Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  The Peshmerga taking control of the northeastern half of Kirkuk province had made it possible for Liberty to move in and start exploring, with Kurdish backing. It was still only in the exploration stage, though, which meant there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure set up yet. There was the primary compound, where most of the workers lived, the wells out in the fields, most of which hadn’t been restarted yet, and that was about it.

  The compound itself wasn’t much. It lay about three kilometers outside Kirkuk City, and wasn’t much more than about five buildings, some tanks, trailers, and trucks. It had been easy to keep the Bears there; they blended in with the rest of the working vehicles that Liberty had staged.

  “Do we know where they’re keeping the Liberty personnel?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Hal answered. “We still need to even get eyes on the compound; this kind of caught us with our pants down. Moving on Kirkuk was always a possibility, but that they’d deliberately come after us wasn’t even on our radar.”

  “It probably should have been,” Larry said from behind me. He’d come in quietly while Hal and I were studying the imagery. “Especially after the lack of response to the Lemonier attack last year, beating up on Americans is the national sport in this part of the world anymore.”

  “Has there been any official statement?” I asked Hal.

  “Not yet,” he replied, but Kelso interrupted him from the desk where he had a laptop hooked up to a satellite link and was watching the net.

  “Actually, it just came out,” he said. “No video yet, but there is a statement. Quote: ‘Today, the Iraqi Security Forces have taken steps to reinstate law and order in the Province of Kirkuk. Over the last year, outside forces have increasingly acted to usurp control of the province and its resources from the people of Iraq. They have created enclaves in the city of Kirkuk where the Iraqi Police are barred from performing their duties, and have acted to remove our precious resources without our consent. The primary culprits in these acts of treachery and exploitation are the Kurdistan Regional Government, which pays lip service to being a part of the Republic of Iraq while attempting to be its own country, and the American oil company Liberty Petroleum.

  “’The Kurds, not content with the territory they already held under agreements penned between the Republic of Iraq and the KRG, have now begun to expand beyond their provinces, forcing Iraqi families out of their homes and jobs. They have done this with the help of Liberty Petroleum’s money, and their hired mercenaries, who kill Iraqi citizens in the night for their oil money.

  “’The Republic of Iraq can no longer stand by and watch her people in the Province of Kirkuk be oppressed, marginalized, and murdered by American oil interests. The Americans have taken advantage of our friendship from the years when they helped the Republic of Iraq recover from the disastrous reign of Saddam Hussein, and now are helping themselves to our resources while brutalizing our people. This must end.

  “’This evening, soldiers of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces captured the chief Liberty Petroleum personnel in Kirkuk Province in a lightning raid on their headquarters. Several of their mercenaries were killed in the raid, but it is believed that there are more at large within Kirkuk. The Ministry of Defense is offering one million dinars for any information that leads to the capture of these mercenaries. They have done enough damage to our country. May Allah smile on our forces, and grant them a quick victory.

  “’Allahu akhbar.’” Kelso looked up. “That’s it.”

  There was a pause as we let it sink in. “Well, fuck,” Hal said. “This just got an order of magnitude nastier.”

  “Pretty standard, though,” I pointed out. “When all else fails, blame the Americans. We’re the biggest scapegoats in the world, especially now that we can’t really do shit.”

  “Heh,” Larry grunted. “The US government might not be able to do shit. We, on the other hand…”

  “We can, and these assholes are about to find that out,” I finished for him. I turned to Scott, who was on the link back to Erbil. “I need to talk to Alek.” He nodded, and started getting Alek on the line, while I turned back to Hal. “We need eyes on that compound, thirty seconds ago. And we need to make contact with Rizgar; if they’re not there, we need to find where they are, ASAP. I am not letting these motherfuckers hold them for long.” I was pissed. I was also undergoing an intense feeling of déjà vu. The shitstorm in East Africa last year had been about finding American hostages. Now here we were again, thousands of miles away, but facing the same problem. Only this time, we didn’t even have the mild support of the CIA. We were on our own. “They just miscalculated. They just don’t know it yet.”

  “What have you got in mind?” Larry asked me quietly, as Hal went to the door to yell for Jack and Rex.

  I stared at the imagery. There wasn’t anything new to see there, but it gave me something to focus on while I thought. “We find ‘em, preferably within the next twelve hours, go in, get our people, and fucking kill every fucking one else on site,” I said.

  Larry just nodded. As barbaric as it might sound to the plant-eaters, it was pretty much our modus operandi anymore. You fuck with us, you pay the bill, and we don’t worry about any hand-wringing before or after. Hostage takers die. People who kill our clients die. People who try to kill our clients die. It’s that simple.

  The safehouse became a beehive of activity as the rumble of the second Bear announced Jim’s arrival with the rest of the team. Nick stuck his head into the ops center. “Jim’s back. You want him in here?”

  I looked over at him and nodded. “Along with anybody who’s not stowing gear or getting the trucks stabled. We’ve got a lot of work coming up. The Iraqis decided to grab our clients tonight.”

  “Oh fuck no,” he said. “All our gear’s inside; I’ll get everybody in here. The Bears can wait.” He started to duck back out, but I stopped him.

  “Make sure one of the Bears at least is getting prepped to go back out,” I told him. “Rex and Jack are going on a little recon.” He nodded and ducked back out to round up the rest of the team.

  Even as I spoke, Rex and Jack came out of the back rooms with their gear, headed out toward the front and the Bears outside. Soon thereafter, the rest of my team started coming in, and we got down to business. Sleep would have to wait.

  As it turned out, after everybody had been brought up to speed on the situation, we had to wait anyway. I spent some more time on the link with Alek, but there was very little he could provide in the way of new information that could affect operations down in Kirkuk. We had to wait for Rex and Jack to get back.

  Most of the time we spent prepping gear and going over what-if scenarios. They were how we kept our minds agile, and kept the team on the same page when it came to combat drills. If such-and-such happens, we’ll do this. It’s kind of like the Immediate Action drills we ran in the military, but we try to keep things a little more flexible and basic. The high-end operators aren’t the best because they have fancy ways of doing things. They’re the best because they’ve trained to unconscious competence at the basics.

  When we weren’t rehearsing or getting gear ready, we caught what sleep we could. Unfortunately, that still meant I didn’t get much. Team lead can be a demanding job.

  About half an hour after I went down, Sammy woke me up. “We’ve got some chatter out there, Jeff,” he said. “Sounds like the Iraqis have a patrol out looking for us.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I had been lying on a thin pad on the concrete floor, next to my gear. “They’re transmitting in the clear?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Fucking sloppy, but it doesn’t sound like these are ISOF. Those guys know how to use SINCGARS.” Sammy would know. He’d been with a MTT that had trained some of the ISOF troops. Possibly some of the ones out there that had hit the Liberty compound were his former students. “They sound like IPs,” he went on. “Probably moonlighting for that hundred mil in dinars the government promised if they find us.”

&n
bsp; “If they find us, they’ll regret it,” I replied. I was still fucking pissed. “Get everybody up, and ready to break out if we have to.” He nodded, and left me to get my head together and start rousing the rest of the team, most of whom was snoring around me in the dark, cramped room.

  Nobody was sleeping very deeply, even after the sleep deprivation of the last couple of days. It didn’t take long at all to get everybody up, their gear ready to go, and weapons close at hand. If we had to break out of the safehouse, we’d have to move fast. None of us had any illusions about how quickly reinforcements would be coming if we schwacked an Iraqi patrol, even if it was just IPs moonlighting.

  I shrugged into my vest, grabbed my FAST helmet and NVGs, scooped my M1A off my ruck, and headed for the roof. I heard boots pounding the cement steps behind me, as Jim followed me up.

  I came out the small doorway onto the roof, keeping low so as to avoid presenting too much of a silhouette over the parapet. Most Iraqi buildings have flat roofs with a low parapet around them; often during the summer Iraqis will move their sleeping mats up onto the roof to sleep.

  Herb, Gary, Mack, and Bing were already on the roof, kitted up, armed, and watching. Bent over, Jim and I went over to Herb, who was on the south side. “Everybody back inside?” I whispered. If the Iraqis were looking for us, we didn’t need to have anyone out working on vehicles, exposed.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “The tactical vehicles are all well concealed, too. They’ll have a hard time figuring out that we’re here. Unless they start searching houses, anyway.”

  “Anyone got eyes on them yet?” Jim asked. Herb just pointed.

  I followed his pointing finger, but at first didn’t see anything. Shoraw Village’s houses were fairly widely spaced compared to the neighborhoods of Kirkuk City itself, but you still couldn’t see all that far. There were no lights on, either, just like Yehyava.

  “There,” Herb said, “due west, just coming around the outskirts.” I saw them then, two HiLuxes, glowing on thermal but blacked out otherwise, slowly trundling along the rough dirt tracks on the western side of Shoraw Village. The beds were full of men, though detail was impossible to pick out at this distance.

  “Looks like they’re just probing,” I said. “If they start searching houses, we’re going to have to break out. Hopefully we can do that unnoticed, but if not, we’ll have to kill these guys in a hurry.”

  My radio earpiece crackled. “Jeff, we’ve got a UAV up,” Hal told me. “One of the new little ones; they’ll never spot it. We’ve got eyes on them. If you want to stay up there, we’ll keep you apprised of their movements.”

  “Roger, that sounds good,” I said. “Make sure everybody’s ready to run if these assholes come up on us.”

  “Already on it,” he answered. “Just be ready to give ‘em a bloody nose to give us time to mount up.”

  “Count on it,” I told him.

  We continued to watch as best we could from the rooftop. I hadn’t thought to bring a PDA to link in to the UAV feed, so I sent Bing down to the ops center to get one, while Jim took his place on the parapet.

  Two more trucks came around the town from the direction of Highway 2, and joined the two we’d already spotted, which were now just sitting there, right on the outskirts of the village. They sure looked like they were getting ready to do a sweep. They didn’t have a cordon as far as I could see, but then, if they were IPs, I couldn’t really expect that level of professionalism from them.

  The two newcomers pulled up to the other trucks, and several men got out. From the roof, that was about all we could make out, just the luminous outlines of the trucks and the smaller glowing specks of the men’s heat signatures. Soon enough, though, Bing came pounding up the stairs with the PDA, and handed it over. Sammy was right behind him, bulky in his gear and carrying his full-length M1A, and joined Jim and me near the edge of the roof to watch the feed.

  It turned out that there were five trucks; we hadn’t been able to see the fifth since it was behind a building from our vantage point. This was starting to look a bit less like an off-the-cuff moonlighting opportunity, and more like an organized, planned operation. Which fact might well mean they had had some idea of where we were operating before they moved north.

  For a while, they just kind of milled around the trucks. They didn’t look to be all that organized, which was a good thing, but that might just have been because they were waiting for somebody. After about a half hour, though, they started moving to their trucks. They didn’t all mount up, though. Some of them did, but some stayed out, moving ahead of the trucks, toward the houses on the outskirts.

  “Dammit,” Jim muttered. “Looks like they are doing a sweep.”

  “I don’t want to run from these fucking punks,” Sammy growled.

  “I don’t, either, brother,” I told him, still watching the feed, “but we might not have any choice.” It wouldn’t be the first time we’d have had to swallow our pride and slip away, just because we had bigger fish to fry. It still stuck in my craw, though.

  The trucks with their forward infantry screen started moving into the town. I was thinking of them as troops rather than police, whether or not they really were IPs. If it came to shooting, it really wouldn’t matter. We couldn’t see much from the roof, but stayed watching the feed. We might need to be up in an elevated position if they started getting too close.

  They moved in…and just patrolled. They didn’t go into any houses, though they did stop at what looked like a house, and banged on the door. A few minutes later, several of them came out with their arms full; they had either bought refreshments or helped themselves. They weren’t acting like they were hunting hired killers, regardless of what their chatter was about.

  We stayed pretty much motionless as they got to the center of town. Three trucks turned south, where the village widened before reaching the highway, while the other two turned north, toward us. We could see them more easily now, as they moved slowly up the unimproved main road through the middle of the village.

  I hit my push-to-talk. “Hal, get everybody ready to move as soon as we start shooting.”

  “Roger,” he replied.

  “No IR,” I told the guys on the roof. “We don’t know if these clowns have NVGs, and if they do, I don’t want them to know we’re here until it’s too late.”

  We moved to the parapet, keeping low. Rifle muzzles slowly eased over the low wall, leveling on the oncoming trucks.

  All of us had various ways of handling low-light shooting. While everyone had a PEQ-2 or PEQ-15 IR aiming laser for their rifle, sometimes they were counter-productive. In the old days, Americans could count on a marked technological advantage at night. We had night vision, the bad guys didn’t. We could flash all the IR we wanted, and the enemy couldn’t see it.

  Not anymore. The rest of the world, and by extension, our jihadi enemies, were getting more and more sophisticated. We still suspected, though we couldn’t prove it, that the IED that killed Hank, Rodrigo, and Danny in Kismayo a year before had been command-detonated because they’d been spotted by a sentry using NVGs or thermals. And we knew for a fact that cases upon cases of old PVS-7B NVGs had been sold to the Iraqis, since they were supposed to be our allies.

  Some guys just used red dots, their scopes, or, like me, had backup iron sights set up as night sights. I had gotten a set of offset irons with a ghost ring rear sight, and tritium dots. All I had to do was cant the weapon, line up the glowing green dots on the target, and squeeze the trigger. I had those dots slowly tracking the progress of the lead truck, as it appeared and disappeared between the buildings.

  We still didn’t have a straight shot at either vehicle; the safehouse was at the end of the main drag, but still offset enough that we were only getting glimpses. If it came to a shootout, it was going to be point-blank.

  It seemed to take forever for them to move up the street, though in reality it was only a few minutes. The whole time, I kept thinking, come on, you fuckers, if yo
u’re going to do this, let’s fucking go.

  Of course, they weren’t going to go ahead and get it over with; they didn’t even know for sure we were there. But waiting for a fight to start can be as stressful, if not more stressful, than actually getting into the fight.

  I had strapped the PDA to my forearm, and continued to watch the feed, at least until they came into direct view. Five men with rifles sauntered up the street, followed by the trucks at a walking pace. They were sort of in a patrol formation, though it was sloppy. They were looking around, but didn’t look all that alert. Two of them were gesturing to each other like they were having a conversation. I couldn’t hear them yet, but they just seemed to be more on a lark than a patrol. Not that I expected much more from Iraqis, especially IPs, presuming that these were IPs.

  They stopped at the crude four-way intersection about one hundred fifty meters southeast of us. There was a good-sized house there, surrounded by a low wall, with several trees, which were remarkably scarce in the immediate vicinity of Shoraw. The lead truck turned onto the crossroad, while the other just pulled over and parked. The rest of the men got out.

  There were now about ten armed men in the crossroads, just kind of milling around. We could faintly hear loud conversation in Arabic. While very little could be made out, the overall tone sounded relaxed. These guys weren’t expecting trouble.

  I called down to the ops room. “Dave, Hillbilly. Are you sure these guys are looking for us? Because they’re acting like they’re looking for a frat party.”

  “I don’t know,” Hal admitted. “They were talking about us when they approached, but the last few check-ins have been standard security-patrol type shit. Maybe they were just supposed to be on the lookout for us.”