Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (5 page)

             
It also helped to have the hardcopy, because none of us entirely trusted anything that ran on batteries.  We’d all experienced too many instances of the fancy electronic toys shitting the bed.

             
“Wow,” he finally said.  “Holy shit.  Jeff, I don’t think we’ve got an attack or anything here, I think we’ve got a meeting going on.”

             
“What makes you think that?” I asked, the thermals back at my eyeballs as I held the intercom mic with one hand.

             
“I’m recognizing a couple of kunyahs,” he responded.  “It sounds like Abu Fariq and Saif al Salahudin are on site.”

             
“Damn,” Larry muttered.  “Those aren’t small-fry.”

             
They weren’t.  Abu Fariq was a known “facilitator.”  He didn’t usually get his hands dirty himself, but he was a top supplier and smuggler.  He wasn’t really a part of any particular group—he was freelance.  Saif al Salahudin was a hitman, for lack of a better term.  He didn’t generally go for big, explosive ops, but he had personally killed at least twenty-five high-level government officials.  There were suspicions that several of them had been executed for not following instructions from either Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood, which was doing less and less to distance themselves from the resurgent terror organization.  Like Abu Fariq, he was a freelancer who was known to have worked with Ansar al Islam, Jaysh al Mahdi, former Baathists, and AQI.

             
“What the hell do those two have to talk about?” I mused, watching for any sign of the entourages that Abu Fariq in particular would have along.  There wasn’t anyone outside on this side of the town.  “Al Salahudin doesn’t usually go for the bigger ops that would require Abu Fariq’s services.”

             
“Maybe he’s branching out,” Larry offered.  He had his own thermals out and was scanning.  He reached for the mic.  “Nick, have we got a DF on this chatter?”

             
“Working on it,” was the reply.  “It’s close, but I don’t think the meet has gone down yet.  It sounds like they’re still trying to link up.”

             
“Are they trying to talk each other in?  Can we get a rough location?” I asked.

             
“Let me listen and I might be able to tell you,” Nick answered.  I shut up and kept watching the town.

             
For a while, the only sound in the cab was the occasional ping or creak from the cooling engine, or the faint rustle of either Larry or me shifting our positions.

             
“So if we do have two HVTs here,” Larry ventured, “how do you want to play it?  Do we break out of the op to take ‘em, or do you want to just call it in and move on?”

             
I thought about it for a minute.  It was a hell of a question.  The primary mission was still to reconnoiter Tikrit.  Overall, that could be way more important than two insurgent bully-boys meeting in a Podunk little Iraqi farm village.  On the other hand, none of us liked leaving any of these fuckers standing.  If we could take them out on the way to somewhere else, usually we’d take the opportunity.

             
I shook my head.  “We’ll hold here for a little while, and see if we can nail them down, then call it in.  Mike’s team might be able to helo in and hit them while we move on.  I don’t want to compromise our presence before we even get to Tikrit.”

             
“Guys, I think I’ve got a general location,” Nick announced over the intercom.  “I can’t give you a precise position, but they are definitely south, in Leylan.  I might have a location picked out from their chatter, but we’re definitely going to have to move to get eyes-on.”

             
“Roger,” I replied.  “Where to?”  I motioned to Larry, who put his thermals back on the seat next to him and reached down to start the truck up again.  I hoped that the bad guys in town wouldn’t be able to hear the truck starting, or at least wouldn’t get too suspicious about it, but sitting here with the diesel rumbling would raise suspicions, too.  In some ways, this was turning into a dress rehearsal for Tikrit.

             
“Start moving due south; I think we’re looking at somewhere close to the radio tower.”

             
I looked over at Larry, who nodded.  “I see it.”

             
I keyed the mic again.  “Who’s running comm back there?”

             
“Malachi,” Nick said.

             
“Have him get a link with Alek or Imad back in Erbil, and put me through.”  We’d have to get Mike’s team up and the helo turning fast if we were going to make this work.  Granted, the bad guys didn’t have the fear they might have had back in the days when the US Army and Marine Corps effectively ran the country, but they still probably wouldn’t hang around all that long.  We had a narrow window of opportunity, and I wanted to take advantage of it.

             
It took a couple of minutes before Imad’s voice came over the little speaker.  “Hillbilly, Spearchucker.  You guys aren’t in Tikrit already, are you?”

             
“Negative,” I replied.  “We are in the vicinity of the village of Yehyava.”  I rattled off the four digit grid coordinate for the town.  “We have a SIGINT hit on two HVTs, Abu Fariq and Saif al Salahudin.  They appear to be having a meet in the town; we are moving to get eyes on the exact location.  I’m requesting that Speedy’s team spin up and proceed to the target once we designate it.”

             
“What is the security situation on the ground?” Imad asked.  He didn’t ask if we were sure; none of us would call an audible on a raid if we weren’t.

             
“We are moving toward the target area, no outer security spotted yet,” I replied.  “We will update with any and all information we gather between now and when the team gets on target.”

             
“Roger,” Imad said.  There was a pause.  “Speedy is on his way to the TOC now, estimate they will be wheels up in twenty minutes.”  Mike’s team was on QRF duty, which meant they were on fifteen minute strip alert as it was.

             
Let’s see…wheels up in twenty minutes, maybe twenty more minutes until the helos could be on target.  We had forty minutes, maybe, to gather all the information that we could and pipe it to Mike and his boys, so they could come up with a solid plan in the air.  More like we had about twenty minutes.  All of this was of course contingent on the meeting going that long, and the targets staying in the vicinity.  It was going to be tight.

             
Larry revved the engine, sending the tanker trundling back up onto the road that ran between the two villages, then across and back onto the bare dirt next to another farm compound that barely qualified as being on the outskirts of Leylan.  After some bouncing and rocking that was doubtless getting him cussed out by all the guys back in the tank, he found a rutted dirt track between the fields, and started us down toward the town proper.

             
I had kept the thermals out, and was trying to see what I could.  There wasn’t much, even in spite of the bouncing; most Iraqis headed inside as soon as it got dark.  I could see a couple of dogs, and a glimmer of something warm deeper into the town, but no people, not yet.

             
“We might have to get out and see what we can see on foot,” I said.  “I don’t want to drive this thing straight into the middle of their little powwow.”

             
“I think you’re right,” Larry said, as he eased off the gas.  “Do we want to get the guys out of the tank?”

             
“We’re going to have to get at least one out,” I said, as I hefted my rifle and reached for the door handle.  “We’ll need somebody out on backup while we run recon.  I don’t think we’ve got time for more than a driver to get out before we take off, though.  We’ve got to get eyes-on and back to the truck in time to pass the data-dump to Mike.”  I paused and reached for the intercom.  “Nick, Larry and I are unassing to get eyes on the target.  Get Bryan out here to drive in case things go pear-shaped.  We should be back in thirty minutes.  If we aren’t, and you don’t hear a firefight, hold for another ten, then get in contact with Mike’s team and come get us.  If we take contact, we will fall back to here, and need to be ready to move as soon as we climb on.”  We didn’t really have the leeway for the usual five-point contingency plan.

             
“Roger,” Nick replied. “Bryan’s coming out now.”  I put the mic back on its rack, and reached under the seat where my bump helmet was stored.  It wouldn’t provide any ballistic protection, but it was light, and provided a more comfortable NVG mount than a halo.  I fitted it on my head, attached the PVS-14s, checked them, and then opened my door and dropped out of the cab.

             
I brought my rifle up and took a knee after I carefully closed the truck’s door.  Behind me, I could hear the faint creak of the tank hatch coming open, then the rustling and grunting as Bryan got his lanky ass out of the tank.  Bryan was taller than me, though we weighed about the same.  It made things interesting for him in tight spaces like the concealed compartments in the Bears.  Come to think of it, we had a lot of guys who were too big for such tight spaces, one way or another.

             
He managed to pull himself out by grasping one of the ladder steps that was welded on the side of the tank, and levered his legs out before lowering himself to the ground.  His rifle and vest followed, then he was pulling himself up into the cab.  “I got this,” he said.  “Good hunting.”

             
I raised my hand in acknowledgement, and led out.  Larry fell in half a dozen steps behind me.

             
The town was a maze of walls, houses, and shadows.  The NVGs dispelled a lot of the shadows, at least enough to keep anyone from successfully hiding in them.  Unfortunately, there was a lot of open ground between those shadows, which pretty much precluded our using them to hide as well.  We were exposed, even with all the lights off; the moon was out, and though it was close to the horizon, and therefore dimmer than it might be, it still provided enough illum to see fairly well.  Our best bet would be to get close to the buildings and keep close, avoiding crossing large open areas as much as possible.  That presented a whole other set of problems.

             
The first of those problems presented itself as soon as Larry and I got across the open field and over the road to the first compound we could get to.  As soon as we came around the corner, the dogs started barking.

             
I didn’t know if any Iraqis actually kept the dogs; none of them seemed to have a home, but just roamed the streets.  I’d heard that most Iraqis, being at least semi-faithful Muslims, viewed dogs as unclean, so they wouldn’t keep them, but just let them run around feral.  They were also the nastiest dogs I’d ever run into.  Jim had had to shoot one in Kirkuk when it came for him, and wouldn’t back down to the usual posturing that turns a dog aside.

             
Now the damned chelubs, as they were called locally, were about to compromise our little leader’s recon.  Fuck.

             
I froze as we crouched in the near-nonexistent shadow of the wall.  We were in another open area, without vegetation or even walls for cover.  There was just nothing.  I scanned the surrounding buildings carefully as I lowered myself to a knee, my rifle up in the low ready position, my thumb resting lightly on the pressure switch for the PEQ-15’s IR laser.  Larry took up a position beside me, faced back across and down the road.

             
There was no other sound, no movement, no thermal signatures of curious people looking out to see what the commotion was about.  There was, in fact, no sign at all that the dogs’ barking had raised any kind of alarm.  I guessed that the locals were too used to the feral things yapping at all hours that they just discounted it now.

             
I sincerely hoped that the terrorist motherfuckers in town would do the same.  So far, it looked like they would.

             
After a minute of waiting, acutely conscious that our time window was rapidly closing, I decided to take the chance and push.  I reached back, thumped my fist against Larry’s shoulder, and then got to my feet.  Behind me, I could hear Larry levering himself up as well.  As quietly as I could, I started forward, following the wall to my left.

             
The compound terminated at another wide open space, crossed by two roads, with another cluster of houses on the far side of the second road.  There were still no signs of life, aside from the handful of dogs I could now pick out by their thermal signatures rummaging around in the piles of trash near the roads.

             
There was nothing for it.  We had to get across that open space, and with the timeline being what it was, speed would have to suffice for security.  I looked back at Larry, and when he looked forward at me, I motioned that I was going to cross the danger area.  Not all that wise, running straight across a wide open danger area, but I didn’t see much choice at the moment.  If we tried going around, we’d just be on the road, which was easily as bad.  There were no good choices, especially as the minutes ticked away.