Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (13 page)

“Wait until they’re past, then back us out of here,” I told Marcus.  “We’re not getting swept up in this dragnet.”

As I spoke, I pulled my rifle onto my lap, keeping the shirt over it.  It might be more conspicuous if somebody looked in the window, but I wanted my weapon readily available to wreck house if this went sideways.  There was a rustle behind me as Bryan and Black did the same.

Holbrook was looking around as he went past, but his gaze slid over
what was probably the hundredth HiLux he’d seen that day, and he didn’t slow down.  The rest of his patrol didn’t seem to be looking around all that much; they were going to meet up with their buddies at the checkpoint, and they figured Yarmouk belonged to them.  They were concerned with uniformed Iraqi security forces, not four guys sitting in a HiLux.

We didn’t move right away. 
I could sense Black getting fidgety in back, but I trusted Marcus.  He wasn’t going to move too soon; that would look suspicious.  He wasn’t going to do anything to draw attention to us.  He was watching the patrol, carefully not focusing on any one of them long enough to trigger that weird sense of being watched.  Waiting until no one was looking our direction before making a move.

He saw his moment before I did, and smoothly shifted the truck into reverse, backing us away from Jordan Street.  It was done so swiftly and smoothly that anyone looking over would just notice that the HiLux that had been sitting there was gone.

I called Jim again, and cryptically informed him of the development, waving him off of trying to make visual contact with Holbrook.  This was reconnaissance, nothing more.  While I had no doubt that we were on a timetable, especially given the mission to evac the embassy, I wasn’t going to get us burned by rushing things.

We had to divert around three more checkpoints on the way out.  We ended up in Mansour, driving past the massive, multi-domed Al-Rahman Mosque.  We were, according to the brief, now officially in Saleh’s territory, but we still didn’t relax, for obvious reasons.

It was a good thing, too…

Chapter 9

The IED wasn’t directed at us.  It was set to catch the patrol of Saleh’s soldiers in digital desert uniforms that was walking down Al Mansour Street past the hospital.

The patrol was walking down
only one side of the street.  Their dispersion sucked, half of them weren’t carrying their rifles even remotely ready, and they weren’t looking around all that much.  They looked bored, and only their commander looked like he was even slightly interested in carrying out their mission, whatever that was.  They walked right by the blue Bongo truck parked on the street near the hospital, not even looking at it until it detonated.

All but the pointman disappeared into the black cloud as the blast shook the entire block.  He was thrown an easy fifty feet.  The limp, rag-doll way he hit the middle of the street said he was dead before he even landed.

Our truck was still about a hundred meters back when the Bongo exploded, giving us a prime view of the explosion.  It still rocked us, and spiderwebbed the windshield with fragments.  The fact it hadn’t shattered was kind of a giveaway that we were riding an armored vehicle, but I didn’t think too many people in the vicinity were going to be noticing much besides the carnage and mass destruction at the hospital.

The bad part was that Jim’s truck had been passing by just as the truck detonated.

Marcus stomped on the brake as soon as the Bongo blew up.  As soon as my vision cleared, I scrambled for my radio, which was under the seat.  Fuck the phone; Jim’s could have been smashed in the blast.  “Kemosabe, Hillbilly.”

There was an agonizingly long moment of dead air.  I was about to key the radio and call again, forcing my eyes away from the dust- and smoke-enshrouded kill zone to scan for secondary threats.  ISIS might not be up to our standards tactically, but they were still pretty damned good at what was called a “complex attack” by TOC commandos who didn’t recognize ordinary guerilla tactics when they saw it.

“Hillbilly, Kemosabe.”  Jim sounded a little fucked up, but he was at least alive.  “No casualties, but we’ve had a mobility kill on this vehicle.  The tires are shredded and part of the engine block is just gone.”  He unkeyed, then came back.  “We’re going to need extract.”

“Fuck.”  I was starting to wish we had taken the Subs.  The big SUVs would have been more conspicuous, but had more room on the inside.  I was going to have to see about getting some off-site vehicles like the Bears, a pair of retrofitted civilian heavy trucks we had up north in Kurdistan, which we could fit most of a team into without appearing any more conspicuous than the dozens of large trucks rolling around Iraq.

“We’re en route,” I told him.  Marcus was already easing us forward, weaving slightly between the larger pieces of debris.  “Get us up next to them,” I said.  “We’ll pile out, get ‘em in back, get ‘em covered, and get the fuck out, hopefully before the smoke clears.”

“We’re going to have to explain losing the vehicle,” Bryan pointed out.

“I don’t give a fuck right now,” I retorted.  “When we get back with everybody intact, then I’ll worry about the State pussies freaking the fuck out.”  I knew they would; we’d lost an up-armored vehicle, though close enough to our planned recon route to be able to brush off any questions.  Hey, we hadn’t gotten in a firefight.  Yet.

The dust was starting to settle, but the car parked behind the bomb, or rather, what was left of it, was on fire and spewing black smoke over the entire area. 
It would do as a makeshift smokescreen.  It wasn’t pleasant; I was already feeling my throat burn as Marcus brought us to a stop next to the mangled wreck of Jim’s truck and Black, Bryan, and I piled out.

I hadn’t really considered the possible ramifications of having Black hold security. 
At the moment, I didn’t have time to.  He took a knee next to the truck, covering the street on the hospital side, as I dogtrotted, rifle in hand, around to Jim’s truck.

The vehicle had taken a hammering.  About all that was left on the right side was the cab, and the doors were studded with bits of metal and less wholesome debris.  The street itself was littered with pieces of the patrol
. There was a severed foot, still in the boot, leaning against the remains of the front tire.

Jim’s door was jammed, to my utter lack of surprise.  So was Nick’s.  Bryan was already around the far side, taking security, and I joined him, going in front of the smoking remains of the engine.  Strangely enough, the left tires were still intact.

Cyrus had gotten his door open, and was squeezing out.  The damned up-armors were somehow smaller on the inside than a standard HiLux, meaning if you were a man of any size, you got to struggle getting in and out.  Once he had his boots on the road, he turned to help Jim crawl out over the steering wheel, but I tapped him on the shoulder.  “Get in our truck,” I told him.  “I’ll help Jim.”  I wanted our footprint on the ground here as small as possible, and I wanted us moving again as quickly as possible.

I reached in over the steering wheel and grabbed Jim’s hand.  Jim isn’t a small guy; he’s shorter than I am, but he’s pretty solidly built.  His belt got snagged on the gearshift twice before he was able to haul himself, with my help, out the small driver’s side door.

As soon as Jim was out, I scanned the area around us again.  People were starting to gather.  No ISIS fighters had come out shooting yet, which was good.  We had to get off-site before too many people noticed the Westerners with rifles.  The smoke was starting to shift away from us.

I reached into the truck and
ripped the radios out, along with any diplomatic credentials we’d gotten from the Embassy.  I wanted to thermite the damned thing, but we didn’t have any thermite grenades.  It was going to be impossible to cover the fact that there had been an up-armored HiLux at the scene of the bombing.  Not that I was worried about the loss of the vehicle or the potential ramifications for the Embassy; we were pulling the Embassy out, after all.  No, this was more an old Recon distaste for leaving signs behind that we were ever there.

The guys were a little rattled, and a little unsteady.  That blast had been
close
.  I didn’t have time to check them all for concussions, not that we could have done anything there in the street anyway.  We hustled them into the bed of our up-armor, climbed into the cab, and Marcus started off.

We were a little more conspicuous with
three fairly big dudes in the back of a truck, but Marcus was already adjusting our route to keep us off the beaten path.  That was more easily said than done.  We were right next to the old Baghdad International Fair; there weren’t the narrow, not-as-trafficked back streets that we might otherwise use to lose any possible pursuit like we’d done in Basra.  So, instead of going that way, he actually turned away from our destination and took us north, into the Mutanabbi neighborhood.

“We need another vehicle,” I pointed out.

“If we find one, I can probably hotwire it,” Bryan suggested.

“The Project usually has vehicles cached all over their operations areas,” Black offered.

“Do you know where the Baghdad caches are?” I asked, as I pulled my phone out to call Mike.  I was pretty sure I knew the answer already.

He grimaced.  “No, I don’t.  And taking one might give the game away.  Fuck.  I hadn’t thought of that.”

Marcus kept it slow, trying not to stand out.  I glanced back at the guys in the bed, hoping they had the presence of mind not to look like a bunch of hardcases who’d just gotten hit and were looking for the next threat.  They’d never pass as Iraqis, but I could hope that they might just pass as some of the handful of NGOs still in the city.

Mike answered the phone on the second ring.  “Were you guys up there by the hospital?” he asked immediately.

“Yeah, we were.  Jim’s truck got hit.  No casualties, but the vic’s toast.  I’ve got the guys with me, but we’re spilling out of the truck.”

“Go to ground and I’ll get some bigger vehicles and come for you,” he said without hesitation.  “We’re getting jocked up right now.  Call me with a
position when you get stationary.”  He hung up.

“Find us a hiding place,” I told Marcus.  “Mike is on his way out with some bigger vics .”

It didn’t take him long.  We were a good distance out of the way, but the Green Zone and its environs were heavy on the big public monuments and parks, and light on places to hide and stay covert.  He found a spot just short of a corner with good fields of view and shade from a large tree overhanging the nearest house’s outer wall.  The shade wasn’t necessarily all that helpful, but we still shouldn’t be all that visible to anyone just driving by.

I called Mike and relayed our location.  He acknowledged.  “We’re on our way out the gate right now,” he said.  “We ran into a bit of a hitch getting the movement approved, but Ventner pushed it through.”

It was good to have friends in relatively high places.

I keyed my radio.  “Kemosabe, Hillbilly.”  Jim was less than six feet away from me, but up-armored pickups don’t tend to have sliding back windows, and the less movement we showed, the better.

“Go, Hillbilly,” he replied.  He sounded clearer than he had a few minutes before.

“We’re going firm here until Speedy can get out to us,” I told him.  “Hang tight.”

“Roger,” he replied.  “Just be advised, we’re already starting to attract attention.  There are some kids in the street watching us.”

That was to be expected.  It wasn’t good, but there was no getting away from being observed on the street in broad daylight.

Bryan suddenly chuckled.  “Hey, Jeff, remember that urban hide in Tripoli?”

I groaned.  “Oh, fuck, don’t remind me.”  My team had been on a
reconnaissance mission in Tripoli, looking for one of the warlords who was causing more trouble than, well, all of the rest.  We’d been certain the house was abandoned.  It had been, until eight in the morning, when the family started showing up from wherever they’d gone for a few days.  The local militia, which was nominally on our side at the time, had gotten called and came screaming in with all the firepower they had, convinced some bad guys had kidnapped the family.  It had been a royal clusterfuck.

I was scanning the sides of the street and the buildings as best I could.  The field of view in the up-armor was limited, and I really couldn’t see out the back, between the smaller window and Jim’s broad back leaning against it.  The radio crackled again.  “A couple of the kids just ran
inside and there are women watching us now,” Jim reported.

I glanced at my watch.  It was going to take some time for Mike to get to us.  I just hoped he could get here before we had to run or fight.  Somebody knew
where we were; even though we hadn’t seen any militia on this street, the calls were being made.  It was just a matter of what the response would be, and how soon it would materialize.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.  I was starting to see
more people coming out and looking at us.  We were compromised, and staying in place was no longer an option.  “Let’s get out of here before this attention turns hostile,” I said to Marcus.

“This isn’t really an ISIS neighborhood,” he pointed out, even as he pulled us away from the curb.

“No, but it is an AAH neighborhood,” Bryan said.

“Ah, fuck,” Marcus grumbled.  “I forgot about that.”

I was already back on the phone to Mike.  At this point, I was about to chance it and head straight in.  Yeah, we might run into a checkpoint, but it couldn’t be much more high-profile than this running around like our hair was on fire, trying to find a “safe” RV point in a city that was pretty much divided between Sunni factions who hated Westerners and Shi’a factions who hated Westerners.  Sure, they were mostly focused on killing each other at the moment, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t go ahead and go after some American targets of opportunity.  Hell, Saleh had been stoking the fires of anti-Americanism for a while now.

“I’ve got two Subs, about five minutes from your pos,” Mike reported when he picked up the phone.

“Scratch that,” I replied.  “We had to relocate; we were attracting too much attention.  We’re either going to have to pick a different RV, or we’ll have to just bite the bullet and go in as is.”

“There are patrols out,” Mike said, “but no checkpoints between you and the Embassy that we’ve seen.  If you can get to Az Zaytun Street, it should be a straight shot.”

I looked at the overhead in my lap.  We were only about a half mile from the beginning of Az Zaytun Street.  Hopefully there weren’t any checkpoints or more IEDs on the way.  “We’re going that way.  Circle back around, and we’ll see you at the Embassy.”

“Roger,” he replied.  “Good luck.”

Marcus stepped on the gas.  He kept it slow enough that maneuvering or hitting a bump shouldn’t throw the rest of the team out of the bed, but he wasn’t wasting time getting back.  I felt vulnerable as hell, and thoroughly approved of getting back to the Embassy as quickly as possible.  We definitely needed to work on movement here.  Even as I scanned for threats, I was formulating future courses of action in my head.  By the time we got to Red Gate, I had some ideas pretty well nailed down.