The Profession (20 page)

As I’m thinking this, I hear Chutes return from topside and, crossing to Coombs’s screen, key in a channel change. “Yo, Gent! Ain’t this your old lady?” He passes me the tablet. Sure enough, center screen is A.D., ducking bullets on a smoke- and dust-obscured boulevard. The caption says
AL-HUSAYN, BASRA
.

My bride is crouched behind a concrete Texas barricade, wearing cargo pants, a dark blue flak jacket with helmet, and speaking into a Trump/CNN mike:

Shiastan, A.D. explains with the rattle of machine-gun fire in the background, is the ethnic and tribal “nation” constituted of the southern governorates of Najaf, Qadisiyah, Missan, Thi-Qar, Muthanna, and Basra, including the lands of the Marsh Arabs. It possesses 15 percent of the world’s known reserves and is second in oil wealth only to Saudi Arabia.

None of this explains what’s going on in Basra.

“Bank on this,” says el-Masri. “The Saudis have lost their balls. They have turned off the spigot and now every Shia mob is greedy to fight.”

I key my own holo and hit A.D. on the speed dial.

When my message box lights up right away, I know the video on TV is a postfeed.

Craning around in my canvas seat, I can see Kuwait City below to the east. Our aircraft comes out of a bank and levels off, heading north. The crew chief has come over, with his thigh-holster 9 mm and his headset tethered to the comm panel. “Feet dry!” he grins and flashes us the thumbs-up.

While I’m pecking out this exchange with A.D., Chris Candelaria gets on the horn to one of his DSF buds from Nazirabad, who is on the ground at Shatt al-Basra. The worst of the fighting is over, the friend tells Chris. The video we’re seeing on FARS and al-Jazeera is two hours old. Everything’s cool. Aside from this one hot spot, Basra and the southern provinces are still with the program. In fact, just as Chris’s friend’s text rolls in, FARS-TV begins broadcasting, live, from Highway 6 against the smoking backdrop of what used to be a slum called al-Hyanniyah, a spokesman for the Waeli syndicate, the politico/religious gangsters who run the region. The dude is in a bloodied white dishdasha, speaking Arabic. There’s no translation but among Coombs, Chutes, and me, we piece it together. “Authorities now have the city under control … an uprising of militants has been put down. We’ll have more for you shortly.”

I tell Chris to ask his friend what he believes is going on. We thought the deal had been sealed. Why is the city resisting?

In minutes we’re over the city. El-Masri, Chris, Chutes, and the others grab their TNVGs—thermal night-vision goggles—and crane around in their seats to peer out the ports.

Basra lies below in the dark.

“Where’s the smoke?” says Chutes.

The city looks untouched.

“There!” Q points.

Thermal vision goggles don’t just magnify ambient light like the old Iraq-era NVGs; they pick up heat signatures and digitally reconstruct them. In their crimson cast, we can see one sector along the Shatt waterway that looks like it’s been cleaned out by a five-kiloton blast. For what appears to be a square mile, not a stick remains standing. The place is smoking, a leveled plot of wild-cherry-tinted rubble.

“I don’t get it,” Quinones says. “The city looks cool except for that one Black Hole.”

El-Masri eyes the moonscape. “Welcome to Shiastan.”

There’s a desert airstrip north of Basra called Hantush. It has no tower, not even a radio shack. But it does possess two full-length hardened runways, crossing in a shallow X. Corporate jets of Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Petronas used the site in the ’20s, as did the Third Marine Air Wing during Operation Iraqi Freedom in ’03 and
Saddam Hussein in his day before that. Our C-130 sets down in pitch darkness, the pilots using TNVGs and riding the glide path set up by a laser comm team on the ground. The field itself appears slightly more hospitable when we waddle off the rear ramp and hump our 120 pounds of gear per man. A line of fire barrels can be glimpsed to the east side of the runway, with at least thirty vehicles, mostly Suburbans, Kodiaks, and Land Rovers, beside them—and a front of chemlight-illuminated tie-downs paralleling the tarmac, with the dark shapes of a half-dozen Black Hawks and Sea Stallions visible in a row. Port and starboard lies raw desert. A ground chief greets me, confirms my identity by three different parameters, including retinal scan, then leads our team on foot toward two parked War Hawks across the sand, on a separate hardstand. “Who’s the company?” I shout over the taxiing 130’s prop wash, indicating the line of civilian vehicles.

“Sugar men,” says the chief. “Waiting for the boss.”

We hear something huge and loud approaching. Out of the black drops a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, massive as a Safeway.

“Salter,” the chief says.

The plane touches down and rolls fast past our position, toward the north end of the runway. An on-ground combat team protects the aircraft; as soon as the jet’s wheels touch down, three up-armored Humvees, a surface-to-air I-SAM truck and a CAAT antiarmor team roll out to protect it. I see Dainty, Salter’s old security chief from Mosul, and an underaged buck colonel named Klugh, whom I don’t know. I give Dainty a high five, but the colonel stiff-arms me.

“Hey, fucker,” I tell him, “I was with Salter when you were popping pimples in junior high.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Well, you ain’t with Salter now.”

As the security team rolls out, Dainty tries to smooth things over. “Don’t mind Klugh, he can be a bit of hard-on, but he’s aces in a scrap.”

Team Bravo has reached the tie-downs now. Our War Hawk pilot, Maj. Mark Kelly, whom we know well from briefings at PSAB, comes up, shaking his head.

“Fucked again, Gent,” he shouts over a rising wind.

“What?”

“Show’s off.”

Chris, Chutes, and Coombs hurry up.

The operation has been scratched, says Kelly.

“Just us?”

“Everything.”

Kelly tells us the Saudis—our employers, apparently—have gotten cold feet. That’s what went wrong in Basra, that’s why the fighting. He points to the lineup of Suburbans, Kodiaks, and Simooms. “That’s why all these low-rise motherfuckers are here.”

I’ve heard shit like this so many times that I don’t believe anything anymore.

Good or bad, nothing is real till it happens or it doesn’t. I convey this to my team in no uncertain terms.

Everyone, keep your head in the game.

I make them eat. I make them hydrate. I make them look to their weapons. My cargo pockets hold a cache of airline-mini Johnnie Blacks; I pass them out like Tootsie Rolls. It helps.

The team stages its gear on the hardstand; Kelly’s crew chief and door gunners are lashing their rotors to little steel X’s countersunk into the tarmac. The flaps of our rucks are snapping in the rising gale. We can see Salter’s Galaxy coming about at the extremity of the runway; already half a dozen VIP motorcades are maneuvering to intercept him as the plane taxis back.

“Who are these black shoes?” asks Q.

“Bankers.” Chris Candelaria watches, paintbrushing sand from the receiver of his H&K Q6 over/under. “Each one of those bulletproofs is packing dudes with investments of 5B minimum.”

“What are they here for?”

“To make sure Salter doesn’t piss it away.”

“Saddle up,” I say. “We’re getting in line too.”

Salter’s C-5 taxis back and comes to a stop. The sugar men’s Suburbans and Kodiaks press around it. I lead our team up too, on foot, bringing Chris and el-Masri and Capt. Coombs, hoping one of us knows somebody who can get us aboard. The Galaxy’s massive nose elevates and its rear doors swing wide, revealing a cavernous interior bathed in red night-vision lights. Salter emerges like he always does—no entourage, just him and his longtime aide, Pete Petrocelli. He wears an M9 pistol in a shoulder holster, in night camo with desert boots and no hat. He looks fit and trim. His hair is cut as high and tight as it was when he was a Marine.

I try to flag Pete down but it’s impossible. The big shots sweep forward. In moments Salter and Petrocelli are pulled away.

I’m wriggling through the crush. El-Masri is at my shoulder. Suddenly I spot a familiar profile.

“Jack!”

It’s Stettenpohl. In civvies. He’s a third-term congressman now, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee—and already being mentioned as a possible VP.

We embrace like brothers. I introduce him to el-Masri, to Chris, and to Coombs. He knows Chutes from East Africa. I point out Q, Junk, Mac, and Tony back outside the aft doors. “What are you doing here, man?”

“Same as you, Gent. Making money!”

Jack gets us aboard. He has been with Salter, he says, for the past ninety-six hours, through the meat of the whole Saudi-SoIraq fiasco. Our team shuffles up the massive steel boarding ramp to a galley aft; Chutes, Q, Mac, Junk, and our UAE troopers help themselves
to Red Bulls, sandwiches, and microwave pizza. The C-5’s scale is colossal, more like a ship than a plane.

Around the chow trough hovers a flock of youngish, executive-looking Yanks, Brits, Germans, and East Indians, wearing desert boots and sports jackets, several topped with cammie IBAs, individual body armor. Stettenpohl introduces us. These sprouts are hotshot VPs from investment banks and sovereign wealth funds, come to bird-dog their bosses’ money. Chris recognizes two from Credit Suisse; another comes up from Jadwa Investing in Riyadh. We start shaking hands. There are reps from French Total, Menatep Bank in Russia, Onexim, Yukos, and Rossiisky Credit Bank. A guy hands me his card in German: Dresdener Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Topside on the command deck, the hatch to Salter’s conference cubby is opening. Who emerges but my old buddy from the Highlands, former secretary of state Juan-Esteban Echevarria. He looks old and fat, sweating like a hog in the yards of material that make up his business suit. I have no inclination whatever to catch his eye or speak a word. Let his security team hand him down to his motorcade; I take a step back into shadow so he won’t see me.

But a few minutes later I glance across the cargo deck and spot the secretary again, slumped against the aft bulkhead in obvious distress, with his team clustered around him.

He’s sick. His detail is calling for a medical officer. I feel my secret self come forward. I stand and cross straight to Echevarria. The security men block me at first but a quick exchange and the Secy remembers me. “Colonel!” He waves me through.

“It’s dust,” I say, indicating the rising sandstorm outside. “It fucks everybody up.”

I pull off my kerchief and douse it with water from a Solaire bottle; I make the secretary press it over his nose and mouth and breathe through it. “In thirty seconds, you’ll be fine.”

I sit beside him and talk him through it. He’s scared, that’s all. His ass is so wide, it takes up two seats; he’s so heavy that his heart and lungs are overwhelmed in this heat and dust. I pluck the last airline-size Jack Daniel’s from the cargo pocket of my trousers. The Secy takes it down in one snort; by the time the doc arrives, Echevarria is fine. He’s grateful. I soak the rag again and make him press it to his forehead.

“So, Colonel, are you still undyingly loyal to your commander?”

“Will I disappoint you if I say yes?”

The secretary’s breath is coming easier now. His color returns. “I must tell you,” he says, “I felt for him. The loss of his son—and in such a grisly manner. But by God, he has caught the world by the balls since then!”

Topside, another group is exiting Salter’s conference compartment. I ask Echevarria what errand has brought him here, to the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. “Not to collect money for another charity?”

The secretary smiles. “Colonel, I understand that you’re something of an authority on tribes and tribal warfare. You know, then, how the sheikhs and
maliks
make sure to plant their own trusted men within the power structures of the enemy. That way, no matter who wins, their own and their tribe’s interests are protected.” Echevarria observes that Washington, D.C., is no different. “Such mischief, as I’m sure you were aware, was very much afoot in that hunting lodge where you and I first met. But you have no idea,” he says, “of its daring or its depth.”

How daring, I ask. How deep? The secretary leans closer.

“The hour shall come in America, as it has for all empires, when the franchise passes officially from the Many to the Few.”

“The franchise? You mean the right to vote?”

“You’re an educated man, Colonel. You’ve read of ‘the Four Hundred’ at Athens. And ‘the Thirty’ under Critias.”

I stare at the secretary. Is he joking?

“I’ve trekked here to treat with Salter, Colonel, as Cicero once appealed to Caesar—to make the case that, when this Catalog of the Elect shall be compiled, my name will appear thereupon.”

Can this be true? Overseas—and by that I mean any place where combat is imminent and the home turf belongs to the enemy—you hear crazier shit than you ever heard in your life. Every dude has a story; 99.9 percent are bullshit. You listen, you shake your head, you keep trucking.