by Peter Nealen
He grimaced. “Across town; their house is in Manawi Al Lajim. Pretty close to the center of Basra.”
“Shit.” The last place we really wanted to go at the moment was downtown Basra or anywhere close to it. “Has he contacted his family? Have we started making arrangements so that we can get in and get out?”
“He has,” Haas replied. “I’ve heard him arguing with his wives.”
“Awesome,” I said, without enthusiasm. Muslim men are allowed by Islamic law to have up to four wives. From all accounts, that could sometimes end up being a handful, particularly in somewhat more modernized places, like southern Iraq. “They’d better be ready to go when we roll up, or I’m leaving their asses there. I’m not going to sit on a street corner and argue with some broad in a hijab for half an hour because there’s some vital family heirloom that absolutely has to go.”
“He’ll make sure they are,” Haas assured me. “He keeps a pretty firm hand on his family.”
I grimaced. “I don’t know whether to say, ‘Good for him,’ or, ‘Fucking jackass,’” I said. “As long as we can get in and out with as few hiccups as possible, fine. Staying clear of the PPF is going to be interesting enough.” I jabbed a finger at him. “And if we do this, he had better come up with some solid leads on the IRGC’s ops, or I’m kicking him out of a moving vehicle right in front of the nearest PPF station.”
Of course, none of it turned out as planned, including my threat.
“Son of a bitch,” Bryan muttered from the driver’s seat. I couldn’t blame him.
Manawi Al Lajim was a maze. Actually, it wasn’t a maze…mazes are actually thought out. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the way the neighborhood was laid out. I don’t think there were two parallel lines in the whole place. Streets that should have been parallel came together in a V, side streets turned into dead ends, and there weren’t any directions that made sense. We’d had to go back to Tamuz Street three times already.
Jaf was in the back of the van, but he wasn’t being exactly helpful. He kept trying to call his house, and then yelling at us that we had to turn around and go take another street. I was starting to suspect he was running us in circles, stalling to give his wives time to get ready.
It was already midmorning, and I was starting to get angry. We were tooling around out here, wasting time, with the PPF looking for us from the day before, and this guy was playing games, as near as I could tell. Haas said he was all right, but I had yet to see the evidence of it.
Finally, he stuck his head and shoulders between our seats and pointed. “There, that house there,” he said, pointing emphatically.
“About damned time,” I muttered, as I pushed his hand back. “Are they ready?”
“Almost,” he said. “Few minutes more.”
“Motherfucker,” I snarled. “They’ve had all day to get ready.” I told Bryan to pull us up to the house, then turned to Jaf, who was looking offended. “You’ve got five minutes to get your family in this van or we are leaving,” I said. “You have to get through to them that we cannot afford to take any more time. Understand?”
He nodded, finally, and got out of the van, walking in the front door. I checked my .45 in the glove compartment, and scanned the neighborhood as I did so. I already had my hackles up, and I was expecting the PPF to show up any minute now.
My thoughts were interrupted by a burst of AK fire from inside the house. I bolted upright, looking around for bad guys, seeing nothing. My TRP was already in my hands, almost without my noticing it. I was wishing for the M1A in the back, but I didn’t think I’d have time to grab it.
There was another, longer burst from inside, as somebody ripped off an entire magazine. I was about to kick open the door and head in after Jaf, when a man in a track suit, his face covered by a white-and-black checkered keffiyeh, ran out of the house. He had an AKS-74 in his hands, and raised it toward the van. I was already halfway out the door. I launched myself the rest of the way, landing roughly on my back, as Bryan blasted away with his 1911, awkwardly held out the driver’s side window. I rolled onto my side, punched the pistol out, the tritium front sight settling just below the keffiyeh, and fired twice. Dark, wet spots blossomed on the dark blue running suit, and he crumpled. Another man, this one dressed in black pants and a dark brown jersey, with a keffiyeh wrapped around the lower half of his face like an Old West bank robber, appeared in the doorway, an AK with no buttstock in his hands, and I shot him twice in the chest. Bryan’s round hit him in the side of the head, blowing half his face off in a shower of gore and bone.
I reloaded as I clambered back into the van. “Go!” I barked. Bryan didn’t need any urging. He floored the pedal and we went careening down the street with a squeal of tires. Two more men with their faces covered, one with a keffiyeh, the other a ski mask, ran out into the street with rifles and fired at us. Three rounds hit the van with loud bangs. I was tempted to return fire, but we were moving too much, and soon Bryan wrenched the van around a corner, almost putting us up on two wheels.
I speed-dialed Haas. “Jaf is dead,” I told him, “presumably his entire family with him. We’re on the way back.”
“He’s not the only one,” he replied. He sounded shaken. “Half my contacts have gone off the grid in the last half hour. I’m on my way to meet one who got away. He says it looks like the Sadrists are liquidating as many Sistani loyalists as they can find.”
We sped past another house, where I saw four armed men come out, their faces covered. Two blocks down, I could see a group of five, armed with AKs and G3s, barging through a compound gate.
“Yeah, we can see it out here,” I said. “Lots of breaking and entering, and no sign of the PPF.”
“That’s because probably half the PPF is in plainclothes with masks on, kicking in the doors,” Haas said. “Remember what I said about divided loyalties? It just solidified in spades.”
“Get your contact,” I said, “and get him to Point Fox. I doubt they had time to interrogate Jaf, but in case they did, I’m considering that safehouse burned.”
“Are we continuing the mission?” he asked.
“Damn straight we are,” I replied. “Just because the city just got a little more non-permissive doesn’t mean we’re leaving. If the IRGC is coming in through here, we’re going to fuck them up.”
That being said, we now had to be more careful than ever. I was being this open over the phone because with the purge going on, it was probable that the PPF and the Iranians were focused on the moderates in their midst rather than on us. We’d have to tighten up soon, but given what was going on, clarity of communication was vital.
I called Jim back at the safehouse. “Get out, get to Point Fox. The Iranians and the Sadrists are purging the opposition, house by house. Jaf is dead; we have to consider the safehouse no longer secure.”
“Roger. Meet you at Fox,” he said, and hung up. That was all the information Jim needed. He’d get it done, and I had no doubt that the whole team would be at Fox in an hour, with the safehouse in Sharqiyah completely sanitized. Jim would likely prefer to burn it down, but that would attract too much attention.
Bryan pulled us out into the traffic circle and onto Tamuz Street, where we headed south at a more sedate pace, trying to blend with the traffic. I hoped the bullet holes in the back of the van weren’t too obvious, at least until I looked around at the state of a few of the other vehicles on the road. The guy driving along in a sedan with no side doors wasn’t going to comment on a couple of holes in the back door of our van, and either somebody had gone to town with a drill on the sides of that hatchback, or it had gotten shot up a lot more than we had.
It took less than twenty minutes to get to Point Fox, even with the roundabout route that Bryan took, swinging north into Hayy Al Khafaat before swinging all the way out into Al Hayyaniyah, driving around for a little bit, and then moving into the Hayy Al Khalij Al Arabi, where Fox was located.
It was a nerve-wracking ride. There wasn
’t much traffic for the time of day, and that seemed cautious, furtive. People were going to ground in their homes, as gunfire and a few explosions echoed across the city. It was the Night of the Long Knives in broad daylight, and we were out and about in the middle of it. Neither of us said much, and when we did, it was in terse sentences, pointing out possible choke points, areas we wanted to avoid, or possible bad guys. I had undone my seatbelt and reached into the back, pulling my M1A up into my lap, mostly covered by a jacket, and had my hand on the pistol grip the entire time. If we ran afoul of the Sadrist hitters again, I wasn’t fucking around with a pistol.
The Hayy Al Khalij Al Arabi was a pretty affluent neighborhood. Haas had rented a townhouse there, ostensibly as a businessman in the construction supply business. How much business he would find these days, if he was legit, was an interesting question, but not one that got asked. As long as the landlord didn’t show up while we were there, the place was ours. Regular and early rent payments pretty well ensured he’d stay out of our hair.
Bryan pulled up to the gate and grabbed his OBR from the back, similarly throwing a jacket over it on his lap. I shoved my M1A against the center console, checked the pistol on my hip, and got out to open the gate. It was unlocked, only requiring lifting the metal bar that slid down into a hole in the concrete. I swung the gate inward, and Bryan pulled the van inside the courtyard.
It wasn’t that large, especially with the trees growing in front of the house. It was going to be a tight fit to get the van, the pickup, and the sedan inside. We might have to park one of them on the street. It wouldn’t be too out of place, but it would mean we were down a vehicle during the day. With what was going down in Basra, I didn’t want to show our faces in daylight if we could help it.
We stayed with the van until the sedan showed up with Jim, Little Bob, Juan, and Paul. All of them were wearing local dress to blend in to casual observers. As soon as they pulled through the gate, Juan and Little Bob jumped out, pulling rifles and kitbags out of the trunk.
“What a day, huh?” Little Bob commented as he stripped off the man-dress and keffiyeh. He had his vest on underneath. He hefted his Mk 17, which looked small in his beefy hands, and stepped to the house door, where I was already stacked up. Juan was right behind him, his own M1A held at the ready. I swung the door open and we flowed into the house.
A thorough clear confirmed that we were the only ones there. The house was reassuringly empty; there weren’t even any signs of squatters having been there lately. I pushed Juan, Little Bob, and Paul out on security while Jim, Bryan, and I started hauling everything inside. Jim told me he had made sure Bryan’s and my equipment was all packed and in the Toyota. The fact that we had never unpacked all the way since we got into Iraq would have helped immensely.
After an hour, I started to get worried. There was no sign of Nick, Larry, and the Toyota. They hadn’t called in, either. I considered calling Nick, but I knew that if they were in a tight spot, the last thing they might need would be an untimely phone call. I trusted both of them to be professional and keep their heads. If they needed assistance, they’d find a way to contact us. It was the same situation as when Larry and I had been out of contact the day before. We just had to be patient.
That’s easy enough to say when you’re not the one pacing a safehouse in what has gone from a non-permissive to an actually hostile city, with a team already down two to wounds and KIA, hoping that you haven’t lost two more brothers only a few days after the last one.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been pacing, my rifle slung in front of me, forcing myself not to try to contact them, when gravel crunched outside, and my cell vibrated. I snatched it up and answered.
“We’re outside,” Nick said. “Coming in.”
I damn near ran to the front door, to see the Toyota creeping through the gate. It had a couple new holes in it, most notably the spider-webbed bullet hole in the upper center of the windshield.
Nick got out of the passenger side and walked over to the house, while Larry retrieved his kitbag from the bed first. “Sorry it took so long, boss,” Nick said. “We kind of ran into a militia headed for the old safehouse. Seems the place was burned for real.”
“You got clear, though?” I asked. “Nobody followed you?”
He nodded. “We’re clean, as long as Jaf didn’t know about this place, too.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “We don’t know for sure if they took him and flipped him before they killed him, or if he’d just talked to the wrong people before today.”
“Did you actually see his body?” Larry asked as he walked over, bulging kitbag over one shoulder.
I shook my head. “We were a little too busy getting off the X,” I said. “Under fire, I might add. So no, we can’t be sure they killed him right off. However, under the circumstances, dead or flipped amounts to the same thing, as far as we’re concerned.”
Larry shrugged. “Can’t argue with that, I guess. What’s our next move?”
“Haas is going after another contact, provided he can get there ahead of the death squads,” I said. “Then we’ll see.”
Even as I spoke, there was another ferocious burst of fire from just a few blocks away. The death squads were being thorough. It didn’t sound like any part of the city was being passed over. “At any rate, we’re at 100 percent security until this shit quiets down,” I said. “If these fuckers come knocking, I want them to get their teeth knocked down their throat.” I smiled, entirely without warmth or humor. “I’ve got Little Bob back on the scanner, looking for a target. As long as there’s plenty of chaos going on here, we may as well take advantage of it.”
Both guys thought about that for a second, then nodded, their expressions changing from the hunted to the hunter. We had all been trained by the US military in some way, shape, or form, and the training was a throwback to the middle of the GWOT in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of it was heavily COIN-based, and emphasized reaction over action. It’s easy to slip back to old methods of thinking when you’re tired, which we all were, and that made it all too easy to start thinking like hunted animals, hunkering down trying to hide from the throngs of bad guys, instead of the predators we were. I had to fight that, keep us on the offensive as much as possible. Yeah, we’d had a setback, but that just meant we had to move faster and harder.
I let the two of them head inside, while I went to the back of the truck to grab my own kitbag. Juan had closed the gate, and was now standing just inside it, peering through a hole he’d punched in the sheet metal, his rifle held ready. He glanced over as I walked out, nodded, then resumed his vigil. Bryan and Paul were on the same lookout from the second story, set back from the windows so they wouldn’t be seen. I glanced up, checking, and saw nothing. I heaved the bag out of the truck bed, slung it over my shoulder, and followed Nick and Larry inside.
I’d give Haas until sundown to come back with his contact. After that, we were going hunting.
“I think I’ve got something, Jeff,” Little Bob said. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, and still had his earphone from the scanner in. He pointed to the notepad beside him, which was covered in names, arrows, and question marks. “There have been about twenty references to Masjid Gilani, usually in the context of orders coming from him. He also sounds like he’s new; there doesn’t seem to be the familiarity you might expect of a seasoned PPF commander. Furthermore, all of his orders are related to the purge.”
“Have we got anything on the rolodex about a Masjid Gilani?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, we haven’t heard of him. If he’s Qods Force, though, that shouldn’t be all that surprising; we haven’t got anything near to a complete roster on them. I don’t think anybody outside Tehran does.”
“How about a location?” Jim asked from over my shoulder. “Do we know where to find him?”
“He said once to bring somebody to ‘Headquarters,’” Little Bob said, pointing to another note on the pad. “I’m pretty su
re the PPF set up its headquarters in the old Joint Security Station, in Al Asma’i, but they could be in the Basra Police Station on the other side of town, too.”
“Any idea of security on site?” I asked.
“It sounds like they’ve got most everybody out to fill out their tags today,” Little Bob said, “but I’d expect there’s going to be some pretty heavy resistance if we hit either place. The best bet might be hitting him on the move as he goes home.”
“The other question is, is he going home tonight?” Jim asked. “With an operation this big, the commander might stay up at the station.”
“This is Iraq, man,” Little Bob pointed out. “Since when have you known Iraqis to willingly operate into the night?”
“The ISOF did it at Installation Two,” I pointed out. “I don’t think we can necessarily bank on the old rules applying anymore.”
“The ISOF went in at night because they’d been trained by US SOF,” Jim mused, scratching his beard. “That’s what SOF does, hell, that’s what we do. The PPF is pretty new, and while their predecessors might have been taught by US Police Transition Teams, how much of that training necessarily got handed down?”
I scratched the back of my neck, thinking. “We need to get eyes on those stations, and verify whether or not this Gilani is there,” I said, half talking to myself. “Then, when we figure out if he’s moving, or sticking, we can develop from there.” I looked over at Jim. “Let’s get ready to either make the hit, or set up an ambush somewhere on the street. I know, I know,” I said, as Jim raised his eyebrows. “It’s going to be on the fly and a little rushed, but this might be our best chance to get this guy. If he’s setting the stage for the next phase of the Iranian takeover here, I want his ass.”
“We want him alive, or corpsified?” Jim asked quietly.
“Alive, if possible,” I replied. “If he is the player he looks like he might be, we just might get some useful information out of him. Let’s start getting things together, and start figuring out a plan here.”
