The Profession by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online Page B

correspondent for FaceTime and Trump/CNN, but she was filing stories as well on her own, through various mil/pol blogs and to her own site,
Line of Fire
, which was also the title of one of her unfinished novels. There was a gaggle of other hotshot female reporters in Africa then, all trying to be the next Christiane Amanpour. A.D. had bigger balls than any of them. In Somalia and Sudan she handled her own sound and uplink, traveling with just a cameraman and one big, strapping
kalash
(a different one on each assignment) to haul her drinking water and batt-paks. She used an Apple HD iCam with an encryption sync and a dejammer. A.D. dictated her stuff over the satellite or texted it from her handpod.
Kalash
comes from
Kalashnikov;
it’s the ubiquitous African term for “young man.” Whatever assistant A.D. had with her, she’d teach him to run the sound. If you want to puff up a black African, put a mike and a Nagra in his hand. These dudes would have leaped into a volcano for her.
    A.D. is two years older than me. The first time she got word that she was a Pulitzer finalist was ten days after we got spliced. I remind her of that now. “I’m lucky for you.”
    “Yeah?” she says. “Did I win?”
    A.D. is a politics junkie. She’s up on every detail of the latest administration outrages. It’s an article of faith with her that the United States under the last six presidents—Dems as well as GOP—has crossed what she calls the Augustan Point of No Return, meaning the date when Octavian took the name Caesar Augustus and the republic of Rome became the Roman Empire. She hates this. It’s the passion of her life to make people see the parallels.
    “I know Force Insertion hasn’t pulled you out of Iran for fun, Gent. What kind of dark shit are you in on now?”
    “Maybe I’m working for Human Rights Watch.”
    “Maybe you’re working for Jim Salter.”
    A.D. asks if I still never read the news.
    “I’ve seen it all before, darlin’.”
    I’ve told A.D. my vision of the ancient battlefield and my belief in previous lives. She regards both as humbug, which, I must say, pisses me off monumentally.
    She fills me in now on the attempted overthrow of the Saudi monarchy. One report states that Western mercenary forces played a role in crushing the uprising; another says the mercs were part of the rebellion. A.D. believes both are fiction. “No one knows for sure because the peninsula has been shut down to news, even tighter than usual.” Salter’s in on this, she tells me. “I’m gonna get in somehow.”
    “Saudi Arabia. Is that where I’m going?”
    “You don’t even know, do you?”
    A.D. knows more about Salter than anybody. A story she broke in East Africa in 2022 was instrumental in terminating his conventional-military career and propelling him into the underworld (as it was thought of then) of mercenary enterprise. A.D. admires Salter as a warrior but believes his philosophy is founded upon a neocolonial, MacArthur-esque self-conception (I disagree; we’ve had more than one brawl on the subject) and that this drive is even more disquieting now, when Salter is a gun for hire, with no force to govern him except his own sense of honor.
    “This is no joke, Gent. These fuckers are destroying the country.” She launches into a rant about when corporations and government become one, it’s called fascism. I say I have no problem with that if it keeps down the price of gas.
    “You don’t fool me, Gent. This shit bothers you, too.”
    When we were still living together, A.D. made it a ritual to give me a book each time I deployed. She continues the traditionnow, crunching me the e-version of her current bedstand companion—Livy’s
History of Rome
.
    “A little light reading, sweetheart.”
    “I’ll knock it off tonight.”
    She blows me a kiss. Her holo image sizzles off. I don’t have to see her to know what she’s doing: texting one editor after another, trying to snag a gig that’ll get her a