Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (21 page)

He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms.  “That’s because I don’t have a lot of special insight,” he said.  “I used to know Renton, but he’s gone from being very hazy on details to completely opaque.  My gut tells me he’s still the same guy, but he doesn’t trust anybody anymore, not even us.”

“Will he sell us down the river when the job’s done?” I asked.

He sighed, looking down at his boots.  “In the old days, I’d have said no, never.  Even after he got pulled into an office, he was too close to the ops guys…he was involved in more than one op where the seventh floor tried to pull out the rug to save political face.  He hated that shit.

“Now, though?”  He looked me in the eye.  “I don’t know.  I think there’s a power struggle going on in the shadows and back rooms back Stateside, as sure as the Sunni and Shi’a are slugging it out on the streets here.  I think we’re pawns, and what happens to us has a lot to do with what happens in those back rooms and conference calls.”

I nodded.  “I’m afraid you’re right.  However, there’s one factor I’d add into that assessment.”

“What’s that?”

“When the game turns against us, I have no problem kicking over the table.”  I stood up.  “Get in touch with Tom.  See what he and the Spook Corral can come up with on this network.  I don’t give a damn how buried it is; I want to know who we’re dealing with.”

I didn’t say it, but the unspoken words hung in the air nonetheless.  I wanted to know who to put in the ground if this went sour on us.

After checking to make sure all the teams were reset and ready to go, anywhere at any time, I took the opportu
nity to crash for a few hours.  Before I fell asleep, I spent a few minutes just staring at the ceiling and thinking.

Some short reflection had made me realize that we were in a somewhat unique position.  Effectively,
we
were now in the position of being insurgents.  We didn’t have a timeline to take the Project down; we just had to do it.  Sure, we had the slight limitation of the imminent necessary evacuation of the Embassy, but we were already setting up our external infrastructure in the form of safe houses and caches throughout the city and the surrounding countryside to allow us to continue to operate against Collins and his cronies even after the Embassy was emptied.

The whole Embassy evacuation thing aside, we now had a freedom of movement that all of us could only have dreamed of in our earlier lives in the military, or even Praetorian’s early operations.  There were no hostages at stake like there were
in East Africa.  Patience became the name of the game.  Collins had a position to defend, namely his relationship with ISIS’ leadership.  We just had to tear that down.  We could take our time as we needed to, within reason.

With that in mind, I dropped onto my rack, still in my trousers and boots, rifle close at hand, and promptly passed out.

Chapter 13

The next day we had all three teams back out on the streets.  Hussein Ali was developing a pretty extensive system of contacts within some of the more moderate Shi’a portions of the city and its environs, though he had to be very careful, considering that the fear of both Jaysh al Mahdi and AAH were pretty high among the few who weren’t by default loyal to one or the other.  Opposing the Islamists had become a very high-risk proposition in recent years and for many who had lived through the American occupation and subsequent withdrawal, a losing one.

Mike had pushed out west, toward Abu Ghraib and the environs of Fallujah beyond.  I hoped we wouldn’t have to go into Fallujah itself, but from what Black had told us it sounded likely; that was ISIS primary headquarters, and where the Project’s key field personnel
were probably going to be holed up as well.

My team had gone back into Yarmouk.  We’d found what I was pretty sure was a Project
safe house, and were presently parked across the street in another darkened van with Hassan and Yusuf up front, trying to look inconspicuous.  The cash that Hussein Ali had taken from Abu Hawid’s smashed vehicle had helped that immensely; we’d been able to add several new vehicles to our “out in town” pool.

Black was peering through the curtains.  “Must have been up late last night,” he commented.  The house was dead, except for the occasional movement of the sentry in the second floor window.  He’d be all but invisible if you didn’t know what to look for; fortunately, we knew what to look for.  We’d fingered the house on one of our earlier recces, but his presence confirmed it was still in use.

“Are they running ops without ISIS?” I asked, only half expecting an answer.

He snorted.  “If that’s what you want to call it.  Half of these guys have some serious drug problems.  They may not be snorting coke out here, but they probably
at least drank themselves stupid last night.”

That caused a couple of raised eyebrows.  While we didn’t have any hard and fast rules about drinking downrange, none of us did it; in large part because our operations model didn’t allow for a lot of down time.  We went downrange to work, and work we had, for months on end.  Hard narcotics were right out; if you got caught with any of that shit, you were fucking gone with a quickness. 
The unprofessionalism of getting hammered drunk on the job, never mind the stupidity of doing it when you were supposed to be playing advisor to a bunch of hard-core jihadis, was frankly mind-boggling.

But we were there to watch, so wait and watch we did.  Morning prayer had come and gone, and what
ever commerce that went down in an ISIS-dominated part of the city went on.  We saw several ISIS patrols, dressed mostly in black, though there seemed to be a new preponderance of Multicam among them.  Their equipment was getting to a higher caliber, as well.  Anything the IA had, these guys had, and then some.

They weren’t just out on the street to maintain security against the IA and the Shi’a militias, though.  That became obvious quickly enough, as a patrol stopped, dragged a man out of a doorway where he was smoking a cigarette, and beat him severely with rifle butts and kicks in the street.  Apparently,
Sharia-compliance was another task of the ISIS patrols in Baghdad.

It was getting on toward 0900 before things started happening on our target.  There was a stir of movement in the window where the sentry was sitting.  I couldn’t see anything that clearly, but somebody was up and moving around, and it looked like the sentry was talking to somebody.  A few minutes later, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the front of the
safe house, and two men got out.

One looked like a local cleric at first glance.  He was wearing a dishdasha,
black besht, and a black turban, with the requisite long beard.  But when he glanced in our direction, I got a good look at ice-blue eyes in an angular, very Caucasian face.  This guy was no Iraqi.

The second looked like one of Collins’ goon squad. 
He was huge, dressed in generally western garb, but nothing that looked too out of place in Baghdad.  It was getting cooler, and the day was cloudy, so he was wearing a jacket.  His hair was a little longer than might be the Iraqi norm, but not so much as to stand out.  He was too big to blend in, though; he probably stood half a head above most Iraqis I’d seen, and outweighed our biggest, Hassan, by about seventy pounds.

I glanced over at Black.  “You recognize either of those guys?” I asked.

He peered out through the curtains, then nodded.  “The dude dressed like an imam is a spook or former spook.  Nobody knows much about him; he just comes and goes as he pleases.  He showed up a couple of times down south.  He never talked to any of the advisors, just the team leads.  Usually when he showed up, there was some kind of major movement on one side or the other afterward.  Nobody knows his name; some took to calling him Ghost.  The few stories I’ve heard about him are fucking scary.

“The big guy is Tremor. 
He’s the top operator on the Project; Collins may call the overall shots and handle the strategic level, but Tremor’s the one in command on the ground.  He was a SEAL, I know that much.  Pretty sure he was DEV.”  DEVGRU, or Naval Special Warfare Development Group, was the euphemistic name for the Navy’s Special Mission Unit.  The unit had been plagued in recent years with accusations of corruption, drug abuse, and operators going well beyond the limits of professional conduct on and off the battlefield.  Apparently, little had changed.  “He’s one mean motherfucker,” Black continued.  “I saw him put one of the advisors who screwed up in the hospital.  Just beat him senseless, then kept going.  He wouldn’t let anybody take the guy to get treated until he left, either.  He figures he’s out on his own and can do whatever the fuck he wants out here.”  There was a distinct bitterness in Black’s voice.  So, not all was hunky-dory on the Project.  Good to know.

Tremor and
Ghost went inside, and for a few minutes nothing seemed to happen.  If there was anything going on in the house, we weren’t in a position to either hear it or see it.  When four men came out of the house, though, it was obvious that it had been pretty unpleasant in that house for a few minutes.

Two of the Project contractors were in the lead, kitted up and carrying
HK 416s.  Tremor was right behind them, and he looked
pissed
.  Neither of the other two looked happy, either, and in fact they both looked hung over.  One looked like he’d be sporting a pretty good black eye in short order, as well.  Ghost was walking behind Tremor, his mien as ice-cold as before, like he really didn’t give a shit what went on with these clowns.

The more I watched these fuckers, the less I liked them.  It went beyond the fact they were aiding and abetting some genuinely evil dogfuckers; they were unprofessional fucktards on top of it.  Their actions and attitudes alone made me want to curb-stomp them.

The four of them got in the Mercedes, and started off down the street, heading north.  After a moment, Yusuf followed.  He’d already had the engine running as soon as they showed up; starting it just as they left might have keyed somebody in that we were watching them.  There was always the chance that somebody would pick up on our movement so soon after they left, but nobody ever said this kind of shit was risk-free.

They took a pretty direct route, up to Arbataash Ramadan Street, then turning off to the west, less than two miles away from their
safe house.  The neighborhood was definitely one of the more affluent ones, though even there, the signs of the war were everywhere.  They stopped at what looked like it had been a school once upon a time, though to no one’s surprise, it was now closed.  ISIS wasn’t all that interested in furthering education where they ruled.  The nearby mosque loomed next to a bombed-out building that had never been repaired.

Yusuf found us a vantage point where we could see the entrance to the school compound.  We weren’t going to see anything more than that; it was one of the weaknesses of our surveillance vehicles.  They severely limited our options.
  You can rarely get an elevated position to observe from in a van.  Better an OP we could just drive away, though, than one where we could wind up compromised and trapped in the middle of the day.

Urban reconnaissance is also risky because it’s so cramped.  We were parked on a corner less than two hundred meters from the objective.  If Tremor was keeping an eye out—I didn’t expect the two he’d rousted out to be all that focused at this point—he might recognize the van, sitting that close.  Unfortunately, it was just one more risk we had to run.

As soon as we were parked, Yusuf and Hassan got out and made themselves scarce, walking around the corner.  They’d hang out, looking like inconspicuous local loiterers, trying to steer clear of any ISIS patrols, until it was time to move.  I’d told Hassan not to get more than about a block away.  Both were armed, but only with pistols.

The Mercedes stopped right outside the school’s outer wall, which had once sported various colorful kids’ murals,
all of which had been defaced by ISIS.  A trio of Multicam-clad, black-turbaned fighters were lounging near the gate.  One had an AK slung; the other two had their rifles leaning against the wall.  One of them stood up as the Mercedes parked, and Tremor, Ghost, and one of the guys from the safe house got out.  I was pretty sure the guy with the shiner was still in the vehicle.

Tremor strode up to the three fighters.  Two of them were still squatting, staring at the three Americans. 
I’ll grant the guy this; he was sure of himself.  He spoke to the standing ISIS fighter for a moment, while one of the other two mean-mugged the trio, and the third stared at the dirt.  Finally, the ISIS guy nodded, and Tremor went inside, followed by the Ghost and the hung-over Project contractor.  I’d mentally assigned the two unnamed guys the nicknames Black Eye and Hangover.  Black Eye was still in the car.

We waited and watched for the next hour.  Recon
naissance and surveillance is boring.  At the same time, while it lacks the rush of combat, there is a certain tense thrill to it.  You are still a predator, watching prey that doesn’t know you’re there.  We watched the three ISIS stooges lounging around the gate, and the people who went past when they absolutely had to, steering clear of the camouflage-clad men with the black turbans.  We could see that they noticed, and enjoyed the fear their presence caused.

There was little conversation in the van, and what little there was stayed quiet and brief.  We also didn’t move if we could help it; the van was supposed to be unoccupied, so if it started rocking with even minor movement, that could give the game away.

Finally, Tremor, Hangover, and Ghost came out, accompanied by a short man with a long but wispy beard and dressed in black.  I lifted the camera to the crack in the curtains and snapped several shots of his face.  Regardless of our next course of action, we were constantly building a database of who was who in this shit show.  Even if we killed this guy in the next couple of hours, there would be benefits to identifying him later.

The four of them stopped on the curb and talked for a little bit longer, as the three guards watched. 
We were close enough to see more detail than we might have, and that made the scene that much more interesting.

Tremor and Hangover were standing sepa
rate from the ISIS types, with Ghost standing over by the side, glowering.  Obviously, we couldn’t hear what was being said, but there was a certain stiffness, a brittleness, to the whole thing.  “Am I imagining it, or does that meet look pretty uncomfortable?” I asked quietly.

“Yeah, they don’t look like they’re too happy with each other,”
Nick whispered, peering out the next window forward.  “You think our little ambush in Karmah already has them looking over their shoulders?”

“We can hope,” I replied, “but from what I’ve seen, none of these fuckers have any particular reason to trust each other from the get-go.”  I looked at Black.  “Is this pretty much the norm for this operation?”

He nodded.  “There’s never been any kind of brotherhood between the Project and the fighters we’re training.  It’s like the worst days of Afghanistan, working with the ANA.”  I’d missed that one, but Jim nodded his understanding.  I hadn’t realized Black was old enough to have been to Afghanistan.  “Both sides are just waiting for a knife in the back, but for the moment, the benefits are enough to keep them working together.”  He paused and grimaced.  “Of course, it’s much the same way within the Project, too.”

“No brotherhood there, either?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “Too much dick-measuring going on.  Everybody is in it for the cash and the opportunity for action.  The other guys are competition, not brothers.”

I turned my attention back to the gate.  It looked like things were breaking up.  Tremor and the wispy-bearded ISIS commander were exchanging a perfunctory and stiff kiss of peace.  I considered calling Hassan and Yusuf back, but our interest wasn’t with Tremor and his lackeys anymore.  He’d just led us to our next target; that was all.

The Mercedes pulled away and the ISIS commander harangued the guards for a few minutes before going back inside.  We stayed put, watching and waiting.  If he left, we’d follow.  If he stuck, we’d wait until nightfall and then move in.