El-Masri says he’ll protect me. He’ll get me away to the tribal areas. He won’t let me go in to see Salter.
“They’ll slice and dice you before you’re in the door, bro.”
I tell him I don’t care. I’ll make Salter face me, one way or another. We’re in el-Masri’s 5-ton, an AfPak-era relic that he’s got rigged with a camp stove, sleeping mats, and a .50 caliber on an X-mount under the highback tarp. Behind the cab el-Masri has an nCryptor masking station, which makes the vehicle invisible to satellites. He has two Dragonfly surveillance drones, the kind you launch by hand like paper airplanes—and the Chinese-built InCom repeaters to monitor and control them. With his brothers, he takes me off road through the desert to Al Salim airstrip in the desert southeast of the city—Salter’s HQ in the north—which had been a single unhardened runway but is now a fortified air-and-ground complex behind a twenty-foot berm topped with razor wire and studded with gun towers. El-Masri’s truck pulls up in a wadi five miles out; the brothers, Jake and Harry, camouflage the vehicle with nets and brush. El-Masri puts up a Dragonfly. We hunker around the InCom screen, watching the green glow of the real-time readout.
“See this gate? Salter will enter there, in a convoy coming from the airfield. Then they’ll call you. Klugh will instruct you, or maybe Petrocelli, to enter by this eastern gate. See the chicane?”
Resolution from the fly is so good, I can make out the clearing barrels where friendlies returning to base eject the rounds from their weapons’ chambers before proceeding past security.
“They’ll kill you right here,” says el-Masri, indicating a site alongside a row of Porta-johns. He mimes a shot to the head, execution style.
He joysticks the Dragonfly out of its loop, heading home.
“You got to remember, Gent, that you’re a dangerous man. They can’t take no chances. Even unarmed, you scare the shit out of them.”
Jake and Harry plant “eyeballs”—robot cameras the size of a dime—at six sites atop the ridge overlooking Al Salim. “Salter’s plane will come in cloaked, but we’ll know he’s here from the activity at the security posts.”
We drive west to a cave complex carved from the walls of another wadi. There’s good water from an ancient Roman cistern. Smugglers, camel- and truckborne, use the site regularly, says el-Masri, so our vehicle will not stand out to even the most sophisticated drone or satellite surveillance.
El-Masri has something important he wants to say to me. He pours gin in tin cups and we sit across from each other, cross-legged on a carpet on the sand.
“Forget this thing, Gent. What can Salter possibly say to you—even if you could get in to see him—that would make any difference? He’s got the world by the nutsack. You ain’t gonna change that. And he ain’t gonna back off.”
The Egyptian wants me to come away with him. Now. Tonight.
“To the tribal areas. I got peeps there; no one will fuck with us. After that, Cairo. I still got money. These people who want you now, they will forget. We can live like humans.”
But I can’t.
El-Masri shakes his head. “What went wrong with you, my friend? You used to be hard. The hardest I ever knew. But you have changed. You have committed the one sin that God himself cannot forgive. You have come to care.”
29
THE PROFESSION
I DRIVE IN TO Al Salim, big as life.
Jack Stettenpohl has cleared me; I have pass-through papers from Col. Klugh.
If the guards have orders to waste me, they haven’t gotten the memo. I cruise. Within ten minutes, I’ve been escorted to a holding area adjacent to Salter’s HQ—a sandbagged, revetment-flanked hangar—and five minutes after that, ex-gunnery sergeant Dainty appears, with three black-suited security contractors, to take me back to the man himself.
I have been disarmed and strip-searched twice. My mouth has been scoured. A girl has been sent to trim my fingernails. “I’m surprised,” I tell Dainty, “you guys don’t wheel me in in a straitjacket like Hannibal Lecter.”
“Klugh thought of that, but we didn’t have the leather mask.”
The headquarters complex is constituted of two big Drash J-Shelter tents, air-conditioned and butted together at right angles to form an L. The rear wing houses the JTCC, the Joint Tactical Control Center—or so I’m told; they won’t let me back there. The forward limb of the L holds individual offices and conference rooms, comm stations, and a fifty-seat briefing theater.
I enter from the rear, with Dainty on my right, another contractor on my left, and two behind me. Salter stands up front at one corner of the stage (which is plywood and so freshly built you can smell the lumber), finishing a press interview with a handful of journalists. Col. Klugh stands above him on the platform. Jack Stettenpohl is there, looking red-eyed as if he has flown in minutes earlier, as are Cam Holland and Tim Mattoon.
Dainty stops me at the entry and points me to a theater seat. I take it. I count four exits, including the rear one by which I have just entered. Each is manned by a three-man security detail. I recognize faces from the Marine Corps and from Force Insertion—contractors now, armed with their own idiosyncratic weapons choices, H&K 416s and 420s, Israeli KM submachine guns, U.S. M6A carbines. Another team of six protects the stage rear.
Several of the journalists are familiar as well. Senior is the Englishman John Milnes. He’s nipping some kind of sauce from an airline minibottle and asks permission to put a question that he calls “a stinker.”
Salter agrees to answer.
“The world knows, sir, that a primary tenet of your political philosophy is that concept that you characterize as ‘the intersection of Necessity and Free Will.’ By ‘Necessity,’ one assumes you mean ‘force of history’ or perhaps ‘momentum of events.’ Clearly something very like that has propelled you to this hour. Yet you retain, as your philosophy asserts, free will. It lies within your power, then, to preside over the extinction of the American republic or to refrain from this overthrow—to step back, as it were, from the threshold of what would appear to be incipient tyranny. Will you, sir? Will you accept the crown that your countrymen seem so keen to place upon your brow? For history has shown that few men, however honorable their intentions, have been granted such powers as you will soon possess and failed to succumb to their charms. It was Pericles, I believe, who said, ‘Tyranny is a fine perch, but there is no way down from it.’ ”
Salter laughs good-naturedly. The query, he observes, is indeed a stinker. He will answer it, he says, though perhaps not from an angle that the distinguished journalist will approve of.
“I am a mercenary soldier, Mr. Milnes, and the warrior-for-hire lives by a code. That code looks upon the world without illusion. It regards all motives, including its own ambition, as equally expedient and self-serving. The code can be cruel or it can be kind. It can save and it can slaughter. It can slaughter in order to save. This is the era in which we reside, Mr. Milnes, whether we like it or not. History has brought us here.
“Any time,” Salter continues, “that you have the rise of mercenaries or the evolution of a code like that of the Samurai, society has entered a twilight era, a time past the zenith of its arc. Before then, no one needed a code; the thrust of history was so irresistible and so self-evident. Raise a flag and you raise an army. It was that easy and that satisfying.
“But when a nation’s sun has passed the meridian, particularly when it encounters enemies whose own despair is so great and whose application of violence so extreme that, to contest such forces, that nation must lower itself to a level of barbarism incompatible with standards of civilized conduct, then despondency enters the hearts of the people. In response arise noble but dark codes like that of the mercenary and the samurai. I’m not saying there’s not great wisdom in such philosophies of willing self-effacement, of nonattachment to outcomes, of voluntary sacrifice of the self to some abstract standard of excellence or skill. That’s the ground that spawns legends. But it’s ground that’s already been f
ought over and lost.”
Has Salter changed? Or was he always like this? As I watch him, I realize that his power, monumental as it was even a week ago, has doubled and redoubled in the interval. He is the only man in the world who can resolve disputes between Russia and China, make peace between India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, Israel and the Palestinians. Plans are in motion, I know from the morning’s news, to triple the size of American mercenary forces, 90 percent of whose funding will derive from corporations and overseas entities, energy producers, mineral and resource extractors for whom military and political security has been the final impediment to their own empire building. Volunteers for Force Insertion and its subcontractors are lining up by the thousands, not only in the United States but in every developed and developing country from India and Brazil to Turkey, Japan, Russia, China, even Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Uganda. The U.S. (or at least that element represented by Salter and Force Insertion) seems at last, after decades of near eclipse, to have found its role in the twenty-first century—as private military guarantor of a Pax International and custodian and distributor of the world’s oil and energy.
“The mercenary code,” Salter continues, “is the standard of a fallen soldiery and of heroes in a time past heroism. Mercenaries serve empires and they serve houses of crime. Soldiers for hire enlist under banners of conquest or of self-preservation. The former means stealing something that has never been stolen before, the latter protecting the employer’s right to keep stealing it. What is either except a felony?
“The United States is an empire, Mr. Milnes. But the American people lack the imperial temperament. We’re not legionnaires, we’re mechanics; DeTocqueville nailed that in 1835. In the end the American Dream boils down to what? ‘I’m getting mine and the hell with you.’
“What happens now? I don’t delude myself that I’ve generaled my way to this moment. History has tossed it into my lap. The country wants a ‘strong man.’ Horseshit. The rocket ride is over. The very ascension of someone like me—a mercenary general plucked from the provinces—is history’s sign that the nation has lost its way and is struggling desperately, merely to hang on.
“But what, I ask, is the alternative? If the presidential election is held without authority passed to me by the Emergency Powers Act, the United States will break down into revolution. The nation can’t go on as it is, and everyone knows it. If not me, who? If not me, what?”
Salter turns toward the rear of the auditorium, toward me.
“Do you see that officer sitting there? This man has traveled twelve thousand miles to assassinate me. I have brought him here and I have let him in. Do I fear him? Watch and see.”
Salter turns back to the journalists around the stage. Four are filming with minicams.
“The American people, Mr. Milnes, are no longer put off by the idea of mercenaries; they like mercenaries. They’ve had enough of sacrificing their sons and daughters in the name of some illusory world order; they want someone else’s sons and daughters to bear the burden. The American people are willing to pay for this privilege, in cash and in the circumscription of their own liberty. Do I approve? No. I hate it. But this is what the times demand—and what the people insist upon. They want their problems to go away. They want me to make them go away.
“So, yes, I will go home. And yes, I will accept whatever crown, of paper or gold, that my country wishes to press upon me. Not because I believe such a coronation will make any difference in the long run. It won’t. But maybe in the short term, it’s better that my hand be on the wheel (since I at least understand how fucked the situation is and possibly how to unfuck it), rather than some other self-aggrandizing sonofabitch whose motives might not be as well intentioned or whose consciousness so painfully evolved.”
Col. Klugh shifts behind Salter. The teams at the exits straighten and come alert. Dainty raps my seat.
“Come up here, Gent,” Salter calls. “Come here, my friend.”
The reporters turn.
Dainty lets me advance.
Salter stands, not on the stage but at ground level in front of it. I stride up. No one stops me from coming close.
“Say what you came here to say,” Salter says.
I’m unarmed. Across Salter’s chest, as always, stretches the holster rig with the M9 Beretta. He withdraws the weapon, cocks the slide, and holds it out to me.
“It’s loaded,” he says. “The rounds are live.”
Security teams step closer. Fingers move beside triggers.
I take the pistol.
I have rehearsed nothing. My secret self will act. He has become me at last, and I him.
“These other sonsofbitches,” I address Salter, “won’t say anything to your face because they’re afraid of you and because they don’t love you enough. But I’ll say it. Not for myself or for the country, but for you. I’ve followed you my whole life. I believed in you. But what you’re doing is wrong. It’s wrong, Jim. I’ve never called you Jim, but I’m calling you by your name now.”
I feel Klugh’s P220 zero on my skull. “Let me paste him, Jefe,” he says. Salter raises a hand to hold him back.
Reporters watch. Minicams record. I’m aware that I look like a madman, that every word I speak makes me seem crazier and makes Salter appear more courageous and self-assured.
I indicate Klugh. “Is this who you’re with now? Have you chosen men like him, instead of me? What kind of country will they stand for—one that worships you and nothing greater, the way I did for so long? I want to hear it from your lips: that you understand what you’re doing and you’re still gonna do it.”
A terrible sorrow fills Salter’s eyes. “I wish I didn’t understand, Gent.”
He tells me the time for choice is over. History has carried us past it.
“It’s never past,” I say. “I’m choosing and so are you.”
I still love Salter. In my eyes he’s still a great man, the only one I’ve ever known. But that doesn’t stop my right hand from elevating the M9—or my index finger from tightening around the trigger.
“Go ahead,” Salter says. “You’ll be saving the republic. And me too.”
Reporters are scampering clear. I hear chairs overturning and laptops clattering onto the floor. The security ring tightens around me.
“Sir!” says Klugh. “Give the word!”
I feel no fear in Salter. His raised hand keeps the teams back.
“What are you waiting for, Gent?”
In my mind I feel the recoil of the M9 and smell the blast of its powder. I see the round punching a hole between Salter’s eyes—and the bright spray blowing out the back of his skull. I see him dropping to the deck, like dead men do, as fast as a marionette when its strings are cut.
But I can’t pull the trigger.
I lower the weapon.
“Now,” I say, “I’m guilty with you.”
I drop the pistol. It clatters onto the floor. Klugh and Dainty seize me. I feel my wrists being yanked behind my back. A kick sweeps my feet from under me.
The deck rushes up and smacks me in the face.
30
A BROTHER
I’M FACEDOWN IN A truckbed with my wrists zip-stripped behind me. It’s dark. The floor is sandbagged, a precaution against roadside bombs. Dainty and another operator pin my ankles. Klugh’s knee, with his full weight behind it, digs between my kidneys; the muzzle of his 9 mm presses against the base of my skull. At least four other contractors complete the execution team.
I feel the truck—and hear two others in front and behind—zig through a series of chicanes.
“Finish it here, Klugh. Save yourself the gas.”
“Shut up!” He wallops me with the shank of the pistol, then mashes my face into the sandbagged floor.
I twist forward. Against the bulkhead behind the cab squats the mass of the ECM—Electronic Countermeasures—transmitter, the anti-IED jamming device. The 7-ton slows for the final checkpoint. I feel the trucks rattle over the scanner gri
d. I’m thinking one thing: all the ECM in the world can’t protect against a buried pressure plate—and that kind of trigger can be as primitive as two hacksaw blades wired to a battery and tucked under an inch of sand.
As I’m thinking this, the bomb goes off.
The truck elevates, stern first, tilts forward onto its nose, and rotates 270 degrees before crashing to earth, upside down and on fire. I have been flung out over the tailgate. I smell the bomb and blood and the contents of somebody’s guts opened by the explosion. Machine-gun fire and RPG rounds are tearing into the vehicles fore and aft. I’m on the ground, facedown, swimming. Someone turns me over. A voice shouts into my ear, “You okay? Gent!”
El-Masri.
He and another man lift me. I see tires, a floorboard. Explosions are going off so close I feel the impact in my eyeballs and my kidneys.
I’m in the backseat of something. Hands probe my guts and limbs. “Relax, bro!” the Egyptian yells in my ear. “You’ve still got your balls!”
We’re moving fast. A tribal warrior is packing a wound on my left shoulder.
“Can you fight, Gent?”
I’m back in my body.
“Fuck yes.”
I’m trying to turn to see if there are vehicles behind us, but my neck won’t crank past my shoulder. El-Masri is slipping the pistol grip of an M4–40 into my fist and jamming a couple of thirty-round magazines into my belt. “Hang on to your ass!” he shouts as a fireball of orange flame erupts fifty feet behind and twenty-five feet to starboard. I feel only the shock wave. El-Masri’s vehicle—an Iraq-era Humvee—yaws left, dumps onto its side, and skids to a stop.
The tribal warrior and I clamber out of the passenger-side window, which has become the roof. El-Masri follows. Floodlights are racing toward us. We dive into a ditch just as a Javelin antitank missile reams the wrecked Hummer right up the wazoo. The blast blows all three of us over a berm and tumbling down a thirty-foot slope. When I try to stand, I fall flat on my face. A shard of steel the size of a spatula is embedded in my heel. I jerk it out; it’s sizzling like a skillet.