Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (25 page)

Peering around the next corner, back toward the administration building, I spotted one more fire.  There were only two figures visible at it, even when I pulled out the NVGs from my belt and scanned.  Only the three heat signatures were visible—the fire and the two hajjis.  There were more mounds of refuse piled between us and the building; several looked like the remains of tents left to collapse.  More stuff to hide behind.

A quick scan showed no one else visible on the south side of the complex aside from the two at the fire.  I seemed to remember that the imagery showed the admin building as being U-shaped, with a possible main entrance inside the U.  That might be a good place to set the charges, provided there wasn’t anybody else hanging out in the little courtyard/parking lot between the arms of the U.

Carefully keeping the same casual pace, I stepped out around the corner, and headed toward the building.  I swung out into the open ground, putting the debris of the tent city between us and the fire.  Larry was right beside me.

Maintaining the casual attitude of just another couple of ISIS fighters on security, we moved up toward the building, bearing left, away from the fire.  The two next to it didn’t even look up as we went by.  They were chatting fairly loudly and staring at the fire, apparently completely unconcerned with the possibility
of intruders.  That was fine with me.  Let ‘em chat.  Just keep looking at that fire, Johnny Jihad.  Don’t look over here.  Nothing to see here.

We walked carefully; just like everywhere else in Iraq, there was trash fucking
everywhere
.  A kicked can could end this entire shenanigan.  But we slipped around the corner without being seen or heard.

I stopped just short of the courtyard and risked a peek.  Empty and dark.  And there was indeed a large double door
there.  Perfect.  In spite of the rumble of a generator, there weren’t any lights showing from the windows.  I tapped Larry and headed for the door.

There wasn’t a lot of detritus around the door to hide the charges.  That was a problem.  We didn’t want them getting spotted before it was time to go boom. 
We hadn’t brought shovels to dig them in, either.

“Shit,” I whispered.  But Larry
was a little more observant than I was.  He grabbed my shoulder and pointed.

It was hard to see in the dark, but there were several loose bricks down by the foundation.  They might provide enough room for the two satchels.  Keeping an eye on the door and the open end of the building as much as I could at the same time, I knelt down with Larry and started carefully easing the bricks out.

They were loose mainly because of cheap, disintegrating mortar.  There was a little bit of unavoidable scraping pulling them out, and I froze at every noise, sure that somebody either at one of the fires or inside was going to hear it.  But nobody came to investigate.  Finally, we had all six out.

There looked like a decent-sized hole behind them, albeit in complete darkness.  Taking the risk of putting my hand on a scorpion or a black widow, I reached in to see if we had enough room, or if we were about to shove two satchels of Semtex into the open entranceway of the building.

My fingers met an inner wall.  It felt like solid concrete; probably the edge of the floor.  I couldn’t find a break above it, either, just cinderblocks.  It looked like we had our hiding place.  I brought my satchel around and took the strap off, carefully arming the detonator before even more carefully pushing it into the hole.  Then I reached over for Larry’s.

A few hair-raising moments later, we were stacking the bricks back in as close to their original configuration as we could get. 
I briefly worried about the bricks blocking the cell signals we would use to detonate the explosives, but so far I hadn’t seen much disruption from being inside thicker walls.

Standing up and dusting off,
I looked and listened hard for anyone moving around.  All it would take would be one guy deciding to go inside…

But no one came around the corner.  There was no sound aside from the wind, the occasional crackle of the fires, and the low murmur of voices.  No alarm, no sign that anyone suspected anything.

Good.  Best not tempt fate.  As quietly as possible, we headed back into the darkness.

It took almost an hour of nerve-wracking movement to get back out.  There weren’t many other openings in the outer wall, but we used a different one anyway.  I didn’t start to breathe easy until we were a good hundred meters away, and even then I wasn’t relaxing.  We weren’t finished yet.

Our chosen RV point/OP was an abandoned farmhouse about five hundred meters north of the main gate.  It took another couple of hours of careful movement to get there.  By then, it was getting close to dawn.  Larry and I were the first ones on-site.

Over the next half hour, the rest of the team straggled in.  We were all exhausted; while it hadn’t been necessarily as physically demanding as a long movement over rough terrain with heavy packs, which we had all done many times, the sheer stress of that infiltration had wrung us all out.  Still, we couldn’t just call it a day.  We thought the meet was due that day, but couldn’t be sure.  Either way, we had to have eyes on the main gate all day.

I took first watch, going up to the roof with Bryan, and told Jim to put everybody else, minus one guy on security, to sleep.  It was going to be a long day.

Chapter 15

Somebody was shaking me awake.  I squinted up at Jim and nodded.  Checking my watch, I saw I’d been asleep for two and a half hours.  It felt more like ten minutes.  “Our guests are here,” he said quietly.

“Showtime,” I replied, and levered myself up off the floor.
  “Who’s on the roof?”

“
Marcus and Larry,” Jim replied before going to get the other four up.

It didn’t take long to get myself together; I’d slept in my vest, my rifle sling around one arm and the rifle itself touching my side.  I hadn’t been worried about rolling over on it.  We were all too damned tired to move wh
ile we slept.  The other four, who weren’t on the OP on the roof or on security on the door, were sprawled on the empty, packed dirt floor around me, fast asleep in spite of the sunlight streaming in the windows.

The rest were going to stay up on security down below.  I headed up the stairs to the roof to join
Marcus and Larry.  I wanted eyes on this.

I climbed the stairs and crouched down at the door, which was propped open, to crawl out onto the rooftop.  Like most Iraqi houses, this one had a low parapet around the roof.  A lot of people in this part of the world tend to sleep on the roof in the summer; that parapet
acted sort of like a safety rail and privacy screen.  It also helpfully served the purpose of concealment for a rooftop OP without having to change anything except knock a small loophole in it.

Marcus
and Larry were lying on the roof near the corner, where Bryan and I had knocked loopholes just large enough to look through with binoculars.  Both were watching the old prison’s main gate.

I crawled over to Larry, who
rolled aside and handed me the binoculars.  “Two Mercedes and a Sub just pulled up,” he whispered.  As far as we knew, there wasn’t anyone around to hear us, but old habits—many of which have kept us alive multiple times—die hard.  “The guards made ‘em all get out.  It doesn’t look like they’re searching the vehicles, but they’re definitely giving the passengers a bit of a hard time.”

I shimmied to the loophole and put the binoculars to my eyes. 
I had to adjust the focus a little, but finally the picture, partially obscured by the palm trees between us and the complex, came into view.

“Damn, Collins came out for this one,” I muttered.  Wearing his cheap suit again, he was standing there arguing with the bearded, camouflage-clad guard.  “They must be more shaken up than we thought.”

Marcus chuckled.  “How shook up are they going to be when our IEDs go off after the big man came calling?”

The argument went on for about another ten minutes.  Finally, obviously fuming, Collins and Tremor got back into their vehicles and drove in the gate.

“Now we wait,” I murmured unnecessarily.  There was no telling how long the meeting was going to take, and we didn’t want to set the explosives off while the Project guys were in there.  Suicide bombing wasn’t their style, particularly not with the leadership present.  We’d have to be patient.

The meeting lasted a good two hours.  Of course, how much was the meeting and how much was the ISIS commanders making the Project guys wait was anybody’s guess.  We had a tough time getting Team Hussein to be punctual or coordinated; I could only imagine how bad it was working with a bunch of “Inshallah,” hair-trigger fanatics.

Finally, the three vehicles came out
through the front gate and roared away toward Baghdad.  The way they were driving suggested they didn’t want to be around very long.

“You suppose that means the meeting didn’t go so well?” Larry asked.

“We can always hope,” I replied.  I had the cell phone we were using as a remote already in my hand.  “Given that little display, how long do you think we should wait?”

“Not very,” he replied.  “If it looks to
ISIS like they were trying to get out fast, why not add some fuel to their paranoia by presenting a very tangible reason for their speedy exit?”

“I like the way you think,” I said, and speed-dialed the first number.

While we’d taken six satchels inside, there were effectively only three bombs, since we’d laid them in pairs.  Larry and I had placed ours at the main doors, Jim and Little Bob had found a fuel dump, and, somehow, Nick and Bryan had planted theirs in what looked suspiciously like a commander’s personal vehicle, which had been parked outside the admin building, flanked by a pair of technicals.  That was the one I set off first.

We saw the dirty black smoke billowing up from the explosion at about the same time the
boom
hit our ears.  By then, I was already hitting the speed dial for the second, at the fuel dump.

That
was pretty impressive.

Ordinarily, high explosives don’t go off with a big fireball.  There’s a flash, shockwave, and a cloud of usually black smoke
along with lots of dust.  The shockwave and whatever frag gets picked up and thrown do all the damage.  But this time, we got a nice, big, satisfying, Hollywood fireball as the fuel dump went up.  A moment later, it was burning fiercely, belching black smoke and orange flame into the sky.  Then I hit the third.

I was counting on the confusion of the first two blasts to draw people out of the building, and hopefully they’d be near the entrance when I triggered our bomb.  We had no way to know, of course, without any direct observation, and no sane way to do a damage assessment.  The whole point was disruption and distrust, anyway.  However much physical damage we did was an added bonus.

We could admire our handiwork later.  “Time to go,” I said, and started shimmying back toward the stairs.  Marcus and Larry followed.

Jim was already on his radio when we got to the stairs.  “Hassan and Yusuf are two minutes out,” he reported. 
The rest of the team was already waiting to head out the door; Nick was actually standing offset to it, his rifle not quite trained on it.

We had to move quickly.  Regardless of whether or not they suspected the Project had planted the bombs, ISIS would doubtless have people out scouring the countryside for a triggerman.  We had to be gone before they got their shit together.

But by the time Yusuf and Hassan pulled up in the old farm truck, there still wasn’t any movement out the front gate.  The bombs must have rattled them more than we’d hoped.

We piled into the back of the truck, covered ourselves with the tarps back there, and banged on the cab.  The engine rumbled and we were moving, heading north
and away from Abu Ghraib.

It was a long ride.  Yusuf went due north toward Saba al Bor, taking bumpy, muddy back roads, only turning south toward Highway 97 and Baghdad after we’d gotten a good fifteen klicks away from Abu G.  Fortunately, it was chilly enough that the tarps held in just enough heat to be somewhat comfortable.  I kept drifting, catching myself with my eyes closed.  It was hard not to; we couldn’t see shit, and the movement and warmth were helping the exhaustion catch up.  Still, we weren’t out of the woods yet, and as I’ve repeated
ad nauseum
, extract is the absolute worst time in any op to relax.

I eventually worked my way over to the side, and adjust
ed the tarp just so I had a tiny crack in the sidewalls to watch the countryside go by.  That way, not only did I have something to focus on, but I had a little bit more situational awareness.

We were already on the highway by the time I got my bearings.  It was a little better than lying in the musty dark, but peering through a crack less than half an inch wide still doesn’t provide a very complete picture.  We were inside Baghdad itself by then, passing north
of the Al Amiriyah race track.

Yusuf kept us on the Highway until we got to Rabia Street, where he turned south.  Along the way, I’d spotted a couple of disturbing trends.

Most of the overpasses had military vehicles on them.  They were mostly ancient up-armored Humvees, though there were a couple of ILAVs and even a couple of BTR-94s.  I spotted a few newer-looking vehicles I couldn’t identify.

There were also long lines on most of the off-ramps, and I caught glimpses of checkpoints.  A few of them had the black ISIS flag flying over them, but as we got further east, more and more had Iraqi flags overhead.

Checkpoints were nothing new.  The ISIS checkpoints were nothing new.  But the Iraqi Army checkpoints looked different.  They looked beefed up, and I was sure I’d seen a couple of black-and-tan-clad ISOF troops hanging around one of them.  That was unusual; ISOF usually had better things to do than babysit checkpoints.

The city being the unconventional battleground that it was, we couldn’t avoid all the checkpoints, no matter how hard we tried.  Sooner or later, we were going to run into one we couldn’t necessarily get around.  It took a while, but it did happen.

I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could feel us slow down, the brakes squealing a little as we came to a stop.  I heard a muffled voice ask, “Jinsiyah?  Hawiyah?”  Those were the two official Iraqi-government-issued IDs.  Yusuf and Hassan each had about half a dozen of them.  They were easy to counterfeit, and the jihadis had been doing it for years.  We’d contracted a top-notch forger, who’d even managed to get the Ministry of Interior stamps just right.

Troops were circling the truck.  The first one that passed by my little keyhole crack was a regular IA soldier, dressed in desert tri-colors, tan plate carrier, and carrying an ancient-looking M16, with all the bluing rubbed off the lower.  Pretty standard.  The next guy I saw, standing a little ways off and just watching, was ISOF.

He was wearing newer digital cammies, a top-of-the-line-five-years-ago plate carrier, a skull mask over his face, and black-painted MICH helmet.  He was also carrying a QBZ-03.

I squinted at the rifle for a moment.  We’d found a few of them in the hands of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force operatives in Kirkuk and Basra.  They were front-line Chinese
People’s Liberation Army rifles.  I knew they were exporting some of them, but they usually only ended up in bulk in the hands of Chinese partner nations.  Usually they settled for exporting the massive numbers of Type 56 AKM knock-offs that could be found fucking
everywhere
.

The QBZ-03s in Iranian hands were easily explained; there had been signs of a growing Iranian-Chinese-Russian strategic partnership for over a decade.  The same rifles in Iraqi hands only pointed to the fact that the Iranians were now actively partnering with Saleh.

Not that that was a surprise…

There was more talking, but
I couldn’t really make any of it out.  It was in Arabic and muffled, so it just came across as a low murmur.  So far there wasn’t any shouting, and the ISOF guy I could see looked relaxed, but I was getting more wound up by the minute.  This was taking too long.  It was only a matter of time before they decided to throw back the tarp and take a look in the back.  I didn’t dare move, but both hands had been on my rifle the entire ride; if we had to shoot our way out, it wouldn’t take much movement to engage.

It would still be a bad day, but it was starting to look pretty inevitable.

That made it doubly surprising when the engine rumbled and we pulled through the checkpoint, on our way.  I waited a couple of minutes before trying the radio.  “Hassan, Hillbilly.”

“Yes, Hillbilly,” he replied promptly.

“What just happened?” I asked.

“An Iraqi Special Operations Sergeant questioned us,” he replied.  “They asked many questions about where we are from and our tribal affiliations.  When they were satisfied that we are just a couple of scared Shi’a
worried about Daash taking over more of Baghdad, they asked if we had seen any Westerners, probably Americans, but possibly some British or Australians.  They warned us that they are very dangerous mercenaries, and that if we knew anything about them, we should tell the Police or the Army.”

That didn’t sound good.  If Saleh’s ISOF were looking for Westerners, it
could mean that they’d tumbled to the Project, which meant part of our mission was already down the drain.  We were supposed to make the Project disappear, without the Iraqis or Iranians getting any propaganda value from American involvement with our old enemies.  Of course, it could have something to do with Mike’s unknown shadowers from when we’d bugged out of the Embassy, too.

The back of a truck, covered with a tarp, in the middle of hostile territory, however, was not the place to discuss the implications.  That would have to wait.  So I lay there, getting jostled by every pothole and crack w
e went over, worrying about what was going on that I couldn’t see.

I didn’t know the half of it.  A couple hours later, the picture got a little clearer, and it was uglier than we thought.

We had wound up at one of our
safe houses; the checkpoints had only gotten thicker the closer we got to the Green Zone, and I’d decided we couldn’t chance getting rolled up.  It was starting to look like we had been well and truly cut off from the Embassy.