Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  “I know,” I said, “but can you think of a better idea? Decapitate the Iranian cadre here, and we give our allies a substantial leg-up. And doing it all in one night will minimize the chances they have to react before it’s too late.”

  The two militia leaders had ceased their consultation, and turned back to us. Hussein Ali spoke, short and to the point. “He says that he wonders how you expect to hit all of them in one night,” Hassan said. “He says his men will not want to spend all night away from their homes and families.”

  “We’ve spent months away from our homes and families, and will likely spend months more, to help fight his enemies,” I said flatly, meeting Hussein Ali’s eyes as I did so. “Tell him that we’re not calling on his men to make the hits; we’ll do that. I just need his men to be the cordoning forces.” There was no way I wanted Iraqi militia in the stack going through a door with me, particularly when we hadn’t had six months to train with them.

  There was another hurried conversation, and then Hussein Ali nodded. “He can have his men ready to go soon,” Hassan translated.

  I shook my head. “Not tonight,” I told them. “We need time to prep and plan for this. I need to take my men back to the safehouse, locate the targets, and plan and rehearse for the strikes. We’ll go an hour after dark tomorrow night. It’s going to be a long night, and I want everyone involved to be as fresh as possible. So tell your men to get as much rest tonight and tomorrow as they can.”

  Hussein Ali grinned, showing several brown, broken teeth, and stood up, extending his hands. We shook hands, and he said something in Arabic. “He says this is going to be the boldest operation he has ever been involved in, Mr. Jeff,” Hassan said. “He is looking forward to it.”

  “I hope he still feels that way later, once the bodies have to be counted,” I said as we left.

  We took Hassan back to the safehouse with us, in large part to make it simpler to translate the target list and get it pinned down on the maps. We had a lot of work to do before launch time, and we had to make sure that we got at least some rest before we stepped off. Like I’d said, the next night was going to be a long one. Every extra pair of hands and eyes helped.

  When we got there, we found more vehicles than expected. None were PPF trucks, but I wasn’t going to take chances. It was getting dark, which provided us some concealment to work our way in. I told Larry to park us at the end of the block, across the street. “Everybody out, good dispersion.” Only then did I call ahead.

  Mike answered the cell. “Everything’s good here, man,” he said. “Come on in. We’ve got bad news, but it isn’t here.” I relaxed fractionally, and signaled to the rest of the team to keep it casual but go on ahead; the house was clear.

  Herman and Bo were just inside the gate, fully kitted out and armed. Bo and I exchanged nods as we came in the gate; he had temporarily joined our team for the Yemen raid, when Alek was still team lead. Herman was the new guy who had replaced Charlie after he went down on the Yemen op.

  Inside, everyone was up and armed. Mike met us at the door. “The other safehouse got hit late this afternoon,” he told me as we walked into the ops room.

  “How’d you get burned?” I asked.

  “I don’t think we did,” he said. “If we did, the bad guys were being strangely subtle about trying to mask it.” He pointed to the map, indicating the whole of Al Najibiya. “They were sweeping the entire neighborhood. They were irregulars, no uniforms, not really. I think they were looking for somebody in particular, but they didn’t have a particular house to target.”

  “How’d you get out?” I asked. I had a feeling I knew. Under those circumstances there was only one way to get out.

  “Killed a bunch of ‘em and ran,” he said. “We looped way outside the city before coming back in here, so we made sure nobody followed us.”

  “You said they didn’t have uniforms, not really,” I said. “Not really?”

  He shrugged. “They were mostly dressed in black, and several of them were wearing green headbands with yellow Arabic lettering on them.”

  Jim and I shared a look. “Jaysh al Mahdi,” Jim said.

  I nodded. “Pretty certain. They’re operating more openly.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Jim pointed out. “If their buddies in the IRGC are running the PPF, they can be pretty certain the cops are going to look the other way.”

  “And that’s assuming they didn’t get their marching orders from Qomi in the first place,” I said. “We had to expect that they were going to keep operating, especially using their irregular auxiliaries since we fucked up the PPF in Zubayr the other day. We’ve still got everybody, so this really doesn’t change the plan much at all.”

  “Speaking of which,” Mike interjected, “what is the plan? We’re a little out of the loop here.”

  I filled him in, as Hassan started working with Little Bob and Lee to get the target list turned into useful target packages. In this case, that largely meant pinpointing their addresses on the map, then sending the Aeroseekers out during the day to get some real-time surveillance. It was going to be fast and dirty; we didn’t have the time or manpower to get proper boots-on-the-ground R&S done.

  “You trust this list?” Mike asked me. “This sounds a little too much like the kind of single-source thing that could have us walking into a trap, or even just fulfilling somebody’s vendetta.”

  “It’s entirely possible,” I said, as I leaned over our makeshift map table, which was starting to sprout various map-pen circles and scribbled notations, “which is why I’ve got Haas out finding Ahmed to follow up on a few of these already. Frankly, I do think we’re getting played, at least a little.”

  “Then why the hell are we going along with this?” Mike asked.

  I straightened up and faced him. “I do think we’re getting played, but not the way you’re thinking. I think this Hussein Ali guy already had the target list, but didn’t trust his own men or position to pull it off without help. Then here we come, with a ready-made, American-trained SOF raid force.

  “The trouble is, if he just turns things over to us, it might look like he did so because he couldn’t pull it off. That’s a stain on his honor, and lowers him in the eyes of his men and his tribe. So he provides just enough intel to get us to follow up on it, without it going public that he’s had the intel all along, but not the wherewithal to make the hit himself.”

  Mike was nodding. “So this way he saves face, and gets us to do the dirty work with minimal loss to himself and his militia, without looking bad.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Honor is huge with these guys. Any length is appropriate if it allows a man, particularly one in Hussein Ali’s position, to maintain his honor. That includes lying, stealing, killing, and backstabbing. That’s why if you insult an Arab you should always watch your back afterward. He has to retaliate, or be less of a man.”

  “So we’re going forward with this?” Mike asked after a moment.

  “Unless we get information from Ahmed that tells us this is a complete lie, yes,” I replied. “As hard as it is to find good guys and bad guys here, I think we can be fairly confident that Qods Force, Hezbollah, and Jaysh al Mahdi are bad guys. If we can take them down a few notches, it’s something.” I paused for a moment. “Of course, Ahmed isn’t exactly above reproach as far as we know, either, so take that for what it’s worth.”

  On that happy note, we got back to work.

  There was a substantial force of militiamen waiting in the old factory when we pulled up the next evening. They were well armed, and most had at least an AK chest rig, even the ones with SIGs or M4s, magazines for which didn’t fit all that well in an AK rig. There were a few other tac vests, of course, and a handful had body armor. Most of them were also covering their faces with shemaughs or ski masks; an understandable precaution that apparently even the IA had taken back during the occupation, when being identified as working with Coalition Forces could mean a death sentence for your family.


  To my surprise, Hussein Ali was also waiting, wearing woodland fatigues, body armor, and carrying an AK-103. An FN 5-7 was holstered in a thigh rig at his side. He was bare-headed, and greeted us with a smile as we got out of the trucks, all of us jocked up for door-kicking and packing our full-sized, suppressed battle rifles.

  He walked up to me and embraced me, making the motions of the traditional kiss of peace without actually making contact. “My friends, my friends,” Hassan translated his rapid Arabic, “Tonight will be a great night. My men are ready to go.”

  I looked around at the company-sized force and the multiple technicals, mostly built out of Toyota pickups and the international version of the Ford Ranger, though there were two big 5-ton trucks as well. There were PKPs, PKMs, a DShK, and a Kord in evidence. More than a few of the militiamen carried RPG-7s, and a couple were packing bigger tubes that had to be RPG-29s. Combined with the firepower we were packing, there was a lot of pent-up destruction in that old factory.

  “I think it will, at that,” I said. I figured if we lived through it, we sure as hell weren’t ever going to forget it.

  Chapter 24

  We led the way in the Toyota, screaming down Baghdad Street with five militia technicals in trace behind us. They were bunched up more than I would have liked, but we didn’t have much more than the most rudimentary comms, and those all had to go through Hassan anyway. I really needed to work on my Arabic.

  Our first target was the closest, a large house in Al Asmaii Al Qadim. There was a district deputy chief living there, and living pretty high, according to Hussein Ali’s information. He also had security 24/7, which made him the hardest target for the night, since Qomi wasn’t on Hussein Ali’s list.

  The former Colonel himself was in the Ranger right behind us. He had been more than eager to join the mission; this guy was no political appointee, which many senior officers in the IA were, those who didn’t buy their commissions outright. Even though I knew he was using us, I could respect him a lot more than some of the militia leaders I’d met.

  We peeled off from Baghdad Street, taking a narrow bridge to cross the canal running parallel to the street and then we were in the neighborhood. There were no fewer than five schools and a mosque in Al Qadim, but we weren’t targeting anyone in those, and since it was well after 2100 local, I wasn’t worried about collateral damage there anyway.

  We blew past the gates of two darkened schools, and came to a halt in billows of dust just outside the target house. The four technicals in the back fanned out and took up cordon positions around the target almost as smoothly as if we’d rehearsed it. Actually we had, or at least we’d tried. It hadn’t worked very well at the factory, but now they were performing. Maybe it just took the pressure of a real mission. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, provided they didn’t start shooting up the neighborhood for the hell of it.

  Paul was driving; he brought us to a halt just short of the gate. The truck was still rocking on its shocks as we unassed, running toward the gate. Little Bob was in the lead, toting his sledgehammer. Larry, Nick, Bryan, and I were right on his ass. Hussein Ali and six of his men were behind us, ready to set the inner cordon as soon as we went in the house.

  The gate was closed, but not padlocked. There was no chain, at least. There was a metal rod thrust down into the concrete, but Little Bob was able to get that out easily enough. As soon as he did, the gate flexed, but didn’t open. There was a bar or latch on the inside. A single swing of the sledge handled that. With a rolling boom, the gates swung open, and we were in.

  We quickly but carefully cleared the courtyard. There were several vehicles there, along with the usual scrap that you find lying around outside Iraqi houses. No sign of the target’s security detail yet, but after the noise of that gate getting slammed open, it was only a matter of time.

  It turned out to be not that much time. We were running to stack up on the door when it opened, followed a second later by the rattle of Hussein Ali’s AK-103 as he cut down the man with the G36K in the doorway.

  A deliberate stack, breach, and clear was now out of the question. I pulled a bang out of my vest, yanked out the pin, and chucked it in the doorway. I hesitated on the porch just long enough for it to detonate, and followed it inside, with Nick right on my ass.

  There were two more goons in the hallway, both wearing suits with no ties, both carrying AKs. Since the door opened into a hall instead of a room, Nick and I found ourselves shoulder-to shoulder, advancing as we each put a pair into both security men. Disoriented, deafened, and partly blinded from the flashbang, neither got off a shot, but collapsed in two heaps in the hallway, their white shirts and the tile floor splashed with blood.

  Bryan, Larry, and Little Bob were right behind us, splitting off and pushing forward as we pushed into the next room. It looked like a tea room, with the floor covered in an intricate rug and a lot of colorful cushions, but there was no one there. Satisfied it was clear, I stacked back up on the door, marking the door as I did so. We weren’t as worried about leaving traces tonight as we had been on some of the previous hits we’d done. There wasn’t going to be any disguising what had happened tonight.

  Little Bob was still holding the hallway, short of where it opened into a central room. Larry and Bryan had gone into the other side room in front, and were just coming back to the door as Nick and I came out. I went straight to Little Bob and kneed him in the ass. “With you.”

  Little Bob hooked into the main room, and I followed him. Clear. Nobody. There was another doorway off to the left, and a stairway to the right. Little Bob had the stairway covered, down on a low knee to give himself a better angle on the top landing. None of us wanted to see a repeat of what had happened to Bob.

  I closed on the door to the left, pausing just long enough to get the knee and, “With you,” from Bryan before I hooked in the door, heading straight for the far corner, as the door opened flush with the far wall. It was a kitchen, with a refrigerator, stove, and a sink piled with pots and several large platters. There was no one in it. I moved back to the door, stacking up behind Bryan, who had finished his sweep and turned immediately back to cover the door.

  I wasn’t fucking around with the stairs. As valuable as the target might have been alive, he wasn’t worth another one of us. I pulled a frag out of my vest, yanked out the pin, and hucked it up the stairs after a three-count. It detonated with a tooth-rattling thud, and Little Bob was immediately heading up, into the smoke and dust the grenade had kicked up.

  The upstairs was a shambles. Most stairways I’d seen in Iraq didn’t have handrails, but this one did. It was now a scattered pile of splinters and chunks of wood. The wooden door at the top was partway off its hinges. Another guy in a suit, a Chang Feng submachine gun still in his hand, lay on the floor, his face and white shirt soaked in blood. He wasn’t moving, but Little Bob kicked the weapon away from his hand anyway, and put a round in his head just to make sure.

  As Larry and Little Bob cleared the main room, Nick kicked in the damaged door, tossed a bang, and flowed into the next room. I was on his heels, hooking through the door to clear the near corner before sweeping the rest of the room.

  Another one of the security men was crouched by the bed, keeping someone else down on the floor, and was starting to point an MP5K at me. I shot him just as it came level, putting two 7.62 rounds into his chest, one just below his sternum, the other just above. He fell backward on top of the person he was protecting, the submachine gun clattering from his hand.

  Finishing my sweep of the room, I saw the legs of another body on the far side of the bed. Nick had shot another security man, close enough to when I’d shot the man in front of me that I hadn’t heard the shots.

  “Clear!” Larry yelled from the main room. “House is clear!”

  “Get Hassan up here!” I called. “We need to confirm the target.”

  I had moved to the man cowering beneath the corpse of his bodyguard, yanked the body off him,
and pulled him away from the bed, carefully. From what we’d seen, the Revolutionary Guard tended not to go for suicide operations themselves; they farmed that out to Hezbollah and their dupes. That said, I wasn’t taking chances that he might have a grenade underneath him. I turned him over in such a way that if something did blow up, he’d absorb most of the blast. He was pretty fat, so he’d absorb a good amount of shrapnel if that happened.

  Nothing exploded. I flipped him over and began to search him thoroughly. I wasn’t gentle. He probably had a few extra bruises by the time I flipped him back on his face and flex-cuffed his hands behind his back.

  Hassan had come up by then, picking his way through the debris. He didn’t give the bodies a second look, but crouched down over the prisoner, and barked in his face in Arabic. Apparently he didn’t like the guy’s answer, because he reached down, grabbed him by the hair, and wrenched his head up to look at him, snapping his questions again. By then, Nick had found an ID in the dresser against the wall, with a photo that matched the prisoner. He handed it to Hassan, who had let go of the man’s hair.

  Hassan looked at the ID and nodded. “This is him,” he said. “Khalid Ahmad. This is our target.”

  I didn’t ask any further questions, but hauled the fat guy on his feet and passed him on to Nick, who grabbed him by the arm in such a way that most of his weight was now on one shoulder. “Gag him, blindfold him, and let’s get him on the truck,” I said. Nick started dragging the guy down the stairs while I moved out into the main room. Larry and Little Bob were already going through every box and chest for anything of intel value. Bryan was at the base of the steps, holding security. I checked my watch. “Five minutes, gents,” I announced. “Then we’re gone. We’ve got a lot of targets to hit tonight.”