Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (24 page)

I liked it, not only for tactical reasons, but because these motherfuckers had murdered a lot of people with IEDs.  Turnabout is fair play, cocksucker.

Fortunately, while they had fortified the place, they’d generally stuck to the inner compounds.  The outer wall had been severely damaged; first in the “Breaking the Walls” campaign in 2013, which had seen lots of their little buddies busted out from
the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji, and then again during the fighting to take the prison itself a couple of years ago.  There were several gaps big enough to drive a tank platoon through.  We didn’t need one that big.  The trick wasn’t getting our little package in the outer wall, though, but getting it somewhere where it would do enough damage when it went off.  The inner compounds were pretty well guarded, even with ISIS’ characteristic laxity when it came to the hours of darkness.

We didn’t have the options that ISIS
had had when they had staged the ’13 breakout.  They used suicide bombers on the gates, following up with RPGs and assault teams.  We were trying to be sneaky; trying to make it seem as though the Project guys had smuggled the IED in when they showed up for the meeting. 

Black had volunteered to drive
a truck packed with explosives; he was Project, and while he was AWOL from Basra, he could probably bluff the ISIS guards if need be.  He’d have to wait until the meeting, but he was pretty confident he could pull it off.

I nixed that idea immediately. 
Whether or not he had planted the GPS trackers on the trucks, I still didn’t trust him
that
far.  I also didn’t trust that his former compatriots didn’t have a BOLO out on him; he could get burned as soon as he showed his face.

So we were crouched in the palm groves just across the
road from the old prison, armed with suppressed rifles and only a couple of backup magazines each, no armor, and lugging half a dozen satchels of Semtex, liberally laced with nails and ball bearings.  They weren’t big enough for a Khobar Towers level bombing, but if placed right, and set off at the right time, they could do a lot of damage.  We’d stolen them from the cache at the school, just before we took off.  Well, we’d stolen the Semtex.  We’d had to scrape up the nails and ball bearings ourselves.

We hadn’t been able to do an on-the-ground recce yet.  The risk was too high.  We didn’t have any of the Aeroseeker UAVs, either; the last of those were up in Kurdistan with Alek and the rest of the guys.  We just had a couple pairs of binoculars, Mark One Eyeballs, and a gap in the wall to peer through.  It hadn’t been perfect, but we had some idea of a target area.

My elbows were in screaming pain from propping myself up on them for the last three hours, watching the compound through binoculars, and the rest of me didn’t feel much better.  Hard ground is hard ground, but it seems to get harder with each passing year I do this.  I ignored it and kept my eyes on glass.

The sun had been down for a couple of hours, but there were still a few lights on at the compound. 
It looked like they were waiting a little bit for night prayer; we didn’t dare try to move in before that.  We were dressed in reasonable facsimiles of the Multicam and black ISIS battledress, but that wouldn’t stand up to up-close scrutiny for long.  Our weapons might give us away, but then, the variety of firearms floating around the Middle East for the last fifteen years or so had gotten pretty eclectic.  Still, it would pay not to move until we were fairly certain that as few people were going to be up and about as possible.

There was the crackle of a loudspeaker, and the muezzin wailed over the countryside, calling the faithful to prayer.  ISIS was fanatical enough that they wouldn’t skip prayer, unless
of course there was some killing to do.  That made the muezzin our initial time-hack.

I continued to watch after the Arabic chant subsided.  It would be a little while before prayers were finished; I had figured on at least an hour.  In the meantime, I continued to catalog what was going on in the compound.

Through the gap in the wall, I could just see the northern end of what the old imagery we’d done our initial planning on called a tent city.  It wasn’t really there anymore; the tents were gone, but there was plenty of refuse left over.  Heaps of trash, splintered wood, and debris were scattered through the old tent city.  I was counting on using that crap as concealment once we got through the outer wall.

Most of the guard force couldn’t be seen
.  I knew they were there, but mostly in the towers that were still standing.  There wasn’t any patrolling going on that we could see.  The picture we were getting was that of a force getting comfortable with its position.  With the Iraqi Army in such disarray, and having been unable to hit them this far west in months anyway, it was hard to see why they wouldn’t get a little complacent.  Sucked to be them, then.  As we used to have pounded into us by every spray-painted sign on every other T-wall inside the wire, “Complacency Kills.”

I was finally satisfied that activity was at a minimum.  I checked my watch.  2304.  Time to go.  I turned to Larry, who was going to make a fucking
enormous
Iraqi terrorist, and pointed toward the compound.  He nodded, and carefully picked himself up off the ground.

I suppressed a groan as I got up.  Lying there for almost four hours had made me stiff as a board.  I’d have to work the kinks out on the move.  I stepped over the low berm we’d been hiding behind and led out.  Nick and Bryan would follow in a couple of minutes, then Jim and
Little Bob.  Marcus and Black were staying behind as our backup.  Marcus had had to do that a lot, since his leg was still pretty dodgy.  He wouldn’t stay behind, but he was slow and still limping.  He’d probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life, since he insisted on continuing to push on with that bullet wound in his calf still unhealed.

Hopefully they’d
both be bored as fuck.  The alternative was a very bad night.

One of my targets for observation was the one tower on the outer wall that had a good enough field of view
that anyone in it might see us crossing the strip of field between the palm grove and the remains of the wall.  In the last four hours, I had seen precisely zero movement, even watching through the thermal-enhanced PVS-14 I had just stuffed in a small pouch on my belt.  It looked as though we would be able to cross unobserved.  One less headache for the night.

Even so, crossing that field presented a challenge.  I couldn’t be sure that
nobody
had eyes on it; there was always a possibility that somebody I hadn’t seen or accounted for might be watching, or even some asshole might look over at an inopportune time.  While walking across like we owned the place might make someone familiar with the area suspicious, creeping across like commandos on infil would make even a casual observer even more suspicious.

After a moment on a knee, watching carefully for any reaction to our movement, I got up and jogged to the wall.  It was only about sixty meters, but it was a long sixty meters.  I felt exposed as hell.  But I got to the wall without incident; no shots fired, no yells, no alarms set off.

I waited until Larry joined me before going through the gap.  The inside was completely open for the next seventy-five meters, but now that we were inside, we might be able to pass for security at least at first glance.  I slowed my walk to a stroll, my satchel behind my back, and rifle carried casually in front of me.  Larry fell in next to me, and we made like we were chatting.  No trouble, just a couple of ISIS jihadis walking the perimeter.  Okay, a couple of uncommonly large jihadis, but we were dressed the same as everyone else, and it was dark.  It was possible.

We took our time, working our way around the
compound.  It was really quiet; there were a handful of fighters with chest rigs and slung rifles standing around a burn barrel up toward the main gate, but between the distance, the lack of floodlights, and the fact they all appeared to be looking at the fire, they couldn’t see us.  It’s a common mistake, looking at the fire.  Hell, it’s one not usually mentioned in any modern combat training.  But some of us learned it either from reading lots of Westerns when we were kids, or the hard way, through experience.  Look at a light, lose your night vision.

As near as we’d been able to tell, ISIS wasn’t really using the prison
as a prison, except for certain high-value hostages of their own.  The prison compounds were silent and dead.  Larry and I worked our way around the north side of the bigger prison compound, until we rounded the corner, not far from the admin building.

There were a couple more burn barrels flickering around the admin building.  It was getting cold at night, and Hajji doesn’t like cold, no matter how hard-core he is.  Once again, most everybody standing around with slung rifles was staring at the fire while they chatted with each other.  They might be halfway useful if something went off, but for actual security, they were presently about as useful as tits on a boar.  So much the better.

I counted three burn barrels spaced around the building; together, those positions could do a pretty good job of covering all sides.  I couldn’t see if there was another group covering the southwest corner.  Since we wanted to get close to one or another entrance, that presented some problems.  Just chucking the satchels in the general direction of a possible target wasn’t going to cut it.  Not only would they be spotted, I wasn’t trusting ISIS’ complacency enough to expect they wouldn’t notice the sound of something hitting the ground close to the doors.  No, we had to run this softly.  The bad guys might not be paying much attention to anything aside from the fires keeping them warm, but somebody just walking hey-diddle-diddle right up the middle to the door was bound to attract attention.

I waved Larry back into the shadows of the corner of the wall, while I studied the layout and thought.  I didn’t concern myself overmuch with what the other two pairs were going to do.  We were used to playing by Big Boy Rules; if the plan goes to shit, which it inevitably will,
adapt and find an appropriate target, then regroup and figure out the follow-on later.  In simpler terms, I’ll borrow the immortal words of Erwin Rommel: “In the absence of orders, find something and kill it.”

I counted about seven fighters between the two fires. 
Three were standing around the fire right on the corner farthest from us; the other four were closer to what looked like the main entrance.  We
might
be able to slip by that group, but I wasn’t laying good odds on that.

I turned away from the corner, back into the shadows by the inner wall.  “No go,” I whispered to Larry.  “Let’s try around the other side.”  I barely made out his nod, then we were moving back toward the breach in the wall, heading around the prison compound the long way.

There were no guards visible at the main entrances to the compound; whether there were more inside or the compound was completely abandoned we couldn’t tell.  Nor did I especially care, as long as no one came out and spotted us slinking around.  We’d have to kill them, and then this infil was officially over, the mission scrubbed.  Sure, it might help continue to feed ISIS’ paranoia, particularly about their “allies,” but not nearly as much as bombs going off half an hour after Tremor left would.

I can’t really describe the tension involved in just strolling along a wall in the middle of the night, trying to act like you belong there.  From what you’ve seen, nobody even suspects you’re there, and nobody really should be able to see you, even if they’re looking in your general direction.  You’re keeping things nonchalant, and you’re dressed right for the area.  But it feels like there are eyes boring into your back the entire time.

A shout would be just as bad as a gunshot.  You keep waiting for both.  Your every sense is screwed up to the point you feel like your whole body is thrumming, trying to see or hear the sonofabitch who’s going to blow the whole mission and kill you and your buddy.  Your ears are ringing with the attempt to hear every little noise, and if you opened your eyes any wider trying to see, they’d pop out of your head.  Every crunch of your foot on the ground sounds like an avalanche.  Your breathing sounds like somebody’s using a bellows next to a PA system.

We got around the south side of the prison compound without incident.  We hadn’t seen either of the other two buddy teams, but they had to be in the complex by now.  The night was so dark, and there was so much crap piled up everywhere, that they could have been ten meters from us and we wouldn’t necessarily have seen them.  That was heartening, but only to the rational part of the brain.  The hindbrain was still in “holy shit we’re going to get caught and die” mode.

It was apparent that the Iraqis hadn’t cleared much out when they moved all the prisoners out and abandoned the prison.  Vehicles, barriers, what might once have been tents, concertina wire by the mile…it was all lying around.  Apparently ISIS hadn’t seen the need to go through much of it.  It presented some good concealment, but also plenty of hazards in the dark.  I was fortunate enough to feel the concertina wire under my boot before I stepped all the way in and got tangled.

Larry and I were walking within arm’s length of each other.  It was that dark, and we needed to be close in order to communicate.  Given the tendency of Arabs, even hard-core jihadis, to hold hands when walking with other men, it wouldn’t necessarily trigger anybody’s alarm circuits in the event we did get spotted.  I reached out to warn him about the concertina before moving on.