The Profession (30 page)

Sacramento, Salter says, is prepared to issue special pardons, turning these prisoners over to Force Insertion as volunteers (all drug-free and in the prime of health) to be trained and employed as legionnaires. And of course to ingratiate itself with what it believes will be the new power in Washington.

“We’ll have an Aryan Brotherhood brigade, and one from the Mexican Mafia. What do you think, Gent?” Salter is laughing, but he’s serious too. “Forty thousand is more than the United States had in Afghanistan for nine years—and that’s just from one state.”

Dainty mutes the tube as a commercial comes on. “Everybody loves a winner.”

Maggie Cole’s face appears on the VTC screen, as well as a number of laptops around the room. It’s lunchtime in Virginia; Mrs. Cole sits at the banquette nook in her farm kitchen, wearing a flannel shirt and sipping from a mug of coffee.

She listens for a few minutes as the group discusses the predicament of Salter’s Force Insertion troops in-country—in Arabia, southern Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. Salter, through his representatives in Washington, has made it known that full amnesty must be granted to all personnel serving under his command and, further, that they and their formations, in their current configurations, must be integrated without prejudice into the armed forces of the United States. He wants American citizenship for all Third Country Nationals who desire it—and, most important, the
legitimization and inclusion of the full force under conventions consistent with the troops’ present station—meaning salaries and bonuses commensurate with those paid by Force Insertion, as well as medical, education, and death and dismemberment benefits for field operators and their families—and for the force as a whole to remain under command of its current officers, in an autonomous position outside of DoD chain of command and commanded by Salter for life.

“Are we talking to Salter,” one columnist has demanded upon hearing this, “or Caesar?”

Salter’s response: “How about gas at forty bucks a gallon?”

The officers in the suite are deliberating Salter’s options. They’re talking power in military, economic, and geopolitical terms.

Now Maggie Cole weighs in.

“You’re searching for the solution in the wrong arena. Forgive me, gentlemen, but at this hour, General Salter possesses the most unstoppable power of all—the force of political momentum. The American people love him, and they’re going to love him more tomorrow and more the day after that.

“Jim,” she says, speaking directly into camera, “you’re riding a once-in-a-century wave, like the ones that swept Churchill and FDR into office. You can ride it to whatever height you wish, but ride it you must. This is the force of historical necessity that you’ve always embraced in theory. Now it’s real. The moment is irresistible, but it’s perishable, too. It must be seized
now.
”

The Steelers game is still playing. Nobody’s watching. Maggie wraps it up with a minute more of specific technical suggestions, then signs off. Salter shuts down all screens. The suite gets very quiet.

“Gentlemen, I’ve always prided myself on thinking three and four jumps ahead. That’s my game; it’s what I’m good at. But I never saw this coming.”

Everyone in the room has turned toward him.

“Maggie’s right. The American people will call me home in any capacity I choose. They’ll make up a new office if I want it. And here’s the tricky part: I can’t say no.”

I glance to Jack Stettenpohl and to Chris and Chutes and Petrocelli and Holland. The men in this room have been with Salter for years. They are his circle. They have come of age serving under his command and have had their worldview shaped, willingly and indelibly, by his intellect.

“You’ve heard me talk many times,” Salter says, “about ‘the intersection of Necessity and Free Will.’ I believe in such moments. I’ve studied them my whole life and prepared myself not only to recognize them, but to be ready to act upon them. The moment compels me to seize it. If I don’t, someone or something worse will step in.”

He pauses and turns to the company.

“But if I perform the bidding of Necessity, I violate the code of the republic to which you and I, all of us, have sworn allegiance. I cross a line, beyond which there can be no return. Do I lose you, brothers? Tell me now. Will you cross that line at my side?”

A rush of concurrence follows from every man in the room. Salter scans the faces. Pledges of fidelity issue from every officer. They stand with him. They will never abandon him.

“If we fail, gentlemen,” says Salter, “every one of you crashes with me.”

“Fuck that,” says Mattoon.

Laughter all around. Obscenities issue from every quarter. Salter is not the type to weep, but I see emotion, profound and authentic, in his eyes.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, my friends.”

I’M BACK IN D.C
.
Still no Hayward. I have grilled Dainty and Col. Klugh in Dubai. Both claim Tim is on assignment in Indonesia. I tell them I don’t believe them. Klugh grabs his crotch. “Believe this, fuckhead.”

One other thing has happened regarding Hayward.

After the confab at the Burj Khalifa, I catch a C-130 up to Mosul to see el-Masri. Chris Candelaria is on-site too, working the same pipeline deal he had been negotiating when my team and I originally ran into him south of Nazirabad. After a drunken day and an even more drunken night, Chris piles me and el-Masri aboard the Iraq-era Humvee that is his personal car/office/sleeping hooch and drives us south along the Tigris.

He has something he wants to show us.

While el-Masri and I carve out seating space amid a small landfill of tech journals, ammo, MRE boxes, and cases of bottled water, Chris confesses to me that our original meeting south of Nazirabad was not an accident. He was sent there, he says, with orders to link up with me.

“What?” For some reason, this unnerves me. “Who sent you?”

“Salter.”

“Salter? What for?”

“To protect you.”

I don’t get it.

“I should’ve told you before,” Chris says. “But my instructions were to keep my mouth shut.”

This is seriously pissing me off. Was all that stuff with the tuxedo and the financial team bogus too?

“That was straight,” Chris swears. “Salter just wanted a few extra guns to look out for you.”

We’ve turned east now, past a sign for Qaraqosh and Al-Hamdaniyah. Terrain is treeless semidesert. An irrigated greenbelt runs along a tributary of the Tigris. “Where the hell are we going?” asks el-Masri.

“Trust me,” says Chris.

I ask him what he knows about Tim Hayward.

“Nothing.”

He’s lying. Godammit. I feel the veins in my neck start to swell.

“Chris, what the fuck is going on?”

“Bro, you gotta learn to stop asking questions.”

“Why?”

“Because you might get answers.”

Chris tells me I don’t understand how important I am to Salter. “Gent, you don’t realize the exalted place you occupy in his heart. Salter loves you, man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“To him you’re the pure warrior—the man who fights for the fight alone. In a way, I think you’ve replaced his son. Or maybe he sees you as who he himself used to be before—”

“Before what?”

“Before he had to become what everybody becomes when they rise beyond a certain level. Politics. He doesn’t want you contaminated with that shit.”

“Then why did he send me to D.C.?”

“He sent you as a warrior, Gent. He knew he could trust you. He knew you loved him as much as—”

A flyblown turnout appears on the left. Chris pulls in. The lot is untended and unpaved. Rolling grassland rises inland toward a range of foothills. There’s a sixty-foot obelisk and a crumbling monument that looks like it came out of a 1954 Cecil B. DeMille movie.

“What is this place?”

“Gaugamela.”

Chris tells me and el-Masri that this site is where Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia in 331
B.C
.

“This is what you brought us here for?”

“This is a cosmic place, dude! Gaugamela was—”

“I don’t give a fuck about some ancient battle, Chris. I want to know what’s going on now. Hayward’s back in D.C., waxing people. I want to know who gave the order!”

Chris brakes at the crest of a rise and kills the engine. He turns toward me.

“Gent, I don’t know Hayward and I don’t wanna know him. But I do know that anything can be bought. You and me are contractors. So are ten thousand guys stateside.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means this is high-stakes chess, baby. Salter’s moving multiple pieces around multiple boards—”

“I get it.”

“—and you and I are players.”

“We’re pawns.”

El-Masri leans in from the back, sets his hand on my shoulder. “My friend, this is why you must always ask for double. Because guys like you and me … we will always get fucked in the end.”

I turn to Chris. I see in his eyes that he’s told me all he knows.

“All right,” I say. “Show us the fucking battlefield.”

Now, in D.C., the capital is nearing its breaking point. Only four days have passed since I flew out, with Salter’s repatriation looking like a gimme. Suddenly, resistance has doubled and redoubled, not only inside the Beltway but from scores of power centers around the country.

ITV HuffPost calls the general’s return “de facto despotism,” “a crypto-coup,” and “the end of the republic as we know it.” Its editors vow to shutter the office and take their outrage to the streets. On the same day, no fewer than eleven political action groups made up of lawmakers, business leaders, and concerned citizens take out above-the-fold banners on the
NYGT, WSJ/CBS
, the
WikiWashington Post, Politix
, and
FaceTime—
all declaring the proposed amendment to the Emergency Powers Act unconstitutional. Salter’s poll numbers have plunged fourteen points.

A powerful, organized resistance has arisen, led by a significant minority of senators, oddly enough from both sides of the aisle; a triad of ex-presidents; and numerous representatives of the retired military and the diplomatic corps, the most prominent and outspoken of whom is former secretary Echevarria. A number of legal challenges are being mounted, the press reports, not only to the proposed amendment but to the Emergency Powers Act itself.

On the second Monday after Labor Day, the House of Representatives votes on, but fails to pass a motion stripping Salter of American citizenship. On Tuesday an unnamed Justice Department source
is quoted in the
WSJ
stating that the attorney general is in fact drawing up an indictment for treason. The story is retracted online two hours later, but not before the blogs and pol/boards short out on tens of thousands of rabid posts, pro and con.

Chaos in the Gulf is driving the country nuts. Will the U.S. lose its oil? A story on MurdochNet has Salter meeting in Abu Dhabi with Vitaly Salaquin of Gazprom, aiming to sell “our” Saudi oil to Russia. Fox/BBC broadcasts file video of Salter with premier Koverchenko during the Ingushettia crisis of ’27 when he, Salter, had hired out a Force Insertion armature to protect the pipeline and other Russian interests.

What is the truth? No one knows. Salter has sealed the kingdom to the press and all outsiders. In place of news, rumors abound. Trump/CNN publishes a schematic purporting to depict the high-explosive wiring rigged by Salter’s mercs across the entire Saudi pumping/pipelining/processing infrastructure. This act, which may or may not be fiction, prompts a photo-op denunciation by a phalanx of congressmen, mostly from Texas and Louisiana, who declare Salter no better than a terrorist. Nuke the bastard! Send in the Marines! Two carrier battle groups continue to cruise the Gulf. Hellfire-packing Predators circle over Salter’s head. Nuclear-missile subs remain on-station; B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s from Diego Garcia do racetrack runs 24/7.

A thousand inflammatory fables ricochet around the blogosphere, from which they are tweeted and retweeted, rChived, HoloTubed, magnified, inflated, and bloviated, before metastasizing onto the mainstream airwaves. Salter, the myths declare, has concluded a pact with Revolutionary Guard Iran; he now has nuclear weapons. He is in bed with China, India, Brazil. One story tells of a deal with Japan. Tokyo, flush with Salter’s promise of limitless oil, is preparing demands for the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands; the Japanese
want Pearl Harbor. Salter, other sources proclaim, has orchestrated a giveback to the Saudis. He has converted to Islam, taken a Saudi bride, and been adopted into the royal family.

A.D’s article comes out—the lead piece of a double issue of
Apple imPress
. The story is unapologetically pro-Salter, portraying him as a misunderstood patriot, a champion of vision and virtue who has been stabbed in the back by envious, craven, and careerist colleagues. A.D. makes the rounds of talk shows. Could this article bring her third Pulitzer nom? She blogs and pens op-eds. This one, posted on
zenpundit.com
, goes instantly viral. It is titled “Coalition of the Bewildering.”