Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (15 page)

             
All of us were now off the breach, and falling back by twos toward the helos.  I saw Jim and Juan running across the tarmac from their perch, the sniper rifle still out and cradled in Jim’s hands.  The first Iroquois lifted in a billow of stinging dust, and banked to take up the same orbit as the second, which dipped down to land.

             
We got to the helo and piled on.  Jim counted the last civilians and the rest of the team aboard, then slapped me on the shoulder and boarded.  I was the last on, leaned toward the pilots, and yelled, “Last man!  Go!”

             
The pilot just nodded, and pulled us into the sky.  The MAGs in the doors were still hammering away at the ground, keeping the Iraqis’ heads down.  We were barely fifty feet off the deck when the pilot pitched the nose forward and sent us racing out over the Kirkuk farmlands.

             
I craned my head to watch the other helo pull off the target and follow us, dipping down to the same low-as-dirt altitude.  We were moving at almost one hundred eighty miles an hour, barely seventy-five feet above the ground.  It was our hope that nobody would be able to get much more than a lucky shot at us.  Of course, sometimes all it takes is a lucky shot, but we tended not to think too much about that eventuality.

             
If the round has your name on it, there’s not a damned thing you can do.

             
We swung wide and headed north, to Erbil.

Chapter 9

             
I was braced for a shitstorm as the helos set down in Erbil early in the morning.  The two civvies who were riding in our helo didn’t have much to say, and neither of them looked at us much.  We’d checked Paul’s leg; he had taken a 5.56 round through the outer thigh.  It had blown some meat off, but it was a through-and-through, without hitting anything vital, and fortunately a long way from his femoral.

             
There were four brown Suburbans waiting for us at the airport.  The Erbil International Airport was a thoroughly modern terminal, all steel and glass that looked out of place when compared with the grubby mud huts you often found in the hinterlands in Iraq.  We didn’t so much as glance at it; we just got in the vehicles.

             
Somoza and Mackey were glaring pure poison at me as they got off the helo, and Somoza looked like he was going to come over, but Dick Weller, one of the Liberty Petroleum supervisors, was waiting, and took them both in hand, steering them toward the farthest Suburban.  Needless to say, I headed for the closest one.

             
There wasn’t a lot of chatter amidst the team as we got in the vehicles.  Most of us just buckled up and crashed, heads lolling against windows that had been covered by curtains.  Even in Erbil, there was the possibility of bad guys who wouldn’t hesitate to hit SUVs full of Westerners.

             
I stayed awake, as much as I wanted to sleep.  My eyeballs hurt from exhaustion, and I just wanted to close them for a few moments, but I knew as soon as I did that, I’d be out.  I needed to be alert for the hot wash that was certainly coming as soon as we got to our local HQ.

             
While it had a lot of the same sort of blocky, layered Arabic architecture we’d seen all over the Middle East, Erbil was a thoroughly modern city.  For every traditional brick building there almost seemed to be a concrete, glass, and steel skyscraper, especially as you got deeper into the city, heading toward the ancient Erbil Citadel in the center.  The entire city was built around that citadel, not unlike Kirkuk, except Erbil was more circular.

             
There was a lot of traffic on the streets; it was enough to even slow us down to a crawl in places.  That was unusual in this day and age; even in oil-rich places like Iraqi Kurdistan, the global economic downturn had meant that a lot of people simply couldn’t afford even the cheap gas.  Relatively speaking, Kurdistan was booming.

             
Of course, it was still less than it had been before, the driver said, his voice barely penetrating my reverie.  There had been times in the old days, just a few years after Saddam had gone down, when it took two hours to get all the way around the Citadel.

             
The city was colorful.  There was none of the drab grimness of Kirkuk, especially south of the Kurdish quarter.  There were bright signs everywhere, for everything from cell phones to soda.  A lot of the buildings were painted bright colors as well.  Reds and blues seemed to predominate.

             
We pulled up to the office building we’d been placed in, a glass-and-steel skyscraper in the north end of the Taajeel district.  There was a crowd in the square, gathered around a fountain with some weird sort of modern art sculpture with hands and doves on it.  A huge Sony sign rose over a one-story building across the square.

             
We’d stuffed all our weapons and gear into kitbags that the drivers had helpfully brought.  They weren’t Kurdish personnel; these were Liberty employees, most of them security contractors.  When we stepped out onto the street, aside from the blood on Paul’s leg, we just looked like a bunch of Westerners with bags.

             
No one said a word as we filed into the office building, pointedly not meeting the curious gazes from the people on the street.  The war was a long way away from here; many of these people may never have heard a shot fired in anger in their lives.

             
We had to split up between the two elevators in the lobby.  The place was as clean and modern as just about anything back in the States; maybe more so in some places these days.  White walls, well-lit, with tile floors and plants along the sides of the lobby.  There wasn’t any receptionist, which was fine.

             
The elevators arrived slightly apart; I got on one with Bryan, Nick, Little Bob, and Paul, while Jim got on the other with the rest of the team.  They weren’t small elevators, but with five guys and their gear, it got a little cramped.

             
The doors slid open on the fifth floor.  Nobody else ever came here; this was solely Praetorian country.  You still wouldn’t know it at first glance.  The walls were the same bare white stucco, until you went through an unmarked door with Imad sitting in front of it, with a concealed pistol on his hip, and a Vepr .308 hidden inside a duffle at his feet.  Imad had been with us in Djibouti and Somalia.  He’d been wounded in Kismayo, before everything really went to hell there, and we’d had to evac him before the raid in Yemen.  Now he’d moved up to the small operations cell.  His arm hadn’t ever quite fully recovered from the AK round that had smashed his humerus; he didn’t trust himself as much in a gunfight anymore.

             
“Welcome back, guys,” he said.  While Imad could pass for just about any Muslim tribesman from East Africa, under normal circumstances he talked with an indeterminate Midwestern twang that he’d probably picked up during his eighteen years in Special Forces.  “How’s the leg, Paul?”

             
“Hurts,” Paul replied with a half-grimace, half-smirk.  As if to say, “What do you think, jackass?”

             
Imad jerked his head at the door, and I led the way through.

             
The room had once been a conference room, but all the slick “big business” stuff, like padded chairs and the long oak conference table, had been stripped out.  In their place was a far more sophisticated operations center than we’d ever had before.

             
In addition to the maps and overhead imagery plastered across most of the walls, there were two plasma screens, which at that point were running UAV footage.  There was an inset of Al Jazeera on one of them, with subtitles.  The comm suite set up on two folding tables would make most tech-heads faint.  Other boards were being used to put up photos of Persons of Interest, High Value Targets, and a growing web of interconnections that our intel had managed to discover.  It still looked like a tangled mess with lots of loose ends.

             
Alek was standing in the center, his arms folded, rubbing his chin as he stared at the intel board.  Haas was standing next to him, his hands clasped behind his back.  Alek turned to look at us as we came through the door.  His frown relaxed slightly at the sight.

             
To say Alek was a big man would be like saying the Persian Gulf is wet.  He was Samoan.  Need I say more?  He had spent most of his Marine Corps career in Force Reconnaissance and MARSOC, which was how I had met him.  After he retired, and I got out, we formed Praetorian with several other like-minded SF and Recon types.

             
Alek came over and shook my hand with a meaty paw.  “Good to have you back, gunfighters,” he said.  “We just got a check-in from Hal’s team; they’re in the clear, no casualties.”  He looked at me.  “How’d it go?  We were watching, but you were the guy on the ground.”

             
I hefted my kitbag full of gear into a corner.  “Aside from now being in a shooting war with the Iraqi government, it didn’t go too bad,” I admitted, “though I might shoot Somoza if he ever tries some stupid shit like that again.”  I filled him in on the Liberty Petroleum manager’s bullshit.  “Has he not been paying attention for the last three years?”

             
“A lot of people haven’t been,” Haas said dryly.  “Mr. Somoza is hardly the most egregious example, either.  Fortunately, our employer is cut from a somewhat different cloth.”  He smiled coldly.  “I imagine Mr. Somoza is being rather thoroughly dressed down, right now.”

             
Jim and I traded a glance at that.  We could only hope.  The fucking idiot had almost gotten himself killed, along with probably several of us.  With our gear out of the way, we joined Alek and Haas at the intel board.

             
“We’ve been interrogating the bad guys you fingered on the way to Tikrit,” Haas said, his eyes fixed on the board instead of on any of us.  “Mister al Salahudin didn’t have much to say at first, but he has been persuaded to start cooperating.  He had a very interesting story.

             
“It seems that various insurgent cells were contacted some two months ago, out of the blue.  He had no information as to what organization made the contact; most of these cells weren’t supposed to be in contact with anyone.  That’s the way many of them functioned during the American occupation, to avoid leaving enough of a trail for SOF to roll them up.”

             
He stroked his chin.  “Whoever made contact, according to Saif, they are setting up a major operation in central Iraq, and soon.  He does not have details, or is still resisting giving them up.”

             
“Who would have that kind of intelligence, and reason to kick off a ruckus in central Iraq, while the Iraqi government is occupied with trying to pacify Kirkuk?” Alek asked.

             
“Iran,” I said, without hesitation.

             
“Wait a minute,” Malachi put in, “Don’t the Iranians have a good relationship with the federal government here?  Why would they stir up trouble?”

             
Haas snorted, and looked at Alek.  “I think you need to bring your newbie up to speed a little bit better,” he said.  Pinning Malachi with cold eyes, he said, “The fact of the matter is, with the fall of Syria, the Iranians have gotten nervous.  Syria was effectively their puppet state.  With its loss to the Salafists, the balance of power has changed.  The increasing activity of AQI here in Iraq has them nervous, but they haven’t indicated that they’re willing to become directly involved yet.  It’s not their way, anyway.  The IRGC has a long track record of using proxies and small local cells.  Odds are good that this is mainly intended to go after the Salafists.”  I think it was the longest speech I’d ever heard Haas give.

             
“At any rate, you have some idea of how the security situation could very well turn even worse in the next few weeks,” he said.  “My suggestion would be to get all the Liberty personnel out of Kirkuk province at the least.  They should still be relatively safe in Iraqi Kurdistan proper, provided the violence in Kirkuk does not lead the Iraqi government to attempt to invade the Kurdish provinces.”

             
None of us reacted much.  Alek was still staring at the intel board, looking thoughtful, and the rest of my team was too tired.  We’d been up for a long time already.

             
“Anything else?” Alek asked finally.

             
Haas shook his head, frustration written on his features.  “Most of my contacts have either gone quiet, or have fled the fighting and are therefore out of contact.  Right now, Assam and Saif are the best leads we have.”  He looked around at us.  “So I had probably better get back to working on them.  I expect you have some after-actions to run, and you probably don’t need me hanging around for it.”

             
Alek turned slightly away from the intel board, but didn’t take his eyes off it.  “Thanks, Haas.  Good luck with those assholes.”

             
Haas smirked.  “Which ones, Mackey and Somoza, or the insurgents?”  Without waiting for an answer, he left the room.

             
Once the door shut, Alek picked up a remote and switched the input on the second plasma screen.  The lined, cold-eyed face of retired Colonel Tom Heinrich appeared, with more maps and intel screens behind him.  “You hear all that?” Alek asked.

             
“I did,” Tom said.  “Nothing especially new.  So how do you want to proceed?”

             
“I think he’s right,” Alek said.  “We need to get the rest of the Liberty personnel out.  They’re just targets right now.”

             
“Agreed,” Tom said, “especially since we don’t really have much more than Haas does at the moment.”

             
“We need to consider how we’re going to continue running ops, if Liberty is pulled back,” I pointed out.  “Haas is okay, but I doubt even the more level-headed manager types are going to be too happy if they find out that we knew about the IRGC setting up networks with loosely affiliated terrorists two months ago, and took this job solely so that we could be in position to fuck up their plans.  And if they’re all up here, and we’re disappearing into the south to hunt Qods Force, they’re going to start asking questions.”

             
“As long as we keep that element quiet, and keep their people safe, I don’t think they’ll care all that much as to what we do in the background,” Jim said.  “It’s results that matter.  They just don’t have to see
all
the results.”