Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (9 page)

I nodded and leaned back against the seat.  I should have known Mike would
have all his bases covered.  He’d been at this as long as I had.  “Sorry, brother.  Just tired.  Shoulda trusted you’d be on it.”

“Yeah, you should have,” he drawled.  “But I understand.  Get some shut-eye.  I’m pretty sure you’re gonna need it soon.”

That was the last thing I heard for a while.  The vibration of the truck and the rumble of the tires on the pavement rose up and lulled me into darkness for a while.

It was getting light when I woke up, but the sun still hadn’t risen yet, so I hadn’t slept all that long.  We’d slowed down, which probably was what roused me.  Even exhausted, I can’t sleep all that deeply when I’m downrange.

I rubbed the gritty, stinging feeling out of my eyes and adjusted my rifle, which had slipped on my lap.  Looking around, I saw we had just turned off the highway.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“
We’re passing by Diwaniyah,” Mike said.  “It looks like there’s a checkpoint on the overpass with Highway Seventeen.  We’re going around.”

That woke me up.  “Any idea who’s manning it?” I asked.

“It looks like IA,” he replied, “which probably means Saleh’s people.”

“Either that, or one of the other warlords still hanging on.”  Our latest reporting said that Ibrahim Hattim Majid and Babaker Sajid still had some sizeable followings, though neither could field more than an understrength battalion. 
Neither one could be considered friendly, either, even if we weren’t trying to make sure
nobody
knew that we were on the road.  Abu Bakr still had most of a regiment, and he was a complete unknown quantity as far as I’d heard.

Mike had steered us onto a narrow dirt road paralleling a canal.  The fields to either side were showing some green
, dark in the pale pre-dawn light, particularly as the rainy season started to move in.  I looked around and saw a few other vehicles on the highway, but none of the rest of our guys; the convoy had spread out just like Mike had said it would.

Leaning forward to peer through the windshield, I could just see the overpass
, with the hulking silhouettes of two ILAVs, the specially built MRAPs we’d sold the Iraqis a number of years ago, sitting on top of it.  The ILAVs weren’t tanks, but they’d stand up to most small arms fire and even lighter RPGs, making the heavy guns in the turrets a formidable threat to anybody but a well-equipped unit with heavier AT munitions.  We had a couple of RPG-27s in the bed, but using them meant we were compromised and, out here, likely completely fucked.

I kept watching the force on the overpass.  I knew they were watching us; I’d been on enough such checkpoints on deployment when I was a Marine to know the pattern.  If we turned back to the highway too soon, they could come after us, or even radio ahead to have somebody further up the highway intercept us.  Granted, they probably weren’t that organized, but we tried to never predicate our planning or tactics on the enemy being dumb.  That’s asking for trouble.

We continued to meander along the canal for some distance, heading in the general direction of the small town of Salal Ati.

I kept my eyes out, in spite of my eyelids desperately wanting to close.  The checkpoint, on a major highway, had ignited my always-smoldering paranoia.  If they were Saleh’s men, it was entirely possible they were looking for us, provided Renton’s ideas about Saleh being after any American forces in the country were right.

But as we rocked over the countryside, nothing materialized.  The sun was coming up, though the clouds were moving in, muting the light.  Farmers were out doing their morning chores around the few buildings we passed.  No soldiers came after us; no ambush materialized out of the fields.

In time, my fatigue started to set in again, and I dozed, though I kept jerking awake and scanning the fields, even after we got back on Highway One, that ever-present paranoia still lurking in my brain.  It can be a little nerve-wracking, knowing that just about everybody in the entire country wants to kill or capture you.

The next couple hours, as the day got lighter, but the cloud cover increased and the rain started to fall, became something of a blur.  It did register that the rain would work in our favor; Iraqis don’t like to work in the rain.  Hell, I’d known American military and intel types who didn’t like to work in the rain and always found some excuse to stay in shelter.  We had no such problem; to us, as unpleasant as it might be to be wet and cold, rain was camouflage.

Finally, Mike’s hand on my knee shook me out of my doze.  “We’re almost there; about two more miles.”

I sat up straighter, rubbed my eyes, and blinked at the surrounding countryside.  There had been steadily more and more greenery as we got farther north; we were in the irrigated breadbasket of Iraq, smack-dab between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

We were also starting to converge; I spotted one of our trucks only a hundred yards ahead.  I recognized it because I could just make out Azzam sitting up in the bed.  Fortunately, he’d ditched his vest and just looked like an Iraqi sitting in the bed of a truck, a perfectly normal thing.

That reminded me that I still had my chest rig on.  If we had to get out and move around, that could be a problem.  I thrashed around in the back seat to get it off and on the floor.  Being a big, relatively pale Westerner would still stand out, but not as much as being a big, relatively pale Westerner in combat gear.

We wove through the side roads, bumping over rough culverts
across canals, and came to a complex of buildings that had obviously belonged to a rich man, probably a sheikh.  The main house was white, with a deep overhang under the roof, a well-fitted, wooden door, and Romanesque columns flanking the door.  There was an air of shabbiness to it, however, and the front lawn, that looked like it had once been well-watered and green, was patchy and mostly dead.  It looked like it had been abandoned for a little while.

There were three black, up-armored Suburbans
waiting in back when we pulled around one of the outbuildings.  I grimaced.  Those fuckers weren’t exactly low-profile.  I’d thought Ventner would be savvier than that.

Mike and I got out of the truck.  I suppressed a groan as I checked that my pistol was under my shirt. 
Several hours sitting in the truck after a seven-kilometer movement had stiffened my legs.  I had to force myself to walk normally as I went over to the three Subs.

The passenger door on the leftmost Suburban opened, and Joe Ventner himself got out.  My eyebrows rose.  I knew Ventner was a very “hands-on” sort of owner, but I sure as hell hadn’t expected him to come personally to a rendezvous like this.

Joe Ventner was deceptively small.  Barely five-foot-seven, he disguised the fact that he was nothing but solid-packed muscle under baggy trousers and loose-fitting shirts.  His face was angular and increasingly craggy from many years in Third World shitholes.  His salt-and-pepper hair was presently drawn back in a short ponytail.

I’d first run into Ventner several years before, when Praetorian was first working in the no-man’s land of so
uthern Arizona and New Mexico.  Our two companies had worked together several times, though always with a certain wariness.  Ventner had already had a reputation by then, going back to well before I got out of the Marine Corps and joined Alek in forming Praetorian Security.  However, while everyone who’d heard of him could agree he had a rep, details got hazy very quickly.  Suffice it to say that he’d been in the game for a long time, and his name cropped up with rumors of operations in Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and at least half a dozen other places.

In my experience, he was a consummate professional and a good tactician.  He was also probably the closest Praetorian had to a friend, at least as far as “rival” companies went.

He strode over and shook our hands.  “Mike, Jeff, good to see you guys made it.  I heard some rumors of things getting a little hairy down in Basra yesterday.”

I nodded.  “Yeah, we had some problems getting out.”

“Any chance you were followed?” he asked.

“Negative. 
We broke contact clean.”

He nodded.  “I’d like you guys to ride with me.  We’ve got some things to discuss.”

Mike glanced over at me.  I nodded.  “Fine.  When are we leaving?”

“As soon as the last of your guys get here,” he replied.  “We can still get in and out with State placards, which is why I brought the Subs.  I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to last, so we need to take advantage for as long as we can.”

Mike nodded and stepped aside, pulling out his phone.  He dialed a number, then lifted it to his ear.  “Geek, Speedy.  How far?”  He listened for a moment, then nodded.  “Roger.  We’re leaving as soon as you get here.”  Another pause.  “All right.  See you in a few.”

He hung up and rejoined us.  “About ten more minutes, then we’ll all be here,” he said.  “Eddie’s the last vehicle.”  Even as he spoke, two more trucks pulled up, one of the deuce-and-a-halfs and a Ranger.  Hussein Ali was riding the cab of the deuce-and-a-half.

Ventner was squinting at him, then his iron-gray eyes flicked to me.  “Sure you can trust these guys?”

“About as far as I can trust you,” I replied evenly.

He grinned.  “Fair enough.”  He lapsed into silence.  Apparently, even though this was supposedly a secure location, he wanted to wait until we were on the road to have our conversation.

He noticed me looking around the compound.  “It belonged to a local sheikh,” he explained.  “It was taken as a FOB for a little while during the war, then the sheikh made the mistake of running for office back in ’13.  Got schwacked in his own back yard.  The place has been abandoned ever since.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “And how’d you find out about it?”

He flashed that grin again.  “I was working out of the FOB for a while.”  I knew that wasn’t the whole story; it never was with Ventner.  But if half the whispers were true, the guy had plenty of reasons to play things close to the vest.  Hell, so did we.

As promised, about ten minutes later, the last two trucks rolled into the complex.  “All right,” Ventner said.  “Let’s go.”  He got in the front seat of the left Sub, and Mike and I followed, getting in the back with our chest rigs and rifles.  The far right Sub led out, with two of our five trucks falling in trace before our Sub joined them.

We rolled about a half mile in silence before Ventner turned around to face us.  “All right, gents.  Renton asked me to brief you, but I would have anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, we’re partners on this gig, not competitors.  We’re facing the same enemies and the same obstacles.”

I met his eyes.  Ventner had, in spite of his legendary vagueness, always been scrupulously honest in the things he did say, at least in my experience with him.  “All right, we’re listening.”

“First off,” he began, “the security situation sucks.  The Marine detachment is down to only eleven Marines, counting the det commander.  The
WPPS guys have been pared down to about thirty, over three shifts.”

That had me frowning.
  Renton had said it was bad, but this was just crazy.  I’d seen the layout of the Baghdad Embassy.  That motherfucker was huge; it was, in fact, the largest US Embassy in the world.  There had been something close to sixteen thousand people working there at one point.  Sure, there were supposed to be less than a quarter that number still there, but from what I’d seen, there wasn’t really a good way to shrink that perimeter.  I already sensed a shit-show, to my utter lack of surprise.  Still, there were questions.  “What about FAST?” I asked.  The last time an Embassy had been threatened like this, a one-hundred-man Marine Fleet Anti-terrorist Support Team had gone in to bolster security.

Ventner shrugged.  “I’ve been told that one’s on its way, but they haven’t showed yet.  Nobody’s told me exactly what the hold-up is.

“The State weenies were not happy to see us show up,” he continued.  “No surprise, but one thing I did notice; some of the more intense dislike seems to be coming from several individuals with a decidedly…
spooky
vibe.”  He studied us with narrowed eyes.  “I wonder if you guys have any ideas as to why that might be?”

I shrugged.  “Not a clue.  Why would we know, anyway?  We’ve been in Basra.”

He smiled slightly, but it was the smile of a predator.  “Come on, Jeff, we’ve worked together before, and Praetorian’s gotten quite a rep in the circles of people who know in the time since then.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that you are legitimately thought of as some serious heavy-hitters.  Rather politically unpopular heavy-hitters, I might add.  I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.  If Renton’s bringing you guys in, ostensibly as support, there’s got to be another reason, and my Spidey-sense is telling me that it’s got something to do with what’s making those spook-types nervous and angry.”

I spread my hands, trying my best innocent look.  I know that it never quite comes across right; I’m not built to look like an innocent.  “I don’t know what to tell you, Joe.”

He just studied me for a moment, before shifting his gaze to Mike, who just leaned back in his seat and looked back sleepily.  Mike’s good at that.  He’s fooled a lot of people with his kind of droopy eyes and slow talk.  Ventner wasn’t fooled—not by a long shot.  He accepted his position, though, and shrugged with an easy grin.  “Have it your way.  I just hope that if you guys end up in some serious shit, you don’t wait too long to read me in.”  He fixed me with that intense stare of his.  “You know we’ve got your backs if you need it.”