Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (4 page)

             
Hal was the first one in.  He was tall, skinny, and sandy-haired.  His callsign had come from the first few Hal 9000 jokes, to which he had responded with an eerie, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”  We couldn’t turn Hal 9000 into a workable over-the-air callsign, so we just settled on Dave.

             
We shook hands as the rest of his team shuffled into the now extremely cramped house.  “I hear you guys get to go be Secret Squirrels down south,” he said.

             
“More like Ricky Recon, but yeah, something like that,” I answered.  “Alek bring you up to speed?”

             
He nodded.  “More or less.  I’m hoping you guys are going to stick around for at least a day, help us set up, do left-seat, right-seat, that sort of thing.”
              “That’s the plan,” I told him.  “We can’t spare more than about a day, though.  If what Haas told us is true, we might be on a tight timeline on this one.”

             
He grunted agreement.  “If the IA’s moving, yeah, I bet.  Let us get our shit squared away, and we’ll sit down and go over the turnover.  I take it you’ve got a folder for me?”

             
I pointed at the ops room.  “Right in there.”

             
He hitched his kitbag over his shoulder.  “Let’s get to it, then.”

              We went well into the night, going over the intel folder I’d worked up for Kirkuk.  Local leaders, organizations, factions, neighborhood polarizations, everything was gone over.  We had photos of Persons of Interest, and imagery of the city, sometimes block-by-block, which had been extensively written on.  There were notes on ethnic and tribal divisions, transcripts of announcements from the mosques and any public meetings, as well as Haas’ notes on any and all of his contacts.  It was a very thorough picture of what we’d managed to learn since we’d gotten to Kirkuk.  It was still only a tiny glimmer of the ground truth, but it was a start.

             
Hal and Sammy soaked it up like sponges, asking pointed questions that sometimes Jim and I could answer, sometimes we couldn’t.  The truth was, we hadn’t been on the ground in Kirkuk for much more than a week.  They’d pass it all along to their boys, along with requiring them to go through the whole shebang at the next available opportunity.  That was the way we worked in Praetorian.  The more everybody on the team knew about the situation, the better.

             
Jim and I took Hal and Sammy out onto the streets for a while, getting the feel for the city, pointing out the major “poles” of the power matrix as we’d been able to perceive it.  The sun was almost up by the time we got back.  Fortunately, it had been a quiet night; aside from a few bursts of small-arms fire, there hadn’t been any major incidents.  We got back to the safehouse and most of my team bedded down for the day.  We’d pack up and get moving after dark.

Chapter 3

              Night fell over Kirkuk with the usual mingling of the call to prayer with honking car horns, shouts, and sporadic gunfire.  There hadn’t been any IED blasts for a few days, and that night was as quiet as ever, aside from the shooting.  Of course, in Iraq, shooting wasn’t necessarily a surefire way of knowing that somebody was getting fucked up.  These people—and I include the Kurds in this—had a scary disregard for the laws of gravity.  They fired weapons into the air to celebrate all sorts of things—weddings, births, funerals.  It made it really difficult sometimes to tell when something was going down, or somebody was just really happy, and decided to chance getting one of their own rounds back the hard way.

             
We waited until the sun was well down and the bulk of the populace had gone inside before we went to work.  Just because we were in technically friendly territory didn’t mean we necessarily wanted a lot of people see where we were going, much less how.

             
Bob and Little Bob headed out first, to go retrieve the vehicles we would be using.  They were a little special, and so we kept them cached at the Liberty Petroleum compound outside the city, near the Baba Dome East complex.  We didn’t want just anybody poking around them.

             
While we waited for the Bobs, the rest of us got our gear together.  We packed all of it; we weren’t planning on coming back here.  Even in friendly territory, we didn’t like to keep a safehouse in one place for long.  Hal would probably relocate a day or so after we left.

             
We stacked rucksacks and kitbags full of gear and optics just inside the door.  It was dark, and most of the populace had turned in, but we didn’t want to chance being seen by wandering eyes, whether human or the electronic eyes of the UAVs that the Iraqis had bought a few years back.

             
Then we sat down on our rucks and waited.  It often comes to that.  You get everything lined up, you’re ready to go into enemy territory, or at least unfriendly territory, and then you wind up just sitting there for a couple hours, trying not to let your mind get too far into how badly things could go, or how short your life could wind up becoming over the next hours.  There wasn’t much talking, and most of us tried to sleep, mostly without success.  I was still going over the plan in my head, even as I closed my eyes.  Had I accounted for all the gear and supplies?  Was the route good?  Had I gone over all the possible contingencies?

             
That got me started on contingencies.  We’d all seen over the years just how pear-shaped things could get downrange.  East Africa had only been the most serious example.  Of course, it was now the yardstick for all such planning, and I found myself going back over how wrong some of that job had gone, and applying similar scenarios to the present task.

             
It wasn’t terribly encouraging.

              About three hours later, the trucks showed up, rumbling and rattling their way down the street from the north.  We started stirring, and Hal pushed out security to make sure we could load up unobserved.

             
There were two trucks; one a big water tanker, the other a dump truck.  Large vehicles like them weren’t all that common on Iraqi streets, but they weren’t terribly remarkable, either.  At least not on the outside.

             
The inside was another matter.  While an inspection, either looking in the top of the tank or the dump truck’s bucket, would show water in one and gravel in the other, just as expected, both were blinds.  The water only filled the top quarter of the tank, with a black-painted false bottom beneath it.  The dump truck was the same.  Underneath the false floors were spaces for up to five operators, albeit cramped space, and their gear.  Fiberoptics provided the ability to look out in all directions.  An extensive comm suite was built into the trucks’ frames.  They were our UURSVs—Ultimate Urban R&S Vehicles.  You can thank Malachi for that bit of inanity.

             
Larry had, after the groans had died down, and Malachi had gotten a couple of hefty smacks upside the head for coming up with another acronym, pointed out that if you squinted at it, UURSV looked kind of like “Ursa,” the Latin word for bear.  So we started calling them Bears.  And we still gave Malachi shit for the original name.

             
Loading up took some doing.  While Hal’s guys held security, we opened up the hatches on the undersides of the Bears, which really weren’t very big; they had to fit inconspicuously as far under the vehicles as possible.  It made for a tight squeeze for the rucks, and for guys like Larry and Little Bob.  We unscrewed the hatch covers and started shoving the gear through first.  Men and weapons would go last.

             
Larry and Little Bob stayed out to drive.  Jim and I would ride shotgun.  Paul led the way into the tanker, wriggling his way through the hatch, pushing his ruck and rifle ahead of him.  Once he was in, he turned and reached out to take the rest of the gear before anyone else followed him in.  Bob was doing the same in the dump truck.  Once all the gear was in, Nick, Bryan, Juan, and Malachi wormed their way into the compartments.  Jim and I closed and latched the hatches.  Now the Bears looked like worn, beat-up old working trucks.

             
It was almost 0300 when Jim and I finished our final walk-arounds and climbed into the cabs.  We might not see each other until we exfiltrated from Tikrit.  It wouldn’t do to have two such vehicles seen hanging around the same area.  Larry fired up the tanker as soon as I was in the passenger seat, my gear and rifle secured under the floor panel, and we trundled off to the east.  We had the longer route; Jim and Little Bob would be taking Bear B straight south.

             
We wove our way through the streets of Kirkuk until we hit the main road heading southeast, toward As Sulaymaniyah province.  It wasn’t much of a road.  It really was just a dirt and gravel track more than a road.  It was still better laid than any in Somalia.

             
As we got out of the city and into the flat, open farmlands that surrounded it to the south, I picked up the intercom.  “How’s the ride back there?”

             
“I’m glad we decided to pad the inside of these things,” Nick replied.  “It’s still going to be pretty fucking cramped when you and Larry get in here.”

             
“Since when were you ever comfortable in a hide?” I asked.

             
“Since never,” he allowed.  “So much for going private sector for an easier life.”

             
“You wouldn’t want an easier life,” I pointed out.  “You told me that five years ago.  Said something about getting out because things had become too easy.  You knew where your next paycheck was coming from, etc.”

             
“I don’t remember saying that,” he said.

             
“Of course you don’t.  You don’t remember what you said yesterday,” I taunted.

             
“Fuck you,” he chuckled.  “Your memory’s not much better than mine.”

             
“Hey, it may not be by much, but it’s still better.”

             
There was a pause, then, “I can still kick your ass.”

             
“You wish,” I replied.  “You’re still playing catchup from after you got out.”

             
Larry was listening to this byplay, shaking his head and chuckling as he watched the road.  The banter came easily, even in spite of the stress of the mission.  It was how we passed the time, and kept from thinking too much about what might be coming down the road.  We still had to think about it, and I can tell you, every one of us was.  But for a little while, even as we focused on the task at hand, we could distance ourselves from it a little.

             
The lights of Kirkuk dwindled in the rear-view mirror, as flat fields stretched on either side of the road.  The farmhouses, some cloaked in palm groves, others simply standing alone among the fields, were dark.  Even in an oil-rich country like Iraq, power was getting sketchy, and usually was all but nonexistent in the rural areas.

             
As we neared the small villages of Yehyavah and Leylan, we found that it wasn’t just the rural areas.  The two small towns, separated only by the road, were as dark as any of the farmhouses.  I couldn’t tell if any of the houses had a generator running; the rumble of the truck’s engine, along with the little additions we’d made to make it rattle more than it should, made hearing much of anything outside the cab all but impossible.  There were no lights showing, though, even through windows.  Granted, it was the wee hours of the morning, but I would have expected at least someone to have a light on for security.  Unless having a light on had turned into an invitation, which was entirely possible.

             
The intercom crackled.  “Jeff,” Nick said, “we’re getting some chatter.”

             
A lot of the money—of whatever denomination—we’d made in the last year or so hadn’t gotten banked so much as it had been put back into gear and equipment.  Among that gear was some top-quality signals intelligence, or SIGINT gear.  We could listen in on just about anything but SINCGARS frequency-hopping transmissions or anything tight-beam.  That made intercepting Al Qaeda or Jaysh al Mahdi signals a breeze.  They were getting more sophisticated, but that sophistication hadn’t bled over into their communications, yet.

             
“What kind of chatter?” I asked.

             
“Nothing concrete,” he replied, “but it does sound like bad-guy chatter.  Can’t pin it down, yet, this translation program’s not that great.”

             
“Does it sound like something we need to loiter for, or do we go ahead and push?”  I wasn’t going to pass up any information we could get, and if AQI or Jaysh al Mahdi was sniffing around Kirkuk, it couldn’t mean anything good for our employers, regardless of what the Iraqi government might be up to.  If it smelled like something brewing that they might need warning about, we needed to see what we could find out.  Jim could handle Tikrit for an extra day, if need be.

             
That was one of the advantages of working this way.  We had a hell of a lot more operational flexibility than we ever would have had staying in the uniformed military.  Sometimes our liaisons with Liberty got a little bit nervous about just how fast and loose we played with mission parameters, but one of our founding principles had been, “Ground truth trumps all.”  We had also borrowed Pete Blaber’s axiom, “When in doubt, develop the situation.”  We didn’t have the kind of support and backup that we might have had if we were working with the Army or Marine Corps in the old days, when they could still project power.  We were the tripwire between our clients and the bad guys.  So we had a tendency to check things out when they caught our attention.

             
There was a long pause before Nick answered.  “I can’t be sure, but this does sound like a little more than a couple of cells talking.  I think we might want to stick around for a little bit.”

             
I pointed to the side of the road, and said to Larry, “Let’s pull off and kill it.”  He nodded, pulling the truck over into the open field just to the northwest of Yehyava and shutting the engine down.

             
I reached under the dash and pulled out the thermal binoculars.  They were bulkier than the thermal attachments on our PVS-14s, but they had a lot better resolution.  If there were bad guys out there in the dark, I wanted to be able to see them first.  I started their cool-down, then reached under the panel and brought my rifle and mags up to where I could get at them quickly in the event we needed to shoot our way out.  That was considerably less than ideal, but it never paid to count on ideal.

             
With the binoculars cooled down, I raised them to my eyes and scanned the town.  Larry, having shut down the truck, was retrieving his own night vision and FAL from their compartments under the floor.

             
The town was still and cold.  I saw a few dogs rooting around in the trash on the outskirts, and a couple of donkeys, but no people were moving, at least not where I could pick them up.  Granted, Yehyava was decent-sized as far as rural Iraqi villages went, and there were a lot of cinderblock walls and narrow streets where somebody might be lurking, without being visible from outside the town.  We weren’t necessarily going to see much from here, but I figured we’d probably find out more from the SIGINT rig that Nick was listening to in back than from direct observation.

             
I lowered the thermals and keyed the intercom.  “Talk to me, Nick.”

             
“Stand by, Jeff.”  Nick sounded like he was rummaging through something.  I realized it was probably the little glorified Rolodex we kept with most of the major known terrorist players and their known aliases.  It was a risk taking it along, but it was a helpful little quick reference, and wasn’t all that different from the decks of cards that had been used in the past, particularly when going after HVTs in post-Saddam Iraq during the US occupation, before we had pulled out and the civil war had erupted.