Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (12 page)

“That may be all we need,” Bryan pointed out.  “If we can positively ID a Project guy, then we can start collecting from there.  Sometimes all you need is one thread to pull on.”

Marcus turned us off Dimashq Street at Nisour Square, heading east on Jordan Street.  We were pushing into Yarmouk—ISIS territory.

I hadn’t expected this first trip to be terribly fruitful.  It
really was exactly in line with the cover story—it was in fact a familiarization run.  I wanted a look at the territory we might be operating in, and ground level was the best way to do that.  It was risky, sure.  The present quiet in Baghdad was nothing but the calm before the storm, and we all knew it.

We were starting to get out of no-man’s land, and it was starting to show.  ISIS wasn’t hiding within the population.  Within only a few blocks of the Baghdad Tower, we started seeing foot patrols.  While a lot of them were still wearing black ski masks to hide their faces, they were as uniformed as the Iraqi Army or the PPF.  Black predominated, with white tennis shoes and either tan or black tactical vests.  “Well, at least they’re easier to pick out and shoot,” I commented as we rolled past one such patrol, which was mean-mugging cars but, fortunately, not checking anyone.  The HiLux’s windows were tinted just enough that we didn’t stand out.

Bryan chuckled.  “Yeah, black against all this tan and green should make for a really nice sight picture.”

“I know I don’t have to say this,” Black interjected quietly, “but don’t underestimate these guys. 
Most of the stupid ones are dead, and the cell leaders are all combat veterans, either from here or Syria.  A few have even been fighting since the original invasion in ’03.  Met one of them once.  Hard motherfucker.  I think he’s taken over as the commander of the Fallujah Brigade.

“Their equipment is the top-of-the-line coming out of Europe, the US, and South America, via Qatar and the Caliphate.  And they’ve had us helping them out for the last several years.”

“Trust me,” I said over my shoulder as we watched a patrol enter a house.  Everything looked calm enough, sort of like the knock-and-talks that had been part and parcel of our operations in Libya.  “We are in no danger of underestimating these fuckers.  We’ve lost enough guys to them over the last couple of years.”  For some reason, the Yemen raid sprang to mind.  We’d gone up against a collection of Yemenis, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood troops, and, I was sure, some Caliphate regulars at a meeting in Yemen.  We’d killed plenty, and got out with the target neutralized, but it had been the hardest fight we’d faced up to that point, and we’d lost a couple shooters along the way.

All of a sudden, Marcus blurted out, “Holy shit.  That looks like Carl Holbrook.”

The man coming out of the compound was unmistakably American, in spite of the fact he was dressed in the same black clothing and kit as the rest of the ISIS fighters.  He was a good half a head taller than any of them, for one, and his sleeves were rolled up, something the Islamist fighters never seemed to do.  He was also considerably heavier, wasn’t wearing a headband or ski mask, and was towhead blond.

“You know him?” I asked, squinting at the guy.  He moved like an American, too
, and was carrying a tac-ed out HK 416.  “He sure doesn’t seem to be worried about keeping a low profile.”

“Carl wouldn’t be,” Marcus said.  “I met him on contract in Libya.  Cocky fucker.  He was a Green Beanie for about four years and thought he was hot shit because of it; he treated the rest of the contractors arou
nd him as somehow beneath him, even the other SF guys who didn’t talk about how cool they were.”

“I’ve met a couple of guys like that,” I said.  I turned back to Black.  “You know a Holbrook?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, and that’s him, too.  I recognize him.  He picked me up from the airport when I got into Baghdad this last time.  He’s been with the Project for a while.  I don’t know who he’s been sucking up to to get where he’s at; nobody else I know on the Project says anything good about him.  They think he’s a piece of shit.”

“Well, I guess we agree on something,” Marcus muttered.

I looked at the patrol, with Holbrook in the middle, moving down the street.  Several of the black-clad fighters were carrying bags of food.  I didn’t expect they’d paid for them; that wasn’t ISIS’ style.  They took what they wanted and called it “taxes.”  That was part of why the Islamic Front turned on them so hard in Syria.  They truly didn’t give a fuck about anyone outside their organization.

“Well, gents,” I said quietly.  “We’ve got a target.  Let’s follow.”  I pulled out my burner phone and dialed Jim.  When he picked up, I launched right in.  “We found one of our friends.  He’s set up shop near the Tower, on Jordan Street.”

“Good news,” Jim replied.  “Does he want to meet somewhere?”

I glanced at the map in my lap, placed so I could bury it under my thigh if somebody came up to the truck, then back at Black.  He shrugged and shook his head.  No help there; he apparently didn’t know where the cells would be working out of in Baghdad.  I supposed that made sense, but I also realized there was the possibility he was playing dumb.  “I think that he’ll be fine with the square where Jordan meets Rabia Street,” I said.  It was a guess that they’d stay on Jordan Street, and also that Jim could get down from the north in time.  He was supposed to be up by Al Mansour.

The trick was going to be maintaining contact with the patrol without it looking like that was what we were doing.  Sticking to the truck was going to mean moving faster than they were walking.  Getting out wasn’t a terribly good idea in an ISIS-controlled area, either.  This wasn’t Kurdistan, where most of the locals saw Westerners and shrugged or said hello.  I was over six feet, and Bryan was six-foot-three.  We’d be pegged in a heartbeat if we tried to follow in daylight.  Worse, both Marcus and Black knew this Holbrook guy, which led me to figure he knew them, and would recognize them.  The last thing we needed was for questions to be asked about what Black was doing in Baghdad, particularly being asked by anyone with the Project.

Bryan was apparently reading my mind.  “The patrol’s not exactly low-profile,” he pointed out.  “We should be able to circle around and pick them back up a block away easily enough.  There are only about five thousand HiLuxes around here that look
exactly
like this one.”

I nodded.  “I was just thinking the same thing.  Let’s just stay far enough away that they can’t see faces through the glass.”  Given that the windows were armored
and
tinted, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Marcus kept us rolling with traffic, what there was of it.  We passed the patrol on our right, pointedly not looking at them.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a few of them watching us, but they made no move to stop us.  I breathed a little easier.  The window tint obscured us enough not to raise suspicions too much.  I found that a little surprising, given the tension in the city at the moment, but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth at that point.

Jordan Street was definitely a business district, though many of them appeared shuttered and abandoned with ISIS running their area of town.  Nobody ever said Islamists were good for business.  Unfortunately, there weren’t any side streets for a long ways; the buildings were all close together in modern, shrub-enshrouded complexes.  Marcus finally found a place to turn off at the next major intersection, with Arbataash Ramadan Street.  There had been several side streets on the south side, but the concrete median kept us from crossing over that way.

We got off Jordan Street through a tight, narrow alley that apparently doubled as a souk.  It looked like a lot of the stalls had been selling electronics and similar luxuries before ISIS moved in and banned them.  I suspected, from what I saw, that a lot of the same trade was still going on under the table.  Of course, the risks involved were pretty high; ISIS wasn’t known to hesitate to cut off heads or hands, or stone people for violating strict Sharia.

Marcus continued driving along a side street, paralleling Jordan Street for about a half mile before pushing back out and parking by the corner.  He kept the engine running, but we sat in the shadows and waited for the patrol to catch up.

“Guys,” Black said quietly, sounding pretty hesitant, “I know I’m not in any position to make demands, but I’ve got to ask this.  Not all the guys caught up in the Project are bad guys.  Some have been suckered in, some still buy the Iranian threat line, and some have been manipulated and threatened to keep them in line.  Sure, there are still plenty of assholes; this contract seems to have collected a larger than usual share of them, but not everybody is a sociopath.  Can we try to take those guys alive?”

I didn’t need to look at him to feel the effect my reply had.  “No promises.”

While it was true that I had little sympathy for those who had agreed, for whatever reason, to provide deliberate support to one of the nastiest Salafist organizations in the region, the fact was that I couldn’t make any such promise.  If these guys all were former US SOF, they weren’t going to surrender easily.  While the US military had taken some serious hits both materially and in its institutional culture over the last decade, SOF still had a deserved reputation for ferocity in combat.  The larger conventional military might be toothless, and SOF headed that way, but the individual operators still had much the same fighting ethos that we did.  And that was to go down in a hail of gunfire rather than surrender or be captured.

It was an attitude going back to the first invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. 
The accepted wisdom was that getting captured would result in you getting your head sawed off with a dull knife in a jihadi propaganda video.  The general reaction was “fuck that,” and so the “death before capture” mindset became prevalent.

If we kicked in the door of a Project
safe house, it was going to be a fight to the death.  No doubt about it.  It was a problem that had been bothering me for a while, and one we’d have to figure out before we got too deep into this operation.

Marcus edged the truck out just far enough that we could see down the street
.  “There they are,” he said quietly, as he saw the patrol moving toward us.  At the same time, I scanned over to the right, and saw another patrol coming from the opposite direction.

“More bad guys right,” I said.  “Looks like more company.”

There were another fifteen black-clad ISIS fighters in this group.  They were accompanied by a technical and an up-armored Humvee with a DShK in the turret.  It was painted in the mottled camouflage scheme of the Iraqi Army, just with black ISIS flags painted on the doors.

They stopped at the intersection with Yarmuk Street and started spreading out.  Several went to the back of the technical and started pulling out concertina wire and barriers.

“Oh hell,” I said.

“Checkpoint,” Marcus said, looking past me.

Bryan leaned forward between the seats to get a better look.  “Well, that pretty much fucks our surveillance.”

“If Jim can get in front of them at Rabia, we can go around,” Marcus said.

“That’s provided Jim doesn’t get caught by another patrol or checkpoint,” I pointed out.  “We can’t stay here, though, not for long.  Wait until the patrol’s past, then we’ll try to go around.”

Marcus studied the street.  “There’s no way around to the south, at least not without climbing over that median.  We’d have to go north.”

“Then that’s the way we have to go.”  I looked back at Black.  “What do you know about this?” I asked.  “Do they just set up random checkpoints, or can we expect more around the area?”

He was peering through the window, watching what was going down on the street, frowning.  “They don’t usually go in for big checkpoints unless they’re raising money,” he said.  “This could be a ‘fundraising’ checkpoint…but I don’t really think so.  This looks more like they’re setting up to capture someone.  It looks like a blocking position to me.”

I had to agree.  More machine guns were coming out of the backs of the vehicles, and the barriers were going up on all three sides of the intersection.  “So, would you expect more of them on the side streets?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” he replied.  “A couple years ago, they might not have been organized enough, but they’ve gone pretty far since then.” 
Since the Project started teaching them to be soldiers, not just fighters
went unsaid.  Though that wasn’t
entirely
accurate; they’d been showing considerable military sophistication for years now.

 
I doubted they were looking for us.  Even if the Embassy was as leaky as I thought it was, we were nowhere near the recon route we’d logged with Ventner’s people.  In fact, I’d gone out of my way to make sure that no one at the Embassy outside of the Praetorians knew we would be anywhere near ISIS territory.  We were supposed to be up in Adamiyah and Maghreb as a three-vehicle element.

Holbrook’s patrol was now closer, moving toward the checkpoint.  The pointmen were calling out and waving to the ISIS fighters on the checkpoint.  Apparently there was only so much the Project guys could do about ISIS professionalism.

Marcus and I leaned back in our seats, trying to stay in the shadows and out of sight.  We didn’t even look straight at the patrol.  We really, really didn’t want to get noticed.  Armored truck or no, compromise at this point would be absolutely disastrous.  We’d be vastly outnumbered and outgunned, not to mention the entire mission pretty much being shot to hell.