Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (8 page)

“Why?” I asked.  It had been bugging me ever since Hussein Ali
had first come into our ops room with his announcement.  “Why us, aside from having the combat experience to increase his chances of getting out of the city?”

Hassan didn’t say anything for a little bit, but just drew on his cigarette, blowing the smoke up into the desert air.  “I think he finds some sort of…what is the word?  Yes, ‘kindred spirits;’ he finds you are a lot like him in a way.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Really?”

He nodded, finally looking back at me.  “You may make the speeches about fighting back against the Islamists,
either Daash”—“Daash” was the Iraqi slang term for ISIS)—“or the Iranians, and I don’t doubt that you do consider them your enemies.  But I have come to know all of you well enough now that I know why you are here to fight.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“You are here to fight because this is where there is fighting.  You fight because it is the only thing you can think of doing anymore.”

My eyebrow climbed toward my hairline.  “Is that why we’re here?”

He chuckled dryly.  “You are far too cynical and realistic to actually think that even as much as you have done is going to stop the Islamists here, my friend,” he said.  “You can hurt them, yes, but stop them?  You…
we
do not have the forces to do that.  No, you are here to fight because there is a fight to be had here.”  He held up his hands.  “I do not doubt that you truly do hate the Islamists, much as I do.  I am a Muslim, but theirs is not the faith I follow.  Perhaps that makes me a bad Muslim; I do not know.  I can only do what I think is right, whether or not it permanently changes anything.”

I smiled slightly, looking out into the desert.  “The world is fucked.  The only thing we can do is live and die as honorably as we can.”

“That sounds like a quote,” he said.

“Not really,” I replied.  “I’ve been saying it or something like it for years.  It’s become a saying of mine.”

“Anyway, I think that Hussein Ali recognizes this.  He knew that as soon as Saleh became involved, he would have to run.  He has many enemies, and Saleh is one of the worst.  The feud between their families goes back generations.  But he is not one to just go and hide somewhere.  He has been a soldier in one way or another all his life.  So you see, he sees who you are, and he thinks he can be at home among you.”

“Fair enough,” I said.  “What about the rest?”

He looked at me, raising his own eyebrow.  “They are his cousins.  He is a sheikh.  What do you think?”

“Good point,” I said.  I knew the ways of the tribal mind better than a lot of people by now; I should have known that was a stupid question.  They weren’t without their own minds, and I was sure some of them didn’t particularly like the idea, but then, not all of the al Khazraji in the PPF had come with us.  These would have been Hussein Ali’s picked few, the ones he could trust, and the ones who were closest to him by blood.  As long as we could trust him, we could probably trust the rest.

That was, of course, provided we got out of this alive in the first place.  If not, trust and motives were a moot point.

Chapter 7

Malik died an hour before sunset.  He’d hung in there for hours, but the blood loss was just too much.  His breathing got slower and shallower, and then he was just gone.  Two of his cousins and his brother dug his grave, after using a bit too much water to wash his body.  There was no white sheet to wrap him in, nor did we have a coffin, obviously, which his brother, Jamail, was more than a little upset about.  Hussein Ali took him aside for a few minutes and talked quietly to him.  When they came back to the rest of the group, Jamail still looked unhappy, but they proceeded to wrap Malik’s face in a black and white keffiyeh and laid him in the grave.  He was covered by the time it got dark,
with Jamail and his cousins praying over the grave for another half hour once the burial was completed.  It wasn’t the three-day mourning and praying period that was required, but Hussein Ali apparently made it clear that the requirements of survival meant that sure as hell wasn’t going to happen.

We didn’t have a lot in the way of pyro to destroy the trucks, but what we did have were rags and diesel.  A few of the rags we could have used for bandages later on, but I wasn’t going to leave the vehicles intact, at least not with the gear we were going to have to leave behind.  If we’d been able to strip the gear out, then fine, I’d have left ‘em where they were.  Burning them was going to put a huge fucking beacon into the sky, but I was not leaving the gear, SBRs, and extra comms intact for the enemy.
  We’d stripped off most of the ammo we could use in personal weapons, but there was still a lot left.

While we were prepping the trucks, I pulled Black aside, and handed him Malik’s AK and chest rig.  “We don’t have the luxury of
bringing dead weight with us on this,” I told him quietly.  “Get this straight, though.  One of us
will
be watching you at all fucking times.  You make the slightest move wrong, and we’ll kill you and leave you in the ditch.  Understood?”

He looked me in the eye without flinching or wavering.  He took the chest rig and slung it over his shoulder before taking the AK and quickly checking the chamber.  “Understood.  You’re the boss.”

I watched him for a second more, but he was as cool and collected as he had been ever since he figured out he wasn’t with the Project anymore.  I went back to making sure everybody else was ready to move.

Yeah, Renton had stressed that we shouldn’t necessarily be totally up-front with our distrust of Black.  However, I was reasonably certain that it wasn’t a great idea to go straight from treating the guy like a prisoner to being all buddy-buddy.
That would be guaranteed to make him suspicious, and nullify the whole reason for granting him some degree of trust in the first place. We’d have to ease into this.

Jim stayed back by the trucks while the rest of us stepped off.  He waited until the last man was about a hundred yards distant before going around the trucks, lighting the diesel-soaked rags hanging out of each fuel tank.  Once the last one was burning, he ran to catch up.

I was about midway in the formation, such as it was.  I waited until I could see Jim moving, dimly lit by the rising flames, then I hoofed it forward.  Hussein Ali might be commanding his kin, but I was in charge of this lash-up, so I was going to be where I could steer the point man.  Since Cyrus was walking point, that only made sense anyway, given how froggy he was getting.

We weren’t moving fast.  Just hustling up toward the front of our scraggly column was painful enough.  Yeah, it was a flesh wound in my thigh, and a shallow one at that, but fuck you.  Holes where there aren’t supposed to be holes fucking hurt.

The terrain was pretty flat.  Really flat.  There was scrub, but it was pretty widely spaced.  Aside from the possibility of running into traffic on the roads, there really weren’t many obstacles between us and the rendezvous.

That didn’t mean it was going to be an easy movement.  We had to stop after a half hour, largely because a few of us had wounds start bleeding again just from walking less than a kilometer.
  Some of the wounded al Khazraji were already dragging ass badly after about seven hundred meters.  We had almost ten times that distance to cover by 0200.  Granted, we had more darkness to work with as winter started to set in; the sun had set at about 1800.  Still, by all appearances, we weren’t going to be getting any faster as the night wore on, and we hadn’t stepped off until some time after dark, either.

I worked my way up and down the cigar-shaped perimeter we’d set up in the desert.  I didn’t want to try to circle up with this many guys, especially when we were trying to keep moving.  A few needed new pressure dressings on bullet wounds, some just needed the rest.  Most of my team, even Little Bob, who was hit worse than any of us, just wanted to get moving.  We were exposed and still too damn close to the burning vehicles, which were lighting up the horizon behind us.  The sooner we got away and to the rendezvous, the better.

Finally, though it took some cajoling with some of the al Khazraji, we got moving again.  Hussein Ali had contributed considerably to getting his people moving; that crusty old bastard had no qualms about kicking the shit out of anybody who didn’t want to pull their weight, or in this case, get off their ass and get moving when staying in place meant dying.

By midnight we still had three klicks to go.  Our pace had slowed steadily as we got farther from the laager site.  Several of the wounded were doing their damnedest to keep moving, but they had to stop every few hundred meters to rest.  Blood loss alone was taking its toll and it takes time to recover from that, time that we didn’t have.

It didn’t help that
the small oil facility we had to pass by to get to the rendezvous was inexplicably active that night.  We were still the better part of a kilometer away from it, but headlights kept sweeping over our position as three vehicles constantly roved around the compound.  Every time the cones of light started moving toward us, we went flat on our bellies in the dust.  We were probably too far away to be seen, but I didn’t want to take any chances.  If somebody over there thought they saw something and came to investigate, we weren’t going to be able to run away.

Right at the moment, I was lying on my belly, sweat mingling with the dust to turn my forearms to slimy sandpaper inside my sleeves, waiting for the lights to turn away.  I was seriously thinking of swinging farther out, away from the complex.  So far, the vehicles seemed to be staying by the big oil tanks, instead of roving out in the desert, so if we got another five hundred meters away, we might not have to worry about it.  The only trouble was, at the pace we were making, that was going to add at least a half hour.  Marcus’ limp was getting more pronounced with every step, and he was obviously in a lot of pain.

I checked my watch, carefully shielding the green glow from anywhere but my eyes and the ground.  0010.  It had taken us almost four hours to go just over four klicks, over open ground.  That’s what bad shape we were in.

Fuck it.  We weren’t going to save time if we got compromised and got the PPF running out here because Habib thought he saw somebody crawling around in the desert in his headlights.  I’d told Mike to be there no
earlier
than 0200, so we had some wiggle room.

I was going to move forward and tell Cyrus to veer north, but before I could I heard the rustle of movement up ahead, and then Cyrus was crawling
through the scrub toward me.  I moved up to meet him.

“We need to get t
he hell away from these lights,” he murmured.  “I’d like to move us north.”

“You’re the pointman, dude,” I replied in the same low tone.  Whispers can actually travel farther than low-pitched speech
at night.  “If I think you’re getting too far off course, I’ll correct you, but you know where we’re going just as well as I do.  Be the pointman.”

He stared at me for a moment, as if expecting something else
, as the diffuse but still too bright light of the headlights swept over our position again.  “Roger,” he said shortly.  “North it is.”

The light traveled on as the car swung away on whatever patrol route it was on, if that was indeed what was going on over there.  Cyrus got up on a knee, took a long look around, then stood up and led off, this time heading straight into the desert, away from the oil compound.  After a short interval, I got up and followed him, my leg protesting at every movement.  I looked back to make sure Ahram was getting up and following me, and hadn’t fallen asleep during the halt.  It was a real concern; as comparatively good as Hussein Ali’s boys were, there were still issues with their fieldcraft, issues we’d have to correct quickly and probably harshly.

However, he was getting to his feet behind me, his M4 held ready in his hands, and looking back to make sure the man behind him was also getting up.  Satisfied, I turned back to follow Cyrus.

The rest of the movement, while slow, was relatively uneventful.  It continued to get steadily slower as the night continued to wear on.  Marcus was all in by the time we got to the RV point, beginning to weave as well as limp.  He’d lost more blood than we’d thought, and was utterly spent.  Plus, most of Hussein Ali’s boys, even the unwounded ones, weren’t exactly endurance athletes.  Something we’d have to work on in the future.

Cyrus and I were huddled in the bush, watching the RV point.  From ground level, it looked much the same as any other stretch of road in the desert; the overpass to the south wasn’t all that large, and the on-ramps were more like side roads leading onto the highway than ramps per se.  Since it was about 0300, there was no traffic to speak of on the road.  There were, however, four dark shapes on the other side of the highway, all roughly truck sized and truck-shaped, glowing faintly with heat in the thermal attachments on our PVS-14s.

I flashed the IR illuminator on my 14s toward the shapes.  A moment later, an answering double flash came from the lead truck.  Mike and his team were on-site and everything was clear.

I pointed to Cyrus, signaling him to push forward and make contact, then turned back toward the rest.  A quick passing of hand signals and, in the case of those without night vision, taps on shoulders or ankles, and the group was getting up and moving toward the vehicles.

I was still plenty keyed-up.  Extract is always the most dangerous part of any mission, mainly because guys start to “smell the barn” and get focused on getting back safe instead of security.  Murphy dictates that that’s when the bad guys show up.

Not to mention the fact that we weren’t safe once we were on the trucks.  Not by a long shot.  We were still in Indian country and would be for a long time.  Hell, there really wasn’t
anywhere
in this country where we were “inside the wire” south of Kurdistan.  The entire fucking country was hostile, and until we knew more about the Project, I had to admit that that included the US Embassy, where we were headed.

Mike had two
deuce-and-a-halfs as well as three HiLuxes.  He was trying to stay a little more low-profile, so the vehicles weren’t visibly armed.  That did mean there was more room in the beds without the machine gun mounts.  Between Jim, Hussein Ali, and I, we got everybody loaded up.  I piled into the back seat of Mike’s HiLux, and announced.  “That’s it.  Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

As soon as I was in the seat, the fatigue of the last couple of days really
started to hit me, and I almost fell asleep right then and there.  I had to force myself to keep my eyes open and outboard, my rifle on my lap, muzzle toward the door, so I could lift it to the window and engage immediately if need be.

Lee, without taking his attention entirely off the other side of the truck, reached down, picked a water bottle up off the floor, and handed it to me.  “Long night?” he asked.

I twisted the cap off and sucked half the bottle down before answering.  “You could say that.”  I leaned over to speak to Mike.  “I’m hoping you’ve got an adjusted plan.  I’ve been concentrating on getting here at the exclusion of much else for the last day or so.”

“I contacted Renton,” he said.  “We’re going to make a straight shot up Highway One.  We shouldn’t have to stop until we get to the new RV point. 
I’ve got the coordinates of a farm outside Rasheed where we’re going to link up with some of Ventner’s boys.”

He twisted around in his seat to look back at me, although it was dark enough that we were both little more than silhouettes to each other outside of the small green circles of our night vision.  “You guys may as well get some sleep while you can,” he said.  “We’ve got enough eyes and guns to provide security for the time being.  We’ll wake you up if shit starts blowing up.
”

I looked around at the darkened landscape, lit only by starlight and the occasional flare of burn-off at an oil rig.  “Not sure if I want to be convoying up a main road right now,” I admitted.  “Even if there aren’t any checkpoints, I doubt we’ll be there by sunup.”  A quick look at my watch confirmed my suspicion; it would be light in about three hours.  “We’ll make a hell of a target clumped up.”

Mike nodded.  “Way ahead of you,” he said.  “We’re going to start staggering here in the next mile.  We should have a minimum of five minutes separation soon.  We won’t look like a convoy, especially once other people start driving, which should be in the next couple of hours.  We’ll maintain comms, and be close enough to support each other within a few minutes if shit does go sideways.  And, while Renton assures me there aren’t any checkpoints on the highway, we’ve got alternate routes around the likely checkpoint spots anyway.  Don’t worry, brother, we’ve got this.”