Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  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.

  Larry signaled that he was ready when I was, so I took off. It was less a sprint and more a fast jog, but it got me across to the cluster of houses in less than a minute. I dropped to a knee, already slowing my breathing, and waited for Larry, who had stayed in place until I got across.

  Larry joined me at the cluster, but rather than just following my lead, he put out a hand to keep me from moving, and started toward the opposite corner. Continuing to make sure I covered the other way, I followed him, figuring that he’d seen something coming across that I hadn’t.

  He had. He peered around the corner, then edged back and motioned for me to look, while he took up rear security. I switched places with him, and eased my head around the corner.

  There was a Bongo truck sitting at the corner of the next cluster of compounds, maybe one hundred fifty meters away. It was warm, and there were two men standing near it, both carrying AKs. Bingo. I took a long look around, to see if there were any others in sight, but they were the only ones. I moved back from the corner, and motioned to Larry that we’d go the other way. I wanted to circle around and see if we could get eyes on any more hanging around. If we could get a good idea of the exterior security, we should be able to pinpoint the target building. The number of vehicles outside might clue us in to how many there might be inside, as well.

  That, unfortunately, was more easily said than done. Looking around the other corner, I could see the corner of a large compound in the vicinity of the target area, along with another man with a slung PKM. But there was nothing but open ground to the side; in order to get a good angle on the target building, we’d have to cross at least another hundred meters, and this time within the field of view of the dude on the south side of the compound. That was bad news. Worse, any other way to get a better view would entail getting within twenty-five meters of the target compound. No fucking way.

  I checked my watch, using my hand to shield the glow. It had been ten minutes since we left the truck. Decision time.

  I peeked out at the guy on the south side of the compound, trying to see if he had night vision. It didn’t look like it, and as far as we’d been able to see, most of the insurgent groups weren’t nearly that sophisticated yet. Some of them were; we were pretty sure that Jaysh al Mahdi had everything the IRGC had had ten years ago, mainly because it had been given the IRGC’s castoffs. But anyone like these freelancers was still going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment.

  The dogs started barking up a storm off to the north, and the guy I was watching turned to look toward the noise. Perfect. I ordinarily don’t like relying on luck, but here it was, and so I moved.

  One hundred fifty meters isn’t far. If you’re sprinting, it’s even shorter. If you’re trying to cross it fast but quietly, without drawing the eye of somebody who will shoot at you if they see you, it’s a long fucking way. But I made it, even as I watched the sentry as best I could the whole way.

  He had moved to the corner of the compound, and was yelling something to the guys at the Bongo truck. Probably wondering what the dogs were making a racket about. I didn’t care. I slid into the narrow roadway between another cluster of walled compounds and a soccer field, and took a knee in the shadows by one of the walls. Larry made it in behind me, having followed when I moved. That was almost just reflex, by now. I should have filled him in, but there hadn’t been time. Training and many years of working together had smoothed such things out. Now if one guy saw an opening and took it, the others just kind of went with the flow, unless it was something monumentally stupid. We generally did a pretty good job of avoiding monumentally stupid, but shit does happen.

  As I peered out and scanned the compound, I breathed a faint sigh of relief that I had dodged monumentally stupid once again. There was no sign that we’d been heard or spotted, and I had an excellent view of what I was now sure was the target compound.

&nb
sp; It was pretty good-sized. There was a two-story outbuilding in the corner of the wall, and I could see the roof of a sizeable building within, including a two-story section on the south side. It looked almost big enough for a school; for all I knew it was. These fuckers had no qualms about using schools and hospitals for their operations.

  I figured directions and distances as I watched. There were two more sentries on the rooftop; one of them was smoking, which meant he was fucked when it came to night vision. Both appeared to be carrying AKs, nothing fancy.

  Even as I watched, white light started to show on the outer wall, and then a black Opal sedan came up the road from the southeast. The sentry on the ground just waved to it as it drove past, headed for the Bongo truck; I had to assume this was whichever HVT wasn’t already on site.

  We didn’t have time to dawdle; I made a quick estimate of bodies on site, increased it by a third, and took as much of a mental picture of the compound as I could, focusing on obstacles and possible points of entry. It was going to be a very quick and dirty intel dump, but it was better than nothing. I looked back at Larry, and pointed toward the truck. He nodded, and we got moving.

  We didn’t take the same route back; that’s always a bad idea in bad-guy country. Instead, we ducked through the dusty side streets, and came out only about two hundred meters from the Bear, but over six hundred from the target. We moved across the open ground to the truck fast; we were running out of time. I could almost swear I heard the helos inbound already.

  “Albatross, this is Hillbilly. Coming from your five-o’clock,” I sent over the radio.

  “This is Albatross. I have eyes on you,” Bryan replied. “Come on in.”

  I trotted up to the cab. Bryan was already getting out and moving over to the hatch. There really wasn’t room for three guys in the cab. “Do we have contact with Mike’s team?” I asked.

  “Just established,” he replied, as he unlatched the hatch cover. “They’re ten mikes out.”

  “Just enough time,” I said, as I pulled myself into the cab and grabbed the mic. Larry was already coming around to the driver’s side. “Nick, put me through.”

  “You’re on,” Nick said. I heard the click of the circuit changing.

  “Speedy, this is Hillbilly,” I called.

  “Send your traffic, Hillbilly,” Mike replied, in his slow drawl.

  I proceeded to give him everything I had—estimated numbers, equipment, the location and surrounding reference points. I gave him my best description of the target buildings, and advised him that it appeared that the second HVT had just arrived on site a few minutes before.

  “Copy all,” Mike replied once I’d finished. “Hang around until we have visual, in case we need you to talk us on,” he said. “Once we’re solid, take off. I know you guys have places to be.”

  So we sat there for a few more minutes, until we could hear the low roar of the incoming Bell 407s. I could just barely see their heat signatures with my PVS-14s; they were running blacked-out and low. A moment later, my radio crackled. “Hillbilly, Speedy. Give us a glint so we can confirm your pos.”

  I pulled the IR strobe out of my pocket, turned it on, and held it out the window, over the roof the cab. “Roger, good strobe. I have visual on you and the target site. You guys are good. We’ve got this.”

  “Good hunting, Speedy,” I replied. “We are gone.”

  Larry started the truck, and we rolled out of town as the two helos swooped down on the target site like stooping hawks. The bad guys never even knew we had been there. That was what I called a good night’s work.

  Chapter 4

  We hit our first check just outside of Saqiyah.

  Saqiyah is less a town than an outlying farming district of Tikrit. There’s a gravel pit that doesn’t look like it’s still in use just past the fields, where farmland becomes desert and the farmhouses are kind of clustered together in places, but there isn’t what anyone could really point to as a municipal center. It’s just a hodgepodge collection of farms and houses that got a name slapped on it.

  It was also where we were going to have to go to get to the bridge across the Tigris that would lead us into Tikrit. Or at least that had been the plan.

  The sun was starting to come up as we started to come out of the desert. Our little side job in Yehyava had taken longer than I’d banked on. Everything was starting to turn that pale shade of gray that is too bright for NVGs, but too dark for the naked eye to see much. It was still bright enough to see that we had a problem.

  There was a long, long line of vehicles, mostly semis and tanker trucks, stopped on the road. Even from where we were, we could see the checkpoint at the big roundabout that formed the major intersection just north of the gravel pit, and the Humvees rolling slowly up and down the road. The Iraqi security forces were out in numbers.

  “This doesn’t look good,” Larry said.

  “No, it sure doesn’t,” I agreed. “Fuck. We can’t afford to get stopped, particularly not in daylight.” We might, might be able to pass ourselves off in the dark. During the day, there was no way we wouldn’t be immediately spotted as Americans, and then there went any hope of being covert. “I’d say we’ve got some confirmation that something’s going on in Tikrit, if they’ve got security this tight.”

  “Maybe,” Larry said, as he tapped his hands on the wheel. “Could be that things have started heating up again, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.”

  “That’s a distinct possibility,” I allowed, as I scanned around us. “We’ve got to get off this road and find a way around.”

  “Damn straight,” Larry said, “provided we can do it without the security forces coming after us for getting out of line. Where’s the next bridge?”

  I was already looking at the map. “Samarra Dam.”

  “Fuck.” Larry started edging us out of the flow of traffic and onto the side of the road. “We ain’t making it in there today.”

  “No, we’re not,” I said. I was concerned that if there was this much security around Tikrit, how much would there be around Samarra Dam? It wasn’t like the dam was a huge target, now was it? Fuck. I picked up the mic again. “Nick, we’ve got trouble. See if you can raise Jim.”

  “On it,” Nick answered. “What’s up?”

  “Lots of Iraqi security on the way in. We’re going to have to go around. I need to find out if Jim at least made it in.”

  “Give us a minute,” Nick answered.

  Larry got us off the Kirkuk-Tikrit road, and headed for Route 55, which would take us southeast, in the general direction of Samarra. I kept a close eye on the security forces I could see; I couldn’t tell if they were Army or IPs, but we were driving alongside the road on the wrong side, and I was more than a little concerned that it might attract attention. Of course, this kind of maneuver was going on all the time in Iraq; the traffic laws were more than a little fast-and-loose. I relaxed a little when I saw another truck about a dozen vehicles behind us pull the same turn. I hoped that when we turned onto 55 that it would just be passed off as a trucker who’d missed his turn.

  The intercom crackled again. “I’ve got Jim,” Malachi told me. “Switching you over.”

  “Hillbilly, this is Kemosabe,” Jim said. “Send your traffic.”

  “What’s your position, Kemosabe?” I asked first.

  “In the desert, about eight klicks south of Tikrit,” he replied. “We ran into a lot of security on the outskirts, and had to redirect to Samarra Dam last night. We tried to pass you the word, but our comms have been all fucked up. Almost like somebody was jamming everything down here during the night. It just cleared up.”

  I frowned at that. We hadn’t run into any jamming that I knew of, but if it had just lifted, we might not have been under its umbrella. That raised a whole other set of thorny questions. The heightened security was one thing. The possible jamming was something else. Put together, provided they were connected, and provided there really had been jamming (and not just comm t
rouble, which was entirely possible), and things got downright ominous.

  The whole time, there in the back of my mind was the thought that something was indeed going down, and we were still out of position.

  “We just got to Saqiyah ourselves,” I explained. “We got a little delayed on the way. We are diverting to Samarra Dam, but we’ll probably have to lay up during the day. Can you get any closer to the IA base there?”

  “Not without attracting too much attention,” was the answer. “There are patrols all over the place around Tikrit. Something’s definitely going on.”

  I looked over at Larry. “When’s the last time you heard of Iraqi security forces patrolling this aggressively?”

  “About never,” he answered, as he steered us carefully toward the stream of oncoming traffic, trying to find a hole. There wasn’t one forthcoming anytime soon; none of the Iraqi truckers wanted to hold up long enough to let us through. Probably figured that if they did, somebody would find a way to cut in front of them, which wasn’t outside the bounds of probability. “Jeff, I’m starting to wonder if this is really just about pushing the Kurds out of Kirkuk,” he said. “This smells like a pretty major undertaking.”

  “Crossing swords with the Kurds is a pretty major undertaking,” I pointed out. “They found that out years ago. You’re right, though—if they’re taking these sorts of security precautions, it does sound more like a major offensive.” I punched the dash. “And we’re out here, out of fucking position! Fuck!”

  “We’d still be out of position even if we hadn’t stopped in Yehyava last night,” Larry pointed out. “Jim isn’t in the city, either.”

  There was a click, as Nick broke in just as I was about to ask Jim if he had any ideas. “Jeff, if that Mech Division is planning to push out, we might be in a better position than we think.”