by Peter Nealen
We watched for a while, as the two of them conversed. Again, the ebb and flow of human traffic occasionally obscured their table, but usually, when one car couldn’t see them, the other could. Finally, after about twenty minutes, the guy in the white shirt got up, embraced Abu Qadir again, and left, heading to the west.
“We’ve got him,” Nick reported. “Positive ID on Husayn Ahmad. We’re moving; see you back at the safehouse.”
Larry and I stayed put. We didn’t move or even start the car. Until Abu Qadir moved, we weren’t going to do a damned thing. We didn’t even look directly at him most of the time. We just waited.
Abu Qadir had gone back to drinking his tea. He ordered another. “Looks like he’s sticking for a while,” I commented. Larry nodded his agreement.
“Another meeting, you think?” he asked. “Or is he just trying to space out his departure so any surveillance doesn’t necessarily connect him with Ahmad?”
“He met with Ahmad out in the open,” I mused. “I don’t think he’s really that worried about surveillance here. It’s sloppy security, but he’s been in the same place three times now in the last four days. If he’s sticking, I’d say either he hasn’t got anyplace else to go for a while, or he’s expecting somebody else. If he’s really working as an intermediary between Qods Force and insurgents here, I think he’s waiting for his assets. He just got the word from his handlers, and now he’s sticking around to pass it on.”
Larry nodded. “Makes sense.”
We ended up waiting for almost an hour. Whether that was Abu Qadir’s timetable, or just the typical attitude toward time you find in the Arab world, I don’t know. At any rate, I was getting bored by the time the Honda van pulled up.
I almost didn’t notice it. Larry reached over and prodded my shoulder; I’d been watching Abu Qadir and wondering if he was just going to spend the whole damned day sitting at a table drinking tea. I looked over and he pointed at the van. It was a two-tone white and tan job, identical to thousands of vans or minibuses that were rolling over the streets of Iraq. There was nothing to call attention to it.
The four young men who got out, on the other hand… I’d gotten a feel for “hard core jihadist” in Libya. These guys had it in spades. None of them was much older than maybe twenty-five, they all had beards, and they were looking at everyone around them like they were animals. They probably suspected that all the people just going about their lives were infidels, apostates, or worse. They didn’t hang around, either, but made a beeline for Abu Qadir.
“I see them,” I said quietly. These had to be Abu Qadir’s assets. The other patrons didn’t spare them much attention, but nobody seemed to get too close to them, either. Even there, fanatics are considered bad news.
The four of them sat down at the table with Abu Qadir. Their passage had cleared the crowd enough that I had a clear view of the table.
Abu Qadir did not rise to greet his new arrivals. There was no display of affection or deference. He simply spoke to them, his face impassive, and handed over two envelopes. I suspected that one had money, and the other had a target package.
This was the tough part. We couldn’t let Abu Qadir go, but I didn’t want to let these four loose, either. I had an idea. I grabbed the satphone.
“Kemosabe, can you get over to the parking lot in the next five minutes?” I asked Jim when he answered.
“It’ll be tight,” he replied. “And doing it without attracting attention is going to be interesting.”
“I’ve got what looks like four jihadi hitters about to walk out of here with a target package,” I explained. “Key-Lock and Albatross are tailing another target, and we’ve got to stay on Abu Qadir. We need to make these assholes disappear.”
“I’ll do what I can, brother, but it’ll be tough,” he answered. “Are they loaded up and ready to leave yet?”
“Negative,” I answered. “But they’re wrapping up, so you’ve got minutes.”
“Moving,” he replied.
The four were standing up now. Abu Qadir stayed seated, establishing himself as the authority figure. He waved at them as they headed toward their van, and continued to drink his tea.
The four jihadis got in their van, and started toward the south end of the parking lot. “Two-tone white and tan Honda van, four military age males inside, heading south out of the Arrafa Canteen parking lot, southeast corner,” I reported.
“Roger,” Jim answered. “We are five hundred meters south.”
“Merging…now,” I followed up, as I watched the van merge into traffic heading south.
“I’ve got nothing, no visual,” Jim said. “Traffic’s kind of thick here.”
“I’m about to lose them,” I said. Damn it, I didn’t want to let those assholes loose. We had to follow Abu Qadir, but those motherfuckers were going to go kill people.
“Negative,” Jim told me. “We can’t get to the street. Too many cars. No contact.”
“Fuck,” I snarled. “That’s it. We’re snatching this son of a bitch, and he’s going to tell us where and when the attack’s going or I’m going to turn him into fucking dog food.”
“You think we’re going to have time?” Larry asked. Even as he spoke, Abu Qadir got up and started walking away from the canteen, heading toward the west end of the parking lot. Larry reached down and started the car, pulling us out of the parking space and heading after him, slowly.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I answered. “Given what I know about these kinds of operations, I’d say we’ve got probably a day, unless this was the final confirmation brief. Seems unlikely, though, if he was passing cash. I expect they’ll have to get things set up first.” The rage was calming down, as the analytical part of my brain was now breaking things down. The truth was that our mission was not to necessarily stop this particular attack, whatever it was. We were trying to roll up the IRGC operation in Iraq, and prevent the big op, whatever that was. I figured it was pretty safe to assume that these four hajjis were not the big one. They were disruption, distraction.
But that disruption and distraction would cost lives, and further contribute to the chaos, making it that much easier for the Iranians to tip things over the edge. Iraq wasn’t my favorite place by any means, and I can’t say I liked the people much, either. But if the Iranians took it over, it would get worse. Way worse. Not that AQI was a better alternative, but the Iranians were better organized, and after Syria, more motivated. We’d get to AQI in time.
We had decided the year before that we’d fight the jihadis wherever we could. We’d seen too much in East Africa, lost too many friends. Our own government had decided it wasn’t interested in fighting a war that was killing Americans every day. We couldn’t stand that. Maybe we were just stubborn old gunfighters who didn’t know any other way. We had no illusions about being able to stop them in their tracks by ourselves. But just because you can’t necessarily win the fight doesn’t mean it ain’t worth fighting.
I’d seen enough of what these fuckers did. I wanted them all dead. Every other member of the company had the same commitment. It was part of our screening now.
Abu Qadir got into a small, white hatchback, and started driving away. Interestingly, he didn’t seem to have any security or other handler. It was just him. Larry and I followed the hatchback at a distance where we could see him, but hopefully not get picked out as a tail. I wasn’t sure of this guy’s situational awareness; he really wasn’t acting like he was concerned about being observed at all.
I called ahead to Juan and Paul, who were in another Toyota off to the west. “Abu Qadir is moving in your direction,” I said. “We might have to hand him off to you for a bit.”
“Roger.” That was the whole reason we had those guys up that way; in fact it was the whole reason we had multiple vehicles on the street today. A single vehicle would eventually get suspicious, but three or four could go unnoticed. The trick was effective communication, and dealing with traffic.
We didn’t end up needing the
second vehicle. He went around the traffic circle just to the west of the Canteen, then headed northwest for less than a mile before he parked on the street just around the corner from the Hasan Najim Mosque. He got out of the hatchback as we drove past, and went into a small house on the corner.
“You got him?” I asked Juan over the phone.
“We’ve got him,” he answered. “We’ll park just west of the mosque. You take the east side?”
“Yeah. I don’t think he’ll have a way out there, but we need to keep an eye out.” I killed the connection, and Larry pulled us up to the curb a street over from the building. We sat back and set in to wait, and watch.
The day went by slowly, and the hatchback stayed put. No one came or went from the house. It looked like Abu Qadir was sticking. We pulled everybody but Malachi and Bob off the site, and started getting ready for the hit.
It was 0230. The streets were empty, and even the sporadic sounds of violence from deeper into the city had died away. One thing I had discovered—people in this part of the world don’t like to be up at night. Even at times when any Western-trained shooter would consider it perfect conditions for operations, Arabs would be asleep. It worked out great for us.
We weren’t fully jocked up. In the event that some hajji had insomnia and looked out on the street, we didn’t want him to see a stack of heavily armed and armored Americans. We were dressed in simple, slightly oversized local clothing, with soft armor under our shirts, and mags on belts under the tails.
We had started out with a company policy that standardized calibers, if not rifles, to make logistics simpler. Our go-to cartridge for rifles was 7.62 NATO. Few of us had any affection for 5.56 NATO, which had let more than one of us down in the past. However, we had found, especially here, that full size battle rifles sometimes weren’t the best tools for the situation. So we’d found a compromise for low-profile hits.
Each of us was now carrying, slung low under our arms, some sort of SBR in .300 AAC Blackout. The cartridge had been developed a few years back as a 7.62mm round that could easily be adapted to existing AR platforms, and could be fired suppressed or unsuppressed. The only thing you had to change on an AR was the barrel. Ammo was definitely harder to find than 7.62, but the versatility was worth it.
Mine was a bit of a Frankengun that I’d built out of parts from Daniel Defense and Ares Armor. The barrel was only ten inches long. Larry had an AAC Honey Badger, the original .300 Blackout SBR that AAC had developed to replace the MP5. Bob was behind us with his Daniel Defense job, which was almost identical to Jim’s. Everybody was running suppressed. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to do any shooting tonight, but if we did, we didn’t want to announce it too widely.
None of us were stacked up very thickly. We had parked our civilian vehicles at different points around the Hasan Najim Mosque, and were filtering into the target area in ones and twos. The power was out again, aside from a few houses that had generators, and the mosque. The low light helped us look more innocuous, in spite of the rifles.
I keyed the Bluetooth headset to the low-power radio on my belt. “Go.”
At the signal, all of us dashed toward the gate. We flowed immediately into a stack, with Little Bob at the forefront. He was carrying a set of bolt cutters, and immediately went to work on the chain binding the sheet-steel gate closed.
The chain had been run through two holes that were randomly punched through the sheet steel. There was simply no way to keep this quiet, but we tried. While the rest of us held security, Little Bob placed the bolt cutters on a link in the chain, while Paul held the chain so it wouldn’t rattle and fall as soon as the link was severed.
The bolt cutters closed, and the link parted. Paul kept his hold on it and carefully eased one end through the hole as Little Bob pushed the gate open, trying not to let it rattle too much against the steel. Some noise was unavoidable, but they managed to keep it to a minimum as Little Bob got the gate open wide enough to admit two of us at a time.
The stack flowed into the courtyard, carefully clearing the corners. There was a Toyota HiLux parked just inside the gate, and various piles of junk against the walls, but no people. We were careful to steer clear of the junk and the Toyota, and watched where we put our feet. It was not unknown for these assholes to wire their hidey-holes with IEDs in case anyone came after them.
With a combination of caution over possible booby traps, and a concern for keeping stealth as long as possible, we carefully moved through the courtyard to the front door of the house. There was a narrow porch, overhung by the second floor, with columns holding it up on the outside. More jugs, boxes, and other junk littered the porch. We had to step carefully to avoid kicking any of it over. I really hoped none of it was explosive.
Larry got to the door first. I was right behind him. As soon as we’d gotten off the streets, rifles had come up to the low ready, and Larry’s Honey Badger was presently aimed at the door’s opening. I ducked across the doorway to get in position to open it.
I tested the doorknob as the rest of the team quietly stacked up behind Larry. It was unlocked. Good luck for us, but still awfully lackadaisical. These guys must think they had no opposition to worry about.
As I swung the door open and stepped back to let Larry follow his SBR through the door, it occurred to me that it could very well be because aside from us, they didn’t have much opposition to worry about. How deeply had the IRGC penetrated the Iraqi security forces?
It was a concern for the after-action and follow-on planning. I shelved it as I followed Jim through door.
The door opened onto the main room of the house, with four other rooms opening off of that one. The main room had several chests and some rugs on the floor, but no one was in it. I was starting to wonder if somehow Abu Qadir had slipped the net while we were jocking up for the hit, and we were in a dry hole.
Larry moved straight to the first door on the right, as soon as the room was clear, with Paul on his heels. They flowed straight into the room, as Bryan and Juan moved past them, heading for the next one. Jim and I were already heading for the first room on the left as soon as we cleared the main entranceway.
This wasn’t a hard hit. We were lightly kitted out, and we weren’t kicking doors or throwing flashbangs. The most light we showed consisted of short flickers of red-lens flashlights; we weren’t even using NVGs. They would have showed too much of a silhouette. Stealth was the order of the night, and so far it was holding.
Jim paused at the door, which was barely cracked open. I reached around him and pushed it the rest of the way. He flowed in and I followed, riding the door around to the stops, though more slowly than I would have under most circumstances. We hardly made a sound as we swept our weapons across the room, ensuring there was no one with a weapon about to try to shoot us.
There were three figures lying on the sleeping mats on the floor. One was waking up, but the other two had not stirred when we entered the room. Jim moved quickly to the one who was squinting at us groggily, and put his face in the mat. I stayed where I was, covering the other two. We were careful that Jim didn’t cross my line of fire, or get between me and any of the men on the floor.
The man closest to me came awake with a start, and stared at the red flashlight beaming into his eyes from beside my rifle muzzle. “Iskut,” I hissed. Be quiet. He apparently got the message, especially as he glanced over as Jim pounced on his comrade, hastily gagging him and zip-tying him.
The guy looked back at me, his eyes like saucers, and started to say something, but Jim’s hand clamped down on his throat like a vise. “Iskut, motherfucker,” he growled. In short order, the guy was trussed and gagged, and a bag slipped over his head.
We roughly pulled and prodded the three of them into the main room. Larry and Paul already had two more there. Bryan and Juan came out of the fourth room and signaled that the house was clear.
Now we had to check to make sure we had our target. Lo and behold, the first bag to come off was over
Abu Qadir’s head. He blinked at the red lens that was shining in his eyes, and was trying to say something, but the Gorilla Tape over his mouth wasn’t having any of it. “That’s him,” Larry said quietly.
“Let’s get ‘em out of here,” I said. I keyed my radio, and said one word. “Scotch.” We’d gone to brevity codes for communications while in the city. We didn’t know what kind of direction finding equipment the Iraqis had these days. The less we were on the radio, the better.
“Roger,” was the only reply. Nick and Bob were heading in with the trucks.
We started manhandling the prisoners toward the door. The geometries got a little interesting—we had to arrange ourselves so any one of the prisoners could be shot if they tried anything froggy, without hitting either one of the others or each other. We’d had a lot of practice over the years, though. It went smoothly enough.
Little Bob and Malachi were in the courtyard, on a knee, facing out the cracked-open gate. We forced the prisoners down into a corner of the courtyard, behind Little Bob, while we waited for the trucks.
So far there was no sign that we’d been made. I still didn’t let myself think that we were out of the woods. Extract is the most dangerous part of any mission.
There was the low purr of an engine outside the gate, and the crunch of wheels on gravel. “Buffalo Trace,” Nick sent over the radio. Extract in position. Little Bob pushed the gate open, and we were moving.
I led, with Larry behind me, then Paul, pushing two prisoners. Juan had two more, and Jim had one. Malachi took up the rear as we came out onto the street.
The street was still quiet and dark. We piled the prisoners in the backs of the trucks, and then jumped in after them. I climbed in the passenger side of Nick’s truck, and Jim got in Bob’s cab. As soon as the doors slammed, we were moving.
To this day I don’t know if we were spotted, and the IED was command detonated, or if they had pressure plates strung out on the street, and had wired them in after dark. All I know for sure is the roadway to my right suddenly exploded, slewing the truck halfway around and shattering the windows. They were safety glass, fortunately, but I still caught a few fragments. If I hadn’t been looking down at that precise moment, I’d have lost my eyes.
