The Profession (24 page)

“The old man had a palace built for himself that looked like the imperial residence at Persepolis. He began calling himself Kyros, after Cyrus the Great of Persia, who, he claimed, his ancestors had killed in 550
B.C
. Which actually was true. Not that anybody gave
a shit. But Razaq/Kyros had this huge fucking palace filled with long-legged Russian poon and that was it, until young Razz the son came along.”

Hayward and Team Alpha, el-Masri figures, are on their way right now to that very palace to knock off Razz’s father, while we, Team Bravo, liberate the son.

“How much longer?” I shout in French to Col. Amaz.

“Bientot.”
Soon.

We are speeding into the mountains in a column of two GMC Kodiaks (with Amaz in the passenger seat of the lead truck and me, Coombs, and el-Masri in back) and the rest of our outfits in the Kamaz trucks and two Russian BMP-4s, tracked amphibious personnel carriers that can do forty miles per hour on paved roads while cornering like Cadillacs. El-Masri continues the story while Amaz, who supposedly speaks no English, plays a handheld video game up front.

The Egyptian recounts his days with Razz in prison, their release together, then the pursuit of Razz through the mountains of northern Yemen.

“For five years after prison I hear nothing from this bitch. I figure he’s ashamed because of what happened; he wants to put it behind him—and he certainly doesn’t want his new smack partners to learn anything they can use against him. I’ve got my own problems. I’m out of the secret service, trying to get a visa back to the States. I haven’t thought of Razz in years. Then one morning an overnight package comes from DHL, from Lebanon. What the fuck? I open the box. Inside is a gold coin in a glacene bag with the profile of Alexander the Great on one side and the goddess Victory on the other, with a certificate of authenticity from the Central Asia Numismatic Society. A gift from Razz. The coin is from Scythia, 320
B.C
. It’s worth seventeen hundred bucks. Razz himself is in Beirut, he says in a note. He wants me to fly over. He has a job for me.
I can’t of course. I’m on an entry list for the U.S.; if I leave Cairo, I’m fucked. I write him back and explain. I hear nothing. Now I’m curious. What is this sonofabitch up to—and why does he want me?

“You know the story, Gent, I told you in Cairo, but I’ll tell you now, Coombs. Razz has fallen afoul of his old man. Since prison he has gotten even more militant; he reads Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyah; he’s become a hard-core Takfiri like we were with the Brothers, which means he believes he can decide who’s a good Muslim and who isn’t and then kill whoever isn’t—which he has decided, now, is his old man. He breaks off all dealings with his father. Now they’re competing for the heroin routes. The roles have reversed! The kid has become the zealot that his old man used to be. He’s playing mullah in the mountains, trying to take down his father, and he’s got followers all over the country. This goes on for years.

“To make a long story short, three weeks ago I’m watching Trump/CNN in my factory in Damietta and suddenly there he is—freakin’ Razz, in the Pamir mountains with a jihadi beard, a
shalwar kameez
, and packing an AK! So I put him on RSS. Two nights later … he’s busted! The old man has put ten mill on his kid’s head, dead or alive, and his secret police have snatched him, no doubt intending to disembowel the ungrateful pup on Tajik national TV. Two days later I get a call from the son of my old boss, Col. Salem (the son is now a captain in the Egyptian Islamic Police), telling me to expect a visitor from the States. That’s you, Gent. I thought Salter might have sent you to whack me, to shut up everything I knew about Razz. But when you said you had a job for me, I knew we were going after the bitch. Which brings all of this up to the moment.”

El-Masri indicates Col. Amaz and his driver in the front seat.

“These fuckers we’re riding with work for the old man. That’s why they killed Suvorov. But they’re selling their boss out for that ruck full of greenbacks.” He turns from me to Coombs. “After they waste us of course.”

“How?” asks Coombs.

“If it was me,” says el-Masri, “I’d set up a fake checkpoint. Our trucks stop, the guards walk up … 
b-b-b-brip
, we’re statistics. Or they could take us alive and saw us off at the neck on the six o’clock news alongside Razz.”

I ask el-Masri what he thinks we should do. Up front, Col. Amaz is still thumbing his PlayStation. His translator is riding in back where he can’t hear us. “We can wax these assholes now,” says el-Masri, “but then how will we find Razz? Plus that squad radio on the colonel’s shoulder is hot miked. If we make a move, those BMPs behind will light us up like the Fourth of July.”

Coombs observes that these Kodiaks have 800 cc batteries. He’s thinking of slotting the lot, as the SAS would say, then wiring the colonel’s testicles till he comes up with a road map to Razz.

At this moment, my own satlink chirps. It wants an encrypt code. Around my neck is a thumbnail-sized randomizer; I read the code on its LCD display and enter it into the phone terminal. I press the headset tight to my ear. From the receiver comes Petrocelli’s voice.

Pete spits out a change in orders.

“Understood,” I say. “Copy all.”

Coombs and el-Masri turn toward me.

“That was Pete. The mission’s blown. Someone has put the old man wise to the plan. He’s moving now to cap young Razz. If we can’t get to him in an hour, our orders are to get out.”

Silence. Our host keeps playing his video game. I lean forward to the front seat and speak in French: “What do you think of all this, Col. Amaz?”

He answers in English. “I think it is rude for your friends to speak with one another in a foreign language, in front of one whom they believe cannot understand it.”

COOMBS PRESSES THE MUZZLE
of his 9 mm against Col. Amaz’s neck.

Our vehicles are careening up an unpaved mountain road above the Varzob River—night, no lights. Blinding dust from the Kodiak in front coats our windshield so thick that the beating wipers only smear it into an even more impenetrable paste.

Amaz has made a deal with us. He wants all the money. He admits that he had planned to kill us. But now he likes us. In return for both rucks of cash, he will deliver Team Bravo to Razz’s jail, get us in safely, and get us out of the country when it’s over.

“But I want the money
before.
”

The colonel is communicating now over his squad Motorola, in some Tajik dialect, guiding the Kodiak ahead of us. The Kamazes and BMPs have long since been left in the dust.

“Time?” Coombs quizzes me, meaning how long since we started on our allotted one hour.

“Ninety-five minutes.”

No need to confer. We’re all in till the finish. We’ll break Razz free or make our widows rich trying.

Suddenly the lead Kodiak slews off the track and brakes. Amaz’s driver follows. We screech to a stop in a tornado of grit. The mountain rises on the left; a precipice plunges to the right. “We walk from here,” says Amaz.

Coombs drags the colonel out. Amaz’s posse covers us with AKs and one Russian PKM. “Where are they?” I demand.

“Where are what?”

I press the cutting point of my K-bar knife beneath his jaw.

Chutes hurries over with the GPR, the ground-penetrating radar. “Three artillery shells,” he says, “buried right beneath us. One-five-fives, daisy chained.”

I tell Chutes to scan both sides of the track.

“You will find two more across the road,” says Amaz. “They will not be detonated while I live.”

I order Amaz to bring all his men down from the hill. Six appear, bundled in
pettus
and winter cloaks—plus his interpreter and the three in the lead Kodiak.

“Tell them to man this point as an ambush. Hit anything that comes up behind us.” I grab Amaz myself. “You and your guide come with us on foot. When we’ve got Razz, we’ll bring you back here with the cash. And remember: no Razz, no money.”

I know Amaz is planning on cutting his confederates out. He’s got a backdoor somewhere up ahead; either that or he’s in with whoever is holding Razz. But he’s smart. “How do I know you won’t kill me and never come back?”

“I’ll leave two of my men here. If I’m not back with you safe and sound, your buddies can do their worst.”

Ten minutes later we’re humping up a goat trail so steep we have to claw our way by hand and so narrow we have to walk it like a tightrope. The night is ink. I have left Chutes and Q with the Kodiaks. We have stripped down for a cross-country hump, jettisoning body armor and half the contents of our gear bags, though the load for
each of us still makes nearly seventy pounds. If we have to assault a fortified compound, we’ll need all that and more. Every man voluntarily packs the max in rounds, grenades, and water—plus boots and heavy woolen shalwar kameez, K-bar knife, squad radios, PVS-24 unit radio with headphones, two GPSes, batteries for all, NODs, ropes, grapnels, explosive kits, hooligan tool, med packs, smoke grenades, flash-bangs, two PDMs (Pursuit Deterrent Mines), M67 frag grenades, chemlites, extra headset for radio, M9 pistols with ammo, M4-40s with M240 grenade launcher underslung (four grenades in bandoleer), EO TECH sight, PEQ-4 laser sight, and ten 20-round magazines. I’m carrying a sawed-off Winchester 101 twelve-gauge. Chris Candelaria packs an SPR sniper rifle with suppressor for killing dogs.

“Set the GPS for behind that rise,” I say, indicating a hide three hundred yards downhill from this site. Chutes and Q will net up and camouflage the Kodiaks there. “That’s our rally point.”

Chutes and Quinones are bitterly disappointed not to be in the assault team, but they make no complaint. They help with the load-out.

Amaz estimates the distance at one mile to the compound where Razz is being held. The trek will take at least two hours. I form up the men at the high side of the road.

“Everyone hydrate. Eat. Get something into your belly. Piss and shit now.”

I note the time.

El-Masri and Amaz jostle at the trailhead. They hate each other already.

“Go on,” says the colonel, indicating the rising slope.

El-Masri bows like a courtier.

“After you.”

The compound where Razz is being held is an abandoned Russian radar installation, sited in a barren, stadium-sized bowl beneath peaks whose summits are already dusted with snow. It has taken us three hours and ten minutes to get within sight of the objective, climbing straight up and straight down across three five-hundred-foot gorges. We are all so cold by the time we reach the overlook that we can’t make our fingers close around our weapons, and so exhausted that our body heat has dialed down to a flicker. We have left our winter gear behind to save weight. That’s the bad news. The good news is the sentries guarding the compound are just as cold and miserable as we are. Two at the central chicane have bundled themselves inside sleeping bags on the seats of a UAZ jeep with the motor running and the heater going. Two of the three guard towers are unmanned.

Amaz has not stopped bitching the whole way. At each crest he has sworn on his children’s souls that the post is just over the next ridge and demanded his money and the keys to one Kodiak. At each crest: nothing. We haul him upslope and belay him down. Three times Coombs and I have had to stop el-Masri from chucking him off the mountain.

“Where are you leading us, you lying dickwad?”

The Egyptian has stripped Amaz of his pistol and two concealed blades.

“What do you think this sheepfucker will do with Chutes and Q if we let him get back to the trucks—not to mention us, before or after?”

Amaz has guts though. He keeps demanding his money and keeps vowing that the compound is just over the next hill.

Now there it is. I send Chris and one of the UAE men ahead to take out the snoozing sentries. The rest of the team enters the compound from the upslope side, bolt-cutting a fence and a six-foot band of concertina wire, then dashing through the shadows of the
two dozen corrugated tin buildings that make up the ancient post. Junk sprints to the gate and lets Chris and the UAE men in.

Col. Amaz points out the building where Razz is being held. “He’s lying,” says el-Masri.

I take Chris and one UAE man, who calls himself Mike, to recce the site from inside the wire. We pass through one section of the compound and discover a second area, on a flat downslope from an abandoned radar dome. Mike taps his ear, meaning “What’s that sound?”

Music.

Five corrugated tin buildings squat in a cluster. We creep closer. Loud Rooskie rock is blasting from Building Five. I swear I smell hashish. I call Amaz up.

“That’s the one,” he says.

“What about the earlier one?”

“Things look different in the dark.”

I call up the team and divide it into two assault elements and a security element. I’ll go in first, through the rear. We crunch closer. I’m stacked with Coombs, Junk, and el-Masri, who holds Col. Amaz on a leash, flush against a generator shack twenty frozen feet from the building. Mac, Tony, and the Emirates guys dash into position, sealing forward egress. Techno-trash blares from inside. Junk pads up beside me with the hooligan tool. I’m so cold that the muscles of my jaw have entered rigor mortis. I can’t speak.