Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  There was about enough room for a moped on our left, and the right was just about scraping the trellis, but we got across without anybody being stupid enough to challenge the five-ton tanker truck. I was kind of surprised, but wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  The road stayed narrow as it threaded through the small outlier to the town that crouched on the sandbar. Most of the buildings on the shoreline had lower walls that reached down into the river itself, I imagined to keep floodwaters out. I know I wouldn’t want to live on a glorified sandbar in the middle of a river, especially in winter and early spring.

  We reached the second bridge with only a couple of close scrapes from local drivers, and started across. The second bridge was built much like the first, but painted red.

  A few kids were on the side of the road as we came off the bridge, and waved at the tanker as we drove past. Some things never changed.

  The cemetery came up quickly on our right, and Larry spun the wheel, turning the Bear onto the south-running road on the west bank of the Zab. We were quickly out of the town and heading through open fields again.

  Soon the fields gave way to the same ridge of hills that we’d gone through coming out of Sharow Village. After a little while, we turned off and headed for Dibis Dam.

  The Dam was going to be another potential sticking point. While we had moved from de facto Peshmerga control into an informal demilitarized zone, we knew that the Dam was held by the Iraqi Army. While we did have documents showing that we were members of a logistics company that was doing business with the local provincial government, such as it was, if they decided to search the vehicle, we were sunk. I really, really didn’t want to have to shoot our way past an IA checkpoint at this stage in the game, but the dam was our only way across the river at this point, unless we wanted to go most of a day out of our way.

  The road wound through low, rolling hills. There was a fair amount of brown grass growing; this close to the river, there was less overt desert. There wasn’t really any traffic; as near as I could see, we were the only vehicle on the road.

  As we neared the dam, I kept my eyes peeled, but there was no movement, no vehicles. There was no sign of even a checkpoint. What the hell?

  Larry brought the truck to the end of the dam and started us across. Aside from a few people down by the water, fishing or splashing around, there wasn’t a soul in sight. The dam was completely deserted.

  I couldn’t quite believe it. Dams are major infrastructure, and therefore major targets. Granted, I couldn’t actually think of a time when AQI or Jaysh al Mahdi had actually attacked a dam, but to leave it completely unguarded seemed more than a little weird. Nonetheless, there were no Iraqi soldiers or police on the dam.

  We turned onto the road that paralleled the canal leading off the dam, and rolled toward Dibis. Before getting to the town, we turned off onto the main road heading back east toward Kirkuk. It was a fairly wide, two-lane road with an overgrown median. Streetlights curved over both sides of the road from the median.

  The traffic continued to be sparse. Larry pointed it out. “People know shit’s going down in this province,” I ventured. “They’re laying low.”

  Larry nodded without taking his eyes off the road. “Makes sense, I guess. From what I’ve heard from the old guys who were here back during the war, though, these folks never let shit blowing up keep them from going about their business.”

  The land flattened back out, and we drove for about a half-hour through farmland, until K1 Airbase started to loom ahead of us.

  There was a checkpoint set up across the road, with concrete Jersey barriers, concertina wire, and two Stryker combat vehicles sitting behind it. A half-dozen jundis were leaning against the Jersey barriers about a hundred yards back from the start of the serpentine that was designed to force vehicles to slow down and weave through the barriers, thus denying a suicide car bomber a straight shot at the checkpoint. They looked about as alert and professional as most regular Iraqi soldiers I’d seen, which was to say, not much. Their helmets were mostly tilted to one side, at least on those who were wearing them. Several had their rifles just leaning against the barriers next to them.

  Larry slowed as we got closer, though he never stopped. We didn’t want to look like we were hesitating too much; it might be taken as a sign we were up to no good. Which of course we were, but we didn’t want the jundis getting wind of that.

  “What do you want to do, boss?” he asked. “We could try to go around. There are side roads.”

  “None of which are very good,” I answered. “We’ve also go to think about whether or not we’re going to arouse suspicion by bypassing the checkpoint. And we’d have to make a U-turn to get to a crossing over that canal on our right, which is bound to attract attention.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed, as we rolled closer. “On the other hand, none of these guys looks all that alert and ready to lay down the law.”

  I didn’t have long to think about it; once we were past the first barrier we were committed. “Hold up. Stop, we’ll sit here for a minute, like we’re confused, and then turn around.” I glanced at the rear-view mirror. There wasn’t any traffic behind us. “It might just look like we missed the turn.”

  Larry was eyeing the jundis. One of them, a noncom by the looks of him, or at least as close as the Iraqi Army got, was starting to stand up, cradling his M4, and was watching us intently, probably trying to figure out if we were going to come through, and give him some work to do, or turn around. I guessed a lot of Iraqis would turn around; we’d seen that sort of thing around Peshmerga checkpoints in the last few months.

  The Bear slowed, then stopped, rumbling, in the road. None of the Iraqi soldiers I could see had optics to tell whether or not we were doing anything inside the cab, but I didn’t know what was on the Strykers, so we made a show of looking at a map and pretending to argue, while keeping an eye on the jundis.

  “One is starting to walk toward us,” I said. “Looks like a couple others are wondering if they should follow him; they’re standing up straighter.”

  “Let’s not take too long making up our minds, then,” Larry said.

  The intercom crackled. “Are we risking a search, guys?” Bryan asked.

  I didn’t dare reach for the mic while we could be observed. The guys in the back would have to sit tight until we were turned around, at least. They could see what was going on, thanks to the fiber-optic cameras mounted over the cab.

  Finally, the lead jundi started to walk purposefully toward the truck. It was time to go.

  Larry threw the Bear in reverse, and turned us toward the curb, executing a neat three-point turn to get us pointed back the way we had come. I kept watching the Iraqi soldier, who had stopped just short of the last coil of concertina wire. He was still watching us, but didn’t look like he was going to run after us to stop us. The Strykers just sat there, unmoving, their guns pointed at the sky.

  Only after we had made it at least five hundred meters from the checkpoint, without any reaction, least of all gunfire, did I start to breathe a little more easily.

  “Dammit!”

  This was the third canal crossing we’d reached that had turned out to be about ten feet underwater. The imagery was proving to be so dated as to be almost useless.

  “There’s got to be a crossing,” Larry said for the umpteenth time. “There are tire tracks; there’s got to be a fucking crossing.”

  “Maybe the crossing’s back the way we came,” I said. I wanted to punch something. Not that this was the first time we’d wound up chasing our tails because the imagery had been wrong, or the intel was bad, or just because somebody had decided to dig out his canal the day before we came through. That didn’t make it any less frustrating.

  “That means going through the checkpoint,” Larry pointed out.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, I know. Fuck.”

  “Hold on a second,” Nick said over the intercom. It had to be getting unpleasant back there i
n the tank; the “roads” we’d been on weren’t exactly smooth. “I think I see a spot we might be able to get across. Push west, almost all the way to the fork in the canals.”

  “Can you actually see this on the cameras, or is it on the imagery?” I asked.

  There was a pause. When Nick replied, he sounded slightly defensive. “It’s on the imagery, but it’s a big-ass crossing point. No way it’s underwater.”

  “The last one looked big on the imagery, too,” I pointed out. “It was the most nonexistent one yet.”

  “What do we have to lose just checking it out?” Nick argued. “I’m in no hurry to go back and play Twenty Questions with the jundis. Are you?”

  I snarled silently. “No, I’m not,” I finally said. “Fine. Let’s go take a look.” I pointed toward the west, and Larry growled as he spun the wheel and started turning us around to get back on the main dirt road running through the mostly fallow fields.

  We bumped along the dirt road in fuming silence for a couple of minutes, before we got closer to the canal. “Well, holy shit,” Larry said. “It looks like it’s actually there.”

  The road continued across the canal, apparently over a culvert. All I could see from the cab was the hardened, baked-dirt road, with dark, stagnant water on either side. It looked narrow as hell.

  “Can we make it across that?” I asked. “Without tipping over and going in the drink, I mean?”

  “Easy day,” Larry said nonchalantly, though the look of concentration on his face, along with the way he slowed down as we got closer, put the lie to his tone.

  Slowly and carefully, Larry eased us out onto the culvert. A quarter of the way across, the truck lurched, as part of the edge crumbled under the front right tire. Larry gunned the engine, and we bumped back upright, but the rear tires were going to go into the same notch. There simply wasn’t room to go over to one side or the other much. I just hoped we didn’t exacerbate the erosion enough that we got stuck.

  Sure enough, the truck lurched even worse when the rear wheel hit the notch. For a second we started to fishtail toward the water, but Larry corrected, and got the front wheels onto better ground on the far side of the canal. The back wheels spun for a second as we teetered precariously, then we surged up onto open ground.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It wasn’t the first time I’d been close to tipping over in a vehicle into a canal, but that didn’t mean I really liked repeating the experience. Larry took a deep breath and flexed his hands on the wheel before we pushed any further.

  The rest of the way was pretty uneventful. We threaded our way through the fields; there really isn’t any straight way to get anywhere in Iraqi farmland. Unless you’re on one of the major highways, the roads are narrow and twist around fields that aren’t exactly square.

  We avoided the village that squatted right outside the outer wall of K1 Airbase, which took a little more time. We could watch the town, and the base, but no one seemed to take any notice of the big tanker truck moving through the fields, apparently lost. I realized that in any sane sort of place, this thing out in the farmland would be suspicious as hell, but in Iraq, people used whatever they could get their hands on, and if it had another use, so much the better. So a big industrial tanker truck being used as a farm truck wasn’t all that weird.

  Eventually we got to the main hardball, and from there it was a short trip to the chicken farm turned safehouse. Larry pulled the truck up under the trees near the dilapidated farmhouse, and we turned to unloading. We had a lot of work to do, now that we were in position, and not a lot of time to do it in.

  Chapter 7

  “I don’t know, man,” Jim said.

  We were in our makeshift operations center, in the central room of the largest residential house on the farm. It wasn’t fancy; we couldn’t afford a lot of the high-tech plasma screens and such that you still could find in the higher-tier units of the US military, as thin as their resources had gotten. We had a big sheet of paper tacked up on the wall, where we taped photos and wrote checklists, two laptops for comms, and two more for the UAVs. Jim, Larry, Bob, Nick, and I were presently bent over one of the UAV laptops.

  The UAV was presently about four and a half miles away, orbiting over Kirkuk Airbase. Fortunately, it was small, stealthy, and high enough that it had so far avoided notice by what still rudimentary air defense units the Iraqi Army had.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t finding what we were looking for.

  There are certain indicators that every unit has, especially in a disciplined military formation, which, for the most part, the Iraqi Army was. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces were no different. Alek had gotten us some overheads of ISOF compounds in Baghdad and Ramadi to use for comparison. The trouble was, we weren’t seeing anything that looked like the standard template within the wire of Kirkuk Airbase.

  “That’s obviously the tank unit there,” Bob said, pointing to a collection of K-spans that helpfully had a row of M1A1 Abrams tanks parked nearby, “and the Strykers there. More Humvees over there, but they don’t match the signature of the ISOF vehicles.” He shook his head. “I’m not seeing anything that looks like the kind of security setup we’d expect for an ISOF compound.”

  “No antenna farm, either,” I pointed out. “Now, I know they might have backslid some since our SF guys left, but they’ve got to be keeping what works. And unless somebody’s decided that there’s enough of a threat of overhead observation from the Kurds, I don’t see them trying to go all that low-profile. These are pros, after all, not the kind of irregulars we were looking for in Djibouti.”

  “Maybe somebody’s been putting two and two together about East Africa and Yemen,” Nick suggested. “Maybe they’ve guessed it was us, and they’re trying to go low profile to avoid our attention.”

  “You don’t put out bounties on somebody you’re that afraid of,” I said. “They still think they’ve got the upper hand here, and for all intents and purposes, I’d say they’re right. We haven’t got any advantages, aside from being small, mobile, and better trained. And with the ISOF, I’d say that’s only a slight advantage.” I glared at the screen. “Nadje knows it, too.” Colonel Hussein Abdul Nadje was the present commander of ISOF. Yeah, we had a pretty full dossier on him. None of us much liked what we’d seen, either. He was canny, and ruthless. While for the most part he had continued to follow the SOF training that he’d gotten from our guys, the ethic had gone out the window as soon as the last plane had left. He was a die-hard Shi’a nationalist, and there were rumors that he’d had dealings with the Mahdi Army clear back to Najaf in ’04.

  “So if they’re not hiding,” Larry asked the obvious question, “Where the hell are they?”

  Nobody answered for a while, as we let the UAV’s camera pan across the base. A lot of what had been there when it had been a Coalition base, before the pullout after 2012, was gone. Most of the hard structures were still there, but the trailers and tents were gone, leaving large open spaces. K-spans had been put in in some cases, but most of the big base was empty. That left fewer places to look, but we weren’t seeing everything the IAs had to have on the ground, the patrols and fighting in Kirkuk City itself notwithstanding.

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said, straightening up from the small screen and rubbing his eyes. “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place. Didn’t you say you ran into some IA presence near K1?”

  “Shit, that’s right,” Nick said before I could reply. “We weren’t expecting a checkpoint there, but it’d make sense if they were using K1, too, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It’d keep anybody from nosing around, that’s for sure.” I looked over at Larry. “How long to get the UAV over K1?”

  “Few minutes,” he said, “half hour at the outside.”

  “Do it. If they’re there, we need to know, soonest.”

  He nodded, and started inputting commands to the drone. It had enough battery power to make it, and loiter for a few hours, but we wer
e already down below fifty percent.

  Bob lowered his voice and leaned close to my shoulder as Larry made the adjustments. “Should we be looking at other possibilities for recon?” he asked.

  “You mean on the ground?” I asked. I scratched my beard. “As Jim would probably point out first, anything that puts more possible points of failure in the way of the primary objective should be avoided. Trying to get on either one of those posts, finding our people, and then getting out again undetected would be a huge potential failure point. Even if we get out scot-free, if they find any sign that we’d been there, they’ll either beef up security, move the hostages, or both before we can move.”

  “I know, but what if we can’t find them by UAV?” he prodded. “We sure as hell couldn’t find the hostages in East Africa that way.”

  “We didn’t have anything close to the parameters for where to look then, either,” I pointed out. “Technically, we’re going after detainees, not hostages. We’ve just got to find the ISOF compound and their detention center.”

  The conversation died out, and we waited in silence for the UAV to get over K1. I was already looking at what imagery we had of the old airbase, starting to plan in my head as best as possible. What was the best avenue of approach? How could we neutralize any security they had up, at least long enough to get in and get out?

  Finally, Larry spoke up. “Get a load of that.”

  We all turned to the laptop screen. And sure enough, bold as brass, there was the unmistakable look of an ISOF camp smack dab next to the airstrip, not far from four parked Mi-17s.