Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  “This isn’t really Iraqi territory,” I pointed out. “The Pesh run this side of Highway 2. And I’m pretty sure they’re not Pesh.”

  “It looks like the Pesh have pulled back into the Kurdish quarter of the city proper,” Hal said. “They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and expecting it in the morning. They’re consolidating.”

  “Well, whoever these idiots are,” I said, “If they keep coming up, they’re going to find us, whether they’re ready to or not, and I don’t think they’re going to enjoy the experience.”

  By now, they had pretty much established themselves in the intersection. Several were leaning against the trucks, with their rifles either on the edge of the beds, or leaning against the tires. Four others were now going over to the large house on the northwest side of the crossroads.

  They banged on the door, and yelled when it didn’t open immediately. It took a couple minutes, but somebody answered the door. There was more loud talking in Arabic, then a few minutes later, they came back to the trucks, this time with a couple of chickens and several bottles. They were shaking down the locals for food and drink. Figures.

  We sat there and watched them for another half-hour. They continued to hang out in the intersection, talking loudly to each other, without a care in the world, while they passed around the bottles of soda and laughed. We started to relax, a little. They weren’t really looking for us; they were passing the time on patrol. The fact that they were patrolling somewhere they weren’t really supposed to be didn’t enter into the equation at the moment. They didn’t come any closer to the safehouse, and after a while, they mounted back up in the trucks and drove back south, down the main road.

  We’d dodged a bullet, but the next time we wouldn’t necessarily be so lucky. I headed back downstairs with Jim, while Sammy stayed up with the guys on security. Inside, everybody was kitted up, sitting on their rucks with their weapons, waiting to get up and go at a moment’s notice. I walked into the ops room, where Hal was leaning over the UAV feed, watching the trucks leave the village.

  “I think we can go back down to fifty percent,” I told him. “Everybody needs to keep their gear packed up and ready to move in five minutes, but we can put some guys down for a little bit.”

  Hal nodded. “That was closer than I’d like,” he said, after sending Gary out to the main rooms to pass the word. “Though I imagine with what’s going down, we can expect more of it, at least down here around Kirkuk.”

  “Especially since the Iraqis have put a price on our heads,” I said. “This could get very, very interesting.”

  I had no idea.

  Chapter 6

  We didn’t make contact with Rizgar Mohammed. Rizgar called us.

  “As salaamu aleikum, my friend,” he said when Hal handed me the satphone. It was almost sunrise, about 0500, and Rex and Jack weren’t back yet. “I have some news for you. It seems that things have gotten almost as bad for you as they have for us.” The usual good humor was gone from Rizgar’s voice. He was dead serious.

  “Do you know where the Iraqis took our people?” I asked, grabbing for a notebook and pen. Even if he didn’t have that information, I had gotten to know Rizgar well enough to know that if he had something to say, it was usually worth listening to.

  “Yes, in fact,” he replied. “Some of my men saw the helicopters when they left your compound. They went to the airbase.”

  That gave me pause for a second. I took the phone away from my mouth so Rizgar couldn’t hear me. “Fuck.” I pointed on the map to Kirkuk airbase, just on the northwest side of the city. Everyone who was free in the ops room to see echoed my sentiment. I brought the phone back. “Did they see where they might have taken them? The base is very large.”

  “I am sorry, my friend,” he said. “We do not have any people on the base. The Iraqi government has kept all Kurds away from it for some time now. I will tell you anything I find out, when I can, but we are expecting them to attack us at any time now. I cannot guarantee that I will be able to communicate much.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” I told him. “You have just helped us a lot. Once we have our people back, we should be in a position to help you in return.”

  “I hope so, my good friend,” he said. “These are bad times, very bad times. Your help would be very welcome, my friend.” There were a few more exchanges of pleasantries, and we hung up.

  “FUCK!!” I bellowed. Kelso started a little, but Jim, Nick, and the rest just took it in stride. I turned to Hal. “Can we get a couple of UAVs over that base?”

  “Without them getting burned?” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe. I’m not sure we’ll find out much; if they’re inside, which is likely, we probably won’t.”

  “We’ll be able to get eyes on their security setup,” I said, “which is about as much as we can hope for. The rest will have to be done on the ground.”

  “Dude, that base is fucking huge,” Bryan pointed out. “We’re not going to have time to search the whole place, structure-to-structure, before half the Iraqi Army comes down on our heads.”

  I stared at the map. “With enough of a distraction, it should be doable,” Jim said. “It’ll be tough, certainly, but I think if we can locate the ISOF guys there, we can narrow things down. We’re better placed than we were going into Yemen last year, at least.”

  “We’ve got a lot more fire support available, too,” Nick pointed out. “We have mortars, rockets, and helos. We didn’t have either last year.”

  I hadn’t looked up. “Bryan’s right, though. This is a hell of a nut to crack. That being said, we are not leaving our clients in the hands of these asswipes.” I scratched my beard. “We need to move. Thanks to tonight’s festivities, we know this isn’t a secure enough location, especially if we bring in other teams. I’m inclined to see if Alek will let us pull Caleb’s team in from Mosul. Unless something’s happened there that I haven’t heard about, this is the flashpoint, and we need the manpower.” I looked over the map. “Hal, can you hold this place down while we go set up in Safehouse 4?” Safehouse 4 was an old abandoned chicken farm, about six kilometers outside of Kirkuk. It was close to the old K1 Airbase, but we’d been monitoring it for a while, and the security forces at K1 hadn’t shown any interest in the place, once they figured out there was nothing left to steal.

  “No problem,” Hal answered. “It’ll actually make things a little easier around here, only trying to hide one team and our gear. You taking the tac vehicles, or the Bears?”

  “If we leave in daylight, we’ll take the Bears,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a good idea to go traipsing around the Iraqi countryside during the day in Growlers.”

  “Good point,” he allowed. “They would stand out a bit.”

  “Can we get any support or cover from the Kurds?” Kelso asked from his station.

  “The Pesh have an entire Iraqi Army division to worry about right now,” Larry answered from the door, “plus more IPs. We have to handle this ourselves.”

  “Which we would do anyway,” I pointed out. “These are our clients. You don’t fuck with our clients.” I turned to Hal. “We don’t have any UAVs at the moment. Can you spare one?”

  “I can spare two,” he said. “We brought a pair in addition to the ones you had at the old safehouse in the city. We haven’t broken ours out yet.”

  “Awesome.” I looked over at Larry. “Have Paul and Malachi get those ready to load up. Everybody else be ready to move in the next hour.”

  It didn’t take an hour, or even two. It took almost four hours before things in Shoraw Village quieted down enough for us to try to load up and move out unobserved. Daylight is a pretty major handicap when you’re a Westerner in any Middle Eastern country trying to do this kind of work. Even though we had the Bears pulled into a sheltered courtyard between the buildings, there were enough people moving around to make the risk unacceptable.

  It was midmorning when we finally trundled out to Highway 2. Getting to the safehouse was going t
o be a bitch. The most direct route was through Kirkuk, but for obvious reasons we didn’t really want to chance that without more cover from the Kurds. Especially since we’d have to go through the Arrafa Quarter to get where we were going, and I strongly suspected the Iraqis would have checkpoints in the vicinity.

  Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of other options. The terrain got rough north of Kirkuk; it was part of the Zagros fold belt, where the Arabian and Eurasian Plates met. There weren’t a lot of side roads going against the direction of the folds. That meant we had to either go through Kirkuk City, or go the long way around. We were going the long way around. While it increased the time we were out on the road, and therefore our chances of compromise during the day, it meant we’d be steering clear of most of the Iraqi forces in the vicinity, and in fact would be in de facto Kurdish territory about half the trip.

  Of course, it would take longer. While I was reasonably confident that we could make it to the safehouse long before sunrise, Murphy always, always has a vote, and he hadn’t ever shown a tendency to leave us alone. There was always the possibility that we wouldn’t make it in time to get into the safehouse under cover of darkness. If that happened, we might have to hunker down in the Bears outside the safehouse for the day. That wasn’t good; we had enough supplies, certainly, but any time lost was probably time our clients didn’t have. Granted, we could expect a little bit better treatment from the Iraqi Army than we might from AQI, Jaysh al-Mahdi, or any of their associated splinter groups. That still didn’t mean we were going to leave them for long.

  We joined the trickle of traffic that was leaving Kirkuk, heading north into Kurdistan, toward Erbil. It initially struck me as strange that the Iraqis weren’t stopping traffic, but then I guessed that if they were intent on pushing the Kurds out of Kirkuk, they wouldn’t go to any great lengths to keep them in. If the Kurds wanted to go to Erbil or Sulaymaniyah, so much the better.

  The road passed through the rugged, mostly barren hills above Kirkuk. Small villages lined the highway, mostly clusters of dusty brick houses with trash-strewn dirt roads between them. A few people watched us as we drove past, but there was no sign of alarm or even interest.

  North of the hills, the land leveled out again, turning into open desert strewn with small farms. There were a few more industrial compounds we passed, and a garish, red-and-yellow restaurant on the side of the road.

  I kept my eye out for patrols. This far north, I wasn’t too worried; this was de facto Kurdish territory, and we were on good terms with the Peshmerga as a whole, though we hadn’t interacted much with any of them aside from Rizgar’s unit in Kirkuk City. That didn’t mean we wanted to necessarily go overt.

  My concern with the Peshmerga, and the KRG, which was by no means monolithic, was that they might interfere with our operation to rescue our clients from the Iraqi Army. While Rizgar obviously didn’t mind giving us the lowdown, there would be Kurds who would argue against further provoking the Iraqis at this juncture. And what we were planning to do would be viewed as a provocation.

  Not that I gave a rat’s ass. Our primary obligation was to Liberty Petroleum and its people, not to mention our not-so-publicized side mandate at Praetorian—make jihadis pay in blood whenever possible. This might not really qualify on the surface, but I knew enough about the direction Baghdad had gone in the last few years not to have many illusions about why they were picking a fight with the Kurds.

  The Kurds, especially the PUK, or Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which dominated As Sulaymaniyah, were mostly Muslims, but they were generally secular Muslims, who didn’t worry too much about Shariah. The KDP, or Kurdistan Democratic Party, tended to be much more traditional, but also didn’t care to be pushed around by imams, mullahs, or jihadis in general.

  Meanwhile, the Republic of Iraq had increasingly become dominated by the Shi’a majority in the south of the country, and, by extension, had become dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. While there was still friction, as no one could ever accuse the government in Baghdad of being particularly united or harmonious, especially as fighting was continuing, both verbal and physical, between the Sadrists of the Jaysh al Mahdi, and the more moderate followers of the late Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the Iranian hand was becoming clearer and clearer as time went on.

  While Westerners kept hearing, and believing, that the Iranians were just a small country of Shi’a extremists, when you dug deeper, you found their hands in any and just about every jihadi, Islamist, and Shariah movement and offensive. They had often bankrolled AQI and were still supporting Jaysh al Mahdi. The war in Syria and a lot of the unrest in Iraq since had reduced if not flat-out ended Iranian support for AQI, we believed, but the history was there. Regardless of the fact that they’d happily turn on any Sunni, Sufi, or similarly “heretical” Muslims later, or today for that matter, their goal was universal Islamic law.

  What involvement they might have here, we didn’t know. Things were pretty chaotic in Iraq, with anywhere from half a dozen to twenty separate Islamist groups all trying to overthrow the government. The Iranians had their fingers in some of them, as well as their own puppets in the government. The entire situation was confused as fuck.

  All of this was of course leaving aside the long-standing ethnic hatred between Kurds and Arabs. I’m sure that Baghdad didn’t need too much of a push. In fact, there had been skirmishes and standoffs between the federal government of Iraq and the KRG going back since before the US troops left.

  And yes, I was thinking about this stuff while riding shotgun on an insert. Look, we’d effectively declared war on the steadily encroaching jihad as a company about a year before, after the fiasco in East Africa. Trouble was, we weren’t part of any official organization, with lots of support and high-level eggheads and command types to point us at the bad guys. We weren’t in the Green Machine anymore. It was just us. “Strategic Corporal,” my ass. The higher-ups who coined that term weren’t expecting or wanting the guy on the ground to dictate what happened. We were making strategic-level decisions every fucking day, without anybody to cover for us if that decision was fucked up. We had to keep track of this shit.

  We crossed a narrow streambed that was pretty dry this time of the year, with another small village off to our right. From the map, I knew we were getting close to our next big turn. We had to cross the Zab River at Altun Kopri, then turn southwest, paralleling the river.

  The highway passed a large industrial plant, painted yellow and red. I was starting to wonder just what it was with yellow and red in this part of the country. The sign out front said it was the Karwanchi Cola Company, in English and Arabic. It looked like it was doing a booming business, too; there were trucks coming and going, and the parking lot was full. I pointed it out to Larry.

  “Some things just keep going,” he said. “Even if people don’t have money for much, they still will find a way to scrape up enough for stuff like soda. Saw it in the PI, too.”

  “Yeah,” I allowed, looking back out the window. “I guess nothing ever completely collapses, does it? Even when everything’s going to shit, as long as the shooting isn’t here, people try to keep things as normal as possible.”

  “For various values of ‘normal,’” Larry pointed out. “’Normal’ in East Africa was pretty fucking shitty.”

  “No argument here,” I said, as the factory dwindled into our rear view. We were coming within sight of Altun Kopri.

  It was here that I was starting to have other concerns. While our operation was based out of Erbil, most of the Peshmerga operation in Kirkuk was not. Iraqi Kurdistan was pretty evenly split between the KDP and the PUK, and it was often ground truth that never the twain shall meet. We would likely have to stop at a Kurdish checkpoint to get across the bridge at Altun Kopri, and it was 99% likely that it would be manned by KDP Peshmerga. Rizgar and his boys were PUK. There could be some trouble from that; the KDP and PUK had fought a civil war as soon as they were out from under Saddam’s thumb back in the �
��90s, when the US started enforcing the no-fly zone over Kurdistan.

  Larry pulled us off the main highway as it turned north, and we headed into Altun Kopri. The main road through town was nice and wide, and I looked around at probably one of the most colorful towns I’ve ever seen in the Middle East. Blocky, stucco houses were painted red, blue, or even bright green. There were still a lot of the standard light tan or gray buildings, but I was struck by the number that were colorful. You saw a lot more of that among Kurds than Arabs.

  There were also a lot more trees. Granted, we were close to the river, so there was a lot more water, but the town looked positively lush compared to Kirkuk.

  There was no sign of Iraqi Police as we rolled into town. While it was technically not in Kurdish territory, Altun Kopri was solidly within the Peshmerga sphere of influence. Even so, with everything going on less than thirty miles away, the town looked peaceful. We didn’t see any patrols. Nobody even appeared to be armed. What we saw was just business as usual. In many ways, what we saw inside the town mirrored that cola factory just outside.

  It was a pretty straight shot through the town, at least until we reached the first bridge. A good chunk of Altun Kopri was actually built on an island, or big sand bar, in the middle of the Zab River. The first bridge was shorter, having little more than a creek to cross.

  There was no guard force on the first bridge, at least. Getting on it was interesting enough as it was, without adding in a guardpost that we’d have to clear. The road had been nice and wide going through Altun Kopri, but it narrowed down considerably as we got closer to the bridge.

  The bridge itself was two narrow lanes with rusty, green-painted metal rails along the sides, leading into the main trellis. It would have been narrow for a HiLux; the tanker was going to take up most of the bridge all by itself.

  Larry stopped the truck at the near end, watching for traffic. We didn’t want to have to get in a pushing match with some locals; even here, that would draw unwanted attention. It was the middle of the day, so as sparse as a lot of the traffic was, thanks to the inflated gas prices—yes, even in the Middle East, sitting on top of huge oil reserves that were actually being tapped, gas prices sucked; that’s what happens when currency breaks down—there were still an appreciable number of cars on the road. Larry waited until the pair of little hatchbacks crossed and went around the tanker before gunning the engine and starting us across.