Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (31 page)

“Interesting.  Well, now you have a reason to do that.  One and a quarter million reasons, really.”

“I’m guessing you’ve got good reason to want to grab these guys,” I prompted.

“Of course,” he replied.  “We need to wring them dry about not only their ‘allies’ but also their sponsors.  There’s a shit
-ton of housecleaning that needs to happen, and these guys are the thread we have to pull on.”

“Are you seriously telling me that you don’t have any idea who’s behind this bullshit?” I asked.

“Oh, we have ideas,” he assured me.  “The trouble is most of them are well insulated at the moment.  We are also pretty sure that they aren’t limited to one or two countries.  It’s going to be a long, arduous process to get to the bottom of this, and the mission I’m giving you is one step of many.”

“I’m listening,” I told him.

“It stood to reason that Collins couldn’t have been running the entire operation out of the Embassy.  There were too many nosy people and suspicious spooks and security types.  Sooner or later, somebody would have noticed something weird and investigated.  Similarly, what we know about Collins indicated that he wouldn’t have been running it all out of ISIS strongholds, either.”

“We saw one or two Project
safe houses in Baghdad,” I mentioned.

“This operation required massive amounts of information, finance, and support,” he continued.  “Collins had to have a central location to run things out of.  Now, in this day and age, there doesn’t have to be a secret base inside a volcano to run this sort of op; these things can be a lot more compact than we might expect.  Computers and hard drives are pretty small, and easily disposed of.  But this reversal happened quickly enough that we hope that there wasn’t time to destroy the records and intel.”

“Do you have a location?” I asked.

“We have a possible location,” he answered.  “There’s an old, abandoned factory in the desert south of Amariya, about an hour south of Fallujah.  It was
an armored vehicle factory under Saddam, and got turned into a FOB while the Marines were holding down Anbar.  It never got re-opened, but I’ve got overheads of several vehicles moving in and out of it in the last few months.  I suspect that Collins had his headquarters in the old Camp Smitty.”

“That sounds pretty fucking thin,” I said.

He sighed.  “I know.  There are other indicators, but if I went into all of them we’d be talking for an hour.  Suffice it to say that I’ve got good reason for picking this as the target, including some first-hand intel.”

“You’ve been talking to somebody on the inside,” I said flatly.

“We have,” he replied.  “And no, very little of it was of use to your side of the operation, which is why I haven’t been feeding it to you.  Besides, you gentlemen did pretty well with what you developed for yourselves.”

“Is one of these sources one of the jackholes you want us to extract?” I asked.  I was getting a little angry, like I usually did with smug employers who withheld information.

“No.  There hasn’t been any contact with the source in several days, and I don’t believe he’s even in Iraq at all.  He’s not one of the Project advisors or one of Collins’ personal shooters.”

I sighed.  I couldn’t say I liked it—for all the ruminating on more dead jihadis earlier, we all knew that going back into that fucking meatgrinder was going to be hell. 
And I wasn’t expecting a lot of support that far south, either.  “Have you got contact with any of the Project types we’re supposed to get out?”

“Intermittently,” he admitted.  “They are in E&E mode
—though it looks like they didn’t have much of an E&E plan—and are on the run without much more than a short-term linkup point.”  I could almost sense him shaking his head.  “I’d have expected Collins at least to have more of a plan in place, but from what little info I have, these guys seem to be in short-term panic mode, just trying to get away from ISIS and to some kind of safe haven.”

“Can we expect this Camp Smitty to be that safe haven?”

“Not so far as we can tell,” he replied.  “The contacts we’ve been able to monitor don’t sound like they know it’s there; I don’t know how close Collins kept it.  We can contact one or two of them and steer them toward it, of course, though I’d be inclined to avoid that until you guys are closer; I’m not sure it would be a good idea to have them waiting for you, rather than the other way around.”

Now that was something we could agree on.  “Do we have an idea where these guys are?”

“For the most part, just going off of cell phone hits, they’re sticking to small villages in the hinterlands around Baghdad and Fallujah, mainly down by the Euphrates.  They’re steering clear of traditional Sunni hardline areas, like Zaidon, but they still can’t stay in one place for long.”

“My heart bleeds,” I growled.  “Can you get us contacts for these fuckers?  And how long do we have?”  I glanced up, to see that Jim and Larry had stepped into t
he doorway and were listening.

“Not long,” he replied.  “Abu Jafar’s issued a bounty for every American head that can be brought to him, and there are going to be a lot of motherfuckers looking to collect.  ISIS is
pissed
about this.”

“They’re not the only ones, just for different reasons,” I said. 
“Give me five minutes, and I’ll call you back.  I assume you’ve got our data link?”

“I do,” he said, even though I was pretty sure we’d never given it to him.  “I’ll dump you everything we have.”  Somehow I doubted it, but I didn’t comment.  Renton’s entire existence seemed to revolve around never telling the whole story.  Maybe I was being unfair, but I’d seen enough since he’d first come to us to know that he had assets and sources that he never told us about, that still directly impacted our mission.  That
fact made me not entirely trust him, although he hadn’t left us hanging.  Yet.

I hung up.  This next part was not going to be pleasant.

“I take it that was Renton,” Jim said.  It wasn’t a question.

I nodded.  “Guess what he wants us to do now?”

“From what I could hear of the conversation, exactly what Black is asking us to do,” Larry said.  “I’m guessing he has something close to a decent reason, which is why you’re about to discuss the matter with us?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s got about one and a quarter million decent reasons.”  That prompted a low whistle.

“That ain’t chump change,” Jim said.  “Let’s put it to the boys before they decide to bury Black without us.”

It was a surprisingly brief discussion.  While there was definitely some reticence, that I think we all were feeling, about going back into the hornet’s nest right after having gotten out of it, Renton’s reasons were sound, even the ones that weren’t monetary.  We had all seen too many instances of taking out the foot soldiers and leaving their networks in place over the years.  This was a sign that our current employers, whoever they were, had at least some interest in going all the way, instead of half-assing the job.

We had a limited amount of time, but all the same, we weren’t going to head right out.  Some of the Project types might well get rolled up while we rested and prepped, but I wasn’t interested in needlessly rushing things and quite possibly making fatal mistakes for the sake of men who were, for all intents and purposes, dead already.  This wasn’t like East Africa; we weren’t going to rescue hostages.  We were going to retrieve High Value Targets before worse bad guys got to them
, and even that was peripheral to getting whatever intel was at Collins’ little secret base.  I wasn’t going to lose guys due to fatigue and poor preparation just for a bunch of fucking criminals.

It was the middle of the next day before we started loading up.  Alek had come out to find us in the middle of mission planning again, and after I filled him in, he got at least one of the Bears
brought out for us.  A dump truck with a bed that was only about six inches deep, with a compartment underneath that could carry four men and most of their gear, along with small cameras and viewports cleverly disguised all around the truck, it was a modern-day Trojan Horse that doubled as an urban hide site.  Hassan and Hussein Ali would be up front, with a few of us in the back.  Most of Hussein Ali’s boys were staying back in Erbil with Dave’s team.

While only half of one team could fit in the Bear, Dave had plenty of low-profile vehicles squirreled away.  He’d been busy, and considering how deep into ISIS and Iraqi territory that some of the Peshmerga hit teams were going, it was no surprise.  Alek told me that our contract with the KRG had been extended and expanded; and that Tom was back in the States working hard to plus us up, without compromising company standards.  If there was one thing I figured we could trust Tom with, it was maintaining the standard.  One of the guy’s favorite sayings was, “Performance is to standard, not to time.”

An hour before sunset, we loaded up and started rolling out.  We had eight vehicles going out, with two teams.  We spaced our departures by several minutes, never the exact same interval, and were heading out by different routes.  We’d infiltrate Iraq proper from several different directions, with as small a footprint as possible.  While we wouldn’t be close enough in most cases for mutual support if things went pear-shaped, at the moment, stealth would provide a better guarantee of security than rolling heavy down the road with guns out.

It was going to be a long trip
.

Chapter 20

I yawned.  It was getting close to
sunrise, and we still hadn’t gotten all the way to our predetermined linkup point.  In fact, we weren’t even halfway yet.

While it is entirely possible to get from place to place in Iraq without taking one of the major highways, it is always done at the expense of speed.  Once you get away from the highways and the major cities,
almost all the roads are packed dirt, and in just the sort of shape you’d expect.  It was impossible to make more than twenty-five miles an hour on them without risking breaking something, and we weren’t in a position to be able to recover a vehicle if we broke an axle in the middle of Bumfuck, Iraq.  A lot of the time, we were down to fifteen miles an hour.

Larry and I were in a HiLux with Black.  While most of the
guys that weren’t crammed into the Bear with Hassan and Hussein Ali were going out in pairs, Mike and I had agreed that we didn’t want Black alone with anyone.  Even if he was sincere, and not just cooperating to save his own skin, he might very well be getting desperate enough to try to pull a fast one.  He knew we didn’t trust him, and he knew that if we decided he’d played us false, we’d kill him.  His alternatives had to be looking pretty bleak by now.

So, Larry and I took turns driving and watching Black.  We even let Black drive a couple of times, but one of us at least had to be awake at all times. 
Black didn’t seem too inclined to sleep; he was visibly nervous.  So, after about six hours of driving, we were all pretty fucking smoked.  One hundred fifty miles might not be all that far when you’ve got highways and freeways to run on, but when most of it is dirt tracks, it takes a long, long time, especially when you’re trying not to be spotted, without
looking
like you’re trying not to be spotted.

I didn’t even want to think about how much farther we had to go.

The hardest parts were going to be getting across the Tigris and Euphrates.  As much as we’d wanted to avoid any areas with large concentrations of people or major infrastructure, there weren’t any fords across those rivers, and bridges and dams are major infrastructure, that had been fought over for years.

We lost some time trying to find a way across the Tigris.  Baiji and Tikrit were both solidly in ISIS hands, and Samarra had traded hands too many times to count.  We had no idea who was holding Samarra Dam as we approached it, but it soon became obvious that we had to chance it and cross there.  There simply weren’t any better crossing points without going all the
way to Baghdad, and we sure as hell didn’t want to go there.  There wasn’t a lot of reliable information coming out of the capitol.  There were plenty of rumors, but so far all they agreed on was that there was a shit-ton of violence going on.  Chaos occasionally had some value for getting in undetected and doing some dirty deeds, but when everybody’s trigger happy and shooting at anything that doesn’t look like one of their people, it can also backfire, especially if you’re just passing through.  It wasn’t worth the risk.

Unfortunately, there weren’t really many good places to get eyes on the dam before attempting a crossing.  The land around Samarra was pretty damn flat, and the only really elevated position overlooking the dam was the spiral minaret that rose above the north side of the city.  Needless to say, trying to climb that to get a better look was a bad idea.  Furthermore, most of the river bank for three miles above the dam was
covered by the ruins of old Samarra, the Eighth Century capitol of the Abbasid Caliphate.  While there weren’t a lot of tourists checking out the ruins these days, driving into the middle of them to get out and try to glass the dam was going to be conspicuous.  There was also the factor that instead of a lake at the upstream side of the dam, it was more like a swamp, with six- to seven-foot reeds growing in thick forests along the banks.

But the sun wasn’t up yet, and we didn’t seem to have many alternatives, so I carefully guided the pickup off the road and into the ruins, heading for the bank of the lake formed by the dam.

It was eerie.  Most of the old Abbasid city was nothing but broken foundations, though truly ancient-looking walls occasionally loomed up as darker ridges against the night.  There was no moon, and it was overcast as the latest storm came in; it also looked like Samarra was without electricity at the moment, so there was very little ambient light.  For obvious reasons we were driving blacked out and on NVGs, so I had to pick our route through very, very carefully.  The thermal attachment was invaluable; ambient light might be zero, but temperature differences are always there.  It wasn’t as good as a dedicated thermal imager, but it did help avoid high-centering the truck on more than one ancient foundation.

I parked the vehicle against the low, eroded remains of a wall, and the three of us got out, rifles in hand. 
I hadn’t trusted Black with a rifle until after we’d left.  It wouldn’t have necessarily gone over well with the rest of the team, at least not without some time to mull it over.  Larry hadn’t needed a lot of convincing; he was already of the opinion that this was just as high-risk an op as the breakout from Baghdad, and that we might just end up needing every gun we could get.  I thought I had a good enough read on Black by that point that we could trust him that far; he wasn’t so stupid as to try to pull a fast one while surrounded by bloodthirsty jihadis who wanted every American dead.  Once we linked up with his erstwhile buddies, though… then things would get interesting.

It was dark enough that we didn’t really bother with being sneaky apart from staying quiet.  The thermal attachments would show us anyone out by the water.  I was frankly expecting fishermen; war or no, people still have to eat, and as long as nothing was blowing up too close to them, most Iraqis had learned to keep their heads down and survive.  That pre-dated the war, too; that went back to the days of Saddam.

There were several tents down by the water, but I noticed that they were all well back from the dam.  It only made sense; stay away from the high-profile target if you don’t want to get shot or blown up.  I led the way to a point on the water about five hundred meters from the closest tent.  That should get us a good view of the dam, without being compromised by one of the fishermen.  I was in front, Larry bringing up the rear, with Black between us.

There was a lot of vegetation at the water’s edge and out into it.  The reeds were so thick that I could barely see the dam standing up.  It was going to make surveillance a little tricky, as I wouldn’t be able to hold the thermal imager all that steady, but it was going to have to do.

Scanning across the dam, I didn’t see anything at first.  It looked deserted.  Then there was a tiny flash of white, at the west end.  I zoomed in on it, and though I had to move a little to get past some of the waving reeds, I started to make out the picture.

Somebody had a guard on the dam.  At first all I could see was one dude, lou
nging near the power station.  There wasn’t much of any detail; we were too far away for that.  He was a barely discernible white silhouette, but he didn’t seem to be moving much.  He might have been alert or half-asleep.  There was no way to tell.

“This shit ain’t gonna work,” I muttered to myself, as the wind blew the reeds into my line of sight again.  We’d have to get closer.  I moved back to where Larry and Black were crouched behind me.  “Larry, go get the vehicle, and follow us as best you can,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. 
“We’ve got to move closer to get a better view.”  I was planning ahead in my head as I spoke.  “We’ll have to take this a step at a time; I don’t think the regular leader’s recon approach is going to work.  There’s at least somebody over by the power station, but I can’t see the near side of the bridge, or how many are out there.  We’ll move in closer to the city, scanning and stopping as need be.  Black and I will stay out front, on foot.”

Larry nodded, and moved back toward the truck.  I gripped Black by the shoulder, made sure he was looking at me, and pointed south, toward the dam.

The remains of a combat outpost loomed on the side of the river, mostly stripped when the US withdrew, then mortared during the fighting over the dam and the city.  A cursory scan showed no heat sources and no activity.  I still didn’t want to go through it, but at least we could be reasonably certain that we shouldn’t be observed slipping past it.

Rain started to patter down as we moved past the old outpost.  Good.  It could only work to our advantage.

As we worked our way closer to the causeway that ran out to the dam, I started to see what looked like a checkpoint that had been blocked from view by the water treatment plant.  Hesco barriers and concertina wire flanked the road, and some heat and light from what was probably a burn barrel flickered within the enclosure, but I couldn’t see any silhouettes from where we crouched.  Nor were there any other lights; a couple of portable floodlights were set up in front of the Hescos, but they were dark, the generators silent.  Either they couldn’t be bothered to start them up, or there simply wasn’t any fuel for them.  It could be either, these days.  Funny how a country as oil-rich as Iraq could have almost no available fuel, but that’s what happens when people start blowing each other up.

I was scanning for a way around it.  Even if they had abandoned it to go to sleep under some shelter, it was still likely that they’d blocked the roadway beforehand.  I didn’t want to fuck with it if we could avoid it.  The less trace we left of our passing, the better.

The trouble was, the checkpoint was pretty well situated.  There weren’t many options, aside from driving the truck through the swampy inlet directly north of it, and as good as a HiLux may be in four wheel drive, I wasn’t entirely confident that we could get it across without making enough noise to alert somebody that there was a truck trying to bypass their checkpoint.  On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anyone up and about.  The closer we got to sunrise and morning prayer, however, the more likely it would become that
somebody
would be up.  We were running out of time.

I knelt on the muddy ground, getting soaked in the rain, and looked over it one more time.  There was no choice.  The walled compound just on the other side of the checkpoint looked like it ran all the way up against the river bank.  It was going to have to be the inlet.

I called Larry, and, almost subvocalizing into the phone, filled him in.  He acknowledged, and in a couple minutes I could hear the HiLux humming up behind us, crunching some of the vegetation and revving through the soft spots, of which there were plenty.  If there were any other way, I’d have taken it; I’d seen too many vehicles get stuck next to river or lake banks because somebody was too lazy to park on the high ground and walk down to the water.  Granted, this wasn’t a MATV or an up-armored Humvee, but the risk was still there.  Four wheel drive isn’t magic.  If you fuck it up, you can still bury a truck to the doors, and then you’re fucked, especially if you happen to be attempting to infiltrate through over two hundred fifty miles of non-permissive territory in less than twenty-four hours.

The truck was a dark shape in the night, showing up as a bright outline on thermal.  Larry took it as close to the checkpoint as he dared, try
ing to steer clear of the deepest part of the little canal/inlet.  As it was, the tires went deep and the truck almost bottomed out getting up out of the mud.  Larry’s pretty good behind the wheel, though, and was able to fishtail the truck out before it could get bogged down.  It looked like we’d been through a swamp, but hopefully we could get back into the middle of nowhere before anybody noticed us.

We still had the causeway and the dam to deal with.  I turned the thermals toward the power station, where I’d seen the guard, but there was too much in the way.  We’d have to get closer.  Again.

“Fuck I hate this winging it shit,” I muttered, as Black and I got back in the truck, about fifty meters up the road from the checkpoint.  We were going to have to somehow hit a balance of slowing or stopping to scope out any possible resistance on the bridge, while simultaneously avoiding looking suspicious to any observers.  All by the seat of our pants.

“
It’s the price of getting this shit laid on so fast,” Larry said as he got us rolling again.  “And hey, it’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

“Even in Africa we had time to plan a little,” I said.

“Remember Hobyo?” he said.  “That was a little seat-of-the-pants.”

I snorted.  “Hobyo was reaction to ambush, that’s all.  It wasn’t trying to recon a bridge
while
trying to cross it.”

“’Recon pull,’ brother,” he chuckled.

I just shook my head, and brought the thermal imager back to my face as we rolled down the causeway.

We weren’t moving fast.  The hum of the engine was quieter than the crunch of the tires on the increasingly muddy pavement.  The rain was getting harder, pattering on the roof and streaming down the windows.

It was the rain that was our saving grace.  As we got closer to the dam itself, I couldn’t see anybody out, not even the one I’d seen earlier from the riverbank.  We got onto the dam, and still there was no one in sight, and no reaction to our presence.

There was definitely a checkpoint at the power station.  There was wire everywhere and several barriers had been thrown up in a sloppy serpentine.  But the road was not entirely blocked off, and there was no one standing security on the whole lash-up.  There were a couple of shacks off to the left, at the entrance to the power station proper, with the flickering of a fire nearby, but it looked like everybody had decided to huddle down out of the rain.  After all, who would be crazy enough to be running around in the rain and the dark?