Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  As it was, I was thrown against Nick, pain lancing through my head and shoulders as shattered glass lacerated me. My ears were ringing, and I wasn’t quite seeing straight as I pulled myself upright. Nick was shaking his head and trying to get us back on the road. After a moment, I could hear him bitching, “Fuck, fuck, motherfucking bullshit, not again…” Nick had been caught in the IED blast in Kismayo that had killed Hank, Rodrigo, and Danny. He was not happy to experience it again.

  I sat up. My ears were roaring, partly with the aftereffects of the blast, partly the straining engine of the truck, and partly what I realized after a moment was the flapping of our shredded front right tire on the pavement.

  I tried to shake my head and immediately regretted it. I twisted around in my seat to see out into the bed.

  At first it looked like utter carnage. Malachi was flat in the bed, and looked like he was covered in blood. Larry was crouched on the other side, bleeding from several wounds, but conscious. Juan was nowhere to be seen. Larry was yelling at me, but it took several seconds to make it out through my dazed hearing.

  “Juan fell out!” he was shouting. “We’ve got to go back for him!”

  Nick heard him before I did, or at least understood him first. A glance had told Nick that I needed a few to get my head back together, so he stomped on the brake, and Larry jumped out. I was still trying to get the warped and shrapnel-perforated door open so I could go back and check on Malachi. I really didn’t give a flying fuck about the prisoners at this point. If they bled out, too fucking bad. I was worried about my guys, in the befuddled way one thinks when one has a minor concussion.

  My head was starting to clear. Larry was running back toward the truck, helping Juan, who was limping slightly, but seemed otherwise alright. Malachi still wasn’t moving. I finally got in a position where I could kick the door hard enough to get it open. I spilled out on the street, checking my weapon to make sure it hadn’t gotten damaged in the blast. It appeared to be in working order.

  A series of low pops sounded from the direction of the rear vehicle. I looked up to see Bryan and Little Bob firing at several dim figures down the street, coming out of the compound across the street from the target.

  Our desire for stealth might have been playing against us. The .300 Blackout can be loaded for supersonic or subsonic. We had gone with subsonic, as it didn’t make much more noise than the bolt cycling. However, it meant that we lost some muzzle velocity. It still hit like a train, since the subsonic rounds were half again as heavy as the supersonic rounds. But for suppressive fire to be effective, it helps to make some noise. That crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier next to your head is a big incentive to get your head down. At most, you’d hear maybe a swish as one of these went past, provided it didn’t hit you. Of course, bodies dropping in the street have a certain suppressive quality as well.

  I got to the back of the truck and started checking Malachi. It didn’t take much to see he was pretty fucked up. The side of his face I could see was a mask of blood and shrapnel, and his arm looked pretty mangled. I hauled myself into the bed and started checking him for life threatening bleeds, as Larry boosted Juan into the bed.

  The truck rocked as Larry pulled himself in. I yelled at Nick, as I continued searching Malachi’s limbs for arterial spurts, “Can we drive on that tire?”

  “Far enough to get out of here,” he replied.

  “Go!” I barked. We had to get the hell off the X. Juan and Larry opened fire on the figures spilling out onto the street with a series of muted pops. One of the prisoners tried to sit up, and Larry put his knee down on him, crushing him into the bed.

  I was satisfied that Malachi was going to live. He might be out for the rest of the deployment, but he’d live. I still had my SBR hanging from its sling, and brought it up as we started grinding our way out of the kill zone. Aim was shit; we were moving too much on that bad tire. The engine was making nasty grinding noises, too. I just hoped we could get to an RV point with the birds before the truck completely shit the bed.

  Around us, the neighborhood was waking up. Two men in white dishdashas ran out of an alleyway on my side of the truck, brandishing AKs. They were acting like the typical Arab gunman I’d run into over the years—lots of posturing, no aim to speak of, literal spray-and-pray. “Allah will make the bullets hit,” seems to be their operating mantra. Glorified gang-bangers, really. I put the red dot on the first one and thumped two 200gr bullets into his center mass. He dropped like a rock. The second guy ripped off a burst in our general direction and I smashed him spinning to the dust with another pair.

  We bounced and rocked off the pavement, cutting toward the main road leading north out of Arrafa. It would have been bad enough if the truck had been in good shape. With a flat, it was fucking murder. I can only applaud Nick’s driving that he managed to get us across the dusty stretch without flipping the truck.

  A glance backward confirmed that the second truck was right on our tail. We had pretty much ceased fire as we left the hardball; we’d only waste rounds and stood a pretty good chance of hitting somebody we didn’t want to hit, bouncing around like that. Unfortunately, the bad guys had no such inhibitions.

  Small arms fire crackled overhead and two cars came roaring out of the night, trying to cut us off before we could hit the main hardball. A couple of the idiots in the cars were shooting out their windows at us, even as they came off the pavement and onto the uneven dirt. A round smacked off the doorframe next to me, but most of them seemed to be all over the place.

  Larry was still up and on his gun. Juan was trying to protect Malachi from the worst of the jarring. Nick was still cussing under his breath and wrestling with the steering wheel, even as we bounced up onto the main road and turned north. I felt the truck almost go completely out of control as we went over the edge of the pavement.

  I got on the radio, once I found it. My headset had been knocked off in the IED blast. “Chickenhawk, Hillbilly,” I called. “Prairie Fire.” That pretty much said, “We’re in trouble, come get us.”

  “Roger, Hillbilly,” Sam said. “Two mikes.”

  We had two minutes to keep these bastards off us, and several of us weren’t in the best operating condition. Worse, the wobble from the shredded tire was starting to get really bad, and was slowing us down.

  I still couldn’t hear for shit; my right ear especially was ringing up a storm. I wouldn’t hear the helos until they were right on top of us. But we were in a spot that wasn’t too closed in, just past the Kirkuk Petroleum Education Institute. The helos would be able to come in here, albeit one at a time.

  “Strobe on,” I sent over the radio, as I pulled my IR strobe out. If the bad guys had NVGs, it didn’t matter now; they already knew where we were. I reached through the broken rear window and punched Nick in the shoulder. “Stop,” I told him, probably a little too loudly. “We’ll hold here. Sam’s one mike out.”

  Nick put on the brakes, and we slewed to a stop. I bailed out, still a little shaky, and took a knee next to the truck, bringing my rifle up to aim in at the two cars that were closing fast.

  I opened fire at about the same time that Larry resumed shooting from the bed. We had to rely on volume of fire to either kill the bad guys, or keep their heads down. There was no cover to speak of. I pumped an entire magazine into the windshield of the lead car. The glass spidered into a million fragments and the car swerved suddenly, hitting the dirt on the side of the road and going out of control. I reloaded and stayed on it, thumping four more rounds into the guy who staggered out of the back seat with an old G3. He staggered backward, hit the side of the car, and fell on his face.

  I turned to the second car, which was slowing, its windshield as smashed and crazed as the first one. Larry dropped his empty mag as I started shooting at the guys who tried spilling out of the doors.

  The light sucked and I was still shaky. I’m not sure I hit any of them. I saw at least one fall and try to crawl away; another dropped and was
still. Then the Hueys were coming in with a roar and a storm of sand and gravel.

  Chapter 11

  My first priority when we got off the birds was to get Malachi treated.

  We had landed on a hasty LZ on the slopes at the base of the Qara Sird Mountains. A cluster of GP tents formed our little FOB, far away from Sulaymaniyah or Erbil, and far away from Liberty Petroleum personnel who might ask too many questions. Green farms lay below, while the barren, rocky slopes of the mountains rose above us to the north.

  Malachi was in the other bird. I made sure that the prisoners were in hand, then jogged over to the second helo, cursing the headache that was now pounding through my skull. I’d have to pop some meds later, and sleeping wasn’t an option for a while, in case I actually had a concussion.

  He was awake, finally, and holding the bandage against the side of his face. I hadn’t seen that much as we’d loaded him up, but I was pretty sure he’d lost the eye. A glance at Jim got me a grim shake of the head. I was right. Dammit.

  Juan and I helped him down out of the chopper, and started him toward the tents. He wasn’t moving that well, and stumbled several times on the way. A combination of the concussion I was reasonably sure he had, and shit depth perception from looking through one eye that was still probably pretty hazy. We were a man down, no question.

  Once we’d gotten him onto a cot, and had Brad, one of the two actual doctors we had on staff, working on him, we gathered in the second tent. The prisoners were still gagged, blindfolded, and flex-cuffed in the far tent.

  The FOB was home to one of our two support teams we’d put together in the last year. Brad was the team leader; since he was busy, Tony met us in the main tent. The place was the opposite of fancy; no air conditioning, no electric lights, no generator for that matter. A couple of solar panels out back charged batteries for the comm suite—that was about it for electricity. The cots were low-grade camping models that weren’t large or comfortable, but could be packed small and light. Most of what had been brought in was mission-essential. Comm, food, water, ammo, and medical supplies were a lot higher priority than comfort.

  “Well, our spook’s late,” Tony announced as we sat down on cots or folding stools and started pounding water. My throat was painfully dry; it wasn’t helping my headache any.

  “Why the fuck isn’t he here?” I asked. “It’s not like it was a secret that we were coming here with prisoners. Where is he?”

  “He got a phone call this morning, and left at first light for Dukan,” Tony said. “Said he needed to follow up on it.”

  “What the fuck is in Dukan?” Bob asked. “It’s not like he’s here to spy on the fucking Kurds.”

  Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. I’ll be honest; this guy’s starting to piss me off. He seems to think his secret-squirrel bullshit puts him a cut above the rest of us.”

  “I’ll fucking crush him,” I said. “He’s not being paid to be James fucking Bond. He’s being paid to be an interrogator and analyst. If he doesn’t like it, tough shit. He’ll do his damn job, or I’ll see him shipped back to the States as fucking cargo.” My headache, coupled with the fact that I’d just sustained my first serious casualty as a team leader, wasn’t helping my already scant patience.

  One of Tony’s guys, a skinny former 0311 named Andrew, came into the tent. “Tim’s back,” he said. “And he brought somebody with him.”

  Hands went to weapons immediately. “Any ID?” I asked, before Tony could.

  “He’s not Iraqi,” Andrew said. “Looks American.”

  Jim and I traded glances. “Definitely not one of ours, though?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “He looks kind of familiar, but I couldn’t say from where. Some skinny, hatchet-faced dude with black hair.”

  Larry, Jim, and I all said it at the same time. “Haas.”

  It was Haas who came through the tent flap, escorted by Bing and Morrie. Tim, wide-eyed and a little shamefaced, came along in tow. Haas had changed out of his ever-present suit, and was now wearing the “CIA Starter Kit” for the first time since I’d met him—khakis, Arc’teryx hardshell jacket, and a plain tan ball cap. I figured he probably had a pistol under the jacket.

  Haas showing up armed didn’t worry me. The fact that he knew we were here worried me. It meant we had a leak, and that leak would have to get plugged, fast. Any chance we had of success here meant working in the shadows as much as possible.

  “What are you doing here, Haas?” I asked bluntly. If he was here, there was no point in beating around the bush.

  “I was going to say I was just in the neighborhood,” he said dryly, “but I doubt that would go over very well.” Stony silence and blank stares were all he got.

  He sobered. “I’m here because your rent-a-spook,” he jerked his thumb at Tim, who actually flinched, “is out of his element. I don’t know what he padded his resume with, but he isn’t very good at fieldcraft. I got wind of him poking around weeks ago.” I glared at Tim, who looked like he wanted to shrink through the floor. I thought of Danny, the Special Activities spook who’d been right beside us all the way through Djibouti and Somalia, until he was killed in Kismayo. He’d be rolling over in his grave, if there’d been enough left of him, and we’d been able to bring him out.

  “As for why I’m here,” Haas continued, “I started putting two and two together, and damned if it didn’t keep coming up four.” He held his hands up to placate us. “I’m sure nobody else at Liberty is making the connection; that’s what they pay me for. First you scoop up Saif al Salahudin on the way to Tikrit; fine, that’s somewhat within the purview of your contract. But once you got the civvies out of K1 Airbase, your team disappeared.” He was looking straight at me. “Shortly after that, a person of interest that I pointed out to you vanishes in what appears to be a night raid in Arrafa, well after there are no Liberty personnel in Kirkuk province anymore. One might almost think you were pursuing an agenda and not telling your employers about it.”

  He was watching me closely. I wasn’t giving him anything—blank face, dead eyes. I still didn’t know where this guy was coming from, or quite what he wanted. That he had enough to burn us, simply due to our being here, made him a threat, but I’d already made the case that we should bring him on board to Alek. I figured that at least meant I should hear him out.

  “Now, that might just be a little bit of paranoia from an old spook, except that it’s Praetorian Security involved. The same Praetorian Security who was working for the CIA in East Africa a year ago, during that nasty business with the Camp Lemonier hostages. The same Praetorian Security that Liberty was in fact warned by the State Department not to hire.

  “Not only that, but shortly after this inexplicably infamous company, who everybody agrees is the new incarnation of the devil himself, or maybe Colonel Kurtz, though they can’t say for sure why, except for something about lots of dead Somalis in Kismayo, gets pulled off the Somalia mission, there is a firefight just outside Aden in Yemen. A high-ranking officer in the Egyptian security forces is killed there. At the time, it was passed off as AQAP attacking a security meeting between Egyptian and Yemeni officials.”

  I had actually not heard that particular cover story. Granted, I’d had other things on my mind in the weeks and months after slipping back into the US from East Africa. The media was unreliable at best, flat out misinformation and propaganda at worst. The fact that the official story blamed our raid on AQAP was actually kind of amusing. They didn’t want to admit that we’d done what they didn’t have the balls to do—we’d taken down Mahmoud Al-Khalidi, aka Al-Masri, the terrorist who had masterminded the resurgence of Al Shabaab and Al Qaeda in Somalia, and planned and executed the overrun of the primary US base in the region. I’d shot the man myself.

  “At first that didn’t seem too far-fetched to me,” Haas continued. “But being the man I am, I had to dig a little deeper. What I couldn’t quite shake were the reports that the attackers had escaped out to sea. That
didn’t fit with AQAP. They’d head back into the mountains, I was pretty sure.” He looked around at all of us. “Interestingly, no one could account for your whereabouts until over a week later, in Mumbai. Now, given the fact that your primary CIA contact had been killed in Kismayo, some confusion during that time might be perfectly explainable. But the timing is just a little bit too interesting to me. The fact that you are decidedly persona non grata with certain very powerful people, for no apparent reason aside from possibly a hot extract from the middle of Kismayo, just makes it more interesting.”

  “If you’ve got a point to make, Haas, kindly get to it,” I said.

  “My point is, you’re not here just to safeguard oil workers,” he answered quietly. “I think you’re here because you suspect the same thing I do; that the IRGC is preparing to make some sort of move in Iraq. I think you decided you couldn’t leave the mission incomplete after Kismayo, so you went to Yemen and offed Al-Masri. I don’t think you’ve stopped, either. I think this is just another battle in a war you stepped into a year ago. And I want in.”

  There was a long silence. When he didn’t get a reaction, Haas continued. “I can provide contacts and sources that you don’t seem to have right now. I’ve dug up target data for you already. And I think I can safely say that you can trust me, especially since I’ve had my suspicions about your operations for a while now, and haven’t breathed a word of it to my employers or anybody else, including the two suits from State who are poking around Erbil right now.”

  “What about your employers?” I asked.

  “What about them?” he answered. “They don’t need to know about my involvement any more than they need to know about yours. If we get out of this alive, we can discuss contracts then.” He frowned, looking down at the floor for a moment. “Did you know Danny was a friend of mine? We worked together when I was still with the Agency. He’s sure not the only friend I’ve lost to these bastards. There were reasons why I left the Agency two years before retirement.”