Tag Archives: Fiction

“I want us to fill it,” Prince corrected. “You. The Trump family. You have a base of millions who believe in strength, in winning, in not apologizing. You have a name that is synonymous with breaking the rules to get things done. Imagine it: ‘Trump Security Solutions.’ Or better yet, something with more punch. ‘The Trump Legion.’ A private military force, available for offensive combat operations, available to anyone who can pay. A government-in-exile for the world’s strongmen, a sword for hire that answers to no one but its client and its own bottom line.” Continue reading →

The contract ran eighty-three pages. Buried on page forty-six, in the particular gray prose that law firms reserve for their most dangerous sentences, sat the clause that mattered more than all the others combined: all intelligence products are advisory in nature; final operational decisions rest exclusively with the client. Simon Chesterman has written about the accountability gaps this kind of drafting creates — gaps wide enough, in practice, to lose a body count inside. Continue reading →

Danie Vermaak was seventy-one years old and had not worn a suit voluntarily in a decade. He wore one now, badly, the way a man wears a uniform he’s proud of but no longer fits into. He had founded Sable Dynamics in Pretoria in the dying light of apartheid, staffed it with men who’d fought a bush war nobody in this room had bothered to understand, and used it to turn the tide of two African civil wars in under eighteen months each. He had been called a mercenary, a war criminal, a stabilizing force, and a cautionary tale, sometimes by the same journalist in the same article. He had outlived most of his detractors and all of his imitators, and he had been invited here, he suspected, because the organizers wanted a photograph of the industry’s founding father shaking hands with its current billionaires. Continue reading →