seat on the first jet to the kingdom.
I land at Inverness midafternoon. The city is socked in by the frigid, milky fog the Scots call
haar
. I can’t see the runway lights till the plane is three hundred feet off the deck, but our pilot, Conrad Hilliaresse, sets the craft down as gently as a bee on a buttercup. Taxiing is more dangerous than landing; it takes us almost ten minutes, tiptoeing through the gloom behind a FOLLOW ME truck, before we reach the terminal and I’ve connected with my driver.
In the five hours since my chat with A.D., the situation in the Middle East has come into slightly clearer focus. Iranian armor has crossed the Iraqi border in Diyala and Sulaymaniyah Provinces but has not yet advanced beyond Baghdad to the south; it may have held up in place deliberately. The Chinese have contributed technical assistance to Iran but have shown no signs of dispatching ground troops; Russian and Turkish armor have checked their advances somewhere outside of Kirkuk and Mosul, respectively. A cease-fire has been proposed by the Syrians. UN negotiators are on the way.
Of Salter’s four armatures on the ground in Iraq, one has taken up positions in the vicinity of the Diyala River, protecting the capital. I do not say “defensive positions,” as it is part of Salter’s philosophy that there is no such thing as defense. The other three have swept south at top speed. They remain intact, according to Reuters and al-Arabiya, and are taking possession of the oil fields at Rumayla andZubayr. Other elements are moving to secure Majnoon. Southern Iraq is being stabilized. Saudi Arabia for the moment appears calm.
My driver is a former SAS sergeant (in farmer-style civvies) who will not tell me his last name and claims to have no knowledge of who I am or why I’m here. All he knows is he has been instructed to deliver me to a certain country estate and wait to take me back to the airport. We speed north for half an hour along narrow, winding coast roads past Dornoch, Golspie, and Brora, then turn west, uphill into the interior. In no time the roads, which have been barely wide enough to hold two cars abreast, shrink to single lanes, then cart-width tracks. We’re climbing through gorgeous, wild country without a tree or a bush taller than a man’s waist. “How much longer till we reach the estate?” I ask.
“We’ve been on it for the past thirty minutes.”
A manor house appears, grim and square and stony, set in the middle of absolutely nothing. We pass through an iron-gated strong-point manned by a brace of dour-looking squaddies with bomb-sniffing Alsatian shepherds and see-through scanners, then proceed for another mile along an unpaved drive, through a second checkpoint, and finally beneath a portcullis-like security barrier and into an enclosed motor court paved with gravel. Two dark-green Land Rover Defenders squat before a sheltered entryway. It’s August, full of sunshine, and the place is fucking freezing. I can hear hounds baying beyond a wall.
“Out you go, sir,” says my SAS driver. Before my soles touch the deck, a gray-haired gentleman with the ruddiest cheeks I’ve ever seen scuttles from the manor house, introduces himself in an incomprehensible dialect, bundles me into one of the Defenders, and fires it up. He keeps mumbling, more to himself, it seems, than to me. I make out something about no time to dawdle, must beat the sunset. Apparently hunting stags in Scotland is a lot like hunting deer in Louisiana; the actual shoot happens at dawn or dusk, the only timesof day that the prey shows itself. “If you don’t mind, sir,” says the guide, “we’ll be ferrying two other gentlemen.”
The right rear door of the Defender bangs open and in piles former U.S. secretary of state Juan-Esteban Echevarria, followed immediately by an extremely professional-looking security contractor who swings into the front seat, revealing a Sig Sauer P220 combat model in a shoulder holster beneath his
I land at Inverness midafternoon. The city is socked in by the frigid, milky fog the Scots call
haar
. I can’t see the runway lights till the plane is three hundred feet off the deck, but our pilot, Conrad Hilliaresse, sets the craft down as gently as a bee on a buttercup. Taxiing is more dangerous than landing; it takes us almost ten minutes, tiptoeing through the gloom behind a FOLLOW ME truck, before we reach the terminal and I’ve connected with my driver.
In the five hours since my chat with A.D., the situation in the Middle East has come into slightly clearer focus. Iranian armor has crossed the Iraqi border in Diyala and Sulaymaniyah Provinces but has not yet advanced beyond Baghdad to the south; it may have held up in place deliberately. The Chinese have contributed technical assistance to Iran but have shown no signs of dispatching ground troops; Russian and Turkish armor have checked their advances somewhere outside of Kirkuk and Mosul, respectively. A cease-fire has been proposed by the Syrians. UN negotiators are on the way.
Of Salter’s four armatures on the ground in Iraq, one has taken up positions in the vicinity of the Diyala River, protecting the capital. I do not say “defensive positions,” as it is part of Salter’s philosophy that there is no such thing as defense. The other three have swept south at top speed. They remain intact, according to Reuters and al-Arabiya, and are taking possession of the oil fields at Rumayla andZubayr. Other elements are moving to secure Majnoon. Southern Iraq is being stabilized. Saudi Arabia for the moment appears calm.
My driver is a former SAS sergeant (in farmer-style civvies) who will not tell me his last name and claims to have no knowledge of who I am or why I’m here. All he knows is he has been instructed to deliver me to a certain country estate and wait to take me back to the airport. We speed north for half an hour along narrow, winding coast roads past Dornoch, Golspie, and Brora, then turn west, uphill into the interior. In no time the roads, which have been barely wide enough to hold two cars abreast, shrink to single lanes, then cart-width tracks. We’re climbing through gorgeous, wild country without a tree or a bush taller than a man’s waist. “How much longer till we reach the estate?” I ask.
“We’ve been on it for the past thirty minutes.”
A manor house appears, grim and square and stony, set in the middle of absolutely nothing. We pass through an iron-gated strong-point manned by a brace of dour-looking squaddies with bomb-sniffing Alsatian shepherds and see-through scanners, then proceed for another mile along an unpaved drive, through a second checkpoint, and finally beneath a portcullis-like security barrier and into an enclosed motor court paved with gravel. Two dark-green Land Rover Defenders squat before a sheltered entryway. It’s August, full of sunshine, and the place is fucking freezing. I can hear hounds baying beyond a wall.
“Out you go, sir,” says my SAS driver. Before my soles touch the deck, a gray-haired gentleman with the ruddiest cheeks I’ve ever seen scuttles from the manor house, introduces himself in an incomprehensible dialect, bundles me into one of the Defenders, and fires it up. He keeps mumbling, more to himself, it seems, than to me. I make out something about no time to dawdle, must beat the sunset. Apparently hunting stags in Scotland is a lot like hunting deer in Louisiana; the actual shoot happens at dawn or dusk, the only timesof day that the prey shows itself. “If you don’t mind, sir,” says the guide, “we’ll be ferrying two other gentlemen.”
The right rear door of the Defender bangs open and in piles former U.S. secretary of state Juan-Esteban Echevarria, followed immediately by an extremely professional-looking security contractor who swings into the front seat, revealing a Sig Sauer P220 combat model in a shoulder holster beneath his
Similar Books
