Free The Profession by Steven Pressfield Page A

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 Teamsand 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 andSysAdmin 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 post 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