The Profession Read Online Free PDF Page B

a conventional U.S. fighting force, he could still attract to his service the savviest military minds and the saltiest trigger pullers, not only from Uncle Sam’s vets but also from seasoned professionals of every English-speaking (and Russian and German and Arabic/Pashto/Dari) outfit in the world.
    We cross the Iraq border ninety-six hours after bolting from Col. Achmed’s. Where are Salter and his armatures? It was under Salter’s orders, relayed via his adjutant Pete Petrocelli, that our team made the run into Nazirabad to retrieve the engineers and the technical report that they were preparing.
    We strike the UAV screen of the northernmost formation just after noon. A drone picks us up as we descend via smugglers’ tracks from the Zagros Mountains. This is high desert country, cloudless,shadeless, waterless, with a sky so clear we can see the Firefly spy-bird, no bigger than a pizza box, soaring half a mile above us. With intense relief we transmit our security signature and report that we are carrying wounded who need urgent care. The fly’s scanners give us the once-over; within ninety seconds, orders appear on the screen of the All Force Tracker on my dashboard. We are to proceed to a trig point twelve miles east-northeast, where we will be met by a CASEVAC chopper and two HSDs, high-speed picket cars of the perimeter security force. We will be VDBed—video debriefed—in place.
    When the commanding officer of any outfit, battalion sized or larger, moves outside the wire—meaning into hostile or potentially hostile territory—he does so shielded by concentric rings of satellite, drone, air, and ground security. Like a flagship at sea, the number one cheese advances as the epicenter of a task force arrayed around him in defensive circles. That’s the way it’s supposed to be—the way, we assume, that Salter will be operating, as commander of the dominant Western combat force in a theater where tactical nukes have supposedly been deployed within the past 120 hours.
    But when our team arrives at the debriefing point—a barren wash between two basalt ridges, which coincides with the easternmost point of Force Insertion’s advancing formation—we see not only the two light HSDs that are supposed to meet us, but a cloaking truck, two satcomm dish cruisers, a three-vehicle CAAT antiarmor team, and a pair of eight-wheeled MI-1 fuel tankers. That’s a Jump CP if I’ve ever seen one.
    We pull in and brake. The CAAT teams’ missile tubes track us all the way. The comm screens on our dash depixelate, jammed by the cloaking truck. A surveillance satellite looking down would see nothing but fuzz.
    “Peace, babies!” Chris dismounts, still in his tux jacket. “It’s only us chickens.”
    He and I step forward, readying our scan-tabs to verify our identities. A bearded officer intercepts us. “Drop your drawers, girls. The only ID I trust is a full cavity search.”
    “Hayward,” I say. “You asshole!”
    The officer clamps me in a bear hug.
    I ask him what scam he’s running in this hellhole.
    “Watching out for the boss!”
    I introduce Chris. Tim Hayward was an airborne lieutenant colonel when I knew him in Yemen and Uganda, six and seven years ago. He is the most lethal specimen of warrior I have ever known. He ran the assassin’s course at the School of the Americas; he has trained the SAS and the Spetsnaz in chemical and biological warfare. He can kill you with a heart attack, make you choke on a chicken bone, rig your brakes to fail at the exact moment you’re highballing down a mountain pass. He also has a master’s in international relations, five kids, and a gorgeous Belarusian wife who took silver in the biathlon at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
    “Come on,” he says, “let’s get your wounded outa here.”
    The CASEVAC bird, an extended-range War Hawk comes whoomping in; Hayward and his troopers help Chutes, Q, and Junk get our engineer and the others aboard. Where is Salter?