The Return Of Dog Team

by William W. Johnstone

  The rest was a matter of skill and ballistics, and Kilroy had both working for him. The high-velocity had drilled the bulletproof windshield and driver alike. The man in the front passenger seat lunged for the steering wheel, trying to wrestle it from the hand of the driver. Before he could, the Explorer crashed into the stone wall. The two shooters behind the wall scrambled for cover.

  Steve Ireland stuck his head up. The crashed Explorer was a sitting target. Motion and noise came from inside. Some of the passengers still lived.

  It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Steve Ireland’s launcher lofted a grenade right on the Explorer. It came down with a soft plop, like an egg dropping into a kettle of boiling water. Then it blew.

  The Explorer was armored, but the plating on the roof was less thick than that on the sides and undercarriage. The explosion gutted the roof, sieving it and streaking down on those inside. Making a real mess of them.

  A fuel line was severed, and a fire started burning somewhere under the machine. It made a crackling noise, like dry twigs snapping and corn popping. Tendrils of smoke, thick and slow and serpentine, curled up from beneath the undercarriage. The flames touched off a line of leaking fuel with a whoosh. Fire crawled back up the line, into the fuel tank itself, touching it off. The blast was big.

  The pickup truck gunner must have paused to watch or been otherwise distracted, because he stayed in one place for a beat too long, and Ervil nailed him. The gunner folded at the knees and dropped into the truck bed, minus a head.

  The handful of gang members sheltering behind the hillock suddenly broke into the open, rushing the farmhouse. They ran headlong into a blistering fusillade from the house being laid down by McBane and Garza. That stopped their rush, pinning them in the open. Then Ervil swung the machine gun muzzle their way before they could retreat to the shelter of the hillock. He fired—and that was that.

  Steve Ireland and Niles continued exchanging potshots with the two shooters behind the wall. Nobody scored.

  Storm winds whipped the flames of the blazing Explorer into long orange-red streamers streaking north. Patches of blazing gas provided fitful, unbalanced illumination.

  The last real pocket of resistance was the bunch at the second Explorer, southwest of the farmhouse. That group sheltered behind the vehicle, firing at the farmhouse and at Creedy, Paulus, and Berger. It was something of a stalemate until Virgil, Donnicker, and Prester came up from the wadi and across the fields in a Humvee. Virgil drove and Donnicker manned the turret machine gun. Prester rode shotgun.

  They rolled up behind the gang members sheltering behind the Explorer. Donnicker at the machine gun made quick work of them.

  The two shooters behind the wall stopped shooting. After a while, Steve Ireland and Niles took notice of the lull. It might have been a trick to lure them out in the open, so they stayed put. More time passed, though, without further sign of the two shooters. Steve and Niles worked their way toward the wall, alternating between advancing and covering each other’s advance. No shots were fired at them.

  When they reached the wall, they found that the shooters were gone. The missing shooters could barely be seen, thanks to the light of the burning Explorer. The two had made their way north and were just disappearing behind the screen of a line of palm trees.

  Steve said, “Too far away. They’re not worth wasting a bullet on.”

  Niles said, “What happened?”

  “I guess they had enough.”

  They stood watching the palm trees for a bit, but the shooters failed to show themselves. Steve and Niles turned, starting back toward the farmhouse. They’d gone no more than two paces when they heard a pair of shots ring out. The shots came from the north, beyond the palm trees. Two shots, no more. They had a ring of finality to them. Silence fell on that quarter.

  Steve and Niles glanced at each other. Niles shrugged. They went to rejoin the others.

  Kilroy saw the two shooters abandon their posts at the stone wall and flee north toward the palm trees. He was waiting for them when they emerged from the other side.

  No costly titanium-alloy rounds for them. Ordinary bullets from his AK-47 would suffice.

  And did.

  Later, when the members of ODA 586 had a chance to compare notes, nobody could explain why the first Explorer had crashed into the wall.

  The best explanation (and that was a weak one) was that a round from Creedy’s machine gun had somehow gotten through the armor plating during the Explorer’s headlong charge, and that it or a piece of shrapnel dislodged by it had wounded the driver, not killing him immediately, but having a delayed effect that allowed him to circle around to the north access road before he expired.

  That tied it up in a neat package, satisfactory to the recordkeepers.

  The explosion had blown out the Explorer’s windshield, destroying the evidence of the neat bullet hole penetrating armored glass. Nobody bothered to examine the machine’s burned-out hulk or the charred remains of its passengers. Which spared them from finding the titanium bullet penetrating the driver’s skull, and opening up a lot of questions into matters best ignored.

  Twelve

  Much happened in the next twenty-four hours following the night of Colonel Munghal’s death and the farmhouse raid. ODA 586 successfully returned to Border Base Foxtrot. Ali al-Magid was operated on in the base hospital, where a surgeon who’d been sworn to secrecy operated on him, removing the mi-crotransmitter implanted in the side of one of his ample buttocks. The implant was taken possession of by Albin Prester, who was present in the operating room, clad in an antiseptic surgical mask and rubber gloves.

  Al-Magid was airlifted to the Green Zone in Baghdad, to a secure hospital at an American military base. After eighteen hours of sleep, he returned to consciousness, dazed and confused but on the road to recovery. Along that road he would encounter many American military intelligence agents who would debrief him extensively on his experience in captivity and, no less important, on his knowledge of the breadth and depth of the mastery of the Razeem process to be found among Iraqi scientists.

  His debriefing would take a considerable length of time. When they were done squeezing him of every vital particle of intelligence, they might hand him over to Iraqi government authorities, provided that the government and authorities in question were not inimical to the vital national security interests of the United States. Which was by no means a sure bet, due to the fitful leaps and odd morphings that the new Iraqi state was creating.

  In Iran, the assassination of Colonel Munghal was cause for consternation. The high-ranking Pasdaran secret police official had had his hand in so many different dirty businesses, foreign and domestic, that there was no telling who’d had him killed, and for what reason. The author of the plot might well be Iranian. Munghal had many enemies. Perhaps a faction in the Pasdaran itself feared him and needed his removal to further some internal intrigue. Or perhaps he’d fallen out with the holy city of Qom, and the mullahs had issued a secret fatwa ordering his destruction.

  Tehran was not overly fond of its erstwhile Iraqi allies. There was a suspicion that the Azif militiamen were the source of their troubles. Hassani Akkad had been a great thief. If militia leader Waleed Tewfiq suspected that Akkad was cheating him, he might have moved against the gang boss and his Iranian allies. Had Tehran been certain, it would have struck against Waleed. But there was no way to be sure. Whatever hand had pressed the button on Colonel Munghal to make him go away, that hand was hidden. Best not to take strong action until the culprit was known.

  Besides, Munghal had headed the Iraqi brain-drain pipeline. That could well be cause for war, if properly exploited. If the Americans could prove an Iranian kidnap plot to hasten the development of atomic weapons, they would take it before the rest of the world and rub their faces in it. The bellicose Westerners might well platform it into an armed military onslaught. It wouldn’t be the first time. Tehran’s policy was that this scenario was to be avoided at the present time if at all p
ossible.

  That kept Tehran from making a fuss about the destruction of the colonel and his column. It didn’t want to call attention to the event. It didn’t want it known that Munghal was in the area at the time, or even officially confirm his death, for that matter. Too many questions would be raised.

  The Pasdaran seethed, aching to lash out but handcuffed by uncertainty and the need for secrecy. Tempers were not improved by the fact that the electron coupler project had come to a crashing halt.

  In Iraq, certain interested parties were no less soured. Imam Hamdi had previously reviled and loathed the Shiite Iranians due to religious differences, but he’d have been willing to make a deal with the Devil himself to expand the power of his sect—and himself. Now, he had no deal.

  Waleed Tewfiq was equally unhappy. The scientists-for-arms pipeline had been a good thing for him. Now it was closed. He was unsure of what exactly had happened on the night of the raid, but he suspected that one faction of the Akkad gang had double-crossed the other, and that both had been virtually wiped out in the mutual slaughter.

  He’d have liked to get his hands on a couple of gang members to put them through the wringer and find out what they knew. But there didn’t seem to be any in Azif. Those few who’d escaped the carnage had gone into hiding, among them Jafar Akkad.

  As for the Iranians, Waleed was cynical. Only they knew what had really happened on their side of the border. Waleed had known Captain Saq personally. The captain was a snake. Now he was said to be dead. Colonel Munghal was known to Waleed by reputation only. His reptilian nature was such that he made Saq seem like a warm-blooded, friendly fellow. Munghal, too, was reported dead.

  Reported by whom? Iranians. Waleed Tewfiq would believe Munghal and Saq were dead only when he personally saw their dead bodies. Until then, he would have his doubts.

  He felt the time had come for him to extend his power in Azif and beyond. For some time now, the militiamen had exerted control over the civil government established in the administrative complex of the town. Many officials were secretly pledged to the cause, the mosque, the imam—and him. Those who were not were mostly soft fools to be cowed or cuffed into obedience. Without the Coalition forces to protect them, they were nothing. It was time that he forced an official understanding and acknowledgment that the mosque was the supreme religious and secular authority in Azif, that the civic government existed solely on the Red Dome’s sufferance.

  This would be accomplished in two ways: the open and the hidden. The open would be a series of marches and protests staged against the administrative complex. Thousands of believers would surround the government buildings, paralyzing their workings. The business of Azif would be at a standstill.

  The hidden way was where the real work was done. The Americans could not protect the hundreds of Iraqi men and women employed in some capacity by the Coalition. When darkness fell, the Americans retreated to their fortified Greentown compound and their military bases. Their hirelings remained in Azif, where their homes and families were. These innocent masses were the ultimate soft targets. Kill enough, and the rest would all bow down.

  Waleed Tewfiq began gathering the militiamen for a mass meeting.

  Thirteen

  It was the night after the raid, the night of the big mass meeting at the Red Dome Mosque. The tumult in Azif seemed far away from a junkyard on the flat between the town itself and the Graveyard of Martyrs to the south.

  The sandstorm was long gone, and the night sky was clear. Not many lights were now burning in Azif. The hour was late, and even most of the militia patrols and other nightriders were already straggling home to their beds.

  The junkyard was a tract of land heaped with the twisted metal carcasses of vehicles that had been burned or bombed out or both on the streets and highways of Azif. They’d been towed out here by a civilian contracting company based in Greentown. That had been early on. Safety considerations soon made it impractical to devote time and energy to clearing the Azif cityscape of wrecks, especially since insurgents sniped at and bombed the tow trucks and wreckers sent out to secure the hulks, thus making more wrecks. But in the time they’d been operating, they’d managed to create quite a junkyard on the flat.

  A handful of outcasts, pariahs, and crazies lived in the warrens of the yard. They were a mangy crew, all men, living scarecrows wrapped in rags. They were filthy, unshaven, covered with caked layers of grime. They had brown broomstick limbs; some faces showed open sores, broken teeth, an empty eye socket. Slumped at the bases of towers of charred wrecks, they looked like a clutch of living mummies.

  They didn’t need a fire because it was a warm night. Had the night been colder, they might or might not have lit a fire. They didn’t like to call attention to themselves. The human scarecrows occasionally stirred, creeping along, not showing themselves much.

  But they moved fast when they heard something coming from the Graveyard of Martyrs. Silence routinely reigned in that quarter. Nothing happened there. The graveyard was thick with unexploded artillery shells. Beyond lay marshy wasteland.

  Noises sounded from the direction of the graveyard mound. Vehicle noises. They came up from south of the graveyard, circling around it to the east. The scarecrow folk flitted to their hiding places. They skulked around in the junkyard maze, peeking through cracks and crevices and around corners.

  The vehicle rounded the curve of the graveyard knoll, emerging into view on the flat. It was an armored scout car, the one stolen from the Iranians by Kilroy and Vang Bulo. It bulled ahead, lurching into the open and rolling north past the junkyard and onward toward town.

  It looked like it meant business.

  Azif was restless. The slums of Old Town teemed with life, ceaseless, pulsating, agitating. The epicenter of the activity was the Red Dome Mosque. Here were comings and goings at all hours of the night.

  The police were afraid to go to Old Town after dark (nor were they keen to do so during daylight hours). The only police or Iraqi National Guard soldiers who ventured into the district at night were those allied to Imam Hamdi or Waleed Tewfiq’s militia, or both. That encompassed a number of individuals, since the sect had managed to place its adherents throughout the official government infrastructure.

  Adding to the danger were local street gangs and other entrepreneurs who set up checkpoints at various squares and junctions to extort and rob passersby who couldn’t keep them from doing it. The Red Dome followers were immune to their importunities, since the small fish inevitably scattered to their holes when these big fish ventured out among them.

  A big fish that was most emphatically not of the militia stirred abroad in the streets of Old Town this night. An armored scout car.

  After the incident of the farmhouse raid, Kilroy and Vang Bulo went to the secret underground bunker built into the side of a hill. They stayed there through the day into the following night. Then they moved out in the scout car. A roundabout route through lonely places avoided observation and brought them up out of the marshlands to the graveyard and Azif beyond.

  Old Town was an intricate maze of narrow streets and alleys, with many abrupt sharp turns. The local unemployed young toughs who congregated around Tanners Square had gone into business for themselves. In this time and place, business meant forming a street gang, neighborhood defense unit, or militia. What it was, was young males in packs with guns. Everybody in the district had guns, but the gangs had organization.

  The Tanners Square gang existed because it was easier for the militia to let the local gangs squeeze the crazy quilt of streets and squares that made up their turf, and then squeeze them, than it was to devote the resources to directly controlling the numberless petty fiefdoms that comprised the district.

  In a country where no self-respecting household was without a Kalash or two, the Tanners Square gang, like others of its ilk, was equipped with standard equipment, mostly assault rifles with some handguns, a few grenades, and some swords, knives and axes.

  The street gangs m
ostly copped their style from Jihadi rap groups they’d seen beamed in on satellite TV or on smuggled or bootlegged CDs and DVDs sold in bins in local market stalls. Military, gangster, and radical terrorist–style elements all made themselves felt in the mix.

  The Tanners Square gang numbered several dozen members in all, all from the neighborhood tenement block. The late hour had thinned out their numbers, with only a dozen or so armed members manning the roadblock that they maintained to control access into and out of the square.

  The roadblock was a half-assed barricade of a few burned-out car skeletons, some empty fifty-gallon drums, piles of concrete blocks, and bales of rusted wire fencing. The barricade was of necessity impromptu. It had to be able to be removed quickly, in case any mobile militia units should happen to be passing through.

  The big guns wouldn’t take kindly to having their progress interfered with by the small fry. Should the street gang present a bar to the militia, even unintentionally, they would have to be punished.

  The militia militants tolerated such gangs as long as they cooperated, since they formed a kind of internal checkpoint and monitoring system. Anyone moving around in the district was likely to cross paths with several such checkpoints. The street gangs kept the militants apprised of who was moving among the streets by day and night, and for what reasons.

  When the gangs stopped strangers who had no pull with the militants or other power brokers, they would usually beat and rob them. That was one of perks of the system.