Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  It was past midnight by the time we all made it back to the safehouse. With the number of checkpoints we’d had to dodge, I was starting to think we needed to move our base of operations out of the city itself, possibly all the way to Zubayr. It would make infiltrating Basra itself too difficult, though, especially if our target deck in the city got larger from Gilani’s information. We’d have to stay put for the time being.

  The sat phone buzzed as Haas manhandled Gilani into a back room. We weren’t going to be as insulated from the noise of the interrogation as we had been in the warehouse back in Chamchamal. I just hoped he was able to keep things down enough that the neighbors didn’t hear.

  It was Alek on the phone. “Bad news, brother,” he said. “The IA abandoned the cordon and moved into Kirkuk last night. There’s pretty fierce fighting in Almas Semti and downtown, especially around the citadel. Caleb’s, Mike’s, and Hal’s teams have been lending support to the Kurds.” He paused. “Caleb and Matt were killed last night.”

  I closed my eyes. Dammit. Caleb had been a loud, obnoxious baboon of a man, but he was still our brother. I’d known him for over fifteen years. Matt had been a quiet, sarcastic, wiry little fucker, who was one of the best gunfighters I’d ever seen. That also made three dead already. This job was stacking up to be as bad as Africa. I swallowed the lump in my throat and asked, “How are the Liberty folks handling our being gone?”

  “That’s the worse news,” Alek said. “They all but panicked, ran for the exits. They grabbed the first flight out, which was going to Kuwait. Apparently, our pal Collins has been busy. They got taken off the flight at Kuwait International, arrested, and are being extradited back to Iraq.”

  “What the fuck?” I snarled. “On what charges?”

  “Stealing national resources, apparently,” Alek replied dryly. “The official claim is that they were illegally drilling in Kirkuk Province. The truth of it is that they’re doing it to get at us.” He paused again, and I could see his contemptuous grimace. “Collins thinks we’re destabilizing the country. Probably going to try to cut a deal with them to turn us over.”

  “We’re destabilizing the country?” I demanded, a little too loudly. The others inside all turned to look at me. “Does that stupid fuck have the slightest clue what’s going on here? The IRGC has just effectively seized control of Basra. From the intel I’m getting, elements of AQI, Al Nusra, and Jund Al Sham are moving into Ramadi and Fallujah, and Baghdad is starting a war with the Kurds because they want to look tough but don’t think they can take the Iranians or the Sunni extremists, and that cocksucker is saying that we are destabilizing Iraq? What fucking planet, hell, what fucking universe is he living in?”

  “The same political universe that the fuckwits who took us off the Africa op last year were living in, brother,” Alek replied. “Don’t expect cold hard reality to faze these assholes. They’ve got their own agenda, regardless of what’s happening on the ground. What we have to consider is how we’re going to deal with it.”

  “Do we need to go in and break them out?” Again, I didn’t add.

  “Our contract with Liberty is terminated,” Alek said. “We officially started the KRG contract two days ago. So, technically, no we don’t. I’m not sure I like leaving them to rot…”

  “But we’ve got some heavier shit to deal with,” I finished for him. “And with a few of them, I don’t think we’d get a lot of cooperation if we showed up to bust them out.” I scratched my beard. “We’ve got to find a way to get this Collins asshole out of our hair,” I concluded. “Sooner or later he’s going to stick his oar in at the worst possible time, and he’s going to get somebody killed. We’ve already lost enough guys on this job.”

  “You don’t imagine things by halves do you, Jeff?” he asked. “You’re talking about finding a way to get rid of a State Department official.”

  “I can think of a very efficient way,” I said darkly.

  “That’s not on the table yet,” Alek warned. “He’s still an American, no matter what a pain in the ass he is. Offing him will create way more problems than it will solve. We’re pariahs now, but we’re not wanted for murder. We assassinate Collins and we’ll have a warrant on us back in the States in no time.”

  “Fine, but if he gets one of us killed, it’s game on,” I growled. “We’ve got enough to worry about without some State hack interfering in shit he doesn’t understand. Or want to understand,” I amended.

  “We’ll figure something out, brother,” Alek said. “Have a little patience. Now, what’s going on down there?”

  I filled him in on the IRGC takeover of the PPF leadership, the purge that was now on its third day with no sign of letting up, and our grabbing Gilani. “If this guy is highly placed enough, hopefully we can get a line on who the IRGC types are here, and start dropping them. I figure if we can eliminate enough of their structure, we can put them out of the game, at least for a while. It’s looking increasingly like the operation as a whole is compartmentalized six ways from Sunday; I doubt trying to intercept a single thrust is necessarily going to work. Find ‘em and kill ‘em is going to be the way to go.”

  “Good luck,” Alek said. “Kalhar still hasn’t talked. He’s a hardcore shahid motherfucker, or he wants to be. Will’s getting frustrated.”

  “How about Lester?” I asked, half knowing the answer.

  “You know Les,” he replied. “Blank is his default expression. I think he’s starting to enjoy it a little. Considers it a challenge.”

  “Kalhar needs to be afraid, then,” I said. “When Les gets that interested…” Lester was one of the best interrogators I’d ever seen. The guy knew mind games like nobody else. Haas might be willing to resort to pliers and a hammer when time was short, but I don’t think Lester had ever used duress in an interrogation. He had a way of getting inside the subject’s head that was just eerie.

  “Are you pursuing other leads besides Gilani’s head?” Alek asked. “I’m starting to think things are getting dangerously close to falling apart here.”

  “We’re listening in on the PPF, looking for target indicators,” I said. “It’s slow, but we got a line on Gilani before Haas showed back up with his two stooges.” I still didn’t trust Ahmed or Hassan that far; I’d seen trustworthy sources go sideways fast before. Spider was still very much on our minds, a year after he flipped on us in Somalia. I’d killed him for it, but not before we lost Hank, Rodrigo, Tim, and Danny, our Ground Branch handler. There hadn’t even been enough left of Rod or Danny to bury. “We’ll take as many of them out as we can.”

  The backlash from our snatching Gilani was not long in coming. By morning, announcements were on radio and the local TV station that the PPF’s number two, Ramzi Qomi, had taken over in Gilani’s absence. We knew of Qomi; he was on our rolodex. He was Qods Force, and had showed up during the uprising in Saudi Arabia two years before that saw the House of Saud dragged into the streets and dismembered in Riyadh, placing probably the most radical Wahhabi regime in the region in power, in what was now the Islamic Caliphate of the Arabian Peninsula.

  The TV in the safehouse wasn’t in the best shape; the picture flickered and the color was never quite right, too bright and shifted toward orange. It was enough, though. Qomi appeared at a podium, apparently indoors, dressed in a conservative dark suit. I couldn’t follow his Arabic, but I got the gist. Whether it had been criminals, Zionists, or apostate terrorists, i.e., Sunnis, someone had killed or captured the police chief, and now the city was going to be locked down. The puppets of the Zionists or the American puppet state in Baghdad were going to be hunted down.

  “I think we’ve got our next target,” Nick mused, watching the TV.

  “Not going to be so simple,” I pointed out. “This fucker knows he’s a target, and he’s going to be a lot more cautious than his predecessor. It’s going to be a lot harder to get him.”

  “Do we need to grab him?” Larry asked from the far end of the room, where he was cleaning his STI Tac
tical. “Or will offing him be good enough?”

  “At this stage,” I said, “since we have Gilani for intel purposes, I’d say we can just start knocking these clowns off as they pop up. As near as we can tell, Gilani was the IRGC’s top dog here. That makes the rest of them expendable. If we get the chance to grab one and pump him for information, I think we should go ahead, but otherwise, smoke ‘em.”

  “That makes it simpler,” Larry said, applying a little Slipstream to the rails before putting his pistol back together.

  “Simpler, not necessarily easier,” Jim said as he came into the room, still wearing his belt kit, plate carrier, and carrying his Mk 17. “They’ll have security beefed up if they have to bring Basij in to do it. And that would probably include counter-snipers, as well. Not impossible, but tougher.”

  “Tough we can do,” I pointed out. “And I’m thinking we need to get moving on putting the hurt on these motherfuckers. Things are speeding up.” I’d already filled them in on the Iraqis new push in Kirkuk, and Caleb’s and Matt’s deaths. “We wanted to get in front of this thing; I think this is the way we manage to do that. Start killing these fuckers.”

  There was general agreement. “Get Ahmed in here,” I said. “Let’s start picking his brain on this Qomi fucker.”

  It turned out that Qomi was a fairly familiar face at the PPF; he had actually been there longer than Gilani. Gilani was a relative newcomer, apparently sent by Tehran to push the plan along more quickly. Qomi had been doing most of the gruntwork prior, laying the foundation.

  He was smart; he had no real patterns aside from praying five times a day, always at the same time. He varied his routes to and from work, and didn’t have a residence that anybody seemed to know. He kept where he slept a secret even from the PPF. It might have raised eyebrows anywhere else, but Iraq had been the scene of a continuous low-level insurgency for well over a decade. Police officials were targets, and no one would bat an eye at a high-ranking police official taking security precautions.

  It did, of course make targeting him that much harder, but now that he was acting police chief—at least that was what he was being called on TV; I imagined they figured they might eventually get Gilani back, since they didn’t have a body—he would have to expose himself more. Eventually we’d get a shot at him.

  “Eventually,” however, wasn’t going to be good enough under these circumstances. We had to draw him out, get him somewhere in the open where we could get a shot at him, or in a vehicle where we could ambush him. If he was as cautious as his record suggested, that wouldn’t be easy.

  It was actually Hassan who made the suggestion that seemed like it would work. It would take careful timing and good intel, but even after we examined it from all sides, it was sound. Hassan slipped out that night, to lay some groundwork.

  Chapter 19

  The plan was more complicated than I would have liked. A lot more complicated. In order to draw Qomi out, we needed bait that he would have to go for. Under the circumstances, the best bet meant exposing ourselves, which I had been disinclined to do since a fuckhead platoon sergeant in my early days in the Marine Corps had ordered me and my ATL out into the open to “draw fire.” That left the alternative of finding him another target. Not wanting to put the hurt on the local moderates any more than the death squads were already doing, that in turn meant finding and working up a target package on a genuine bad guy. So essentially we were going after two targets at the same time, with a nine-man crew, not counting the two Iraqis.

  We found our target in Abu Falah. Nobody knew what the asshole’s real name was; he’d used about fifteen different aliases that we knew of since he’d first popped up in Najaf in 2004, killing Marines and sawing the heads off of Iraqis who cooperated with Coalition forces. He was a very bad guy, having been affiliated at different times with Ansar Al-Islam, AQI, the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, and had been rumored to have been on good terms with Ayman Al-Zawahiri himself. The guy was a hardcore Sunni jihadist, with a lot of blood on his hands. Plenty of Shi’a wanted him dead, including the IRGC, despite the rumors that he’d done some training and even received support from Tehran in the past. He’d sided with Jabhat al Nusrah in Syria, so as far as the IRGC was concerned, he was done.

  Finding Abu Falah was a bitch. For Qomi, we could get some idea by listening in on the PPF’s radio traffic. Finding a hardened jihadist who didn’t want to be found was not easy. Hassan had contacts on both sides of the fence, which made me a little wary of him, but he sniffed out in a couple of days that Abu Falah was in Basra. That only took us so far, though. Basra’s a big city. We’d have to narrow it down, and find a place and time he’d be stationary, with enough lead time to tip off the PPF, for this to work.

  Hassan, Haas explained in the short periods he took off from interrogating Gilani, had been with ISOF for a while, and had hunted terrorists throughout southern Iraq before going private sector. He had a working knowledge of many of the jihadist mosques and social centers in Basra and Najaf. Apparently, he had hunted Abu Falah in Najaf, while he was still going by the name Adar.

  Hassan hadn’t said much in the time he’d been with us, allowing his cousin to do most of the talking, but when he did decide to open his mouth, we found it generally paid to listen to him. “He will likely be laying low in the Al-Othman mosque,” Hassan said, looking down at the map. “It is an older mosque that has had to be rebuilt twice since the war started, thanks to the Shi’a militias bombing it several times. I imagine that has contributed to the radicalization of the Muslims there. It has turned into a hotbed of jihadists in the last couple of years.”

  “And if he’s not there?” I asked.

  “Then I will look around the other mosques,” he replied calmly. “Allah willing, I will find him.”

  I wasn’t all that willing to trust in Allah. As far as I was concerned, regardless what the more naïve back in the States thought, he wasn’t the same God I prayed to. And I had a little too much experience with just what “Inshallah” meant, and it wasn’t, “I’ll work my ass off to get this done.” I wasn’t necessarily going to say that to Hassan, however. Muslims, even moderate ones, tend to be a little touchy about expressing your lack of faith in their god. And this was a case where we needed Hassan, so cultivating his loyalty, i.e., not badmouthing his religion, was necessary.

  It still didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill him in a heartbeat if he turned on us.

  I was wrapped in a dishdasha and keffiyeh, my eyes hidden by sunglasses. I’d been in the sun enough that with my beard I looked like a particularly large Arab from a distance. As long as the sunglasses stayed on, so nobody could see my blue eyes, and nobody tried to talk to me, as my Arabic sucked, I was all right.

  The day was hot as hell and humid as fuck. I was sweating my ass off under the dishdasha, even with the car’s anemic air conditioning running. I almost wanted to get out and take a dip in the canal running alongside the street. Almost. I remembered well enough how much filth was in those canals from a few nights before.

  It was almost noon, and a Friday. Friday is to Muslims what Sunday is to Christians. Even as I pulled the car over to the side of the road, within sight of the Al-Othman mosque, the call to prayer echoed out over the city from over thirty different mosques, the timing off just enough to make the echoes seem louder than they really were. People were already streaming down the street toward the mosque for Friday prayers.

  Hassan was in a small blue-and-rust hatchback two blocks ahead of us. He didn’t know we were back there, or at least he wasn’t supposed to know. Bryan was in the passenger seat, his rifle hidden against the door, trying to lean back away from the window. I might be able to pass a brief inspection, but Bryan’s taller than I am, and whiter. Now, I’ve seen some pretty pale Iraqis, including one who was actually blond, but it was better to try to avoid the problem altogether, which was why we were staying in the car.

  We were there for two reasons. One: I didn’t trust Hassan, and wanted to be close en
ough to have some warning when he flipped on us. Two: if he was trustworthy, but got in over his head, I wanted to be there to back him up. If he was trustworthy, he was too valuable an asset to waste.

  I watched the crowds heading for prayer. Especially here, close to a Sunni mosque, people were wary, moving quickly and trying not to make eye contact with anyone they didn’t know. The fear was palpable. I couldn’t exactly blame them, except when I reminded myself that there was quite possibly at least one very dangerous jihadi psychopath amongst them. The odds were good that there were quite a few more.

  It was only a matter of time before the purge generated its own backlash. While the Sunni population in Basra was relatively small, the more it got beaten on, the more radical outsiders would come to fight for their brothers, by which of course I mean murder a bunch of Shi’a in retaliation. I was just waiting for the first car to detonate in a souk or outside a Shi’a mosque.

  The crowd began to thin out as most of them filed into the mosque, kicking off their sandals or shoes before shuffling inside. As they did, I noticed several young men hanging back near the entrance. After a moment, it became obvious that they weren’t going inside. I saw a flicker of light on metal as one of them adjusted an AK leaning against the wall just inside the doors to the mosque.

  I nudged Bryan, and indicated the group. “Militia,” I said. “Probably there to keep the death squads away.”

  He nodded. “They don’t look like they’re set up to take on the PPF if they decide to mount a serious raid, though,” he said.

  “We don’t know how much ordnance they’ve got inside that mosque, either,” I pointed out. “They could have enough RPGs to take out a mechanized infantry company for all we know.”

  “Good point,” Bryan said. “They sure pulled that a lot in the last war.”