by Peter Nealen
We came out of the densely packed buildings and onto a low earth bridge back across the Khasa. We were almost home free, or as close as we could get in this country. We had technically passed into the Kurdish quarter a mile back.
So naturally, we turned a corner into an IP checkpoint.
I didn’t know what they were doing there; it was no secret that the IPs weren’t welcome in the Kurdish quarter. They usually didn’t even try to drive into it, much less set up a checkpoint. I wondered if this was official, or an officer trying to make some extra dinars shaking down Kurds. If it was the former, it was a bad sign, but one that we were in Kirkuk to find in the first place.
They had placed the checkpoint flawlessly. There was no getting away from it without backing up. There were already two IPs in their black body armor, with AKMs slung but ready walking toward our truck. One of them had his hand raised in a “stop” gesture. The gunner on the blue and white Toyota behind him had his PKM machinegun leveled at our windshield. The message was pretty clear—if we tried to leave without their say-so, we’d get lit up. A burst or two of 7.62x54mm would do a pretty good job of shredding the lightweight Bongo truck, along with anyone inside.
“Fuck,” I said, stuffing my pistol between the seats, trying not to move too much while I did so. “Any ideas?”
“Hopefully they just want money,” Jim said. “We might be able to pay them off and get out of here without a search.”
“And how likely is that, this deep in the Kurdish quarter?” I asked.
“Not very,” he admitted.
Behind me, our cargo was fidgeting, bad. I risked a look back and saw he was sweating heavily, his eyes wide and white. He probably figured we were going to get rolled up and he was going to disappear somewhere. I almost wanted to reassure him, but that would mean I was confident we were going to get out of this one without shooting, and I wasn’t.
The IP with his hand in the air was almost to the door when a set of headlights came around the corner behind us, and a horn honked.
I was almost as surprised as he was; I’d gotten focused on the checkpoint. But when I looked back, I almost laughed out loud.
Three Peshmerga Humvees, with Kurdish flags flying from their antenna masts in case anyone wasn’t sure, had come around the corner and spread out across the street behind us. They were all old US up-armored jobs, which made them rather more formidable than the IP Toyotas. Two of them had DShK 12.7mm machineguns in their turrets; I couldn’t see the third. Either of those guns could easily go through the IP trucks, and their occupants, and hardly slow down.
The IP next to my door was standing there, blinking into the headlights of the Hummer just in front of him, looking shocked and a little stupid. Jim was chuckling, but our passenger was still frozen, his hands dimpling the thin cushions on the back seat. A quick glance at the rest of the IPs at the checkpoint showed similar deer-in-the-headlights expressions.
The passenger door of one of the Humvees opened, and a familiar, burly figure dressed in camouflage utilities and an old-style military sweater got out, his AKM slung muzzle down. He swaggered up to the IP and just stared at him for a moment before launching into a torrent of abusive Arabic. I couldn’t pick out all of it, but it sounded like Rizgar Mohammed was telling the Iraqi Policeman that he was a long way from where he should be, that he was a misbegotten idiot, and that if Rizgar caught him or any of his cronies in the Kurdish quarter again, they’d be torn to pieces and fed to his goats. Or something like that.
For a moment, the Iraqi started to recover from his shock at being caught by a Peshmerga patrol in what was functionally Kurdish territory. He started to glower back at Rizgar, and looked like he was about to try to invoke his authority as an Iraqi government official in what was technically still an Iraqi city. But a glance at the heavy machineguns in the turrets behind us made him rethink whatever he was about to do. He stared at Rizgar for another handful of heartbeats with pure hate in his eyes, then abruptly turned and stalked back to his vehicle. The Kurds didn’t move, but kept watching the IPs over their gun muzzles until the trucks started and pulled away. Only then did their commander come over to tap on my door.
“Ah, Mister Jeff,” he said. “What are you doing out on the streets at this hour, my friend? It is not safe.”
I grinned at him. Rizgar Mohammed Rashid had been one of the first Peshmerga officers we’d met when we started this contract. He had actually helped us secure the safehouse in Kirkuk. He didn’t know everything we were doing in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, but accepted that we were on the same side, and was happy to help whenever we needed it. He was a big, bluff, honest man, and I found I liked him.
“We don’t know the meaning of the word ‘safe,’ Rizgar,” I told him. “Especially when we are on business, and tonight we are on business.”
Rizgar glanced at the guy in the back seat, and his gaze lingered for a moment on our passenger, who was staring at the floor of the truck. I could see the wheels turning, and almost hear the questions that Rizgar was asking in his head, but he didn’t voice them. Instead, he just grinned at me under his huge walrus mustache and clapped me on the shoulder. “Okay, my friend, I let you go about your business. But be careful. I cannot always be here to rescue you from Arabs, hey?”
“We’ll be fine,” I assured him. He grinned at me again, and started to walk back to his Hummer. “Rizgar,” I called after him. “What were they doing this far north?”
He turned to look back at me. “Pushing,” he replied. “This was the third time we have found them in our territory this week.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said. “Thank you, my friend.”
He placed his hand over his heart, then turned back and got into his Humvee. A moment later, the three trucks pulled away, leaving us alone in the intersection. Jim put the truck back in gear, and we headed for the safehouse.
Chapter 2
Mr. Haas was waiting for our guest when we walked into the safehouse. I couldn’t tell if the guy looked relieved or even more terrified when he saw Haas standing by the door.
I suppose Haas was kind of scary, at least if you don’t deal in scary for a living. He was a thin, hatchet faced man with pale skin, pale eyes, and black hair that always seemed to be immaculately combed, even out here. He usually wore a suit, and tonight he was wearing slacks and a white shirt with a black tie. It seemed a little incongruous in this setting, but it was just kind of his way. I’d never seen him wear the khakis, polo shirt, and ball cap ensemble that Nick had dubbed the “CIA starter kit.”
Of course, Haas wasn’t CIA, at least not anymore, if he ever had been. We hadn’t ever heard which three-letter agency he’d worked for before he became a spook-for-hire. Of course, Haas was a cypher to us because he wasn’t one of our spooks. He was on our employer’s payroll, not ours.
The year before, in the ending phases and aftermath of the East Africa job, Praetorian Security’s resident retired officer and Machiavelli, Tom Heinrich, had started up a Spooks-R-Us section of the company. His reasoning had been that we had been thrown into a highly volatile situation without enough information, and he’d determined not to let that happen again. As a result, we now had about a dozen former spooks on the payroll, from at least three different agencies.
But Haas wasn’t one of them. He worked directly for Liberty Petroleum, and had been in Iraqi Kurdistan since before we had come aboard.
Liberty Petroleum had arisen in the wake of the collapse of several major energy companies after the dollar’s crash a few years before. They had come to Iraqi Kurdistan because they were one of the only Western oil companies that was still on its feet, that was willing to risk working with the Kurds, while surrounded by increasingly hostile regimes. The Kurds had a lot of oil wealth under their soil, and with a lot of the world unwilling to do business with them, in large part because of the reaction that would come from the Iraqi, Turkish, and Iranian governments, they were more than willing to work with Liberty.
Liberty’s reps hadn’t been on the ground for a month before they started looking for better security. They came to us because, even though most people had no idea what really had gone down in Djibouti and Somalia, much less in Yemen, Praetorian Security had still gotten a rep for being the hard-nosed bastards who would kill anyone and everyone who tried to fuck with your people.
Oh, the media, at least what was left of it, loved us.
Iraq had been in the throes of an on-again, off-again civil war since about 2012, when the last American troops left. It had its flare ups, but was constantly smoldering in the background. In recent years, with the civil war in Syria that had recently resulted in the overthrow of the Assad regime and the establishment of a hardline Salafist ruling council, things had gotten worse. Al Qaeda in Iraq had been closely involved in the fight in Syria, and had come out stronger than ever, and three times as belligerent. That chaos had occasionally spilled over into Kurdish territory of late, in spite of the often quite competent efforts of the Peshmerga. With things in Iraq, and along the “Green Line,” which was the unofficial border between Iraq proper and Iraqi Kurdistan, getting increasingly tense, our security operations soon expanded well beyond just pulling overwatch on the oil fields.
In short, Liberty Petroleum had found itself holding a vested interest in Kurdish security. Given that those interests probably meant we’d have a chance to kill a lot of jihadi bad boys, we were fine with that.
Haas nodded to us without a word as he beckoned the guy we’d picked up into the other room. That room actually had a door instead of the curtains that were strung across most of the other doors in the safehouse. The guy went in and Haas followed, closing the door behind him.
Jim and I dropped our gear near the door, across from where Larry was sitting on watch with a KSG shotgun across his lap. Larry was a mountain of a man, going bald, with a dark goatee. He had been a teammate of mine when we were both with MARSOC, before we’d gotten out and gone private sector. We had become teammates again in Praetorian, and had been side-by-side through Djibouti and Somalia, and into Yemen.
“How’d it go?” Larry asked.
“Bad guys were trying to get our friend there,” Jim replied as he grabbed a bottle of water from the corner. “We ended that.”
“Not only that,” I put in, “but our friends the Iraqi Police had a checkpoint set up less than a mile from here.”
“That’s not good,” Larry said. “They pushing the Kurds again?”
“That’s what Rizgar said, after he pulled our asses out of that particular sling,” I answered.
“Alek’s going to want to know,” he pointed out.
“I know,” I answered, as I caught the water bottle Jim tossed to me. “I’ll call him as soon as we’ve got some results from Haas’ debrief of our boy in there.” I cracked the cap off the bottle and took a swig as I swept aside the curtain into the back room we had set up as our comm center.
It was pretty spare as such things went; we were in a safe house, not a Forward Operating Base. The necessity of being ready to break out and run, not to mention keeping a low profile, meant that our setup wasn’t much different from a small recon team’s in the field. A laptop, a satcom setup, and a shorter range VHF radio were all we had set up. Batteries and the backup radio were still packed in kitbags on the floor.
Little Bob was sitting against the white concrete wall, the VHF radio handset to his ear. He looked up from the laptop when I walked in.
“Any word from Bob or Juan?” I asked.
Little Bob shook his head. We called him Little Bob for two reasons. One, he was fucking huge; he could give Larry a run for his money on sheer physical size. Two, we already had a Bob on the team, and he had been with us a lot longer than Little Bob. “Nothing besides their normal check-ins,” he said. He had a surprisingly soft, high voice for such a big dude. It wasn’t squeaky, or feminine, but it didn’t sound like he’d spent the better part of a decade living in shit and yelling at subordinates or superiors, depending on the circumstances. He had—the guy had done five years with the 75th Ranger Regiment. He just didn’t sound like it.
“From what I could hear out there, it sounded like you and Jim found some excitement tonight, though,” he went on, pointing toward the door with his chin.
“You could say that,” I replied. “Some bad guys were on the target, and some pushy Iraqi Police tried to stop us about four blocks from here.”
He frowned. He was one of the newbies on the team since I’d taken it over from Alek, but he was no dummy. We wouldn’t have hired him if he had been. “They’re getting bolder. You think they’re getting ready to finally try for the push on Kurdistan they’ve been making noises about for the last couple of years?”
“Maybe,” I answered after finishing off the water bottle. “There’s nothing concrete, though Haas’ little friend in there might say something different. We’ll have to see. Everybody else crashed out?”
“All but Malachi,” he said. “He’s on rear security.”
I nodded. “When did you go on radio watch?”
“About an hour ago. I’m good.”
I waved at him and went back into the main room. Jim was already sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his rifle next to him, with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes closed. I went to do the same; one of the first things you learn in this business is get what sleep you can, when you can.
No sooner had I settled myself against the concrete than the door to the back room opened, and Haas came out, lighting a cigarette.
I stayed where I was and watched him. I’d dealt with Haas long enough to know to let him start talking in his own time. He was thinking, lining up all the little data points in his head. When he had a picture, however partial, he’d fill us in.
He walked over to the photomosaic/map of Kirkuk we had tacked to the wall and studied it for a moment before half-turning toward us. “Well, he doesn’t know who was after him tonight,” he said. “In the course of a half hour, it changed from AQI to plainclothes Iraqi Police, to Jaysh al Mahdi, to any one of about five criminal enterprises he owes money to.” He snorted. “Knowing him, I find the last possibility to be the most probable one. Those debts are how I turned him in the first place.”
“So who is this guy?” Jim asked.
“He is a guy who is related to a guy who knows things,” Haas said. “And that guy who knows things tends to talk about them around family to express how important he is. This individual let slip the other day that there are fifteen hundred more Iraqi Police headed to Kirkuk, along with a division of the Iraqi Army; Assam doesn’t know which one, but it’s probably the 12th Motorized Division out of Tikrit.”
I frowned. “Is this the first we’ve heard about it?”
“So far,” he said. “Which raises a few questions; is he telling the truth, and if so, what are they hoping to achieve?”
“They wouldn’t send only a division if they were thinking of pushing on Erbil or Sulaymaniya,” Jim mused. He hadn’t moved a muscle or opened his eyes. “Even they’ve got to know the Pesh are better prepared than that.”
“I wonder if it’s some ambitious Army colonel or something trying to make a power play,” Larry said. “The Army has gotten as divided as any branch of the government.”
Haas shook his head. “It doesn’t even have to be that complicated,” he said. “A division might not be enough to move on Kurdistan itself, but remember, the Iraqis still don’t—and probably never will—consider Kirkuk part of Kurdistan. I think the more likely scenario is that they’re getting ready to try to push the Kurds out. It’s happened before. And if there’s one thing Sunni and Shi’a alike can agree on in this country, it’s that they all hate Kurds.”
“Awesome,” I growled. “Ethnic cleansing by mechanized infantry. I need to call Alek.” I stalked back to the comm room for the satphone.
Alek picked it up after only a couple of rings. “Talk to me, Jeff,” he said.
Alek
had been one of the founders of our little company, and team leader for the founding team. I had been his assistant team leader for several years, through the unpleasantness in East Africa the year before. Afterwards, we had had to rebuild the team; several of our friends and brothers in arms had fallen in Djibouti and Somalia. With the company expanding, Alek had reluctantly let Tom pull him into more of an operations chief position. He was now sitting in our primary operations center in Erbil, while we were down in Kirkuk trying to sniff out whether or not the Iraqi chaos was going to get pushed into Kurdistan, and Caleb’s team was doing the same thing in Mosul.
“We got the contact,” I reported, “but not without incident.” I filled him in on the night’s events. Then I told him about what Haas had found from the contact.
He didn’t say anything for a minute, but just mulled it over. Finally he asked, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we need to push down to Tikrit,” I answered without hesitation, “and see if we can get a gauge as to whether this is just an attempt to Arabize Kirkuk like Saddam did in the ‘90s, or if it’s a prelude to an actual offensive against Iraqi Kurdistan. Or both. We can’t really figure that out from up here.”
I could almost see Alek shaking his huge head. “I need you guys on the ground in Kirkuk. You guys are the tripwire if something does start heading this way.”
“So send Hal’s team,” I replied. “Even if they aren’t planning on pushing past Kirkuk, we need to know if they’re going to try to push the Kurds out of the city. The Kurds aren’t going to stand for that. Half this province is already de facto part of Kurdistan, and the client has facilities here. If this particular tinderbox goes up, we could find we’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands. And if the Kurds decide to resist here—which they will—you know it’ll spread into Kurdistan proper.”
“We have Kurdish contacts and support in Kirkuk,” he argued. “We’ve got nothing in Tikrit. Hal’s team just stood up; I don’t want to throw them into that kind of a zero-support situation.”