The Profession (5 page)

The two HSDs slalom into the ravine and brake in a storm of sand and grit. Chris and I squint. Through the swirling alkali we see Salter dismount from the lead vehicle. He wears cargo trousers, a calf-length duster, and sand goggles. No helmet, no flak jacket. He pulls the goggles off over a peaked desert cap and beats the dust off both by swatting them against his right trouser leg. In a shoulder holster rides the M9 pistol that has been his trademark since Marine Corps days.

Two more CAAT vehicles and a surface-to-air missile truck come up behind Salter’s vehicles, disperse into a perimeter, and stop, facing outboard. Hayward trots over. Salter, with Hayward and a couple of officers from the scout teams, mounts the ridge on foot, scanning the horizon to the east with binoculars. The force protecting him is, to put it kindly, underpowered. There’s only one cloaking truck, no airborne security, and not another fighting vehicle as far as the eye can see.

“Far be it from me to criticize our commander,” says Chris, “but what the fuck is Salter doing this far forward with nothing to protect him bigger than my nine-inch dick?”

“He leads from the front.”

“I do too, bro. But I’m not the maraschino cherry on top of the hot fudge sundae.”

Salter glances in our direction. Hayward is telling him something and pointing toward us. We can see Salter react with animation. He strides down the ridge. Chris and I move toward him, saluting.

“Stand easy, gentlemen!”

Salter comes up with his right hand extended. “Gent, you sonofabitch!”

He grabs my hand and embraces me warmly. He gives me shit about Abd el-Kadr and the Land Cruiser and makes a joke of times we nearly got killed in Yemen and East Africa. Such intimacy is one of Salter’s gifts as a commander. It can’t be faked. Though he is light-years beyond us, his junior commanders, in intellect and force of command, he makes us know that he loves us as brothers and as equals; we are his blood and he is ours. I feel with Salter now—as I have felt before, every time I have been in his presence—that unprovable but indelible certainty that he and I have known each other in earlier lifetimes and will know each other again.

I introduce Chris. “I know, I know,” says Salter, indicating the satellite truck. “Hayward and I have been following you characters’ getaway for the past three days.”

Salter debriefs us himself. We deliver our assessments of Nazirabad, of Col. Achmed, of the sense of the situation. I present the engineers and hand over the document our team had been assigned to collect. I haven’t looked at it; I have no idea what’s in it. Salter passes the paper to his ADC, who stashes it at once in a locking briefcase. He starts to say something to the aide about delivering the report by hand and at once. Then an impulse seems to strike him. He glances to Hayward, then back to me.

“What division is your contract with, Gent?”

I tell him. He asks my pay grade. I tell him that.

“With your permission,” he says, “I’m buying you out.”

Salter indicates Chris, Chutes, Q, and the others. He asks if I’m happy with my team.

“The best there is.”

“Acquire their contracts too,” he instructs his aide.

Salter takes the locking briefcase from the ADC.

“Gent, I’ve got an assignment for you if you’ll take it.”

He hands me the case. I am to deliver it to a certain individual whom I know and about whose location “outside of theater” the
aide will provide particulars and arrange all transport, cover, and compensation. I will complete the assignment as discreetly and expeditiously as possible, then turn around and get back to Salter in person as fast as I can. “After that,” the general says, “I’ve got an important job for you and your team.”

He glances to Hayward but says nothing. Chris listens; the others look on from their vehicles. Salter apologizes that he can’t tell us more. He reminds us that our position, compensation-wise, is pretty cozy right now. We can play out the tail end of this campaign and fly home, each of us, with a quarter mill in the bank.

“This new job will triple that,” Salter says. “But you may come back missing your ass.”

“With respect, sir,” says Chris. “My ass will take the money.”

Salter regards me. “Will you go where I send you, Gent?”

I don’t give a damn about the money. The mission is strictly secondary. What counts to me is the chance to fight alongside Chris and Chutes and the others. And the opportunity to serve again under Salter.

“Sir,” I say, “I’ll fly to hell if you tell me to.”

I LAND AT AMMAN, JORDAN
,
at 1030 local, 20 August 2032, bound for Inverness, Scotland—having flown out of Kuwait City an hour and fifty minutes earlier on a private jet (no other passengers) leased to Force Insertion. Queen Alia airport is bedlam. Status boards read

Loudspeakers broadcast in English, Chinese, and Arabic, as Asian and Middle Eastern families and businessmen crisscross the floor, pushing loads of luggage atop carts, or camping disconsolately in recesses and alcoves. Even though I’m flying privately, Security has required me to deplane; I have been searched three times and interviewed twice. I wait with everyone else in the main terminal.

My assignment from Salter is to deliver the briefcase to Maggie Cole—Margaret Rucker Cole, the former first lady, widow of the late president of the United States, Jack Cole. Mrs. Cole is stag
hunting in the highlands of Scotland. The plane will clear regional security here and continue on to Inverness.

In the terminal, TV news covers only two subjects—chaos in the Middle East and plummeting markets around the globe. Holo stalls broadcast bulletins and updates on the attempted coup in Saudi Arabia. The rising has been put down, say the Iranian news agencies FARS and IRNA, by mercenary troops commanded by Gen. James Salter and in the employ of the Saudi royal family. Al-Jazeera is reporting the exact opposite: Salter’s troops, paid by sources unknown but suspected to be a cabal of young and disaffected princes, has overthrown the House of Saud. No one knows which report is true, if either. I certainly don’t. What seems to be factual, at least according to Trump/CNN, Tass, and Ariel Caplan, the female combat correspondent from Agence France-Presse, is that chaos in the kingdom has touched off a regional territorial free-for-all. Russian and Turkish troops are clashing in the Caspian Basin; Iranian armored units, supported by the satellite and drone power of their Chinese allies, have emerged from their enclaves in Tehran and are sweeping south and west (the fore-wash of this wave is what swept me and my team out of Nazirabad), attempting to recapture the oil and gas fields that had been stolen from them, in their view, after the second Iraq-Iran war, by Lukoil, BP, Petrobras, DNO International, and ExxonMobil and their privately funded mercenary armies. Propaganda out of Persepolis is calling for the overthrow of all Sunni elements in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which is all Sunni, even Wahhabi Sunni, except for parts of the Eastern Province. Iran’s aim, reports Ms. Caplan, is the establishment of a “Shiite Crescent,” which would extend from western Afghanistan across Iran and southern Iraq to the Arabian peninsula and whose boundaries would include the vast Rumayla, Umm Qasr, Zubayr, and Majnoon oil fields in southern Iraq and the supergiant Ghawar, Shaybah, and Khurais fields in Saudi Arabia—in other words, three-fifths of the world’s known crude oil reserves.

Clearly in this scenario, not a single drop would flow to the United States.

Conventional U.S. and NATO ground forces have been gone from the Middle East for half a generation now, with power projection limited to “standoff” forces—the navy, including missile cruisers and destroyers, nuclear subs and naval aviation; satellite; and drone attack arms, both seaborne and land based in Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE. The United States maintains two MEUs, Marine Expeditionary Units, shipborne out of Djibouti and Diego Garcia, but each of these comprises only a Battalion Combat Team. The only Western troops on the ground are Salter with his four armatures of Force Insertion mercs—and no one seems to know which side he is on, where his formations are, or even if they remain intact and unmassacred. Hysteria reigns on Capitol Hill, gas prices are setting new records, the Dow and the Nasdaq have gone over a cliff. Adding to the delirium, notes Fox/BBC, is the fact that this is an election year and the presidential primaries are in full swing.

I’m monitoring all this on civilian channels and also on my AKOP, the encrypted mil/net, which gets raw combat feeds, as well as my own bootleg satware that taps into the central database of the AFT, the All Force Tracker—the digital display and comm device onboard all merc aircraft, tanks, and combat vehicles, which links them and shows their locations, as well as those of the enemy.

At Queen Alia I wind up sharing a lounge alcove with a Lebanese businessman named Nabil al-Aftar, who is probably a spy, judging by the expansion of his irises when he gets a squint at this little beauty. We bond immediately and agree to swap secrets. He helps me log on to an outlet I’ve never been able to get aboard before—Arabic-language al-Manar, Hezbollah’s mouthpiece out of Beirut. The site has footage, which it plays over and over, purporting to be the mass beheading of some forty Saudi rebels, supposedly in “chop-chop square” in Riyadh. It also has edited versions of public statements,
with subtitles in Arabic, of both American presidential candidates, including the incumbent Murchison, denouncing the violence in Iran, Arabia, and the Caspian Basin, calling for restraint and moderation while simultaneously threatening nuclear Armageddon. Both candidates cite their “close personal ties” to Gen. Salter and declare, in the tone one reserves for talking a suicide-belt-wearing maniac down from a ledge, their confidence in his loyalty, stability, and self-restraint. “Let’s go back,” I tell my Lebanese friend, “to the beheadings.”

According to al-Manar, two of the unlucky devils are West Point–trained generals in the Royal Saudi Air Force; a number of others are security force generals and colonels with pedigrees from Annapolis, Sandhurst, and St. Cyr. This intel is probably bogus—but try telling that to the true believers in Sana’a, Dushanbe, and Mogadishu, pumping it at high volume into their earbuds. I’m trying to read between the lines. Has there actually been a rising? Of whom? Against whom? With what aims and what second-generation consequences?

Do the contents of the briefcase I’m carrying have something to do with this? I have met Mrs. Cole in the past and have even shared with her what might be considered confidences. But that was years ago and under far different circumstances. Why have I been tasked to make this delivery to her now? What connection can the former first lady have to any of this?

My wife—I should say estranged wife—is a pretty famous new-media journalist. Her name is Adrienne Economides; you might have heard of her. She calls herself A.D. professionally because it sounds more like a man. I call her A.D. too. One of the more constructive habits I’ve acquired from her is the practice of due diligence. Research. A.D. is a scrupulous note taker and deep driller, as they say in the Nooz biz. She taught me about proprietary databases. Big outfits like the
New York Google Times
or Fox/BBC subscribe to these massive private search engines to the tune of five or ten million
bucks a year. Authorized reporters get access. When A.D. and I split up, I gave her my Ford F-250 in trade for her two code-bars, which we still share. The conventional military also has a number of clearance-required databases—AKOP, Trident-V, and the Manassas Group being the most familiar to the general public. Private contractors have their own key-access sources as well. But the most reliable, comprehensive, and easiest to use are the two dedicated journalists’ databases—Getty/Carolingian in London and al-Hamra in Dubai. The searchware used on both is called CPK, a.k.a. “cupcake.” Among reporters, cupcake is a verb. You cupcake somebody. While I’m waiting in Amman, I cupcake Mrs. Cole. (There is also a “blind cupcake,” which means your search is encrypted so that no one can trace who initiated the activity.)

I scan through a blizzard of blog posts, articles, photos, and videos. Few depict Mrs. Cole’s family or professional life, which apparently she has guarded jealously. I have to run an enhanced search to learn that her father was James MacDowell Rucker who, according to an appreciation in
Oil and Gas Journal
upon his death in June 2019, “was a pioneer in ‘rejuvenated extraction’ from depleted fields using high-pressure nitrogen injection. He is credited with revitalizing the vast Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, as well as Safaniya, also in Arabia, and el-Arish in Iran. He was the architect of the merger between ExxonMobil, Petróleos Mexicanos, and Brazil’s Petrobras.” A footnote tells me that Mrs. Cole served as counsel to this conglomerate for twenty-two years.

Most of the video of Maggie shows her as first lady. Jack Cole, as
we all know, was a two-term governor of Virginia, chairman of the RNC, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, vice president under Jeremy Spruance, then president himself. The following is from politix.holo:

My final cupcake is “intersect Gen. James Salter.” Pickings are slim. I unearth only one tidbit that I had known before: that Margaret Rucker had been a sophomore at Bryn Mawr when James Salter was a first classman at Annapolis. I dig up a photo of the two of them together from June Week, the time of graduation balls and dances. Are they a couple? I can’t tell. Maggie wears a gown and Salter is in dress whites, but there is no accompanying text or caption and the resolution is so poor that it breaks up into pixels when I try to enlarge it.