The Profession (6 page)

While I’m doing this a holo comes in from my estranged wife. She has tracked me via our shared cupcake code. Her call comes in with no greeting or salutation:

My reply:

A.D.:

I try to block A.D.’s visual linkup so she can’t grab any cues from the environment, but she catches just enough airport audio to get a glimmer before I toggle the camera icon off. “Where are you? Amman? Is that Gate 6?”

She’s good, A.D. This is serious though. Revealing the tiniest clue will be enough for her to unspool an entire story; in ten minutes she’ll know more about my assignment than I do and the saga will be all over the air, the Web, and the blogosphere.

My problem with A.D. is I have a weakness. I’m still in love with her. A.D. can get to me and she knows it. She starts asking how I am. Am I okay? She’s been worrying about me, she says. What makes it worse is she means it.

Some women get to you with their bodies. A.D. does it with her voice. I can’t describe it. It’s not throaty or come-fuck-me seductive; if anything it’s the opposite: cerebral and news-y. It has that rhythm to it. A.D. is quick. Nothing gets past her. She has a relentless curiosity that’s childlike—and oddly arousing. I hear that voice and I have to hang on.

She makes me set up the holo where I can see her. That’s another problem. Her face. I have a weakness for that, too. “You can’t write anything about this, A.D.”

“What’ll you do, kill me?”

“Yes.”

A.D. has been a finalist twice for Pulitzers. Along with Ariel Caplan of Agence France-Presse (who is A.D.’s best friend), she is one of the half-dozen most celebrated female journalists in the world, though you’d never know it to hear her talk. A.D. is tortured and insecure. That’s one of the things that first attracted me to her. For years when I was with her, I tried to save her—to take away her self-torment, or at least ease the pain it caused her. Finally I realized that she didn’t want to lose it. She needed it. It was the engine of her artist’s soul.

I never knew a writer before I met A.D. Any time you have a writer, you have self-torture. Why? Because every one of them wants to be Shakespeare. And every American wants to write the Great American Novel. I don’t care how many awards they get for journalism or movie-writing, they all want to be Hemingway. The women more than anybody. A.D. has four novels she’s working on. I know them all by heart. She hasn’t finished one. She’s always going off to war. You can’t help her. When I’d suggest that maybe journalism was her true calling, she’d cut me off for a month. I look at her now on the little, shimmering hologram. I hate that sick feeling in my heart but there it is.

“So,” she says, “are you gonna get yourself waxed this time?”

“If I do, honey, you’ll get the exclusive.”

This is an old joke between us. A.D. asks if she’s still in my will.

“Always, baby.”

“How much do I get?”

I recite my line: “You’ll never have to turn tricks again.”

A.D. is half Greek, half South African. She speaks with a Johannesburg accent. On the occupation line of her passport, it says “war correspondent.” A.D. is ambitious. She likes to quote Elvis:

I first met A.D. in East Africa in the late teens. We got married in Mombasa, at the Hotel Serena Beach, with Chutes as my best man and Rob Salter—then a ILT with Force Recon—pouring the pineapple daiquiris. A.D. and I had a bayview suite for two nights that she got us comped for through Trump/CNN; the rate was $1,450 per. I was in the Marine Corps then (technically still married to my second wife, but who’s counting?), a twenty-nine-year-old O-2 serving under Gen. James Salter.

I used to run into A.D. on flights. In Africa, to get anywhere, you
have to travel by plane. Even if you’re serving-military, you catch hops with whoever’s going near where you’ve got to go; otherwise you wait around forever. A.D. was a correspondent for FaceTime and Trump/CNN, but she was filing stories as well on her own, through various mil/pol blogs and to her own site,
Line of Fire
, which was also the title of one of her unfinished novels. There was a gaggle of other hotshot female reporters in Africa then, all trying to be the next Christiane Amanpour. A.D. had bigger balls than any of them. In Somalia and Sudan she handled her own sound and uplink, traveling with just a cameraman and one big, strapping
kalash
(a different one on each assignment) to haul her drinking water and batt-paks. She used an Apple HD iCam with an encryption sync and a dejammer. A.D. dictated her stuff over the satellite or texted it from her handpod.
Kalash
comes from
Kalashnikov;
it’s the ubiquitous African term for “young man.” Whatever assistant A.D. had with her, she’d teach him to run the sound. If you want to puff up a black African, put a mike and a Nagra in his hand. These dudes would have leaped into a volcano for her.

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 mare 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.”