by Peter Nealen
None of us reacted much. Alek was still staring at the intel board, looking thoughtful, and the rest of my team was too tired. We’d been up for a long time already.
“Anything else?” Alek asked finally.
Haas shook his head, frustration written on his features. “Most of my contacts have either gone quiet, or have fled the fighting and are therefore out of contact. Right now, Assam and Saif are the best leads we have.” He looked around at us. “So I had probably better get back to working on them. I expect you have some after-actions to run, and you probably don’t need me hanging around for it.”
Alek turned slightly away from the intel board, but didn’t take his eyes off it. “Thanks, Haas. Good luck with those assholes.”
Haas smirked. “Which ones, Mackey and Somoza, or the insurgents?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room.
Once the door shut, Alek picked up a remote and switched the input on the second plasma screen. The lined, cold-eyed face of retired Colonel Tom Heinrich appeared, with more maps and intel screens behind him. “You hear all that?” Alek asked.
“I did,” Tom said. “Nothing especially new. So how do you want to proceed?”
“I think he’s right,” Alek said. “We need to get the rest of the Liberty personnel out. They’re just targets right now.”
“Agreed,” Tom said, “especially since we don’t really have much more than Haas does at the moment.”
“We need to consider how we’re going to continue running ops, if Liberty is pulled back,” I pointed out. “Haas is okay, but I doubt even the more level-headed manager types are going to be too happy if they find out that we knew about the IRGC setting up networks with loosely affiliated terrorists two months ago, and took this job solely so that we could be in position to fuck up their plans. And if they’re all up here, and we’re disappearing into the south to hunt Qods Force, they’re going to start asking questions.”
“As long as we keep that element quiet, and keep their people safe, I don’t think they’ll care all that much as to what we do in the background,” Jim said. “It’s results that matter. They just don’t have to see all the results.”
“Jeff’s right, though,” Tom said. “We have to tread very carefully. It’s the primary weakness of working this way; we have to rely on either governments or companies like Liberty for funding. If I had a way to keep us in the black while we hunted jihadis full-time, we’d be on it like stink on shit. But this is what we’re stuck with for the moment.” He grimaced. “Given the costs of operations alongside how much we can actually make, I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon, barring a windfall like the cash you guys picked up by Nogales a few years ago.”
“Most of which is gone,” Nick pointed out.
“All of which is gone,” Tom replied. “Hate to break it to you, but even without having to pay off that fucking pirate last year, it would still all be gone. Helos, those old Skyraiders, and the other gear you guys get to use don’t come cheap.”
“None of which we can do anything about from here,” Larry pointed out. “Let’s get back to what we can do.”
“Mike’s team is already getting the rest of Liberty’s people out of Kirkuk right now,” Alek said. “Caleb’s moving in from Mosul to assist. Hal’s regrouped in a safehouse north of Kirkuk; they got out without casualties, thanks to the air support.” He turned to us. “You guys get some rest, and we’ll have a target for you soon.”
I nodded, and most of the team hefted their gear and headed out to our temporary sleeping quarters. They didn’t amount to much more than another erstwhile conference room filled with cots, but they’d do. Jim and I stuck around.
“What about this move on Kirkuk?” I asked. “Do we think it’s the Iranians behind it?”
“I doubt it,” Tom answered. “There’s been plenty of tension between the Kurds and Iraqis over Kirkuk Province ever since the KRG was recognized in 2005. Just in the last five years, there have been four confrontations that damn near turned into shooting wars. Ever since Talabani stepped down as the Iraqi President, the Kurds haven’t had that much voice in Baghdad, so things have gotten that much worse. The Iranians don’t need to push this. It was bound to happen, especially when the Kurds started selling oil out of the Kirkuk fields.” He lit a cigarette. “The Iranians just knew it was coming—how could they not? They’ve got puppets all over Baghdad—and decided to capitalize on it.”
“And we don’t have any idea of when or where?” Alek asked.
“As for when, I’d say soon,” Tom replied. “They’re going to want to use the confusion of the Kirkuk operation to sow as much chaos as possible. As for where, we’ve got nothing. Doomsday scenario, we’ll see attacks all over, all at roughly the same time. I don’t doubt that Jaysh al Mahdi is similarly getting spooled up for a round of retaliatory attacks. That’s the way it’s gone in the past—AQI as the Sunni suicide bombers hitting Shi’a targets, then the Mahdi Army sends death squads into Sunni neighborhoods. In the past it was used to sow chaos to either force Coalition forces out, or try to collapse the government. This time, it might be used to both hurt AQI and cow any Sunnis who feel like joining them.”
“Do we have lines on any Qods Force officers who have already made their way into the country?” I asked.
Tom shook his head, frustrated. “None that we have any information on have popped up. Iraq’s information infrastructure is pretty shit these days as it is. It’s not like there’s much of a grid for them to pop up on. And the market for falsified jinsiyahs was plenty busy back in the insurgency days. As near as we’ve been able to tell, it’s only gotten more sophisticated.” Jinsiyahs were the state-issued Iraqi ID cards that had been originally issued by the Provisional Government under US supervision. We each had a half-dozen false ones squirreled away. Tom’s assessment was a bit of an understatement.
“Be nice if we had a few more assets on the ground,” Jim muttered.
“We only have a few operators who have that kind of training, and who can blend in there,” Tom pointed out. “And most of them are tasked out.” He took a puff on his cigarette. “We also have the problem of keeping this under Haas’ radar. The guy’s sharp, and he’s very good at his job. If we start actively recruiting sources, sooner or later we’re going to run across one he’s already watching, at the very least. Then the op’s blown.”
“Why not try to bring him in?” Alek asked.
“Under other circumstances, I’d say go ahead,” Tom said. “But I’ve got a whole dossier on Haas, from a couple of his former bosses. The trust issue about our keeping him in the dark would be tough to overcome at this stage in the game. We get through this, after this contract, I’d be all for it, and I think he might be, as well. Right now, though—no go.”
“So, we sit and wait for something to come up?” I asked. Alek nodded.
“Afraid so,” he answered. “It’s the price we pay for working this way; we’ve got to maintain a delicate balance so that our ‘side jobs’ stay opaque to our employer.”
I turned toward the door. “Let’s just hope we get some leads before this all blows up in our faces.”
It almost turned out to be too much to hope for.
Chapter 10
For once, I actually got to get up on my own and pour a cup of coffee before everything started going nuts.
I had just wandered into the ops room, steaming canteen cup in hand, when Alek looked up from one of the laptops he’d been crouched over with Imad and saw me. “Jeff, good, I was about to send somebody to go get you,” he said. “We might have a live one.”
That woke me up. “Where?”
“Kirkuk, believe it or not,” he said. “We just got a report of two sightings of Abdullah abu Qadir in Arrafa.”
“Who’s Abdullah abu Qadir?” I asked. “It’s not ringing any bells.”
“Not surprising,” Imad said. “He’s been out of circulation for a while. The last the PUK knew of him, he skipped over the border
into Iran in 2003, when the SAD and SF guys were hammering Ansar al Islam and the Iraqis with the Peshmerga. Nobody’s heard a peep from him in years—he was actually presumed dead. Fortunately, we’ve got a database that presumes nobody dead until a body’s been seen.”
I nodded. “A lot of people thought Bin Laden was dead before they found him in Pakistan, too,” I said.
“Exactly. Anyway, this guy is some serious bad news, or at least he was. No hard and fast numbers on how many people he killed, but he was a major player up until he disappeared.” Imad pointed to the screen, where there was a photo of a tall man with a short, close-cropped beard and wearing a Muslim cap and black dishdasha, standing just outside the Arrafa Canteen, talking to three other guys, all of whom carried AKs. “It looks like he’s still in the game, or got back into it.”
“Who wants to bet the Iranians got him to come back in?” I asked, sipping my coffee. It was hot as hell, but I managed not to burn my tongue.
“Who knows?” Alek mused. “We’ve got next to nothing in the way of HUMINT coming out of Iran for the last five years at least. The Agency cut back their assets, and the dissidents figured out nobody was going to help them, so they clammed up. Notice there hasn’t been an uprising that anybody’s heard about for a while?”
I looked back at the photos. “So, we’ve got this guy in Arrafa. Is there a pattern? Or is this a one-time sighting?”
“There have been two sightings in the last three days, apparently,” Imad said, “both at the Arrafa Canteen.”
“Where’d the pictures come from?” I asked.
“One of Haas’ people took them,” Alek replied. I raised an eyebrow. “He said he thought we’d find them interesting,” he said ruefully.
“Huh,” I grunted. “Sometimes I wonder just how much we’re keeping that guy in the dark, and how much he’s laughing at us for even trying.” I thought for a moment. “What do we know? Is he coordinating, or operating?”
“It looks like he’s coordinating,” Imad said. “The source says he was meeting with at least five different groups of young, armed men between the two times he was being watched. Some money might have changed hands, but he’s not sure.”
“So, he can be expected to be found in and around Arrafa?” I pressed. “If we’re going after this fucker, we’re going to need a solid locale. Kirkuk’s a big town to be running around, especially when the IA and the Peshmerga are at each other’s throats.”
“From what information we have,” Imad said, “we can pin him down somewhere in Arrafa. The Canteen seems to be the best place to pick him up, though probably not to take him. You’ll have to tail him to somewhere a little less public.”
“No shit,” I answered, a little crossly. Imad put his hands up to placate me. I don’t like being told how to do my job, especially after this long, and he knew it. “Can we rendezvous with Haas’ asset, or do we need to pick this up from scratch?”
“We don’t have contact with the asset, but I’ll see if Haas can arrange a linkup,” Alek said. He frowned. “I’ll admit, this is the part of our little shadow-play I don’t like. We’re half working against the people on our side.”
“So sound Haas out,” I said. “Tom might not think it’s a good idea, but like I said, I don’t think we’re giving the guy enough credit. He probably already has his suspicions, if he hasn’t figured out what we’re doing already.”
“It’s a possibility,” Alek conceded. “But not one we’re going to get into right at the moment. Consider this your warning order. Your team’s inserting tonight.”
Larry and I sat in our little brown Opal sedan and watched the Arrafa Canteen. It was early morning, the sun was just coming up, and business was brisk, after morning prayers had just concluded.
The sedan’s windows were tinted, way more than would have been legal in the US, and plenty to obscure the two people sitting in it, even in the middle of the day. Larry’s STI Tactical was on his hip, under his shirt, while my TRP was in the glove compartment. I also had a KSG shotgun at my feet, under the mat on the floor. We were close enough not to need optics to observe, so there really wasn’t anything to point us out to the casual observer.
I was scanning faces as people came and went. Haas’ people had reported that Abu Qadir usually sat at the same table, and we had that part of the canteen well covered. Bryan and Nick were in another vehicle, across the parking lot, covering a different angle. If he showed up, we should be able to spot him.
“Quieter than I expected,” Larry murmured.
He was right. Kirkuk wasn’t quite the war zone we had expected after the IA and IP had pushed in. We still heard sporadic gunfire, and the occasional explosion, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of heavy fighting. Occasional skirmishes along the edges of the Kurdish Quarter, maybe, and a higher-than-usual frequency of bombings and small arms attacks in the rest of the city, but for the most part, it was eerily quiet.
“From what I’m hearing,” I said, just as the satphone buzzed, “the IA got their nose bloodied in the Kurdish section of town the first night, and haven’t wanted to push too deeply in since. It sounds like they’ve got a bit of a morale and discipline problem on their hands.” I lifted the phone. “Go.”
“There’s a guy in a black man-dress coming on foot from the west, along the south wall,” Nick reported. “Looks like he might be our boy.”
I squinted out the windshield. Unfortunately, the amount of business the canteen was doing was hindering our surveillance. There were too many people milling around to get more than a glimpse of who Nick was looking at. “I can’t see him,” I admitted. “Have you got positive ID?”
“Not yet,” he answered, sounding frustrated. “Can’t get a good look at his face.”
“Fuck. I…” I stopped, looked more closely. “Hold on, I think I see the guy you’re talking about. Under the awning on the south side, passing a green Toyota right now?”
“That’s him,” Nick confirmed.
I glanced down at the photo of Abu Qadir taped to the underside of the dash. It wasn’t the best quality, but still orders of magnitude better than some of the POI photos we’d had to use in Libya. The lighting and the crowd made it hard to tell.
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Hard to tell if it’s him, or not. Let’s hold what we’ve got and watch for a while. If he starts having a meeting, then that makes it a little more probable, anyway.”
Larry fidgeted a little in his seat. “And if it’s not him, we wind up watching him while the real target goes somewhere else.”
“Relax, brother,” I said. “This is the only lead we’ve got, so we follow up on it until we get another one. You know how R&S works. Seventy-five percent of the time, we end up sitting for three days staring at an empty intersection, waiting for bad guys who never show up. The inconsiderate bastards.” Larry chuckled a little at that.
“I know,” he said. “It just feels like we’re on the clock here, is all. I don’t know why.”
“It’s because we know just enough to know that something’s coming, but we don’t know when or where,” I said, as I carefully watched the guy in the black man-dress. He had chosen a table back from the edge of the awning that stretched around the outside of the canteen, and was sitting with his back to the canteen wall. He was in shadow, and turned at such an angle that I still couldn’t get a good enough look at his face to see if he was in fact Abu Qadir. “That lends a sense of urgency to it.”
Larry nodded. “But we can’t let that urgency make us rush this, I know. Just sucks, is all.”
“’Recon ain’t fun,’” I quoted, not for the first time. Larry grunted his agreement.
People came and went, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. Several times, the guy in the black dishdasha was out of sight, hidden by groups of men in dishdashas or cheap suits. During one of these disappearances, someone brought him tea. He disappeared again behind a fat man in a dark suit, and when that guy moved, he was on a cell phone.
“Any cha
nce we can listen in?” Larry asked, not sounding very hopeful.
“No way,” I answered. “Way too much traffic around here.”
“I know, but it’s always worth asking.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted him. “Who’s this guy?” I leaned forward slightly, trying to get a better look without flashing my face like a spotlight in the windshield.
A man in black slacks and a white shirt had just walked up to the table. He was standing there talking to the man in the black dishdasha, who had stood up when he approached. They embraced, doing the little side-to-side head bob that signified kissing, and then sat down. Black dishdasha motioned for a server to bring tea.
During the greeting, I had finally gotten a good look at the man in the black man-dress’s face. It was Abdullah Abu Qadir, no question now. We had eyes on our target.
“I can’t make out the new guy’s face,” Larry said, “but I’m pretty sure now that black man-dress is our guy.”
“He is,” I said confidently. We were in business, and it hadn’t taken three days to spot our quarry. I still didn’t say that we were doing well. I didn’t even think it real loud. One does not taunt Murphy. Ever.
The phone buzzed again. I answered it. “Jeff, I’m looking at The Deck,” Nick said, “and I think the guy in the white shirt might be on it.”
“Have you got an ID?” I asked.
“Nothing positive,” he said, “but he looks a lot like Husayn Ahmad. We’re pretty sure he’s one of Qods Force’s dedicated terrorist advisors. I think he’s a major, but that might be outdated.”
“Well, if we were looking for links with the IRGC, we may have just found ‘em,” I said. I filled Larry in. “See if you can get PID,” I told Nick. “Depending on what direction he takes when he leaves, one of us will follow him. If he is Qods Force cadre, we need to find them. Whoever doesn’t go after him follows Abu Qadir.”
