Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (19 page)

             
I opened fire at about the same time that Larry resumed shooting from the bed.  We had to rely on volume of fire to either kill the bad guys, or keep their heads down.  There was no cover to speak of.  I pumped an entire magazine into the windshield of the lead car.  The glass spidered into a million fragments and the car swerved suddenly, hitting the dirt on the side of the road and going out of control.  I reloaded and stayed on it, thumping four more rounds into the guy who staggered out of the back seat with an old G3.  He staggered backward, hit the side of the car, and fell on his face.

             
I turned to the second car, which was slowing, its windshield as smashed and crazed as the first one.  Larry dropped his empty mag as I started shooting at the guys who tried spilling out of the doors.

             
The light sucked and I was still shaky.  I’m not sure I hit any of them.  I saw at least one fall and try to crawl away; another dropped and was still.  Then the Hueys were coming in with a roar and a storm of sand and gravel.

Chapter 11

              My first priority when we got off the birds was to get Malachi treated.

             
We had landed on a hasty LZ on the slopes at the base of the Qara Sird Mountains.  A cluster of GP tents formed our little FOB, far away from Sulaymaniyah or Erbil, and far away from Liberty Petroleum personnel who might ask too many questions.  Green farms lay below, while the barren, rocky slopes of the mountains rose above us to the north.

             
Malachi was in the other bird.  I made sure that the prisoners were in hand, then jogged over to the second helo, cursing the headache that was now pounding through my skull.  I’d have to pop some meds later, and sleeping wasn’t an option for a while, in case I actually had a concussion.

             
He was awake, finally, and holding the bandage against the side of his face.  I hadn’t seen that much as we’d loaded him up, but I was pretty sure he’d lost the eye.  A glance at Jim got me a grim shake of the head.  I was right.  Dammit.

             
Juan and I helped him down out of the chopper, and started him toward the tents.  He wasn’t moving that well, and stumbled several times on the way.  A combination of the concussion I was reasonably sure he had, and shit depth perception from looking through one eye that was still probably pretty hazy.  We were a man down, no question.

             
Once we’d gotten him onto a cot, and had Brad, one of the two actual doctors we had on staff, working on him, we gathered in the second tent.  The prisoners were still gagged, blindfolded, and flex-cuffed in the far tent.

             
The FOB was home to one of our two support teams we’d put together in the last year.  Brad was the team leader; since he was busy, Tony met us in the main tent.  The place was the opposite of fancy; no air conditioning, no electric lights, no generator for that matter.  A couple of solar panels out back charged batteries for the comm suite—that was about it for electricity.  The cots were low-grade camping models that weren’t large or comfortable, but could be packed small and light.  Most of what had been brought in was mission-essential.  Comm, food, water, ammo, and medical supplies were a lot higher priority than comfort.

             
“Well, our spook’s late,” Tony announced as we sat down on cots or folding stools and started pounding water.  My throat was painfully dry; it wasn’t helping my headache any.

             
“Why the fuck isn’t he here?” I asked.  “It’s not like it was a secret that we were coming here with prisoners.  Where is he?”

             
“He got a phone call this morning, and left at first light for Dukan,” Tony said.  “Said he needed to follow up on it.”

             
“What the fuck is in Dukan?” Bob asked.  “It’s not like he’s here to spy on the fucking Kurds.”

             
Tony shrugged.  “I don’t know.  He wouldn’t say.  I’ll be honest; this guy’s starting to piss me off.  He seems to think his secret-squirrel bullshit puts him a cut above the rest of us.”

             
“I’ll fucking crush him,” I said.  “He’s not being paid to be James fucking Bond.  He’s being paid to be an interrogator and analyst.  If he doesn’t like it, tough shit.  He’ll do his damn job, or I’ll see him shipped back to the States as fucking cargo.”  My headache, coupled with the fact that I’d just sustained my first serious casualty as a team leader, wasn’t helping my already scant patience.

             
One of Tony’s guys, a skinny former 0311 named Andrew, came into the tent.  “Tim’s back,” he said.  “And he brought somebody with him.”

             
Hands went to weapons immediately.  “Any ID?” I asked, before Tony could.

             
“He’s not Iraqi,” Andrew said.  “Looks American.”

             
Jim and I traded glances.  “Definitely not one of ours, though?” I asked.

             
He shook his head.  “He looks kind of familiar, but I couldn’t say from where.  Some skinny, hatchet-faced dude with black hair.”

             
Larry, Jim, and I all said it at the same time.  “Haas.”

             
It was Haas who came through the tent flap, escorted by Bing and Morrie.  Tim, wide-eyed and a little shamefaced, came along in tow.  Haas had changed out of his ever-present suit, and was now wearing the “CIA Starter Kit” for the first time since I’d met him—khakis, Arc’teryx hardshell jacket, and a plain tan ball cap.  I figured he probably had a pistol under the jacket.

             
Haas showing up armed didn’t worry me.  The fact that he knew we were here worried me.  It meant we had a leak, and that leak would have to get plugged, fast.  Any chance we had of success here meant working in the shadows as much as possible.

             
“What are you doing here, Haas?” I asked bluntly.  If he was here, there was no point in beating around the bush.

             
“I was going to say I was just in the neighborhood,” he said dryly, “but I doubt that would go over very well.”  Stony silence and blank stares were all he got.

             
He sobered.  “I’m
here
because your rent-a-spook,” he jerked his thumb at Tim, who actually flinched, “is out of his element.  I don’t know what he padded his resume with, but he isn’t very good at fieldcraft.  I got wind of him poking around weeks ago.”  I glared at Tim, who looked like he wanted to shrink through the floor.  I thought of Danny, the Special Activities spook who’d been right beside us all the way through Djibouti and Somalia, until he was killed in Kismayo.  He’d be rolling over in his grave, if there’d been enough left of him, and we’d been able to bring him out.

             
“As for why I’m here,” Haas continued, “I started putting two and two together, and damned if it didn’t keep coming up four.”  He held his hands up to placate us.  “I’m sure nobody else at Liberty is making the connection; that’s what they pay me for.  First you scoop up Saif al Salahudin on the way to Tikrit; fine, that’s somewhat within the purview of your contract.  But once you got the civvies out of K1 Airbase, your team disappeared.”  He was looking straight at me.  “Shortly after that, a person of interest that I pointed out to you vanishes in what appears to be a night raid in Arrafa, well after there are no Liberty personnel in Kirkuk province anymore.  One might almost think you were pursuing an agenda and not telling your employers about it.”

             
He was watching me closely.  I wasn’t giving him anything—blank face, dead eyes.  I still didn’t know where this guy was coming from, or quite what he wanted.  That he had enough to burn us, simply due to our being here, made him a threat, but I’d already made the case that we should bring him on board to Alek.  I figured that at least meant I should hear him out.

             
“Now, that might just be a little bit of paranoia from an old spook, except that it’s Praetorian Security involved.  The same Praetorian Security who was working for the CIA in East Africa a year ago, during that nasty business with the Camp Lemonier hostages.  The same Praetorian Security that Liberty was in fact warned by the State Department not to hire.

             
“Not only that, but shortly after this inexplicably infamous company, who everybody agrees is the new incarnation of the devil himself, or maybe Colonel Kurtz, though they can’t say for sure why, except for something about lots of dead Somalis in Kismayo, gets pulled off the Somalia mission, there is a firefight just outside Aden in Yemen.  A high-ranking officer in the Egyptian security forces is killed there.  At the time, it was passed off as AQAP attacking a security meeting between Egyptian and Yemeni officials.”

             
I had actually not heard that particular cover story.  Granted, I’d had other things on my mind in the weeks and months after slipping back into the US from East Africa.  The media was unreliable at best, flat out misinformation and propaganda at worst.  The fact that the official story blamed our raid on AQAP was actually kind of amusing.  They didn’t want to admit that we’d done what they didn’t have the balls to do—we’d taken down Mahmoud Al-Khalidi, aka Al-Masri, the terrorist who had masterminded the resurgence of Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda in Somalia, and planned and executed the overrun of the primary US base in the region.  I’d shot the man myself.

             
“At first that didn’t seem too far-fetched to me,” Haas continued.  “But being the man I am, I had to dig a little deeper.  What I couldn’t quite shake were the reports that the attackers had escaped out to sea.  That didn’t fit with AQAP.  They’d head back into the mountains, I was pretty sure.”  He looked around at all of us.  “Interestingly, no one could account for your whereabouts until over a week later, in Mumbai.  Now, given the fact that your primary CIA contact had been killed in Kismayo, some confusion during that time might be perfectly explainable.  But the timing is just a little bit
too
interesting to me.  The fact that you are decidedly persona non grata with certain very powerful people, for no apparent reason aside from possibly a hot extract from the middle of Kismayo, just makes it more interesting.”

             
“If you’ve got a point to make, Haas, kindly get to it,” I said.

             
“My point is, you’re not here just to safeguard oil workers,” he answered quietly.  “I think you’re here because you suspect the same thing I do; that the IRGC is preparing to make some sort of move in Iraq.  I think you decided you couldn’t leave the mission incomplete after Kismayo, so you went to Yemen and offed Al-Masri.  I don’t think you’ve stopped, either.  I think this is just another battle in a war you stepped into a year ago.  And I want in.”

             
There was a long silence.  When he didn’t get a reaction, Haas continued.  “I can provide contacts and sources that you don’t seem to have right now.  I’ve dug up target data for you already.  And I think I can safely say that you can trust me, especially since I’ve had my suspicions about your operations for a while now, and haven’t breathed a word of it to my employers or anybody else, including the two suits from State who are poking around Erbil right now.”

             
“What about your employers?” I asked.

             
“What about them?” he answered.  “They don’t need to know about my involvement any more than they need to know about yours.  If we get out of this alive, we can discuss contracts then.”  He frowned, looking down at the floor for a moment.  “Did you know Danny was a friend of mine?  We worked together when I was still with the Agency.  He’s sure not the only friend I’ve lost to these bastards.  There were reasons why I left the Agency two years before retirement.”

             
Some of the guys seemed to be a little in shock, particularly Tony’s guys.  Larry, Jim, and I weren’t all that surprised, but we had to play this carefully.  I supposed that the “sounding out” I’d been suggesting had just happened whether we wanted it or not, but when you’re operating without much in the way of support, out in the wind the way we were, it didn’t pay to take chances.  And being too trusting equaled taking chances.  “I don’t have the final say on that, Haas,” I said.  “I’m going to have to consult with the other partners.”

             
He nodded.  “I understand.  Don’t take too long, though.  I don’t think we have a lot of time to dick around.”

             
We didn’t, especially with an enemy facilitator in the next tent.  It was only a matter of time before the bad guys figured out he was missing, and acted accordingly.  We didn’t quite have the one advantage we’d had in Somalia anymore—there, the bad guys hadn’t had the slightest clue of who we were.  Here, there was already a price on our heads.  I wouldn’t put it past either AQI or Qods Force to try to send somebody after us in Erbil.  That was, of course, why we had a few of these little FOBs scattered around, off the record.

             
I traded glances with Jim, who nodded ever so slightly.  He’d keep an eye on Haas and our wayward rent-a-spook, Tim, while I went outside to make a call.  I grabbed the sat-phone off the comm bench, and headed outside.

             
It was getting warm as the day got later, but not as warm as down in the lowlands.  A light breeze passed through the low trees and rustled the tents.  I extended the antenna and dialed the number.  As far as we knew, the Iranians and Iraqi security forces still couldn’t listen in on satellite comms.  Unless the NSA decided to help them out, but that way lay a deeper paranoia than I was willing to entertain at the moment.

             
Alek answered it.  I was starting to wonder if he ever slept these days.  Being out of the field and in an op-center wasn’t good for him.  “Has our boy talked already?” he asked.

             
“Nope,” I answered.  “We haven’t even started the conversation yet.  We had an unexpected visitor.”

             
“What’s going on?” Alek was suddenly wary.  There weren’t supposed to be any unexpected visitors at the FOBs.

             
“Your boy Haas crashed the party,” I told him.  “Says Tim’s OPSEC sucks, and now he wants on board.  He also says that there are some State pukes poking around Erbil, and he seems to think they’re more interested in us than in Qods Force or a war between Baghdad and the KRG.”