Ariel has reconstructed them. “The CyberLeaks chief dies of a heart attack. A marathon runner, in the pink. Courtemanche, the blogger, crashes his Lexus on a dry road, alone, with no other vehicles in sight. Now Congressman Fallon suffers a stroke—at age fifty-six—and kicks.”
“With respect, Gilbert, you haven’t told me what you intend to do.”
“With respect, Mrs. Cole, you haven’t told me a damn thing.”
The former first lady studies me for a long moment. Clearly she is making up her mind whether to spare me or send me to the guillotine.
“Will you believe me, Gilbert, if I’m completely candid with you?”
Maggie swears she has no firsthand knowledge of any action taken against these three men who were responsible for ruining Rob Salter’s career and ending his life. “But I understand,” she says, “how the game is played. This country is fighting for its survival. Sometimes messages have to be sent.”
She glances into the adjacent dining room, making sure that the Secret Service men are out of earshot.
“The world changed for Jim Salter,” Maggie says, “the day Rob was killed. Jim worships this country. But he came to understand, then, that he had lost it, or rather that it had become a different country—one he didn’t know, one he no longer recognized.
“We started then. He and I and others. Believe me, there was no want of patriots who shared our desperation, our fear for the nation, and our refusal to stand by and permit it to perish.”
Maggie tells me to take a drink. I do.
“This is not the first occasion in history when a nation has banished her noblest son, only to call him home in her hour of need. The days of the United States pretending to be a republic are over, Gilbert. History has moved past that place, and you, as much as any man, have been a part of it.”
The first lady’s eyes fix upon mine.
“You blew an entire village into a river. I applaud that. It was justice. When unspeakable crimes were committed in East Africa, you struck at the villains, though you knew the act could cost you everything. I salute all you’ve done, in the service of General Salter and on your own. But you are no innocent. You’re in this game up to your eyeballs, my friend, and you have been all your life.”
My blood turns to ice.
“I’ve put people in the ground, Mrs. Cole, plenty of them. But never Americans—and never in the cause of trashing the Constitution.”
“The Constitution is a piece of paper. Men wrote it and men can rewrite it. It was made to be amended!”
“Then amend it by law, not by murder!”
“It is being amended, Gilbert. Read the news! Ask your precious friend, Miss Caplan!”
A rustle from the dining room; the Secret Service agent appears in the doorway. “Are you all right, Mrs. Cole?”
“I’m fine, Richard. Thank you.”
Maggie recovers herself.
The agent withdraws.
Maggie turns back to me. She tells me she wants me at her wedding. She wants me up front—with the family.
“Jim’s flying back. He and I decided tonight, just a few hours ago. It’ll be the first time he’s set foot on U.S. soil since Rob was killed.”
The wedding, Maggie says, will be held in the chapel at Annapolis. She and Salter had reserved the National Cathedral but have changed their minds. Modesty is more seemly. And it is critical, they both agree, that the ceremony be held on ground sacred to the military, particularly the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps, which are and always will be Gen. Salter’s home.
“Jim loves you, Gilbert,” Maggie says. “You have no idea how deeply.”
She lifts her Scotch and throws it down at one belt. Then, looking over my shoulder into the night:
“This country is fucked. Who else is there but Salter? No one.”
24
A DISH BEST SERVED COLD
THE PHONE RINGS AS I’m driving home. It’s Jack Stettenpohl. The dash clock says one thirty. “Gent, I love you, man. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Did Mrs. Cole just phone you?”
“Biscuits and gravy tomorrow. I’m buying.”
Jack makes me promise to meet him for breakfast at the Hay-Adams.
“Gent—”
“What?”
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
I turn onto Jeff Davis Highway, heading home to Crystal City. A black SUV turns behind me.
I try to reach A.D., but her phone’s on work-block. I cal
l Ariel. “Put a pin in me. Come now.” I sync the GPS in my phone to hers, so she can follow me.
“Where are you?”
“In trouble.”
I turn off Jeff Davis. The SUV turns after me. Crystal City is high-rises built in the 1980s; you turn onto a frontage road that leads to underground garages serving corridors of aging residential towers.
Ahead, a Chevy Suburban angles in from an alley. In three seconds they’ve pinned me. I’ve got a .45 under the seat but it’s too late.
“Gentilhomme.”
It’s Agocopian, the FBI man. He presses an ID against my driver’s-side window and points to the locked door.
“Open it.”
Secretary Echevarria’s house is an 1850s historical landmark near Lee’s Hill in Georgetown. It’s past two when Agocopian and two other agents, one a woman, shove me up a flight of Civil War–era stairs and down a long, unlighted hallway.
Into the secretary’s bedroom.
He’s sitting up in bed, with papers and documents strewn around.
“Here he is,” says the FBI guy, pushing me forward.
Echevarria doesn’t look up. The room is flooded with video lights. A cameraman runs a disk-cam on a tripod. The secretary is speaking into the camera—something about Salter and the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. A boom mike extends above him, held by a soundman.
The FBI female tries to clip a microphone to my shirt. I tear it off. “What the hell is going on?”
Echevarria continues speaking into camera. I stare at him. He has lost fifty pounds. He looks like death.
The deputy, Agocopian, approaches me, with a Fed-issue 9 mm pointed at my chest. “Put on the mike.”
“Fuck you.”
The female wallops me with a steel baton behind the right knee. I won’t go down. I refuse to give them the satisfaction. “Stop it!” cries the secretary.
The female has come around in front of me; she is itching to shatter my shin. She’s strong as a man.
“That’s enough!” shouts Echevarria, stopping the agents with his voice. He has finished dictating to the camera. He turns to me. For the first time I notice medical monitors and IV drips.