El-Masri’s contract was with StratCorp, a Cairo-based intelligence outfit, but he had been recruited at Salter’s by-name request through the Egyptian Islamic Police. He came in with a CIA field operator, “Monty.” Monty was the bagman. We never knew how much payoff cash Monty was carrying, but it was well over a million and he was cleared to come up with millions more. Monty and el-Masri’s job was to get to Razz with greenbacks if the rest of the team couldn’t do it with bare knuckles.
At that time, less than twenty-four hours after the Long Beach blast, the U.S. public was screaming for nuclear payback. But against whom? Our team, though we didn’t know it at the time, was one of over sixty operations on every continent but Antarctica, chasing down leads.
From Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, three other teams were already on Razz’s trail; they had pursued him by helicopter, truck, and even horseback north through Huth and Sa’da and were closing in on him approaching the Saudi border.
My team, with el-Masri, Monty, and two others, took off after them. Salter himself was already at Najran, across the frontier, with five twelve-man TacOps teams and a detachment of Black Hawks from the 160th SOAR, Special Operations Aviation Regiment. His was the blocking force. The task of our three teams and the three ahead of us was to drive Razz and the tribal fighters who were protecting him into this force. Razz was to be taken alive, no matter what the cost, because he could tell us who was behind the bomb.
“In these mountains in Yemen,” el-Masri continues his recitation, “there are no roads, only tracks and washouts from the winter floods. Tracks mean ambushes. You are driving through potholes bigger than your truck, with high ambush-ground on one side always and sometimes on both. We have chased Razz for thirty-six hours now. No sleep. Many of you brothers have fought in such country. You know how easy it is to lose an enemy in terrain so vast, with no maps worth a shit, where you don’t know where the hell you are but the enemy does. It is like chasing a rat through a maze. Still we are on Razz’s ass.
“At the mouth of the Vale, Salter lands and joins us. This is crazy. A freaking two-star general in the dirt with TacOps teams—but this is how he rolls. Meanwhile two sandstorms in a row have whipped through. All drones have crashed. We’re blind. It’s November.
“To make a long story short, Razz and his men hit us at a T in the trail with four IEDs daisy-chained together. The first knocked out the lead Humvee, which was Gent’s guys Chutes, Q, and Junk. The second two vehicles were trapped; then the fourth, a 7-ton truck, got blown too. Now all four are fucked. Gent and me are in number five, which is still outside the killing zone. The ambush is now twenty seconds old. The enemy is firing from high ground on the right and behind. They have AKs, two light machine guns, and one motherfucker Russian Dishka, which is tearing the hell out of the vehicles in the kill box. Worse, we can see Houthi fighters scrambling down the hillside with RPGs, trying to get close enough to finish the job.
“I turn to Gent, who says to me, ‘Hang on.’ He is in the commander’s seat on the right, Tony from Sri Lanka is driving; the third man, Mac, is up top on the .50 caliber. The way Americans fight is fire suppression. They have IADs, Immediate Action Drills. They turn toward the enemy and give them hell. But this don’t work now, because Razz and his muj have hit them too hard too fast. The bad guys have fire superiority. Americans fight from what they call the PofA, Point of Action. They always go where the shit is hottest. I studied this and even taught it at Bahrain, but I had never seen it. This is some crazy shit.
“Gent’s Humvee is rolling now, downhill, no road, firing like sonsofbitches. I hear him shouting into his headset. He is trying to save Salter. Salter is down, in vehicle number three.
“In that high clear air you can see the streaks made by the bullets as they fly. Every American vehicle is on fire, every tire is shredded; the men who ain’t hit have dived behind boulders or into creases, any microterrain crack they can find. They are returning fire, but when they jumped from their vehicles, the only weapons they took were the M4-40s and SAW light machine guns in their hands, and the only mags or belts they have are what they jumped with. Meanwhile Razz’s tribesmen are scrambling to flank the T-end of the ambush, where they can get direct fire onto the Americans. I’m with Gent, bouncing downhill over boulders with AK rounds zinging all around us.
“Suddenly we see Salter stand up and run to the shot-up 7-ton. This is the truck that got blown over sideways. It’s on fire; rounds are cooking off. Salter plunges into the truckbed, then pops back out, with his vest burning. He’s carrying in his hands four metal cans of 5.56 ammo with two big belts of NATO 7.62 rounds over his shoulders. When the Houthi see him, every weapon on the hillside leaves what it is shooting at and concentrates on Salter.
“It’s like a movie. You see it but you don’t believe it. Gent is shouting into his headset, telling Salter to get down, we’re coming for him. He is a general, man! He’s fifty fucking years old … he ain’t supposed to be doing this. I can see Salter fling himself into a trench between boulders. His vest and trousers are on fire; he’s beating the flames out with his bare hands. The muj are plastering this hideout with so much fire that a cloud of dust blows up as big as a house. They think they’ve killed him. We can hear them whooping.
“But Salter gets up again. He’s trying to get to the men up front, to bring them ammo. We can see them—Chutes and Q and Junk—waving at him to go back. He’s alone, Salter, on his belly now, crawling toward vehicle number one. The truck is about fifty yards away. This is like saying fifty miles. Every shooter in the ambush is now zeroed on him. They forget us coming down the hill. They forget everything. Every one of those bastards wants to do one thing: kill the Crawling Man.
“Salter stands up and runs into the open. You can’t believe the volume of fire that pours onto him. The muj are getting pissed now. They are yelling. The Americans are yelling. Salter can’t survive. No one can, under such fire. But somehow these bastards can’t hit him. There is something about his courage. It is not emotion; it’s not crazy or frantic. You can feel his will. He won’t quit. He is spitting in the face of death. This fills the valley. He means to save his men and he will let nothing stop him.
“Suddenly the craziest thing happens. The muj stop firing. They stand up. First one, then another. It’s only a moment. To this day, I can’t say for sure what it meant. Gent’s truck has almost reached Salter now. I see Gent leap down and race toward him. I’m expecting Razz’s men to tear them apart. But when we look up, they’re gone. It’s the most amazing fucking thing I ever saw.”
The room is silent as el-Masri finishes. He is shaking his head, remembering.
“But this is not the end of the story, brothers. Gent hauls Salter to safety behind our Humvee. Salter is bleeding from everywhere, but he won’t go down. The Humvee is up front at the T-end of the ambush, with Chutes and the others rushing toward us. I look up the hill and there is fucking Razz—fifty feet above us with a dozen Houthis and AQ motherfuckers. All I see is RPGs and AKs. It is that moment when you say to yourself, ‘So this is how it ends.’ Our guys are all looking up too. We are dead meat and we know it.
“Then Razz sees me. His eyes get big. I’m thinking, I got one-tenth of a second to come up with something. I raise my arm and point straight at him. ‘You owe me,’ I say. I don’t know where the fuck this comes from. It is like somebody else is saying it. And I don’t shout it neither. I just say it calm, like I’m speaking here right now.
“Razz looks at me. He looks at Salter. He has no clue who Salter is, but he knows he’s somebody big because he’s fifty fucking years old. All this is happening in slow motion. I see Razz raise his hands. The Houthi put up their guns. In the distance we can hear the sound of Black Hawks approaching. Razz makes a sign; his guys melt away up the slope. He looks at me and says, in English, ‘This is a card you can play only one time.’ Then he vanishes too.”
Two in the morning: I’m in el-Masri’s kitchen, washing my face in the sink, when he com
es downstairs, carrying his holdall. The plane is waiting. We’re ready to roll.
“Gent,” he says, “we must ask for more money.”
He wants the code to contact Salter. This is business, he says.
I balk. My compensation, I tell el-Masri, is more than generous. I’m not in this to milk Salter. “Besides,” I say, “how do you know he’ll pay it?”
“Because you and me are indispensable to his enterprise.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he is telling us bubkes. In my business when we keep someone in the dark, it is so he can’t talk if he’s captured. And why don’t we want him to talk? Because whatever he’s doing for us is so fucking important we can’t take a chance. That’s you and me, my friend. I’m asking for double.”
I tell him to include me out.
“Gent, my friend. With that attitude, you will never get ahead in life.”
I won’t give him Salter’s code. El-Masri gets through anyway. Later, on the plane, he tells me. I ask if he got the money he wanted. He winks. “I always get it.”
While we’re at it, I ask el-Masri for his take on the attempted coup in Saudi Arabia. If anyone can dope out the inside story, it’s him.
“Let me tell you something, my friend. The Saudi royal family exists in a state of nonstop terror. They are sitting on the wealth of the world and they have no balls. They pay off everyone not to murder them in their sleep; this is how they live. Well, now King Nayif and his brothers have grown a sack. They won’t beg no more, not to the U.S.—and not to the Chinese or the Russians. Who started this uprising? They did. Why? To clean house in the army. And to throw a world-class scare into the oil markets.”
To what end, I ask. Gas in the States is already eight bucks a gallon. Prices can’t go any higher without the global economy collapsing.
“I don’t know, my friend, but I will tell you this. Whatever pie these princes are baking, if you lift the crust, you will find our benefactor.”
“You mean Salter?
El-Masri smiles. “Grinning like a fox.”
BOOK
THREE
THE EMPTY QUARTER
7
PSAB
WE ARE BOUND—EL-MASRI and I—for an area in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province called the Empty Quarter. It’s noon; the Egyptian and I are the only passengers on the Gulfstream 450. Conrad Hilliaresse is our pilot; he has his second officer and a comm chief forward behind a partition that they keep sealed. Aft is a lavatory and a stand-up galley with Cokes, chips, and sandwiches. El-Masri and I have the main cabin to ourselves—two facing seats down one side of a narrow aisle, with fold-down tables between, and banquette/bunks down the other. The Egyptian’s lower back has gone into spasm; he lies in the aisle, stretching his hamstrings.
“Gent, are you still plowing that bitch from South Africa?”
“You mean my wife?”
“Your lovely wife.”
El-Masri talks like a street mook from Newark but he’s actually quite educated. He has a degree in Islamic philosophy from Anwar al-Saad University in Cairo. He considers himself a romantic.
“Do you ever think about your own death, my friend?”
“No, but I think about yours.”
El-Masri creaks upright. “All soldiers are romantics, Gent. The worst are us so-called mercenaries, for we have come to fight for hire only after having our hearts broken fighting for a flag. And you, my brother, you don’t fool me. You act hard-core, but underneath you are a cream puff.”
I like el-Masri. I owe him my life from Yemen and may owe it to him again before the next week is up. I ask him what he knows about the Empty Quarter.
“I know it is not empty.”
We’re over the Eastern Province now. I look down on the fields and pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, and processing complexes of the massive Ghawar and Khurais facilities. All are humming as industriously as ever. I see no sign of the uprising that has dominated the news for the past eight days. Supply routes are clear; no checkpoints, no barriers. Another twenty minutes and there’s the airfield. El-Masri suits up in Kev-lite vest, M4-40 with mags, and wraparound Oakleys; he brings me two liters of Solaire bottled water and stows two for himself.
The Empty Quarter, as el-Masri has predicted, is anything but empty. Our plane touches down at 1300 local time into a facility as sprawling as Disneyland and as packed with troops and transport as D-Day at Normandy. The place is called PSAB, Prince Sultan Air Base. It’s eight thousand acres in the middle of absolutely nothing, seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh.
The Egyptian and I step down onto concrete so hot it blisters your feet right through your boots. Chris Candelaria is waiting for us in a ’23 Chevy Simoom bulletproof with a cooler of iced Rolling Rock. Salter has acquired his contract, he confirms for me, along with those of my entire Iran team, plus several ex-UAE Special Forces operators and a former SAS captain named Coombs, whom I will meet as soon as we get back to the converted hangar that the team has turned into our temporary home. Chris gives me an orders packet from Salter (actually from his aide Pete Petrocelli) and Pete’s secure number on-base, which I am to call ASAP. Chris brings us up to speed as we drive. PSAB was an active U.S. base in the ’90s. The air force flew combat sorties out of here in the post–Desert Storm days of the no-fly zone and Saddam Hussein. It was used again as a support facility in ’01, during Operation Anaconda, and throughout OIF and the campaign in Afghanistan. The Saudis shut the base down in ’16, following the Ramadan coup attempt that supposedly originated from the site. It’s been sitting empty ever since.
No longer. Financed by God knows who, the place has been brought back to roaring life. Transport planes are coming and going. Lines of troops in full kit snake across the tarmac, boarding C-130s, An-225s, and converted civilian 747s. A sand berm thirty feet high, topped with razor wire and studded with security towers, rings the expanse. I get on the horn to Petrocelli, whom I’ve known since East Africa in ’22.
“What’s up, Pete? Where are we going?”
“Couldn’t tell you, Gent, even if I knew. Did you get your OP?” He tells me to disregard everything except the top sheet; plans have changed.
“Iraq?” I ask. “Back to Iran?”
Pete can’t say. “Tim Hayward’s on his way. You’re gonna be working with him again.”
“Is Salter here? What the fuck’s going on?”
Salter’s flying in from Basra right now, says Pete; he wants to brief you and your team tonight. “Chow with the boss, I’ll get back to you with time and place.” He laughs. “Welcome to history, cowboy!”
El-Masri has already sussed out the drill. “This is Saudi money,” he says. “I got to give them credit, the princes have grown gonads at last.” Salter, he says, holds the fields of southern Iraq. “That’s where these troops are going; they can’t be heading nowhere else.”
Chris agrees. The mobilization’s aim is to hold Iraq, to prevent the Iranians’ move to establish a Shiite Crescent. PSAB is wall to wall with aircraft and armor. On the tarmac and inside Mahaffey and CoStruct hangars sit scores of big-bellied C-130s and C-17s, even a massive C-5 Galaxy. More jumbos squat in the sunblast a mile away across the field. We pass two EC-130s and one 130H—jammer craft that can broadcast TV and radio and interdict enemy transmissions. Behind Hesco revetments squat row after row of recycled transport choppers—Sikorsky D-12s, Army Chinooks, and Marine Super Stallions—plus scores of Iraq-era Cobra gunships, Apache attack helicopters, and the new Chinese drone Wasps, which are basically pilotless missiles. Out on the runways, ancient Ilyushins and Andropovs land and take off in steady succession. This fleet can only be Alessandro Martini’s Regia Aeronautica and Teddy Ostrofsky’s Air Martiale (or whatever names these notorious arms merchants are using currently to identify their private air forces out of Iran, Angola, Sierra Leone, Sharjah in the UAE, and Burgas in Bulgaria). The whole armada is protected from aerial and drone attack by hundreds of Chinese I-SAM rocket trucks
and cloaked from satellite surveillance by Tata/Hewlett-Packard masking stations. Everything is private enterprise. Ground transport is KBR, Pilot, Acacia, Overnite, or owner-operators from Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, and Egypt, all independent contractors with their names and home ports on the truck-cab doors. No vehicles bear the American flag or the banner of any nation. You see the logos of Force Insertion, Trans-Asia, Iramco, Neilson, Moxie, ZORX, AmmasaUniv, and the ubiquitous Roman helmet insignia of the Legion.
The scale of the mobilization is beyond anything I’ve seen short of full-bore invasion. It’s incredible how far the merc biz has come in only twenty or twenty-five years.
In the original Iraq and AfPak eras a generation ago, military contractors were hired individually and assigned to teams of varying size and specialty. Primary missions back then were to provide security for VIPs, diplomats, press, aid and humanitarian workers, and civilian staffs of various NGOs; detention, prisoner interrogation, and so forth; as well as force protection—guarding bases and troop concentrations. That was the low end. At the other extremity you had elite teams of highly skilled operators undertaking such business as in-country and cross-border direct action and sensitive site exploitation—assassinations and raids. In such capacities, contractors usually worked in conjunction with, and under command and control of, conventional military or special forces, as the hybrid teams did in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Some of these operations were spectacularly successful. Few, if any, made the evening news.
Gen. Pietter van Arden, the iconic South African commando, was the first to organize, train, and equip full-scale private combat formations and put them out for hire as units. In the profession in those days, the late teens and into 2020, there was no such thing as a standing force. An individual operator was either CS—Core Service, meaning command cadre—or TA, Time Available, meaning on call. Mercs were either working or waiting to work. This system functioned well as long as the jobs didn’t get too big. Company- and even battalion-sized formations could be put together with a six-month train-up, with their logistical tail outsourced and the employer fronting the funding in cash.
The Profession Page 8
