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.
“Whatever General Salter told you, it didn’t prepare you for this, did it, Gilbert?”
“He never says much, ma’am.”
“You did well. But then I would expect nothing less from a blood relation.”
The first lady shakes my hand warmly and presents her cheek. I am not unaware that I am standing in the presence of royalty.
“Give my best to Jim when you see him. You shall stay with me on my farm, Gilbert, the next time you’re in Virginia.”
BOOK
TWO
NILE
5
CLOSE TO ISLAM
I ARRIVE IN CAIRO at 0630 Zulu—eight thirty in the morning, local time—22 August 2032, seven hours after departing the highlands and five after wheels-up out of Inverness. Cairo is enormous, nineteen million people, bigger than New York, L.A., and Chicago combined. It’s ugly. I’ve never seen an uglier city. And it’s hell to get around. It takes three hours to clear Customs at Cairo International, followed by another ninety minutes of add-on security (hastily emplaced because of the Saudi crisis), complete with biometric scan, full body search, and polygraph interview. I emerge to sunlight at two in the afternoon. A traffic jam extends for twenty miles in every direction.
A car is waiting for me. “William” picks me up in a black-and-white ’02 Opel with no meter and all the windows open. He’s wearing a white cotton shirt, soaked through. In the Middle East, a passenger will often ride up front with the taxi driver as a sign of social solidarity. I get in back. William apologizes for the heat and the diesel fumes; it seems his A/C has crapped out just ten minutes earlier. William is not a real cab driver; he’s a policeman moonlighting on a private contract. The first item I take note of in any vehicle is the fuel gauge. William’s is on empty. “How far are we going, William?”
“Not far. Near.” His accent is thick but penetrable.
I make him fill up. In Cairo every median and boulevard crossing is populated by boys selling a liquid they claim is gasoline, which they dispense from ten-gallon plastic jugs
via a pouring funnel. Gas in the States has hit eight bucks a gallon; here it’s $6.50 USD (42.5 Egyptian pounds) a liter. The juice is half kerosene but people pay because they’re all driving around with the needle on E in cars so ancient that they don’t dare top off for fear that the tank will outlive the vehicle.
Egypt, since the fall of Mubarak and the National Democratic Party, has transitioned, after an interval of freedom, from a secular police state to an Islamic police state. The trick to fueling in Cairo or in any part of the country, I’ve been forewarned, is to have either a police badge or a retina-scan card from the EST, the civil and humanitarian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. EST has all the petrol, in service compounds behind fences topped with razor wire. Of course everybody carries a siphon. If a foreigner is foolish enough to park his car without passing out a little baksheesh to a pack of street urchins to stand sentry over it, his tank will be dry in five minutes, not to mention tires and wheel covers stripped, along with the alarm rig, the sealed-argon headlamps, and the nav and sound systems. If the thieves can get at the engine, they’ll winch that out too, though every car hood in Cairo is double padlocked and booby-trapped with pepper spray. I was in Egypt briefly during the NDP’s last days. One of the stunts the street kids worked then was to wait on the sidewalk outside a hotel for any European or Asian who was wearing a clean business suit. The little hoodlums would approach, holding out one hand empty, palm up, the other holding a thick black glob of shoe polish. You learned to dive into a cab fast.
I pay for the gas and slip two folded U.S. fifties into William’s shirt pocket. We are instantly the best of buds. This is not entirely inauthentic. By recognizing his state of need and addressing it at once and without ceremony, I have proved myself a friend. Who else will do this for William? Not even his own brother, if he has one, who’s for sure as tapped out as he is.
I am here in Egypt to contact and recruit a gentleman named Abu Hassan el-Masri. These are my orders from Salter. El-Masri is a generic name, the equivalent of Joe from Kokomo. It means “father of Hassan, the Egyptian.” My man is not from Egypt. He’s from Bergen, New Jersey.
I know el-Masri from Yemen in 2019 and from several contract assignments over the decade. El-Masri was a contractor flown in to Sana’a by Salter to act as an interpreter and disbursements adviser, meaning bagman. Before that, el-Masri had served as a sergeant in the Egyptian army and, earlier still, as an undercover agent of the Amn al-Dawla, the old regime’s secret police. My instructions are to recruit him CDW—Can’t Do Without. Americans are not permitted in Egypt since the rise of the Brotherhood, so I’m traveling on a Canadian passport.
El-Masri lives in Helwan, a prosperous suburb. William gets me there in about an hour, coming in down Uribe Street, by Sadat’s tomb, then past the Citadel and through Maadi into a maze of streets choked with taxis and buses, minicabs, gharries, bicycles, and mopeds. I haven’t been in an Arab country in over a year. It all comes back. The smell—which is a malodorous amalgam of diesel fumes, animal and human excrement, rotting fruit, dust, and body odor that is simultaneously revolting and romantic—triggers a full-body flashback.
“Do you have something for me, William?”
He indicates the cargo pouch behind the driver’s seat. Inside an oiled rag I find a U.S. Army Colt .45 automatic, M1911A1, loaded, with three full clips in a wrapper. I see William smile in the rearview. “Beautiful,” he says.
I agree.
I have traveled to Egypt without a weapon, knowing that Customs and the police at any hotel will go through everything I have.
“William, let’s talk some shit.”
I ask him who hired him and what he knows. The tone I take is agent to agent, peer to peer. Does he work for a specific agency or department that’s part of an overall operation? No, he’s freelance. He doesn’t know who hired him; a broker he often works for phoned him with a job. Did the hiring agent say what the job was? To bring you to this address. William doesn’t know who lives there.
“Then what?”
“Wait for you. Watch over you.”
I ask if I’m in danger. He grins. “The blind are leading the blind, no?”
We inch forward in the gridlock. One of the things I do to kill time when I’m traveling is to cupcake A.D.’s byline. She never stops working. She’s got contacts at every videomag, holozine, and network, mainstream or alternative, and at a hundred online and subscription journals. Sure enough, here she is now with an op-ed two hours old in the satfeed Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The piece is about Saudi Arabia and mercenary forces. It’s about Salter. A.D. has pounded it out, I’m certain, within minutes of our holo call from Amman and placed it within hours after that.
“For those who fail to recall General Salter’s résumé,” A.D.’s second paragraph begins,
it includes the swift, violent, and extremely efficient takeover of the state of Zamibia in East Africa during the famine and tribal genocide in the early twenties. With only two Marine Battalion Landing Teams and four squadrons of gunships, Salter stabilized a region the size of Kansas that was in the throes of one of the worst humanitarian crises of the new century. He also set himself up as that region’s de facto dictator and confronted nuke for nuke the Chinese 9th Expeditionary Army based in Sudan, before being sacked by President Jack Cole and enduring before Congress a spectacular public defenestration. Where is Salter now? I know no one who can say for sure, but hints from certain well-placed sources make the screen on my GPS start calling up Saudi Arabia.
A.D.’s next two paragraphs recap Salter’s career, post–Marine Corps. She names General Pietter van Arden, the legendary South African mercenary, and cites the 2018 acquisition by van Arden’s company, AST Security, of Xe International, Titan, DynCorp, and half a dozen others to form the military-contracting superfirm, Force Insertion. Salter, A.D. writes, has been employed for almost a decade by this notoriously secretive enterprise. Where is he now? Why is none of this in the press? Why aren’t we seeing satellite real times, Twitter feeds, or street-cam videos smuggled out of the kingdom? Who’s putting the lid on this? “Our friend,” A.D. reminds her readers, referring to Salter,
has in recent years accepted employment from such dubious entities as the West African Congress of Unity (which has failed to stop ethnic cleansing in at least three of its member states); from the dictators William Johnson Brown and Mbuke Egbunike; from forces on both sides of the conflict in Uzbekistan; and, to “advise” a regimental-size unit of Russian mercenaries, from no less a personage than Premier Evgeny Koverchenko. Salter is an American patriot but he could be more dangerous to U.S. security than any general of any sovereign foreign state. And this man is no mere military goon. His forces include highly trained civil affairs components—teachers and translators and SysAdmin teams that he trains himself and are said to be the best in the world. He is an acknowledged master of tribal psychology and of operations within failed states. Probably no commander since Philip of Macedon has so skillfully employed bribery, intimidation, and cooptation to achieve his military and political ends. If they gave Ph.D.s in Taking Over Foreign Countries, Salter would be running his own school at Harvard. What is he up to? The American public needs to know.
A.D. is shrewd to write this as an op-ed. Because it’s an opinion piece, it’s not subject to strenuous fact-checking. She can speculate. But what she’s really doing is angling for a gig. She wants some network or mega-zine to send her to Saudi Arabia. Stay tuned, I tell myself.
William breaks free of the traffic finally. Our taxi enters a neighborhood of quiet lanes lined with jacarandas and magnolias. Streets are paved, sidewalks shaded. On both sides of a fragrant way I glimpse gated enclosures, their pastel walls brightened by pots of geraniums and bougainvillea. William finds el-Masri’s house. He parks across the street. I dismount. William is reaching for a girly magazine he keeps under the driver’s seat.
“William, do something for me.”
“Sure, boss.”
“Take a pos
t on that roof.”
I indicate a tangerine-colored two-story house, kitty-corner from el-Masri’s.
William squints unhappily. “People live in that house, sir!”
“Watch over me.”
I hand him the .45. It would be an insult to el-Masri’s hospitality to bring it into the house.
Affluent Eastern residences are often built around courts. You enter through a stronghold door in an exterior wall, in this case opened by el-Masri himself when I ring the copper bell. My old friend is reinforced by two bull-necked gentlemen, one of whom carries an S74U, the snub-nosed version of an AK-47. The other comes forward and pats me down. El-Masri greets me with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. He has been eagerly awaiting me, he says.
“You are still trim, Gent!”
He beams and pats his own jelly roll. In we go. While a boy fetches iced drinks, the phone rings; it’s the lady from the tangerine two-story, wondering why a strange man has just climbed onto her roof and inquiring whether this outrage has anything to do with the Englishman who has just entered el-Masri’s court. The conversation is in Arabic but el-Masri, grinning and holding his palm over the receiver, translates.
“By the way,” he asks me, “you’re not here to kill me, are you?”
He apologizes to the lady, feeds her some story that she clearly doesn’t buy, then sends his boy across the street to tell William to come down.
“Seriously, are you here to assassinate me?”
I tell el-Masri I’m not sure his stature merits the term “assassinate.”
“Don’t fuck with my head, Gent.”
I’m a friend, I swear.
“I would not hold it against you …”
I repeat my denial.
“… in fact, I would respect Salter more if I knew he was operating with such prudence.”
A spread of hummus, sliced tomatoes, onions, and olives appears, served by the bodyguards, whom el-Masri introduces as his brothers—“Jake” and “Harry.” The pair either live here in the compound or are doing a hell of a job of faking it; one is barefoot, the other wears pajama bottoms.
The Profession Page 6
