The Profession (23 page)

Salter called for a vote. He would not compel anyone, he said. If you fault me, fire me. Strip me of command. But if you elect me as your leader, then follow me with all your heart.

“Do you trust me, brothers? Will you follow where I lead?”

Salter called upon the people of Shiastan to stand with him. Why shouldn’t they? The rest of the world hated them as much as
it despised him and his warriors. He appealed to the civilian drivers and contractors, and to the logistics teams who had come ashore with the expedition, whose role was to supply the troops for the next ninety days. Join us! Stand with us!

Then came the peroration that would be played over and over on cell and video around the planet:

Aboard our PBY, my half of Team Bravo knows none of these specifics. We get only what Petrocelli can compress into a twenty-second sound bite—the troops have backed Salter. We’ve all jumped off the cliff. I relay this to Coombs, Q, Chutes, and the others aboard our sister plane.

All hands still in?

Fuck, yes.

Twenty minutes later an encrypted reroute comes in. We are to
proceed to the old U.S. base at Pasni in Baluchistan, now in the hands of friendly elements of Pakistan’s ISI, from which other air transport will convey us to Dalbandin, fifty miles south of the Afghan border, and from there across the Registan desert, up the Helmand valley and past Kabul. Our aircraft will have landing clearances at Bagram (our designation code is IC3, “humanitarian assistance”), but when we reach the Shomali Plains, we will drop off the scope and make for the original secret strip in the Panjshir. We’ll overnight there at the Afghan HQ of RNI, the private intelligence agency that serves as Force Insertion’s CIA. Two of Teddy Ostrofsky’s Soviet-era Mi-24 Hind helicopters will take us north in the morning. By then hopefully some genius will have developed a lead on Razz’s whereabouts.

This alteration in timetable is no joke, as the execution of our assignment must be coordinated with Tim Hayward and Team Alpha, as well as several other operations of whose specifics our team is not yet “need to know,” but of whose schedule imperatives we, according to our instructions, will be apprised at the appropriate moment.

To further complicate matters, a coup is apparently in progress in Tajikistan. Chutes is our comms specialist; his plasma repeater can pick up regional radio and TV in real time even if the broadcast isn’t satellite relayed. The system translates and closed captions too.

The army of Tajikistan numbers only thirty thousand; what holds the country together are an equal number of Russian “volunteers.” According to our intel, these poor bastards are luckless conscripts, yanked off the streets and assigned to what, even to Russians, must feel like the asshole of the universe. Chutes reports that IMT rebel television on the far side of the mountains is reporting that one armored regiment has mutinied and seized a critical pumping station along the TUC, the Tajik-Uzbek-Cerna gas pipeline. Whether this is true or not (Tajik state TV makes no mention of it) or what its import may be for us, I have no idea. I remember only the wisdom
of my old enlisted mentor, Master Sergeant Vaughn Telamon of Arcadia, Mississippi, regarding behind-the-lines insertions:

But the pea keeps rolling. Both halves of the team reunite on schedule in the Panjshir. Morning of day three we fly out of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s old base, bound north over the Pamirs into Dushanbe and Tajikistan.

DOWN WE COME INTO
the disused Russian airfield at Kurkan, which is nothing but a flat pitch beside the Varzob River that looks like it was paved sometime in the 1950s and hasn’t seen a patch of asphalt since.

The field was once a bustling Soviet base—Coombs has briefed us from his own time in service here—but is now used only by opium and armaments smugglers, most of whom are Russian military personnel using army aircraft. We ourselves have flown in, as I said, on two hired Soviet-era troop helicopters (which have had to make a pair of unscheduled stops, at Faizabad and Khoja Bahauddin, to replace clogged fuel filters), having braved the Amjuran pass in the predawn darkness to avoid getting stovepiped by the mujahideen rocketeers who camp at 12,500 feet in the narrow gorges waiting for a shot.

Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan. Coombs had been stationed here in 2024 with the SAS. Flying in, while the rest of us eyeball the terrain from a tactical point of view, our Brit launches into a rant on aesthetics.

“Look at this bleedin’ arsehole, will you? Have you ever seen such hideous architecture?” We’re banking in low, past a massive crenellated mosque sited amid an urban wasteland dominated by a desolate main drag upon whose flanks squat soulless apartment blocks, cube monoliths, and vast barren plazas. “This is Soviet totalitarian architecture, Stalinist Modern. God, what a horror!”

Coombs says he’d rather be in Afghanistan, which at least possesses aesthetic integrity, if only of impoverishment. “Look down there. That’s not third world, it’s fourth!” Our ex-SAS captain declares that he despises all isms, “ideologies that are based on some lunatic intellectual concept like the perfectibility of man or the efficiency of free markets. Give me a bleedin’ break. This is what it comes to. Look at this place!”

I love a guy who knows how to bitch. Any moron can gripe about chow or rotations, but someone who can get exercised over architecture is my kind of dude.

Another of Coombs’s tirades takes off on the abuse of the word
insurgents
. “What bloody ‘insurgents’? It’s their flippin’ country! If you and I defend home and hearth, do we call ourselves insurgents? ‘Stand still, insurgent! Hurry up, insurgent!’ I’m glad I never got promoted past captain. The higher one rises, the more deranged become his faculties of discrimination!”

Kurkan airfield is vacant. We’re supposed to be met by Russian contractors, who will provide us with ground transport and deliver the latest intel regarding Razz’s highjacked location. But the tarmac is deserted; dust devils scour the weedy flat.

The Hinds whoomp-whoomp away as we deploy on the double, packing our 120-pound gear bags. Suddenly three Kamaz trucks appear out of the blowing grit, a thousand yards east, trundling toward us in echelon with their topside-mounted PKM machine guns and gunners muffled to the eyeballs in the whipping gale. It’s September but it feels like midwinter.

We’re caught in the open. Chris, Coombs, Chutes, Mac, Tony, Junk, and I spread out at as wide an interval as we can, prone and ready to fight. The Kamazes brake about three hundred yards out. A form pops from a topside hatch, waving both arms.

It’s our Commies. They’re late.

The most recent hot wire from Pete Petrocelli has informed us that we’ll be met by a Russian contractor named Suvorov, a civilian. Instead we get a Tajik colonel who introduces himself as Amaz. He knows my name and asks if I speak French.

“The bayou kind.”

El-Masri has come forward, ready to translate Tajik. Col. Amaz wants to communicate with me directly. He and I stand by the trucks in a freezing blow. My team has formed an HDP, a Hasty Defensive Position, facing inboard and out. I ask Col. Amaz where Suvorov is.

“Il fallait eliminer Suvorov,”
he says.

“You killed him?”

“I command now.”

This is my third crisis. The first two are ongoing: how to coordinate with Tim Hayward and Team Alpha, which can’t make its move until they know we’ve completed ours, and with Petrocelli, who’s juggling other in-country elements that I don’t know about. The second is the coup, which these Tajiks may or may not know about or even be a party to. The clock is ticking and I’m the guy who has to watch it.

“All right,” I say. “What now?”

Amaz’s trucks take us off the tarmac to a double-wide trailer parked at the southern extremity of a mile-long junkyard of cannibalized Antonovs and Ilyushins. Inside, on a table, spreads an array of brown and white powders; red, yellow, and black capsules; bottles of vodka and trays of cigarettes of dubious origin. Amaz’s
men ring the vehicle, packing S74Us, the snubbed-up AKs with grenade launchers under the barrels. The men are dark, stocky Tajiks, clearly a different race than the lean Pashtuns of the south or the black-eyed, black-haired Mongoloid Hazaras of the north.

“Pourquoi avez-vous assassine Suvorov?”
Why did you kill Suvorov?

“He wanted the money all for himself,” says Amaz in French.

The colonel tells us to help ourselves to the alcohol and drugs.
“Pour votre equipe.”
For your men. His boss, who had been Suvorov’s superior, expects us in an hour for a banquet. There will be plenty of blond Russian females with big chests and big asses who will do anything I or my men want.

Then he, Amaz, will take us to Razz.

I’m translating this for el-Masri, and louder for Chris and Coombs and our three Emirate operators who are just outside the door, trying to look nonchalant with their fingers on their trigger guards and their eyes on the horizon.

“How far to Razz?” I ask Col. Amaz.

“
Pas loin.”
Not far.

“Take us now.”

“Non. Mon chef.”
His boss. And he shrugs as if the decision is out of his hands.

My mentor Telamon has an axiom for occasions like this:

I do.

I call for Coombs, who enters immediately. Amaz’s share (what would have been Suvorov’s) is a million bucks, which Chutes, Q, Junk, and Tony are packing in hundreds, eleven pounds apiece. From Coombs’s North Face ruck that holds a reserve quarter mill I remove $25K, also in wrapped hundreds.
“Pour votre chef.”

I set this wad on the table alongside the powders and pills.
Col. Amaz is too well mannered to take it himself. Instead he nods to one of his men, who with a practiced motion scoops up the parcel and stuffs it into his field jacket. It’s a safe bet that the colonel’s
chef
will not learn of, let alone acquire, a dime of this.

From the North Face ruck, I count out another fifty grand. I do not set this on the table. Instead I deliver it for safekeeping to Coombs, who stands at my shoulder in the posture of a second in command or bagman.

“Which of your men,” I ask Col. Amaz, “will guide me, right now, to where Razz has been taken?”

“Comment?”
Say again?

“Right now,” I repeat.
“Tout de suite.”

It works. Within minutes Col. Amaz has split his motorcade, ditching the lesser players (who will, for certain, also be cut out of the revenue stream) and cramming Team Bravo into their slots.

We head east for the Pamirs.

Jingly-jangly is SAS slang for running a mission in hajji-flage, meaning dressing up like the natives. That, we learn later, is also the MO for Team Alpha. Alpha is eleven men, all former Turkish and United Arab Emirates Special Forces, commanded by Tim Hayward. Salter has promised each operator a quarter of a million bucks (and Hayward and his team leaders a million apiece) if they pull this off. Tajikistan, as we are beginning to grasp, is not really a country. It’s a criminal narco-fiefdom locked in a death struggle with an Islamo-narco-fiefdom, which will soon become, with the integration of the new “Beautiful Mountain” oil field, a criminal Islamo-petro-fiefdom.

Razz’s father—el-Masri tells us as our convoy speeds east—had been at one time an idealistic young revolutionary, an Islamist back when Islamism was unheard of. The old man had fought the Soviets, then the warlords and, after them, us. To buy guns and pay his
militiamen, he needed money. The only way was drugs. Razz’s father’s men acquired and transported the raw poppy out of Afghanistan into Tajikistan, then shipped it via the Caucasus to Turkey, where it was processed into heroin and transported to Europe and the United States. Apparently the elder Razaq had become a little too close to his product.

El-Masri continues: “The old man never touched the shit himself, but he got addicted to the power. We heard about him originally in Egypt because he was a Salafist and a Takfiri like we were, a warrior of God. At least half the dope that funneled through Suez came from Tajikistan via the elder Razaq. The heroin trade was regarded as God’s work because the poppy was destroying the infidel. Tajikistan became independent in 1991. The Soviet Union broke into pieces. The killing was worse than in Chechnya but nobody gave a shit because the Western press didn’t cover it. The Spetsnaz was in there big-time, along with mercs from China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Mongolia. When the smoke cleared, Razz’s dad was the last man standing. Only he was no longer God’s holy warrior. He was a narco lord, who ran the country like hell is run by Satan.

“The Russians love that shit. They want countries on their borders to be as weak and as fucked up as possible, so they can pull the strings. I knew a woman named Irina, the wife of Razaq’s finance minister, who used to run whores, and maybe still does, out of Syria, Egypt, and the north—Russians, Poles, even Swedes and English. Koverchenko and the others made it flow. The whole country ran on skag and overseas pussy. They had no courts. If you ran a red light, the cops killed you. If you published a pamphlet or a newspaper, they chopped your head off.