Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (11 page)

             
There was a pause.  When Nick replied, he sounded slightly defensive.  “It’s on the imagery, but it’s a big-ass crossing point.  No way it’s underwater.”

             
“The last one looked big on the imagery, too,” I pointed out.  “It was the most nonexistent one yet.”

             
“What do we have to lose just checking it out?” Nick argued.  “I’m in no hurry to go back and play Twenty Questions with the jundis.  Are you?”

             
I snarled silently.  “No, I’m not,” I finally said.  “Fine.  Let’s go take a look.”  I pointed toward the west, and Larry growled as he spun the wheel and started turning us around to get back on the main dirt road running through the mostly fallow fields.

             
We bumped along the dirt road in fuming silence for a couple of minutes, before we got closer to the canal.  “Well, holy shit,” Larry said.  “It looks like it’s actually there.”

             
The road continued across the canal, apparently over a culvert.  All I could see from the cab was the hardened, baked-dirt road, with dark, stagnant water on either side.  It looked narrow as hell.

             
“Can we make it across that?” I asked.  “Without tipping over and going in the drink, I mean?”

             
“Easy day,” Larry said nonchalantly, though the look of concentration on his face, along with the way he slowed down as we got closer, put the lie to his tone.

             
Slowly and carefully, Larry eased us out onto the culvert.  A quarter of the way across, the truck lurched, as part of the edge crumbled under the front right tire.  Larry gunned the engine, and we bumped back upright, but the rear tires were going to go into the same notch.  There simply wasn’t room to go over to one side or the other much.  I just hoped we didn’t exacerbate the erosion enough that we got stuck.

             
Sure enough, the truck lurched even worse when the rear wheel hit the notch.  For a second we started to fishtail toward the water, but Larry corrected, and got the front wheels onto better ground on the far side of the canal.  The back wheels spun for a second as we teetered precariously, then we surged up onto open ground.

             
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.  It wasn’t the first time I’d been close to tipping over in a vehicle into a canal, but that didn’t mean I really liked repeating the experience.  Larry took a deep breath and flexed his hands on the wheel before we pushed any further.

              The rest of the way was pretty uneventful.  We threaded our way through the fields; there really isn’t any straight way to get anywhere in Iraqi farmland.  Unless you’re on one of the major highways, the roads are narrow and twist around fields that aren’t exactly square.

             
We avoided the village that squatted right outside the outer wall of K1 Airbase, which took a little more time.  We could watch the town, and the base, but no one seemed to take any notice of the big tanker truck moving through the fields, apparently lost.  I realized that in any sane sort of place, this thing out in the farmland would be suspicious as hell, but in Iraq, people used whatever they could get their hands on, and if it had another use, so much the better.  So a big industrial tanker truck being used as a farm truck wasn’t all that weird.

             
Eventually we got to the main hardball, and from there it was a short trip to the chicken farm turned safehouse.  Larry pulled the truck up under the trees near the dilapidated farmhouse, and we turned to unloading.  We had a lot of work to do, now that we were in position, and not a lot of time to do it in.

Chapter 7

             
“I don’t know, man,” Jim said.

             
We were in our makeshift operations center, in the central room of the largest residential house on the farm.  It wasn’t fancy; we couldn’t afford a lot of the high-tech plasma screens and such that you still could find in the higher-tier units of the US military, as thin as their resources had gotten.  We had a big sheet of paper tacked up on the wall, where we taped photos and wrote checklists, two laptops for comms, and two more for the UAVs.  Jim, Larry, Bob, Nick, and I were presently bent over one of the UAV laptops.

             
The UAV was presently about four and a half miles away, orbiting over Kirkuk Airbase.  Fortunately, it was small, stealthy, and high enough that it had so far avoided notice by what still rudimentary air defense units the Iraqi Army had.

             
Unfortunately, it wasn’t finding what we were looking for.

             
There are certain indicators that every unit has, especially in a disciplined military formation, which, for the most part, the Iraqi Army was.  The Iraqi Special Operations Forces were no different.  Alek had gotten us some overheads of ISOF compounds in Baghdad and Ramadi to use for comparison.  The trouble was, we weren’t seeing anything that looked like the standard template within the wire of Kirkuk Airbase.

             
“That’s obviously the tank unit there,” Bob said, pointing to a collection of K-spans that helpfully had a row of M1A1 Abrams tanks parked nearby, “and the Strykers there.  More Humvees over there, but they don’t match the signature of the ISOF vehicles.”  He shook his head.  “I’m not seeing anything that looks like the kind of security setup we’d expect for an ISOF compound.”

             
“No antenna farm, either,” I pointed out.  “Now, I know they might have backslid some since our SF guys left, but they’ve got to be keeping what works.  And unless somebody’s decided that there’s enough of a threat of overhead observation from the Kurds, I don’t see them trying to go all that low-profile.  These are pros, after all, not the kind of irregulars we were looking for in Djibouti.”

             
“Maybe somebody’s been putting two and two together about East Africa and Yemen,” Nick suggested.  “Maybe they’ve guessed it was us, and they’re trying to go low profile to avoid our attention.”

             
“You don’t put out bounties on somebody you’re that afraid of,” I said.  “They still think they’ve got the upper hand here, and for all intents and purposes, I’d say they’re right.  We haven’t got any advantages, aside from being small, mobile, and better trained.  And with the ISOF, I’d say that’s only a slight advantage.”  I glared at the screen.  “Nadje knows it, too.”  Colonel Hussein Abdul Nadje was the present commander of ISOF.  Yeah, we had a pretty full dossier on him.  None of us much liked what we’d seen, either.  He was canny, and ruthless.  While for the most part he had continued to follow the SOF training that he’d gotten from our guys, the ethic had gone out the window as soon as the last plane had left.  He was a die-hard Shi’a nationalist, and there were rumors that he’d had dealings with the Mahdi Army clear back to Najaf in ’04.

             
“So if they’re not hiding,” Larry asked the obvious question, “Where the hell are they?”

             
Nobody answered for a while, as we let the UAV’s camera pan across the base.  A lot of what had been there when it had been a Coalition base, before the pullout after 2012, was gone.  Most of the hard structures were still there, but the trailers and tents were gone, leaving large open spaces.  K-spans had been put in in some cases, but most of the big base was empty.  That left fewer places to look, but we weren’t seeing everything the IAs had to have on the ground, the patrols and fighting in Kirkuk City itself notwithstanding.

             
“Wait a minute,” Jim said, straightening up from the small screen and rubbing his eyes.  “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.  Didn’t you say you ran into some IA presence near K1?”

             
“Shit, that’s right,” Nick said before I could reply.  “We weren’t expecting a checkpoint there, but it’d make sense if they were using K1, too, wouldn’t it?”

             
I nodded.  “It’d keep anybody from nosing around, that’s for sure.”  I looked over at Larry.  “How long to get the UAV over K1?”

             
“Few minutes,” he said, “half hour at the outside.”

             
“Do it.  If they’re there, we need to know, soonest.”

             
He nodded, and started inputting commands to the drone.  It had enough battery power to make it, and loiter for a few hours, but we were already down below fifty percent.

             
Bob lowered his voice and leaned close to my shoulder as Larry made the adjustments.  “Should we be looking at other possibilities for recon?” he asked.

             
“You mean on the ground?” I asked.  I scratched my beard.  “As Jim would probably point out first, anything that puts more possible points of failure in the way of the primary objective should be avoided.  Trying to get on either one of those posts, finding our people, and then getting out again undetected would be a huge potential failure point.  Even if we get out scot-free, if they find any sign that we’d been there, they’ll either beef up security, move the hostages, or both before we can move.”

             
“I know, but what if we can’t find them by UAV?” he prodded.  “We sure as hell couldn’t find the hostages in East Africa that way.”

             
“We didn’t have anything close to the parameters for where to look then, either,” I pointed out.  “Technically, we’re going after detainees, not hostages.  We’ve just got to find the ISOF compound and their detention center.”

             
The conversation died out, and we waited in silence for the UAV to get over K1.  I was already looking at what imagery we had of the old airbase, starting to plan in my head as best as possible.  What was the best avenue of approach?  How could we neutralize any security they had up, at least long enough to get in and get out?

             
Finally, Larry spoke up.  “Get a load of that.”

             
We all turned to the laptop screen.  And sure enough, bold as brass, there was the unmistakable look of an ISOF camp smack dab next to the airstrip, not far from four parked Mi-17s.

             
The compound was walled in, and a handful of hard structures had been supplemented with tents.  There was a row of up-armored Humvees lined up just inside the gate.  When Larry zoomed in on the permanent buildings, we saw a bit of a glint from the ground.

             
“What’s that?” Nick asked, pointing to it.  Larry zoomed in further.

             
“Concertina wire,” Jim said.  It was hard to make out, even with the quality that the UAV’s camera could get, but there was a fuzzy sort of line around one of the buildings.  While I couldn’t make out the telltale coils of concertina wire, I was inclined to agree with Jim.

             
“So, is that their detention facility, or is that their TOC?” Bob asked.

             
“I don’t see any antennas,” I answered.  “Unless they’re not using a lot of radios…”

             
“Antenna farm is there,” Larry pointed out, swiveling the camera toward the cluster of tents.  Sure enough there was a large central tent with plenty of antennas outside.  “That’s probably their operations tent…which would make the building the prison.”

             
I looked over at him.  “Are we getting any chatter from there?”

             
He shook his head.  “It’s all encrypted.  They’re making good use of the SINCGARS radios we gave ‘em.”

             
I sat back and looked around at the team members there in the ops center.  The rest were either sleeping or on security.  It had worked out that the guys in here planning were all veterans of East Africa.  It hadn’t been intentional; I hadn’t even realized it until we were already sitting down to plan.

             
“Well, gents,” I said, “thoughts?  This is kind of a long shot; we don’t have eyes on the prisoners.  If we go off half-cocked, hit this place, and our people aren’t there, I think we can kiss off any chance at getting them out.”

             
There was a long, pensive silence as we mulled it over.  It felt like déjà vu.  Finally, Bob spoke up.

             
“Maybe we should do something like we did in Yemen,” he suggested.  “You know, send one or two guys ahead and see if they can get eyes on the prisoners, before calling in the rest to make the hit.  One guy, or maybe two at the outside, shouldn’t have a huge footprint.  I realize these guys are better trained than your run-of-the-mill jundi, but they’re still jundis, and they think they’re on friendly ground.  That’s going to count against them.”

             
There was some merit to what he said.  I knew guys who’d been here during the war, who told stories of finding jundis asleep at their posts, even in the middle of the day.  Discipline was at once harsh and ineffective in most Arab armies.  The Iraqis had something of an advantage when it came to their training, because most of it came from America’s best for the better part of nine years.  The ISOF were going to be better than that.  I’d seen some footage of these guys training, and they were decent operators.  I had no idea how they performed off-camera, though.

             
The more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to be a little cautious.  “Let’s sit tight for at least a day, and keep an eye on things from overhead.”  I held up my hands as a couple guys started to protest that you couldn’t always see everything from the sky.  “I know, there’s a good chance we won’t see anything more than what we’re looking at.  There’s also a chance that we will see something that confirms the presence of our people there.  Let’s get a feel for the patterns of life, and see what we can see.  We’re not dealing with the same sort of situation we were with the Lemonier hostages.  As Islamist as these guys have gone, we’re still not likely to see one of our people getting their heads sawed off on the Internet anytime soon.  They still operate by
some
rules.”

             
“Maybe,” Larry said, without taking his eyes off the screen.  “They’re chopping hands and heads off right and left in the Caliphate of the Arabian Peninsula, the Egyptians are crucifying Christians…  I don’t think we can necessarily rely on the rationality and legal restraint of these people anymore, Jeff.”

             
“You’ve got a point, Larry,” I said.  “But under the circumstances, we can’t just jump in without more intel.  And I’m not willing to put a man inside that compound without more to go on.  If we see enough indicators, we might try it tomorrow night.  But for now, we’re going to sit tight, prep, and watch.”  I looked around at the rest of the guys.  Jim was nodding, Nick was looking thoughtful, and Bob was frowning at the screen.  “Let’s face it, gents,” I added, “We’re better off than we were in Somalia, but not by all that much.  We’re still on a shoestring, and we’ve got to operate accordingly.”

             
Nobody objected.  We settled in to wait and watch.

              I had a CO many years ago, who’d been one of those rare animals who managed to spend his entire career as a Marine officer in either Recon or Special Operations.  At a company powwow, he once said, “Recon ain’t fun.”  He had a good point to make.  While most of us loved the job, we had to admit that it was exhausting, painful, and often boring as hell.  While we weren’t humping ninety-pound rucks ten miles over mountains to squeeze into a tiny hide for three days to stare at an empty intersection this time, the boredom certainly applied to this situation.

             
A day spent sitting in a house, with nothing to do but go over the gear you’ve already gone over five times, along with staring at a computer screen waiting for something to happen, is brain-killing.  Of course, we tried our best to keep the guys who weren’t sleeping or on security occupied with trying to plan, but we were kind of limited in that the entire plan could easily go right out the fucking window if our target turned out to be a dry hole.  After about twelve hours of watching K1, I was starting to be convinced that such was the case.

             
While the building was still being guarded, there was no activity to speak of.  Nobody went in or out.  We could see activity around the tents, and once the guard force got replaced, along with the usual smoking and ass-grabbing that you see with jundis, but other than that, there wasn’t even any sign that there might be people in the building.

             
I had just sat down at the laptop, relieving Jim, who went to lie down on a thin pad in the corner, when that changed.

             
The first thing I noticed was not activity at the target building, but rather back at the TOC tent.  Some jundi with an entourage came out and walked toward the guarded structure.  I perked up a little as I saw this, and leaned forward, as though that was going to let me see the screen better.