Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (26 page)

             
I couldn’t get all that accurate a count, but I could tell they were moving in our general direction.  Which, I don’t need to tell you, was bad news.  The most dangerous part of any operation is extraction, and this one looked to be no exception.  We didn’t dare move while these guys were poking around, unless we wanted to get in another fight.  They were obviously local militia, just like Nick had described.  I didn’t know where they stood, and in the middle of the night, with IEDs going off and machinegun fire spraying up north, was not the time to have a chat about it.

             
This also wasn’t the time or place for a firefight.  I still checked my mags; I’d gone light for the night’s festivities, as had we all.  I’d brought five mags, and had three full ones left.  No more bangs or frags.  My TRP was still high on my hip, just below my plate carrier, with two extra mags.

             
The thing was, I didn’t dare call any of the guys inside to come out.  Either the sound of my call or the movement could give us away.  So I stayed in the shadows, tried to get as small as I could, and not move a muscle.  Trust me, that gets painful as hell after a while when you’re on a knee.

             
Four of them stopped at the edge of the playground or soccer field, or whatever the hell it was, and talked for a moment.  It looked like they were trying to decide something.

             
Don’t come over here.  Don’t come over here
.  I tried to will them to stay away.  It didn’t work.  One of them pointed toward the cluster of houses we were sheltered in, next to the main hardball road.

             
Fuck
.  If I got in a fight with these guys, I was dead.  There was no doubt in my mind.  I’d probably take all four of them down, but we’d get swarmed immediately thereafter.

             
I heard a rustling sound, and risked turning my head to look back at the door with the corner of my eye.  Nick was kneeling just inside, his rifle raised, covering the four militiamen who were now walking toward us.  He was far enough back in the shadows of the door that I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t be seen.

             
“Get in here, Jeff,” he whispered.  “I’ve got these clowns.”

             
Carefully, slowly, my joints protesting with every move, I got up into a crouch.  Being painfully careful as to where I put my feet, and moving slowly enough I hoped they wouldn’t spot my movement, I crept over to the door, and stepped through, barely squeezing by Nick’s bulk.  Nick was shorter than me by about half a head, but he weighed about thirty pounds more.

             
As soon as I was past him, I moved to cover the door as well.  “Larry!” I hissed.  “Let Little Bob cover the front.  We need you back here.”

             
Almost as soon as I’d finished speaking, Larry was there.  He could be remarkably quiet for a six-foot-four, almost three-hundred pound man.  “We’ve got local militia headed this way.  If they come in here, we’re going to have to take them out,” I explained.

             
Larry just nodded, stepping back from the door, and bringing his Honey Badger to the low ready.  I stepped back to one side, and motioned for Nick to do the same on the other side of the door.  The three of us had the fatal funnel covered.  Nobody was getting through it alive.

             
I was still hoping that the militiamen would stay out.  I didn’t know who they were, so I wasn’t necessarily all that anxious to turn them into corpses.  There was also no guarantee that we’d be able to take them all down without their buddies out there noticing.  The last thing we needed was another firefight.  By the time we got them sorted, we’d have the IPs around our ears.

             
Murphy, however, is a misbegotten, miserable bastard.  I heard talking in Arabic just outside.  A moment later, a man with a Saddam mustache, wearing a light-colored dishdasha and carrying an AK with no buttstock stepped through the door.  His buddies were right behind him.  I brought the SBR’s sights to my eye and stroked the trigger.

             
Larry shot the lead guy between the eyes.  Nick and I both got number two at the same time.  His head just seemed to disintegrate under the impacts of four 200 grain bullets.  I quickly swung to the guy behind him, who was looking shocked, the contents of his friend’s skull spattered across his face.  I put two more rounds into his center-mass, the suppressor muffling most anything besides the clack of the action cycling.  He crumpled, his heart destroyed, the same look of shock on his face.

             
The fourth guy panicked, and turned to run, opening his mouth to yell.  Larry pumped four rounds into him as fast as the rifle would cycle, smashing him on his face in the dust.   Unfortunately, he fell outside, and the moonlight was going to be on his body soon.  I grabbed my push-to-talk.  “Kemosabe, Hillbilly, we are at point Charlie, need extract thirty seconds ago.”

             
“Roger, Hillbilly,” Jim answered.  “We are one mike out.  Stand by.”

             
I pointed to the front.  “One minute.  Let’s move.”  We flowed through the rooms toward the front of the ruined house, keeping coverage back toward where we’d left the bodies.  As soon as one of the other militiamen saw them, or even noticed that Hamid was late and started to wonder where the others were, all hell was going to break loose.

             
I didn’t like what had gone down.  Killing during an infiltration or exfiltration meant things had gone bad, and you’d probably done something wrong.  Granted, in this case, it was just sheer bad timing, but it was messy, and I didn’t like it.  I didn’t like the fact that we had no idea who we’d shot, either.  The only thing that mattered was that they had been armed, and a threat, but we had no idea if they were jihadis, Iranian sympathizers, or just the local version of the neighborhood watch.  They’d still have probably killed us, but that didn’t make it sit any better.

             
Tires crunched outside, and I got one word from Jim.  “Go.”  I pointed, and Larry led the way, Little Bob and our unwilling guest in tow, while Nick and I covered the back of the house.  I tapped Nick and he got up, jogging out to the microbus, where Bryan and Paul were on a knee at the back, covering the street.  I glanced over my shoulder to see that he was in, and got up to go.  At that very moment, I heard the yelling in Arabic from behind the house.  I sprinted out the front door for the back of the van.

             
Hissing, “Last man,” at Bryan as I went past, I vaulted into the back.  The seats had been stripped out, and there were curtains over the windows.  It was crowded, even more so when Bryan and Paul piled in and slammed the back doors.  “Go!” I barked at Jim, who floored the pedal.  The results in a microbus were rather underwhelming, but we were well down the road by the time the militiamen got to the front of the house.  A few desultory shots snapped past and one banged into the frame of the van near the roof, but then we were around a curve and accelerating.

             
Only then did I allow myself to close my eyes.  When I did, all I could see was Bob falling backward, blood spurting from the bullet hole in his neck.

Chapter 15

             
I was sitting on the floor in an old abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Chamchamal, next to the body bag.  I didn’t react when somebody came through the door.  I didn’t pay any attention to the unpleasant noises coming from the back, where Haas was busily interrogating our Qods Force guest.  He wasn’t being gentle about it, either.  I gathered it had something to do with a hammer and a pair of pliers, but that was Haas’ part of the game, not mine.

             
The team was settled in, security was set, gear and weapons were taken care of, I’d brought Alek up to speed, and now we had nothing to do but wait.  I waited next to Bob’s body.

             
Bob had been the new guy on the team just before the contract that led us to East Africa.  He’d had a chip on his shoulder that we’d done our best to knock off at every opportunity.  We were Praetorian’s founding team, after all.

             
He’d gotten his first real taste of combat and loss in Djibouti.  The one guy on the team who’d ever really gone easy on him, Colton, had been shot and killed during the raid that rescued the most hostages out of that entire misbegotten operation.  It had hit Bob pretty hard.  I still remembered him flailing at the ground with a shovel in a desolate wadi just outside the city, where Colton’s bones are still buried.

             
He’d gone on to be a solid operator, and a good friend.  He had still been a smartass, but the FNG had been replaced by a brother.  A brother who was now gone, just a shredded hunk of meat and bone wrapped in a rubber bag.

             
Footsteps crossed the concrete floor.  A pair of Lowa hiking boots and khaki trousers came into my peripheral vision.  Jim sat down with a sigh, his hand coming down on my shoulder.  I looked over at him.  His eyes were red, his lips tight.

             
“It never gets any easier,” I said finally, my voice sounding hoarse and broken to my own ears.  “How many have we buried so far, Jim?  And it’s still the same every fucking time.”

             
Jim swallowed before he could answer.  “No, it never does get any easier.  It’s probably going to get worse, too.  It’s what we do, who we are.  This job will probably put all of us in the ground eventually.”  He blinked back tears.  “I just hope I’m not the last one standing.”

             
I nodded.  Finally I couldn’t hold it back anymore.  I put my head in my hands and wept.  It was quiet, at least.  My shoulders shook and my throat got raw as hot tears squeezed out of my eyes.  Grief and rage mingled until they were the same damned thing.  Jim’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

             
I knew we’d all accepted the risk.  We were here in the middle of a burgeoning war of our own volition.  We’d all gone in with our eyes wide open to the fact that we could be going home in a bag, if at all.

             
But Bob had been my brother.  Rationality and understanding don’t erase the loss of a brother.  Whether or not he’d known and accepted the risks, whether or not he’d saved all of us by his dying act, didn’t matter next to the pain of his death.

             
Worse even than the grief at Bob’s loss, and rage at his killers, dead though they were, was the guilt.  The nagging thought that if I’d been a couple steps faster, I’d have been in a position to take those rounds instead of Bob.  The thought that I had been his team lead, and so I’d let him down.  That I was ultimately responsible for his death.

             
I knew better.  I knew that in war, shit happens.  People die.  You don’t get to choose who lives or who dies.  You can only do what you can, and that’s limited.  In the long run, maybe I’d be able to finally accept that when it came to Bob’s death.  Right at the moment, it just hurt.

             
Finally, the sobs receded, as I choked them back down and forced control again.  The ache still stuck in the back of my throat, and I knew from experience it would be there for a while.  I dashed the water and snot off my face.  “When’s the truck getting here?” I croaked.  Alek had sent a truck to pick up the body for transport to Sulaymaniyah, where it would be put on a plane to eventually get back to Kansas, where Bob would be buried.  Tom would be at the funeral, but none of the rest of us would make it.  We still had a job to do.

             
“Another half an hour,” Jim said.  His cheeks were wet.  “They just checked in that they were leaving Sulaymaniyah.”  I nodded.

             
Thirty minutes.  Thirty more minutes with my friend before he was taken away, to where I’d never see him again, unless or until I could get to Kansas and visit his grave.  I wrapped my arms around my knees.

             
It was going to be a long half an hour.  And not nearly long enough.

              Haas walked up beside me as the truck pulled away, Bob’s body in the back and Imad riding shotgun.  Imad had been with us most of the way in East Africa, and had been adamant that he would escort Bob at least to the plane.  I knew Alek would have come, if he hadn’t had his hands full coordinating four teams across northern Iraq.

             
Haas didn’t say anything until the truck was out of sight, heading back up the road toward Sulaymaniyah.  Finally, taking a deep breath and still trying to swallow the lump in my throat, I turned to him.

             
“Thanks for holding off for a minute,” I said quietly.

             
“Not a problem,” he replied.  “I’ve buried enough friends over the years.  I didn’t know Bob, but I know where you’re at right now.”

             
I nodded my understanding, and led the way back into the warehouse.  “He didn’t give anything up already, did he?” I asked, as the door closed behind us.

             
“No, he hasn’t,” Haas sighed.  “He hasn’t so much as made a sound, past telling me that his name is Hassan Kalhar.  He’s a pro, which we already knew from how hard it was to find him in the first place.  I can break him, but it’s going to take time.”

             
I frowned.  “Time may not be something we’ve got in great supply,” I said.  “Everything we’ve gotten so far is pointing to this being bigger than just general destabilization.  They’re building up to something, and unless we can get in front of it…” I trailed off, frustrated.

             
“That’s actually why I came to find you,” Haas said.  He waved a hand somewhat dismissively at the back room where Kalhar was taped to a plastic lawn chair.  “We might get something out of him in a while, but right now just taking him out of circulation is going to disrupt their operation.  The trick is going to be finding how to exploit that, and quickly.

             
“Over the last few months, I’ve worked on cultivating some contacts with a few of the Shi’a militias that have some ties, however loose, with Jaysh al Mahdi, and therefore with the Iranians.  A lot of these guys aren’t too different from those poor bastards you had to kill last night; they’re glorified neighborhood watch organizations, who have affiliated with some bad guys largely because they trust the sectarian bad guys over the corruption of the ‘authorities.’  I know a few who are uncomfortable with some of these ties, and might be willing to trade information for other forms of support.”

             
“What kind of support?” I asked.  “In case you hadn’t noticed, we aren’t exactly the Bush-era US Army.  They could throw huge amounts of cash and weapons around whenever the hell they wanted.  We can’t.”

             
He shook his head.  “Nothing like that.  It may mean some side operations to help them deal with some of the more openly criminal elements that they are trying to beat back.  I know, I know,” he said, holding up his hands at my raised eyebrow.  “We’re not exactly at a premium on manpower or time, and this is going to stretch things a bit, but it may be the only way to get the intel we need.”

             
I took a deep breath, then blew it out.  “No, you’re right,” I said.  “Get things rolling, make contact with your sources, and start feeling things out.  I’m going to talk to Alek about consolidating some of our efforts; we’re spread too thin, trying to follow too many threads at once.”

             
“That’s kind of the nature of this sort of thing,” Haas pointed out.  “Decentralized warfare is the way of the world now.  We may have to accept spreading out in teams of two to four for a while, if we’re going to be successful.  I know it’s not ideal, but that’s fourth generation warfare for you.”

             
“Dammit,” I swore.  “I fucking hate this reactive bullshit.”  I ran a hand over my beard, which was greasy and crusty with dust and sweat.  None of us had had a shower in a few days.

             
“It should get better once Liberty is away,” Haas said, “though the general nature of this operation is going to be somewhat reactive, since we’re trying to actually stop something from happening.  We’d have to head into Iran itself and start raising Cain if we really wanted to disrupt this without being reactive.”

             
“And the enemy always gets a vote anyway,” I replied.  “All right.  How are you going to make contact with these sources?”

             
“Some of them I can call,” he said.  “Cell traffic is still pretty easy to keep under the radar here.  Some of them I’ll have to contact in person, which is going to take time and several other messages to make happen.”  He looked over at the back room.  “I’ll be able to arrange to get Kalhar somewhere more secure before I have to leave.”

             
“Good,” I growled.  “Babysitting his ass isn’t going to help with the whole operational flexibility thing.”

             
“Not to mention the off chance that something might happen to him, given that his guards killed Bob,” Haas ventured.

             
I shook my head.  “Won’t happen,” I said.  “I won’t deny I want him dead, and the rest of the team is going to feel the same way, but we don’t act on what we feel, we act on what we have to do.  He’s safe, until he’s been wrung out.  Then he goes in the ground.”

             
Haas just nodded.  Whether it was an understanding of the overall situation, or sheer cold-bloodedness, I’ve never been quite sure.  The man just never displayed the slightest queasiness at such things. Maybe he’d just been in this world too long, much like the rest of us.

              Less than two hours later, we had something.

             
“A meeting,” Haas said, putting the phone down.  It was a cheap local job, bought at the souk near Chamchamal’s ancient citadel.  “In Basra.”

             
“Basra?” Larry asked.  “As in, right next door to Iran, pretty much autonomous from Baghdad, most officials and Provincial Police Force officers appointed by Tehran?  That Basra?”

             
“Are you familiar with a different Basra I haven’t heard of?” Haas asked.

             
“We don’t have any assets there,” Jim pointed out.

             
“I do,” Haas answered.  “A few friends and contacts from the old days, when the Brits were running things there.”  I raised my eyebrow slightly at that.  We still didn’t know a lot about Haas’ background, but the fact he’d been running around Basra back in the ‘oughts said a lot about his experience.

             
“I’ll start making contact,” he said.  “It’s going to mean I’ll have to leave soon, probably before I can finish breaking Kalhar.”

             
“This thing in Basra is solid?” I asked.

             
“As solid as we can expect,” Haas replied.  There was always a caveat in intel, especially in the Middle East.

             
I looked around at Jim, Larry, and Nick.  Bob’s absence was palpable.  The others nodded, or in Jim’s case, he just stroked his beard and looked thoughtful.  Jim did a lot of beard-stroking anymore; before East Africa, he’d always stayed clean-shaven.  After, he kept what was now an epic beard that covered his face almost from eyeballs to neck.

             
I turned back to Haas.  “If this is solid, let’s move on it.  I don’t want us still standing here with our dicks in our hands when the IRGC makes its big move.  Like I said, we’ve got to get ahead of this thing.  That means finding out what it is, or finding their cadre and hunting them down.”

             
“I’m in favor of the second one,” Nick said.

             
“I am too,” I replied.  I cocked an eyebrow at Haas.  “Which one is this little meeting promising to facilitate?”

             
“I don’t know,” he replied.  “We’ll just have to see.”

             
“What are the odds that this is legit and not just some hajji promising he knows something just to use us as a hammer in a tribal vendetta?” Jim asked.

             
Haas smirked.  “About seventy-five percent,” he answered.  “Look, this is Iraq.  Tribes come before anything else.  Always have, always will.  And if these people think it will benefit them or their tribe, they will smilingly tell you the sky is green on a perfectly clear day.  That’s why I’ve always,
always
made sure I can corroborate any information I dig up here, and not from somebody in the same tribe.  Trust me, gents.  I know my business.”