Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (32 page)

We slowly rolled through the checkpoint, windows rolled down and rifles poised to point out and open fire.  We were getting soaked as the rain came in the open windows, but Black and I were wet already anyway.

We passed the power station, went around the roundabout, and then over the second stretch of bridge, over the half of the river that had been diverted into a canal.  Still no one stirred; no militia or IA came after us.  It looked like we’d made it across unnoticed.

I still didn’t breathe any easier until we were another mile down the road, and even then, I didn’t exactly relax.  We still had a long way to go.

After Samarra, we were back out in the open desert and back to following shitty dirt tracks gone to mud in the rain, and generally avoiding any habitation.  The sun came up, obscured by the overcast, and the rain kept most people inside, including those inclined to fight.  It took some serious commitment to get Iraqis out to fight in inclement weather.  I guessed that meant that Baghdad could have been even worse if it had happened in the middle of the summer, though it was hard to see how.

We worked our way south, skirt
ing the shore of Lake Tharthar.  We had to find a way across the major east-west canals, but found them as unguarded as anywhere else out in the boonies.  The insurgencies in Iraq had become mostly urban, with the hinterlands largely ignored.  Considering how little there really was out in the hinterlands, and the limited manpower that most of the armed groups in country really had, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

We came into the Euphrates’ green zone near Saqlawiyah, just northwest of Fallujah.  Judging by the imagery, we had only one or two options for getting across the river, and neither of them was particularly palatable.  We could go west and cross at Habaniyah, which would essentially mean either going through Habaniyah itself, and then Al Taqaddum Airbase, which we were pretty sure was under ISIS control at the moment, or we could take the bridge be
tween Saqlawiyah and Fallujah.

While the latter was uncomfortably close to Fallujah, which had been the first city ISIS had taken, back in 2013, and had been their stronghold
for longer than that, it was looking a lot more appealing than the Habaniyah route.  While it was now the middle of the day, making us a lot more exposed and complicating any reconnaissance we had to do on the bridge, it was much more out of the way, and the rain hadn’t let up yet.

There were dozens of houses scattered among the fields and palm groves near the river.  The main dirt road ran by most of them, so we avoided it, keeping back from the riverbank, along the canals to the north and east.  Eventually, however, we had to turn south and make for the bridge.

There was no guard at all.  No checkpoint, no vehicles, no nothing.  Apparently, there simply wasn’t enough traffic to justify it; we were far enough back into ISIS rear area that they weren’t that concerned about Saleh’s troops or opposing militias, and for damned sure the local farmers were too poor to be worth shaking down much anymore.  The rain was probably a deal-breaker on the extortion front.

Once across the bridge, it was a matter of minutes before we were back out in the open desert, heading south toward the assembly area.

The assembly area wasn’t much to look at.  There was a well, out in the middle of nowhere, with the crumbling remains of a mud-brick hut nearby and a few old tire tracks.  That was it.  The Bear was already parked
by the side of the hut when we got there, but none of the other vehicles had showed up yet.

The well wasn’t what Westerners tend to think of when they hear the term “well.”  Instead of a shaft, it was a glorified trench, dug out with a backhoe, about fifteen meters by forty-five, full of reeds and dark, brackish water. 
The trench sloped down at one end, to facilitate driving water trucks down to pump water out.

Aside from the
rusty, battered-looking dump truck sitting by the hut, there was no sign of anyone around.  I put a tasseled banner on the dashboard.  It wouldn’t look out of place to any Iraqis, but it was also our pre-determined recognition signal.  After a moment, Jim came out of the hut and waved, his Mk 17 slung in front of him, his hand still on the pistol grip.

I got out of the HiLux with a groan.  Aside from a couple of stops to furtively piss on the way, I hadn’t been out of that seat since we’d crossed the Tigris at Samarra.  That had been a long time ago.

Jim walked over as I stretched my back.  He jerked a thumb at the Bear.  “That fucker’s about as good cross-country as a fucking MRAP,” he said.  “We damn near got stuck at least five times.”

“You mean you guys couldn’t do what hajji does with his jingle truck?” I jibed.

He shook his head.  “Fuck you, dude.  Seriously, the Trojan Horse is a good idea, but I think next time we need to stick with Bongos or something.  The dump truck is just too fucking heavy for some of this terrain, particularly in this weather.”

“I hear you,” I said.  I looked around.  “Is it just us so far?”

He nodded.  “I’ve got the rest of our guys in the hut.”  As he spoke, my sat-phone buzzed.

It was
Bryan.  “Little Bob and I are five minutes out,” he said.

“Good copy,” I replied, reverting to radio lingo in my
exhaustion.  “Larry and I just got on-site, Jim’s already here.”

“I’m pretty sure I spotted Mike’s truck about five minutes behind us,” Bryan said.  “See you in a few.”

The rest of the guys filtered in over the next thirty minutes.  Once everybody was accounted for, and security was set, Mike and I gathered the guys who weren’t on watch.  “We’re moving in two hours for the target,” I said.  “I know it’s not a lot of time after that ass-pain of a movement, but we’re on the clock here.  So, if you’re not on security, rack out.  Enjoy the rest while you can.”

Nobody had to be told twice.  We’d all been in this line of work long enough.  You rest when you have a chance.  Most of us had managed to get a little bit of sleep in the vehicles on the way down, but dozing in a car seat isn’t the same as actually racking out for a couple hours.

I watched Black from under mostly-closed eyelids for a few moments before drifting off.  He was lying on the floor in the hut with all the rest of us, his head on what little kit he had, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.  He had his hands behind his head, but he kept fidgeting.

He was
getting more keyed-up the closer we got.  Of course, there were plenty of reasons to be nervous on this op.  We were all alone, relatively unsupported, almost three hundred miles into hostile territory.  Anyone who said he wasn’t a little apprehensive was flat out lying.

But who knew for sure with Black?  Was he nervous because of the mission?  Or because he was about to face some of the contractors he’d flipped on?  Or because there were going to be enough Project contractors to possibly get him out of the jam he was in?

We still only had his word that he’d been a reluctant participant in the Project.  I couldn’t be sure how much he was telling the truth, and how much he was looking out for his own skin.  If the circumstances changed, would he turn his coat again?

There was no way to know until we got there, and no way we could get rid of him at the moment.  We’d have to drive on, and keep one eye on him the whole time.

It wasn’t an ideal way to be going into an op like this.  But then, there really isn’t any ideal way to go into an op like this…

Chapter 21

After not nearly enough rest, we loaded back up and headed for the factory.

It was still light when we rolled away from the well, but the sun was rapidly nearing the horizon.  Not that we could see it; the storm hadn’t lifted, and in fact it was raining harder than it had the night before.  Good; more concealment.

By the time we were a mile out, it was fully dark.  The rain was slacking off, though.  By the time we reached the factory itself, the clouds were starting to blow away.

The factory was completely dark, and appeared abandoned.  There were no vehicles nearby, but then, the eight-foot wall around it was still intact, so there could be some inside.  We halted just outside the gate and got out.

No one said a word.  We didn’t have to.  Even with Black in the mix, we’d been doing this long enough that the motions were instinctive now.  We knew where we were going, and we knew what had to be done.  Talking was completely unnecessary.

The front gate was hanging open, and looked like it had been for a long time.  Understandably, Collins hadn’t wanted to draw attention to the fact that the old factory/FOB was occupied again. 
A quick scan of the narrow courtyard between the gate and the first handful of buildings, still surrounded by deteriorating HESCO barriers and stacked with crumbling sandbags, showed nothing moving, and nothing showing a heat source.  I led the way inside, carefully scanning around every corner, following my rifle muzzle as I went.  It would take a fraction of a second to snap the weapon up and get on sights if a target presented itself.

The gate area was as quiet and motionless as a tomb.  The stars were starting to show over the top of the wall.  Nothing was stirring inside.

Still moving carefully, though my boots crunched on the dusty gravel underfoot, I continued along the wall, scanning around every corner we came to.  Most of the gate had, at one time, been enclosed by HESCOs, but several had obviously been removed at some point, probably to make it easier to move all the personnel and heavy equipment out when the FOB was de-militarized.

As I came around a smaller cinderblock building, I got a glimpse of a heat signature.  It wasn’t much, just a flash of a brighter outline in the green of the PVS-14.  I froze, lifting my off hand in a fist, and the rest of the team followed suit.  I scanned back, leaning out until I saw it again.

It took a second to identify what it was.  It was a truck, parked in front of the largest building, in the back of the compound.

Somebody was here ahead of us.  It could be bad guys, it could be scavengers, or it could be the Project survivors.  Renton had been in contact with some of them.  He might have already given them the meeting point, without waiting for us to make contact.  If that was the case,
was he just figuring out the timeline, or was he sending a message that he didn’t trust us one hundred percent?  If the latter, his timing sucked.

I turned back to Bryan, who was right behind me, and leaned in to where he could hear me.  “At least one truck by the back building,” I said.  He nodded, and turned back to pass it down the line.

I continued moving slowly and deliberately, taking a moment to scan around me even as I slowly pied off the corner.  There was another truck parked next to the first.  This one definitely had someone near it.  A distinct human silhouette, outlined in bright green by the thermals, was leaning against the hood.  I couldn’t see if he was armed, but I had to assume he was.  I signaled back to Bryan, and then continued to move forward.

I stepped to the corner of the next building, and heard a radio crackle from the direction of the back building.  What was said was indistinct, but the night was still enough out here in the desert that the noise still reverberated across the compound.  I froze again, dropping to a knee behind the corner, and peeked out.

The man leaning against the hood of the truck had pushed off of it.  He was definitely armed, as were the half dozen others who came out of the building.  They spread out and started toward the gate, weapons at the ready.  They moved well; they moved like Americans.  I was pretty sure we’d found the Project, or what was left of it.

Black was suddenly beside me.  He was remarkably quiet when he wanted to be.  “Let me call Ledeen,” he hissed urgently.  “I
guarantee they know somebody’s here; they wouldn’t do a sweep on a whim.  If I can talk to Ledeen, I can get us to link up without any shooting.”

I didn’t hesitate.  We were way past the point where it would do any good.  I hauled my sat phone out and handed it to him.

He dialed the contact number quickly.  I’d disabled the beeping noise the buttons made, but the backlight was still on, so he sheltered it behind his body.  Once it was dialed, he turned back to watch the oncoming figures, the phone to his ear.

I saw one of the rearmost thermal silhouettes react to something, and reach into his pocket.  He said something that was audible if unintelligible, and the rest stopped and gathered around.

I shook my head.  These guys were the weirdest combination of decent tactics and sloppy bullshit I’d ever seen.  I guessed I was looking at the result of the “lowest bidder.”  Either that, or they had become so contemptuous of the very jihadists they had been training that they’d gotten complacent.

“Ledeen, it’s me,” Black said, keeping his voice low as he continued to watch the figures ahead.  He paused for a moment, listening.  “Yeah, that’s us.”  Another pause.  “
We didn’t know you were here already.”  A longer pause; and he took a deep breath.  “You’re going to have to trust me, dude.  Like it or not, there isn’t really a better way out of here.  These guys can get you out alive.  That’s about the best offer you’re going to get at this point.”

That was putting it mildly.

“Tell him we’re coming over, and if they don’t want to get shot, they need to keep their hands away from their firing controls,” I said quietly.

He passed the word, and after a few moments arguing, which was partly audible across the compound, they turned toward the gate and let their hands down by their sides, except for the last guy, who still had one hand to his ear.

“Stay put, and don’t move quickly,” Black said into the phone.  “In fact, it’ll probably be better if you don’t move at all.”  Good call.

We came out from between the buildings, spreading out across the central “street” that led to the back warehouse, or factory building, or whatever it had been.  The seven men standing by the trucks stayed where they were, their hands at their sides, rifles hanging from slings.  I was under no illusions that they couldn’t get those weapons into action fast, but we were all moving at the low ready, watching them just over the sights of our rifles.  They could try, but we’d win.

“Coming up on the left,” Mike said over the radio, his voice crackling in my earpiece.  We had them in an L-shape.  If things went sideways, they were in a very bad place.

“You’ve got balls, Black, I’ll say that much,” one of them said.  He sounded pissed.  “Coming out here to ‘rescue’ us after you sold us out.”

“I did what I had to, Carnivore,” Black called back, lowering the phone.  “You’d have done the same thing.” 

Carnivore
? I thought. 
He actually calls himself Carnivore?  What a fucking douchenozzle.

“Obviously not,” came the reply.  “I stuck with the job. 
I
didn’t get most of us killed.”

“For fuck’s sake,
I
wasn’t the one who decided to team up with a bunch of moose limb crazies who were going to turn on us as infidels at the drop of a fucking hat,” Black snapped back.  I noticed he didn’t mention the role we’d played in that turn, but then, I wouldn’t have expected him to, especially not at this juncture.  The last thing we needed at the moment was to give these guys more of a reason to shoot us in the back.

Carnivore
stepped forward.  A couple of rifle muzzles rose fractionally as he did so, but he kept his hands at his sides.  “I don’t think that’s why they turned on us,” he said, “and you know it isn’t.  They turned on us because somebody was bird-dogging us, and hitting them just right to make them think it was us.”  He looked around at us.  “And I’m guessing it was this bunch of ass-clowns you’ve attached yourself to, wasn’t it?”

“That’s enough,” I said.  “This is the deal.  We SSE this place, you keep your mouths shut and your heads down, and then we get out of here and up to Erbil.  You get to keep your heads on your shoulders, and our employers get the dirt on this little operation.  It’s a better deal than you’ll get from ISIS.  And by the way,” I added, “if any of the important stuff is destroyed when we search, you’ll be lucky if we shoot you and leave your bodies here.  More likely, we’ll take your guns and leave you to the throat-cutters.”
  Of course, the odds were pretty good that if it came to that, they’d make us shoot them rather than hand their weapons over.

There was a long silence as they looked around at us.  We hadn’t advanced that far; if they had buddies in the adjacent buildings, they weren’t in a good position to ambush us, and Mike was out on our left flank, ready to roll
them up if things got froggy.

The silence went on long enough that I started
mentally getting ready to throw down.  Surprisingly, I just felt a deep weariness at the realization that we were going to have to gun these fuckers down.  There wasn’t any point to them fighting us anymore and even less honor, but I could tell they were going to try anyway, and get slaughtered.  All for the sake of an illegal, dishonorable op helping out some of the worst savages in a part of the world that seemed to breed savagery like nobody’s business.

“Damn it,
Carnivore!” Black suddenly bellowed.  “This shit has to fucking end!  What are you going to die for here, huh?  Collins and Tremor are dead; you’re not going to protect them, not that they ever gave a shit about any of us.  Are you going to go down in a hail of gunfire for the sake of fucking
ISIS
?  Come on, man.  Play it smart.  If I hadn’t talked them into it, these guys never would have come back for you at all.  It’s a chance.”

Black was certainly overstating things a little; it was Renton who’d talked us into coming south, and extracting the Project survivors was a pragmatic fringe benefit, not a primary objective.  However, they didn’t need to know that, at least not until we got back into Kurdistan.

Still, they didn’t look like they were buying it.  It took a radio call from outside the factory to pause the imminent bloodbath.

“Hillbilly, Hillbilly, this is Ali Baba.”  Hassan was inordinately proud of that callsign; he’d thought it up on the way out of Baghdad.  “Ali Baba” is slang in Iraq for “robber” or “bad guy.”  He thought it was awesome, and was surprised that none of us were already using it.

I keyed my radio, never taking my eyes off the Project goons.  “This better be important, Ali Baba,” I said.

“Hillbilly, there are lights coming from the north,” he said.  “Ten, twenty trucks at least.”

“We’ve got company,” I said, looking at Carni-douchebag.  “Friends of yours?”

“We haven’t got any friends left in this fucking hajji country, thanks to you,” he replied.

“Well, that kind of clinches it, then, doesn’t it?” I said.  “If you want a chance at living, versus having your corpse violated by a pack of jihadi animals tonight, you’ll cut the bullshit and do what we say.”

There was some exchange of looks, but they said more, “Are these guys going to jump one way and leave me in the lurch?” rather than, “What do you guys think?”  For all of
Carnivore’s indignation about Black’s defection, it looked like Black’s description of the inner dynamics of the Project were pretty much spot-on.  I guess when your moral compass is broken enough that you’re willing to work with Islamist butchers for pay there isn’t much to bond with others about.

Finally, Carnivore turned to me and said, “Fine.  We’ll work with you.  But only because they’ve got us outnumbered, and there’s no way out of here without being observed.”

“Yeah, gotcha, tough guy,” I snarled.  “Now keep your fucking teeth together from now on unless I ask you a question or tell you something that requires an acknowledgment.  You’re starting to piss me off.”

I keyed the radio again.  “Ali Baba, how far out are they?”

“One, maybe two kilometers,” he replied.  “They are moving fast.”

“Mike,” I called out, “we need to get those vehicles inside the compound, thirty seconds ago.”

“On it,” he called back, somehow managing to sound unhurried even in this situation.

I looked around the compound, never quite taking my eyes away from the Project types, who hadn’t moved from their position near their trucks.  From a defensive standpoint, the old factory left a lot to be desired.

It had a pretty solid concrete wall around the outside, but there were no defensive positions, no towers or loopholes.  I found it a little odd that the Marines who had held the place years ago hadn’t made any defensive improvements aside from the HESCOs around the entrance.  I knew that things had occasionally slipped tactically, thanks in large part to the over-dependence on body armor and up-armored vehicles, but this was surprising.