Authors: Steven Pressfield
We crest a rise and brake. The sun is finally setting. Our driver kills the engine. Before us in the failing light spreads a spectacular vista of dales and glens, receding into a smoky distance probably twenty miles away. “End of the line, lads.” The driver springs down. “Let’s have you!”
We advance on foot. The secretary is not happy. “How much farther?”
“We’ve only just started, haven’t we, sir?”
I like our guide. He doesn’t wear hunting togs; except for his shoes, which are rubber mud-sloggers, he’s dressed in a gray houndstooth business suit with a tattersall shirt and a necktie with little Irish setters on it. He looks like a banker. The gear works, though I’m shivering in my North Face field jacket; he’s toasty as a tick.
“What’s your real name, Colonel?” Echevarria tramps beside me over the spongy, heather-carpeted turf pocked with patches of spiky, knee-high gorse. “Or do you go by rank in your outfit? Clearly you’re nobody’s nephew.”
“I’m somebody’s nephew.”
“My guess is General Salter’s.”
Our guide hisses for silence. “If we molest the lady’s hunt,” he says, “she’ll have all our bollocks, mine first.”
We cross two ridge crests and start down a third. I’m scanning ahead. “There.” The guide’s hand stops us in place. He goes down on one knee. We do likewise.
“Where?” says the secretary. There’s excitement in his voice.
The guide indicates a rocky promontory, well over a mile ahead. Daylight is going fast. It’s hard to tell the rock from the dark furze and heather. The secretary squints through 10X pixel-aug binos. I’m straining with the naked eye.
“See the stag?”
I can barely make out a darkish blotch, perhaps three hundred yards below the outcrop, in a vale that must contain a spring or a burn, as the Scots call a creek. The blotch could be one animal or several. I can’t see the first lady.
“Here, Colonel.” Echevarria passes me his glasses. They’re beauties: Special Forces optical-enhanced binos that deconstruct visible light and IR/UV into digital elements, then recombine and enhance these signals electronically. With the tap of a button, a full-color representation zooms into focus. I can see a guide, prone among rocks, and Maggie Cole on one knee beside him (apparently she needs the extra height to get a clear shot, given the down angle) with her rifle sling-braced around her left upper arm and forearm. She looks like a Marine on a rifle range.
“Why doesn’t she shoot?” asks the secretary. The guide shooshes him. He snatches the glasses back. Maggie wants the trophy, the guide says, meaning she must go for a heart shot. She’s waiting for the stag to turn his chest toward her.
I find myself calming my own breath and stilling my heart. This is serious shooting Mrs. Cole is doing. A deer rifle weighs twice as
much as an M4–40 carbine and it only gives you one shot. The first lady must put a single round inside a circle no bigger than a fist at three hundred yards. If she fails and only wounds the stag, both our parties will be out here on foot in the dark tracking the poor creature to put him out of his agony.
The secretary peers through the binos. I see him react and, a second later, hear the report of the rifle. It’s too dark now to see without glasses. “He’s down!” cries the secretary.
“Bloody hell!” The guide slaps his thigh in celebration. We stand. The valley echoes with the rolling peal of the gunshot. Our escort hands me his own glasses; through them, I can see Maggie’s guide stand. She herself has not moved, except to work her arm and shoulder free of the sling and to elevate the smoking barrel of her rifle.
My SAS driver is supposed to pull me out as soon as I deliver the briefcase. But by the time the motorcade of Land Rovers has delivered the hunting parties back to the manor house in the bone-rattling dark, Mrs. Cole won’t let me go. She is still high from her trophy shot. She downs three sherries like water, though the cold may have something to do with that; when a serving man brings single malt in a decanter for the group, she signs for two fingers, then changes it to four. The gathering—whose numbers have swollen to nearly two dozen, counting the hunters, their assistants, and their aides—breaks up for an interval so that its members can bathe and change for dinner. There is no cold on earth like Scottish cold, and it’s worse after dark in a drafty, vaulted, stone-founded hall. Not even a pair of walk-in fireplaces roaring with timber can take the edge off. “Now you see, Colonel,” says Echevarria, setting a hand on my shoulder, “the evolution of 90-proof malt whisky.”
The secretary is a bit of a bully. In front of his aides and the first members of the party returning from their tubs, he tries to provoke
me. “Clearly our bearded ‘nephew’ is a soldier for hire and, judging by the scorches on his neck and brow has come to us straight from the fight. But which fight and for what purpose? What’s in the briefcase? Something to do with petroleum, that’s certain.”
A part of me would love to pop the Secy right in his beautiful capped front teeth. But my orders are to exercise discretion. Then too, Echevarria—I know from his history—is a stand-up hombre. When he reaches stiff armed for a cigar offered by a serving man, I remember news photos of the suicide car bomb that killed his wife and daughter six years earlier in a motorcade in Oran; the secretary lost the sight in his left eye and suffered paralysis in that arm from the elbow down, but he never backed off or trimmed his rhetoric. His aides—if they’re any good, and I’m sure they are—have acquired my identity hours ago and cupcaked me through half a dozen mil/pol databases in the time he and I have been away on the moors. Without doubt the secretary has been informed of my service under Salter in Mosul and Yemen and East Africa. It would not surprise me if he knows too the origin and ownership of the leased jet I flew into Inverness on.
“Do you admire General Salter, Colonel? Are you a loyal myrmidon or only a gun for hire?”
“Sir,” I tell him, “I’m just here to see my aunt.”
Maggie Cole returns. She descends the stone and hewn-timber staircase in boots and Western-cut jeans with a man-tailored white linen shirt and a quilted vest, crimson, with a silver stag pin at the collar. All conversation ceases. Maggie is fifty-nine. She looks sensational. She crosses toward one of the great fireplaces, greets the secretary and others, and comes up, smiling, to me.
“Gilbert, is Inquisitor Torquemada attempting to rack you on the wheel?”
“He’s stretching my bones a bit, ma’am.”
The secretary salutes Maggie with a crisp bow. The former first
lady takes his arm. With a smile she steers the group and the conversation toward the vaulted stone dining hall. When I sign to her, as subtly as I can, that my orders are to get out of Dodge pronto, she dismisses this with effortless charm and motions me to keep close beside her. One of the guests—a Conservative MP named Sir Michael Lukich—asks Echevarria why he so dislikes Salter.
“I don’t dislike him. I fear him.”
And why, asks the MP, has the secretary himself trekked to this remote outpost, if he does not count himself among the general’s admirers or adherents.
“I’ve come, sir,” replies Echevarria, “for the same reason we all have: to collect my bounty. I believe the technical term is ‘being co-opted.’ ”
Here the secretary turns to me, the outsider. He speaks as if for my edification, but in truth his oration is intended for the ears of all.
“A sum,” he says, “that could only be described as munificent shall be donated by firms associated with General Salter to a charity dear to the hearts of my late wife and daughter. I shall accept this largesse, Colonel, as my fellow guests will claim their own respective emoluments, though perhaps I shall take mine with a bit more shame.”
A murmur of indignation arises from the company. The secretary dismisses this with a gesture of contempt, aimed, it seems, at least partially at himself.
“Surely, Colonel, you have apprehended that these gentlemen, however impeccably turned out in field-and-stream attire, have not traveled all this distance to stalk wild bucks and harts. In truth, the only real hunter in this company is our hostess—and her aim is to bag far more substantial quarry.”
I’m a Southerner; I can’t let this pass. “With respect, Mr. Secretary, your tone is offensive, addressed to the former first lady.”
Echevarria smiles. “Margaret, is this young man indeed your nephew?”
Mrs. Cole releases the secretary’s arm and takes mine.
“He is now.”
Dinner is game meat and whisky. The platters of venison, grouse, duck, and hare placed before the party, along with potatoes, beets, parsnips, and several vegetables I don’t recognize, must total twelve thousand calories per man. I down it all and so does everyone else. The conversation steers clear of politics until the group repairs to ancient leather chairs in the sitting room. Cigars appear, and brandy. The MP asks Echevarria what act he fears Salter might take under the current circumstances that would prove injurious to Western interests.
“Sell Iraqi oil to the Russians or the Chinese.”
“He can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not his.”
“My young friend,” the secretary says, “what’s his and what’s not his makes no difference to a man like Salter. If I had not pulled the plug on him nine years ago, these highlands you have tramped over so happily today would have been molten glass—”
“I beg your pardon.”
This from Maggie Cole, in a tone like iron topped with honey. She is standing with a hand against the rolled leather back of an armchair; now she rises to her full height and turns toward Echevarria.
“First, Mr. Secretary, it was not you who ‘pulled the plug’ on General Salter nine years ago. It was my husband.”
The secretary bridles, but swallows this. The face-off between Salter and President Cole in 2023 has been recounted a thousand times in books, films, and participants’ memoirs. Other than the
Truman-MacArthur showdown in Korea in 1952, this incident was the only time that a serving military commander had defied the orders of his commander in chief and initiated actions that would have called the bluff of a nuclear-armed superpower, with world war potentially the consequence.
President Cole ordered Salter home and fired him.
“And second?” Secretary Echevarria asks.
“Let me ask you, J.E.,” says Maggie to the secretary. “What would you do now, if you still held office?”
“The age of Great Powers has returned,” says Echevarria. “In truth it has never left. What can be done, therefore, will be negotiated between and among these actors—not in the field and not compelled by the actions of armies, state sanctioned or otherwise. Too much is at stake.”
While the secretary is speaking, a report comes via one of the guests’ aides that Salter’s forces have completed their seizure of the Rumayla, Zubayr, and Majnoon oil fields in southern Iraq. His mercs are, thus, the West’s final line against whatever Iranian, Central Asian, or Chinese-backed forces wish to exploit the current chaos by pressing their advantage. It will be months before conventional U.S. or NATO reinforcements can deploy. Salter’s privateers are the power on the ground for the foreseeable future.
The secretary, with an edge, asks me what I think of this. I answer that my role is to follow the orders of my superiors, not to question them. Maggie smiles.
“What the secretary means by ‘Great Powers,’ Gilbert, is that an accommodation will be reached between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. By this undertaking, naval incursion into and about Indonesia’s Strait of Malacca by the latter will no longer be considered provocation by the former. You realize of course that 59 percent of China’s nondomestic oil is transported by supertanker from Africa and the Persian Gulf through that passage. In return for
the United States’ acquiescence to this new understanding, the Chinese government will invoke its influence upon its Iranian and Central Asian allies. It will induce them to back off. All nukes will stand down, all apocalyptic rhetoric be dialed back.”
Maggie smiles again. “I see by your expression, Gilbert, that you’re wondering how all this will happen. Let me tell you. No treaties will be signed, no measures placed before Congress. The Joint Chiefs will not be consulted. The electorate will not read of this accommodation in
FaceTime
or
Apple imPress
, nor will they learn of its existence via Fox/BBC, the Courtemanche Report, or ITV HuffPost. It will be enacted by Letter of Instruction of the commander in chief and take the form of a two-line alteration in the Rules of Engagement. American naval and air commanders in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans will be informed that certain confrontation scenarios, which formerly had been considered acts of war, will now be looked upon—how would you put it, Mr. Secretary?—more benignly.”
Echevarria’s eyes deny none of this. Apparently the scenario Mrs. Cole has just laid out is exactly what will happen.
“This accord will achieve its desired effect,” Maggie says. “War will be averted; markets will stabilize; oil will flow.” She pauses for the briefest instant. “And the United States will have backed down one further increment from her once-proud pinnacle of power.”
The secretary snorts. “And what would
you
do in the circumstances, Mrs. Cole?”
“You know damn well what I’d do.”
My car finally arrives. With it via the SAS sergeant comes a note from Salter, handwritten on a back cover torn from a paperback copy of
Lost Victories
by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. It instructs me, using nicknames and terms that only I would understand, to fly to Cairo, recruit a certain individual, then return directly, via Conrad Hilliaresse’s aircraft, to Salter himself. I bury the
note in the coals of a brazier, pausing till the paper curls and crumbles into ash.
I hear the secretary addressing Maggie. “What, Mrs. Cole, was your second point concerning ‘pulling the plug’ on General Salter?”
“My point, Mr. Secretary, was that you—and my husband—were wrong.”
Mrs. Cole walks me out to the fogbound court. The rush of the hunt and the whisky have left her. It’s cold; she shivers.