The Profession (34 page)

I feel the truck—and hear two others in front and behind—zig through a series of chicanes.

“Finish it here, Klugh. Save yourself the gas.”

“Shut up!” He wallops me with the shank of the pistol, then mashes my face into the sandbagged floor.

I twist forward. Against the bulkhead behind the cab squats the mass of the ECM—Electronic Countermeasures—transmitter, the anti-IED jamming device. The 7-ton slows for the final checkpoint. I feel the trucks rattle over the scanner grid. I’m thinking one thing: all the ECM in the world can’t protect against a buried pressure plate—and that kind of trigger can be as primitive as two hacksaw blades wired to a battery and tucked under an inch of sand.

As I’m thinking this, the bomb goes off.

The truck elevates, stern first, tilts forward onto its nose, and rotates 270 degrees before crashing to earth, upside down and on fire. I have been flung out over the tailgate. I smell the bomb and blood and the contents of somebody’s guts opened by the explosion. Machine-gun fire and RPG rounds are tearing into the vehicles fore and aft. I’m on the ground, facedown, swimming. Someone turns me over. A voice shouts into my ear, “You okay? Gent!”

El-Masri.

He and another man lift me. I see tires, a floorboard. Explosions are going off so close I feel the impact in my eyeballs and my kidneys.

I’m in the backseat of something. Hands probe my guts and limbs. “Relax, bro!” the Egyptian yells in my ear. “You’ve still got your balls!”

We’re moving fast. A tribal warrior is packing a wound on my left shoulder.

“Can you fight, Gent?”

I’m back in my body.

“Fuck yes.”

I’m trying to turn to see if there are vehicles behind us, but my neck won’t crank past my shoulder. El-Masri is slipping the pistol grip of an M4–40 into my fist and jamming a couple of thirty-round magazines into my belt. “Hang on to your ass!” he shouts as a fireball of orange flame erupts fifty feet behind and twenty-five feet to starboard. I feel only the shock wave. El-Masri’s vehicle—an Iraq-era Humvee—yaws left, dumps onto its side, and skids to a stop.

The tribal warrior and I clamber out of the passenger-side window, which has become the roof. El-Masri follows. Floodlights are racing toward us. We dive into a ditch just as a Javelin antitank missile reams the wrecked Hummer right up the wazoo. The blast blows all three of us over a berm and tumbling down a thirty-foot slope. When I try to stand, I fall flat on my face. A shard of steel the size
of a spatula is embedded in my heel. I jerk it out; it’s sizzling like a skillet.

Somehow we’re in another vehicle, pounding across country. El-Masri’s brother Jake drives. The truck’s roof has been torn off by something, probably another missile blast; there’s no driver’s door, no flank at all on my right side. Ahead of us speed two hajjis on motorbikes, leading the escape.

Explosions detonate in front, behind, and to the sides.

“Goddam drones!” shouts el-Masri.

We’re back on a road. The Tigris dazzles on the right. A warrior in a turban mans the .50 above me; another in a pettu rides forward in the right-hand seat. El-Masri points east. “The tribal areas.”

We’ve got no chance. Klugh’s drones will have us locked down by thermal, infrared, motion, and XGPS. Apaches will be overhead in minutes. Even the chase vehicles can smoke us from beyond the horizon.

Somehow I’ve still got my M4–40. I have no concept of time and distance.

“How far have we come from Al Salim?”

“Farther than we deserve.”

El-Masri points ahead.

A sixty-foot obelisk looms out of the dark.

“What the fuck’s that?”

“The battlefield.”

“What?”

The bikes slew off the pavement; our truck follows, zigging wildly. Drone strikes explode right and left.

The ancient battlefield.

Gaugamela.

Where Chris took us a few weeks ago.

Bikes and trucks buck east on farmer’s tracks into the cultivation. I look back just as another javelin blows the hell out of the
obelisk. Stone blocks rain down like meteorites. The chase trucks race, right behind us.

Then we see the Apaches. Four attack helicopters in line abreast, east, a quarter mile ahead under the moon.

I can see rocket flash as the Wildfire missiles erupt from their pods and streak straight at us. The bikes scatter. Our truck swerves hard left, behind a berm and down into a dry watercourse. The missiles scream overhead; a wall of stone and fire erupts behind us.

Our truck is doing sixty between boulders the size of Cadillacs. “There!” shouts el-Masri, pointing to a rise of ground with a rubbled stone wall on its crest.

A place to make a stand.

The truck ascends from the wadi just as a second broadside of Wildfires explodes in front and to our right. I feel the right front wheel buckle. The axle shears. The tribesman on the .50 snaps his spine as the truck whiplashes with the impact. The Apaches blast overhead, strafing us with their cannons. The whole front half of our truck disintegrates. Jake’s chest shreds; the warrior in the commander’s seat is torn in half.

El-Masri and I scramble on foot toward the rise and the wall. Here come the chase trucks. The Egyptian clambers on all fours, ahead of me, up the slope. I see the wall above him. Ancient. Rubbled. Three worn stone columns.

It’s the wall from my memory.

I fall.

“Gent!” El-Masri comes back; he lifts me. I can see the Tigris to the west, foothills to the east.

This is it.

“… I thought it was the sea,” I say.

“What?” El-Masri hauls me to the crest. We both plunge to cover behind the wall.

“I thought it was the sea. But it’s the river.”

He looks at me without comprehension.

Machine-gun fire rips the slope. Two chase trucks attack from the south; two more maneuver to take us from the north.

“We’ve had it, bro,” says El-Masri.

He and I have wedged ourselves into fissures in the floor of ancient stones. All I want is one clear shot. I read el-Masri’s eyes; he wants one too. We hear drones above us. Survival time is seconds now.

El-Masri’s eyes lock onto mine.

We’ll die in the open.

We rise together. A chase truck is rushing up the slope. I kneel and fire the 40 mm. El-Masri has one shoulder-fired rocket. He stands. The truck is roaring straight at him. El-Masri puts the rocket right between the headlights. The truck’s front end rises, shredding like a can of peas. But the mass of the vehicle keeps coming of its final, fatal momentum. It rolls right over the Egyptian, burying him under its wheels and frame.

I race to him. More headlights mount the rise. Rotor wash blasts down.

El-Masri lies under gravel and shingle, with no part of him visible aboveground except his left hand clutching the launcher of the rocket.

The chase trucks brake at the crest. Men leap down; a dozen muzzles zero on the center of my chest. Search lamps blind me. I hear the static of radio transmissions.

Salter’s voice.

Pete Petrocelli dashes forward in the lights. I see Jack Stettenpohl.

A final chase truck mounts the rise and brakes. Rotor blast from the Apaches turns the hill into a hurricane. Someone on the truck waves the choppers back. They withdraw; the gale abates.

Salter stands in the turret of the final chase truck. Search lamps from the trucks and helicopters light him from the side and behind.

I see his eyes move from the rise to the rubble wall to the three worn, eroded columns.

He orders his men to hold their fire.

I’m kneeling beside the broken remains of el-Masri. Salter’s truck edges forward until the general stands, in the vehicle’s turret, directly above me.

“Whom do you bury, soldier?”

I answer, “My brother.”

Security men look on, baffled, waiting for the order to blow me to hell.

Instead Salter bares his head. He straightens into a posture of respect for the fallen el-Masri.

“Take this man’s weapon. Leave him as he is. Let him bury his brother.”

Two contractors scramble forward. They disarm me. I glance to Petrocelli and to Jack Stettenpohl. Both look on in mystification.

Salter meets my eyes one last time. Then he reaches forward and, with his knuckles, raps his vehicle’s armored roofline directly above the driver’s station.

The truck shifts into gear. Its front wheels turn. The vehicle peels away and descends the slope.

One by one, the others follow. The column moves off toward the road and the river. The Apaches bank eastward and ascend. Even the drones withdraw, the tinny whine of their propellers receding.

Darkness swallows the site.

From the foothills I hear the two tribesmen’s motorbikes, coming back to collect me.

I feel neither grief, nor anger, nor fear. Only waves of love rising from the earth at my feet.

COL. ACHMED CROSSES THE
courtyard toward the mud-brick hooch I share with el-Masri’s brother Harry. It’s January, but the temp in the sun sits at thirty Celsius—eighty-five Fahrenheit. “Here comes your news,” says Harry. He was one of the motorcyclists at the ancient battlefield. It was he who rescued me and got me here.

Nine weeks have passed. I’m well enough now to walk, according to Dr. Rajeef. But the physician advises me not to push myself. “Healing takes time,” he says.

Indeed it does.

Col. Achmed brings the
New York Google Times
, the English-language version downloaded from the satellite, which his militiamen have run off on the printer in the office in the main house. He does this every day. I don’t know why. I get the news online three hours earlier.

“Your President Murchison has died.” Achmed tosses the paper onto the bed. “Guess who has taken his place.”

Harry’s room and mine compose a small but comfortable apartment. We’ve got every modern convenience, from our host’s stores
of loot—a brand-new 12BTU A/C, a Lucas espresso machine, two LG 3-D flatscreens, and high-def Internet 24/7. We even have women—Dutch and Polish prostitutes who come out once a week from Husseinabad.

Col. Achmed and I have become friends. He practices his English on me, and I struggle with my Farsi and Arabic. He has a sense of humor. Dr. Rajeef is a good man too.

They and their tribesmen love to mock me about my stateside celebrity. Video of my verbal confrontation with Salter has set the all-time Web record for hits. “Why didn’t you shoot the bastard? Now we are all fucked!”

Once, when I was a kid, some gangbangers tried to screw with my sister, Jane. She was fourteen, I was nine; we were on our way to the market. I took the bullies on. They kicked the crap out of me of course, busted my face up good and proper. Later, Robbie, the boss in our town, came by our house in his black Lincoln. “Let me look at you.” He turned my face this way and that in the light. “So,” he said, “you are a fighter.” And he gave me fifty bucks.

Not long after that, I had my first vision of the ancient battlefield. I never told anyone. Not my sister, not anybody. I had the vision again a few years later, and again when I was seventeen. That was what made me join the Marine Corps.

I have experienced my life, from within, much as Robbie expressed it from without. “So … you are a fighter.” That’s how it came to me. Before that day with my sister, I had never thought of myself in that fashion. After that, I could not conceive of myself any other way. It was like I was discovering, as I grew, not who I might become, but who I already was.

My secret self was me already.

When I met Salter for the first time, in Mosul in 2016, I associated him with the commander in my vision. I thought,
This is the
man I was born to follow. He will lead me and my brothers to our collective destiny
. Salter was indispensable to my conception of myself. I could not function without him.

The love that arose in my vision from my brother’s grave, I took to mean his approval of this vision. Go with this commander, I thought it said. You belong to him.

I was wrong. That love said instead, “Be true to me, brother. Be true to us, and true to yourself.”

I killed my brother by leading him to war. I’m responsible for his death, because he looked up to me and to the certainty I projected. He followed me, as younger brothers will, wishing to be like me and to earn my love and respect.

But my brother was wiser than I, in his ancient incarnation and again as el-Masri.

His love, both times, was forgiveness. He forgave me for being the engine of his extinction. Next time, his love said, we’ll get it right.

Will we?

I cannot blame Salter for exploiting my love and loyalty, as he has done and is doing with so many others. I made up my story. I told it to myself and I believed it. The myth was my creation. I am responsible for every act I performed or failed to perform in its service.

I cannot hate Salter either. He has acted by his lights, in full awareness of the peril to himself and to the peoples and nations over whom he will rule. Will he be able to navigate those waters? No one ever has.

I am his enemy now. His reach could finish me with ease, even here in the rugged land of Persia. But he won’t come after me. He spared my life, not out of love, as I wish he had—but out of cunning, so that I would be cast in the public imagination as the mad and futile emblem of opposition to his ascension.

I’m okay. I’ll be walking soon. Harry is well already.

We’ll make our way to Cairo, as el-Masri said, traveling via the tribal lands, where you need no papers and where friends hand you on to other friends. We’ll be safe in that city of millions, and from there we can go anywhere.

I no longer have my brother. But I have my brother’s brother, and he has me.

As for Salter, he and I are quits. What he has been to me, he is no longer. I see him plain, and I see myself.

He did not spare my life out of love. But I spared his.

Many friends have helped me try to get this right. For geography, finance, politics, language, and lots more, my gratitude to Fred Lowther, to Christy Henspetter and Nadine Uzan, to Gisela Eckhardt, Sallie Shuping Russell, Justin and Lissa Pressfield, and to Monty Freeman.