A.D. is two years older than me. The first time she got word that she was a Pulitzer finalist was ten days after we got spliced. I remind her of that now. “I’m lucky for you.”
“Yeah?” she says. “Did I win?”
A.D. is a politics junkie. She’s up on every detail of the latest administration outrages. It’s an article of faith with her that the United States under the last six presidents—Dems as well as GOP—has crossed what she calls the Augustan Point of No Return, meaning the date when Octavian took the name Caesar Augustus and the republic of Rome became the Roman Empire. She hates this. It’s the passion of her life to make people see the parallels.
“I know Force Insertion hasn’t pulled you out of Iran for fun, Gent. What kind of dark shit are you in on now?”
“Maybe I’m working for Human Rights Watch.”
“Maybe you’re working for Jim Salter.”
A.D. asks if I still never read the news.
“I’ve seen it all before, darlin’.”
I’ve told A.D. my vision of the ancient battlefield and my belief in previous lives. She regards both as humbug, which, I must say, pisses me off monumentally.
She fills me in now on the attempted overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. One report states that Western mercenary forces played a role in crushing the uprising; another says the mercs were part of the rebellion. A.D. believes both are fiction. “No one knows for sure because the peninsula has been shut down to news, even tighter than usual.” Salter’s in on this, she tells me. “I’m gonna get in somehow.”
“Saudi Arabia. Is that where I’m going?”
“You don’t even know, do you?”
A.D. knows more about Salter than anybody. A story she broke in East Africa in 2022 was instrumental in terminating his conventional-military career and propelling him into the underworld (as it was thought of then) of mercenary enterprise. A.D. admires Salter as a warrior but believes his philosophy is founded upon a neocolonial, MacArthur-esque self-conception (I disagree; we’ve had more than one brawl on the subject) and that this drive is even more disquieting now, when Salter is a gun for hire, with no force to govern him except his own sense of honor.
“This is no joke, Gent. These fuckers are destroying the country.” She launches into a rant about when corporations and government become one, it’s called fascism. I say I have no problem with that if it keeps down the price of gas.
“You don’t fool me, Gent. This shit bothers you, too.”
When we were still living together, A.D. made it a ritual to give me a book each time I deployed. She continues the tradition now, crunching me the e-version of her current bedstand companion—Livy’s History of Rome.
“A little light reading, sweetheart.”
“I’ll knock it off tonight.”
She blows me a kiss. Her holo image sizzles off. I don’t have to see her to know what she’s doing: texting one editor after another, trying to snag a gig that’ll get her a seat on the first jet to the kingdom.
I land at Inverness midafternoon. The city is socked in by the frigid, milky fog the Scots call haar. I can’t see the runway lights till the plane is three hundred feet off the deck, but our pilot, Conrad Hilliaresse, sets the craft down as gently as a bee on a buttercup. Taxiing is more dangerous than landing; it takes us almost ten minutes, tiptoeing through the gloom behind a FOLLOW ME truck, before we reach the terminal and I’ve connected with my driver.
In the five hours since my chat with A.D., the situation in the Middle East has come into slightly clearer focus. Iranian armor has crossed the Iraqi border in Diyala and Sulaymaniyah Provinces but has not yet advanced beyond Baghdad to the south; it may have held up in place deliberately. The Chinese have contributed technical assistance to Iran but have shown no signs of dispatching ground troops; Russian and Turkish armor have checked their advances somewhere outside of Kirkuk and Mosul, respectively. A cease-fire has been proposed by the Syrians. UN negotiators are on the way.
Of Salter’s four armatures on the ground in Iraq, one has taken up positions in the vicinity of the Diyala River, protecting the capital. I do not say “defensive positions,” as it is part of Salter’s philosophy that there is no such thing as defense. The other three have swept south at top speed. They remain intact, according to Reuters and al-Arabiya, and are taking possession of the oil fields at Rumayla and Zubayr. Other elements are moving to secure Majnoon. Southern Iraq is being stabilized. Saudi Arabia for the moment appears calm.
My driver is a former SAS sergeant (in farmer-style civvies) who will not tell me his last name and claims to have no knowledge of who I am or why I’m here. All he knows is he has been instructed to deliver me to a certain country estate and wait to take me back to the airport. We speed north for half an hour along narrow, winding coast roads past Dornoch, Golspie, and Brora, then turn west, uphill into the interior. In no time the roads, which have been barely wide enough to hold two cars abreast, shrink to single lanes, then cart-width tracks. We’re climbing through gorgeous, wild country without a tree or a bush taller than a man’s waist. “How much longer till we reach the estate?” I ask.
“We’ve been on it for the past thirty minutes.”
A manor house appears, grim and square and stony, set in the middle of absolutely nothing. We pass through an iron-gated strong-point manned by a brace of dour-looking squaddies with bomb-sniffing Alsatian shepherds and see-through scanners, then proceed for another mile along an unpaved drive, through a second checkpoint, and finally beneath a portcullis-like security barrier and into an enclosed motor court paved with gravel. Two dark-green Land Rover Defenders squat before a sheltered entryway. It’s August, full of sunshine, and the place is fucking freezing. I can hear hounds baying beyond a wall.
“Out you go, sir,” says my SAS driver. Before my soles touch the deck, a gray-haired gentleman with the ruddiest cheeks I’ve ever seen scuttles from the manor house, introduces himself in an incomprehensible dialect, bundles me into one of the Defenders, and fires it up. He keeps mumbling, more to himself, it seems, than to me. I make out something about no time to dawdle, must beat the sunset. Apparently hunting stags in Scotland is a lot like hunting deer in Louisiana; the actual shoot happens at dawn or dusk, the only times of day that the prey shows itself. “If you don’t mind, sir,” says the guide, “we’ll be ferrying two other gentlemen.”
The right rear door of the Defender bangs open and in piles former U.S. secretary of state Juan-Esteban Echevarria, followed immediately by an extremely professional-looking security contractor who swings into the front seat, revealing a Sig Sauer P220 combat model in a shoulder holster beneath his coat and quilted vest. I have been prepped for none of this. The former secretary looks exactly like his photos—silver-gray goatee, Bolivian-dictator pompadour, hands the size of skillets. He goes 290 if he goes an ounce. He sits to my right in back; the Defender yaws to starboard. The secretary’s bulk dominates the vehicle. He grasps my hand in a mitt as big as a Christmas ham.
“So you’re Maggie’s nephew,” he says, introducing himself. “We’ve been waiting for you for two hours. The guides refused to take us out without you.”
The Defender bucks and jounces out of the court; in ninety seconds we’re on the moors, following rutted dirt trails that make the river tracks in Nangarhar look like Southern California freeways. Nephew? No one has alerted me to this cover story either—or given me the slightest warning that I’m going to be planted cheek by jowl with the former SecState (and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) who singlehandedly, or almost so, destroyed Gen. Salter’s conventional-military career.
The drive goes on forever, following back trails and sunken traces so as not to alert the game. It’s eight in the evening and still not dusk. Our ruddy-cheeked driver, who apparently is a hunting guide or gamekeeper employed by the estate, wears a satcomm earpiece beneath his tweed cap. It squawks with staticy transmissions. “I’ll ride ye as far for’ard as I can, gents,” he says. “Then it’s shank’s ma
re for the lot of us.”
He explains that four hunting parties are fanned out over a number of miles, across the range of treeless vales ahead of us. Each party consists of a shooter and a guide. Mrs. Cole’s is one of these. On a hunt, our driver reminds us, the guide has the final say in all matters. The radio transmissions are from the various guides ahead, navigating us in.
“The lady must be onto somethin’, or her man wouldn’a shut down.” He means that Mrs. Cole’s guide, in the interest of stealth, is not responding to our driver’s transmissions or allowing them to come through. “Stags can hear a mouse fart a mile away and pick up a Rover engine at five miles. They can smell the diesel thirty minutes after you shut the damn thing off.”
He explains how the hunt, as twilight approaches, becomes a competition, even though the hunting parties are miles apart. “If one party fires, the hunt’s over for aw th’ others. Every animal within ten miles’ll bolt.”
We crest a rise and brake. The sun is finally setting. Our driver kills the engine. Before us in the failing light spreads a spectacular vista of dales and glens, receding into a smoky distance probably twenty miles away. “End of the line, lads.” The driver springs down. “Let’s have you!”
We advance on foot. The secretary is not happy. “How much farther?”
“We’ve only just started, haven’t we, sir?”
I like our guide. He doesn’t wear hunting togs; except for his shoes, which are rubber mud-sloggers, he’s dressed in a gray houndstooth business suit with a tattersall shirt and a necktie with little Irish setters on it. He looks like a banker. The gear works, though I’m shivering in my North Face field jacket; he’s toasty as a tick.
“What’s your real name, Colonel?” Echevarria tramps beside me over the spongy, heather-carpeted turf pocked with patches of spiky, knee-high gorse. “Or do you go by rank in your outfit? Clearly you’re nobody’s nephew.”
“I’m somebody’s nephew.”
“My guess is General Salter’s.”
Our guide hisses for silence. “If we molest the lady’s hunt,” he says, “she’ll have all our bollocks, mine first.”
We cross two ridge crests and start down a third. I’m scanning ahead. “There.” The guide’s hand stops us in place. He goes down on one knee. We do likewise.
“Where?” says the secretary. There’s excitement in his voice.
The guide indicates a rocky promontory, well over a mile ahead. Daylight is going fast. It’s hard to tell the rock from the dark furze and heather. The secretary squints through 10X pixel-aug binos. I’m straining with the naked eye.
“See the stag?”
I can barely make out a darkish blotch, perhaps three hundred yards below the outcrop, in a vale that must contain a spring or a burn, as the Scots call a creek. The blotch could be one animal or several. I can’t see the first lady.
“Here, Colonel.” Echevarria passes me his glasses. They’re beauties: Special Forces optical-enhanced binos that deconstruct visible light and IR/UV into digital elements, then recombine and enhance these signals electronically. With the tap of a button, a full-color representation zooms into focus. I can see a guide, prone among rocks, and Maggie Cole on one knee beside him (apparently she needs the extra height to get a clear shot, given the down angle) with her rifle sling-braced around her left upper arm and forearm. She looks like a Marine on a rifle range.
“Why doesn’t she shoot?” asks the secretary. The guide shooshes him. He snatches the glasses back. Maggie wants the trophy, the guide says, meaning she must go for a heart shot. She’s waiting for the stag to turn his chest toward her.
I find myself calming my own breath and stilling my heart. This is serious shooting Mrs. Cole is doing. A deer rifle weighs twice as much as an M4–40 carbine and it only gives you one shot. The first lady must put a single round inside a circle no bigger than a fist at three hundred yards. If she fails and only wounds the stag, both our parties will be out here on foot in the dark tracking the poor creature to put him out of his agony.
The secretary peers through the binos. I see him react and, a second later, hear the report of the rifle. It’s too dark now to see without glasses. “He’s down!” cries the secretary.
“Bloody hell!” The guide slaps his thigh in celebration. We stand. The valley echoes with the rolling peal of the gunshot. Our escort hands me his own glasses; through them, I can see Maggie’s guide stand. She herself has not moved, except to work her arm and shoulder free of the sling and to elevate the smoking barrel of her rifle.
My SAS driver is supposed to pull me out as soon as I deliver the briefcase. But by the time the motorcade of Land Rovers has delivered the hunting parties back to the manor house in the bone-rattling dark, Mrs. Cole won’t let me go. She is still high from her trophy shot. She downs three sherries like water, though the cold may have something to do with that; when a serving man brings single malt in a decanter for the group, she signs for two fingers, then changes it to four. The gathering—whose numbers have swollen to nearly two dozen, counting the hunters, their assistants, and their aides—breaks up for an interval so that its members can bathe and change for dinner. There is no cold on earth like Scottish cold, and it’s worse after dark in a drafty, vaulted, stone-founded hall. Not even a pair of walk-in fireplaces roaring with timber can take the edge off. “Now you see, Colonel,” says Echevarria, setting a hand on my shoulder, “the evolution of 90-proof malt whisky.”
The secretary is a bit of a bully. In front of his aides and the first members of the party returning from their tubs, he tries to provoke me. “Clearly our bearded ‘nephew’ is a soldier for hire and, judging by the scorches on his neck and brow has come to us straight from the fight. But which fight and for what purpose? What’s in the briefcase? Something to do with petroleum, that’s certain.”
A part of me would love to pop the Secy right in his beautiful capped front teeth. But my orders are to exercise discretion. Then too, Echevarria—I know from his history—is a stand-up hombre. When he reaches stiff armed for a cigar offered by a serving man, I remember news photos of the suicide car bomb that killed his wife and daughter six years earlier in a motorcade in Oran; the secretary lost the sight in his left eye and suffered paralysis in that arm from the elbow down, but he never backed off or trimmed his rhetoric. His aides—if they’re any good, and I’m sure they are—have acquired my identity hours ago and cupcaked me through half a dozen mil/pol databases in the time he and I have been away on the moors. Without doubt the secretary has been informed of my service under Salter in Mosul and Yemen and East Africa. It would not surprise me if he knows too the origin and ownership of the leased jet I flew into Inverness on.
“Do you admire General Salter, Colonel? Are you a loyal myrmidon or only a gun for hire?”
“Sir,” I tell him, “I’m just here to see my aunt.”
Maggie Cole returns. She descends the stone and hewn-timber staircase in boots and Western-cut jeans with a man-tailored white linen shirt and a quilted vest, crimson, with a silver stag pin at the collar. All conversation ceases. Maggie is fifty-nine. She looks sensational. She crosses toward one of the great fireplaces, greets the secretary and others, and comes up, smiling, to me.
“Gilbert, is Inquisitor Torquemada attempting to rack you on the wheel?”
“He’s stretching my bones a bit, ma’am.”
The secretary salutes Maggie with a crisp bow. The former first lady takes his arm. With a smile she steers the group and the conversation toward the vaulted stone dining hall. When I sign to her, as subtly as I can, that my orders are to get out of Dodge pronto, she dismisses this with effortless charm and motions me to keep close beside her. One of the guests—a Conservative MP named Sir Michael Lukich—asks Echevarria why he so dislikes Salter.
“I don’t dislike him. I fear him.”
And why, asks the MP, has the secretary himself trekked to this remote outpost, if he does not count himself among the general’s admirers or adherents
.
“I’ve come, sir,” replies Echevarria, “for the same reason we all have: to collect my bounty. I believe the technical term is ‘being co-opted.’ ”
Here the secretary turns to me, the outsider. He speaks as if for my edification, but in truth his oration is intended for the ears of all.
“A sum,” he says, “that could only be described as munificent shall be donated by firms associated with General Salter to a charity dear to the hearts of my late wife and daughter. I shall accept this largesse, Colonel, as my fellow guests will claim their own respective emoluments, though perhaps I shall take mine with a bit more shame.”
A murmur of indignation arises from the company. The secretary dismisses this with a gesture of contempt, aimed, it seems, at least partially at himself.
“Surely, Colonel, you have apprehended that these gentlemen, however impeccably turned out in field-and-stream attire, have not traveled all this distance to stalk wild bucks and harts. In truth, the only real hunter in this company is our hostess—and her aim is to bag far more substantial quarry.”