by Peter Nealen
I was already tuning most of the meeting out. Alek had something else set up to cover for our being in-country, while we hunted Qods Force and their terrorist lackeys. I would have gone on to think about the next move, except I hadn’t debriefed the night before yet, I hadn’t been filled in on Hal’s and Mike’s teams’ progress, and I was fucking exhausted from the previous night’s firefight. The adrenaline dump leaves you shaky for a while.
What was going through my head, though, was the fact that we were going to be stretched a little thin for a while. Liberty had a lot of operations going in both Erbil and Sulaymaniyah Provinces, and defending all of them was going to take some serious manpower. That was going to take assets away from hunting down this Qods Force operation, and I wasn’t sure how much time we had left to throw a wrench into that.
Never enough bodies, never enough ammo, never enough fucking time.
Half an hour later, I was back in the Op Center, still in my crusty field cammies. The after-action from the night before had been fast and dirty; we’d inserted, fucked up the jundis, and gotten out. A few things had come up that could be improved—they always did. We noted it, and moved on to the next thing.
The next thing was the results of Hal’s team’s trying to track down Abu Qadir’s handler. The guy was elusive as hell, and appeared to change locations every few days, but Hal thought he might be able to stick to him long enough to nail him. The trick was, he had his team spread all over the Arab parts of Kirkuk City in pairs, watching for this fucker. He’d need another team standing by, on 15-minute strip alert, to make the hit, once they pegged him. Guess who got that duty?
Not that I minded. That was the whole reason we were in Iraq in the first place. With Liberty’s hasty prep to exit stage left, it would be easy enough to explain why my team was hanging out near the helos, all jocked up. It meant rest was going to be in short supply, but what else was new?
Before we could roll out, though, Alek brought us all in and made sure the doors were shut. Haas had slipped in as well, but just got nods. Everyone knew where he stood now, and that he’d be staying with us when Liberty pulled stakes. Nobody objected. The guy was good, and had demonstrated his skill at intel from the get-go.
“Nothing’s really changed, gents,” Alek said, once everybody was settled. “Liberty’s pulling out, but we now have an agreement with the PUK branch of the Peshmerga to stay in an ‘advisory capacity.’ We will be moving our base of operations from Erbil to Sulaymaniyah, which is going to disrupt things a little bit, but we’ll have a COC-mobile set up the whole time. Comms might get spotty, but you’re all ready to operate alone if need be.” He looked around and got nods from everybody, even though it hadn’t been a question.
“The move’s not going to happen until after Liberty has pulled everything together and is getting ready to fly out,” he went on. “In the meantime, I don’t have to tell you to keep things cool and don’t let on too much about what else is going on. Some of these people, like Annette, would understand, but others wouldn’t, and could cause us some trouble.”
“What’s the deal with Collins?” Bryan asked. “Because I’m getting a serious itch to send that guy to join Abu Qadir.”
“I don’t know yet,” Alek admitted. “He’s from State, and he seems intent on shutting us down, largely through throwing his non-existent weight around and making threats. How much of a danger he is to us right now, I don’t know.”
“I imagine he can do a fair amount of damage,” Jim said, “if only by pointing the ISOF at us whenever we pop up on his radar, which we do right now because we’re attached to Liberty. Once we’re no longer working for them, he’s not likely to have a lot of ways to keep track of us.”
“Collins may have State credentials,” Haas said quietly, “and he may act like a bureaucrat with his tighty-whiteys in a bunch, but he’s a lot more dangerous than he seems. I’ve looked into him. He’s a nobody. He hasn’t got any sort of high-tier position on the books, and he sure as hell isn’t documented as being authorized to throw around the kind of weight he’s trying to.” He took a breath. “This might be something akin to an incident in Egypt a couple years ago.”
Alek gave him the “go on” gesture. Haas cleared his throat and continued. “There was an outfit working in Egypt, after the Brotherhood solidified its hold post-Morsi. They were strictly humanitarian, do-gooders trying to build schools and such. The trouble was, they were Christian, in a place that had recently outlawed Christianity. The crucifixions in 2012 weren’t enough, apparently. They were arrested.
“They appealed to the US Embassy. A State flunky came to see them, and promised that he’d get them out, get them back to the States, that no harm would come to them.”
He looked at the floor and shook his head. It was the most emotion I think I’d ever seen from him. When he looked back up, there was a fire in his eyes. “That fucker went to the Mukhabarat and washed the US’ hands of the issue. Told the lead ‘investigator’ that, ‘The United States respects the laws of the Islamic Emirate of Egypt and is a willing partner in enforcing them.’ That’s on tape; I’ve seen it. He even showed up at the executions, next to the top official, and watched. Then State issued a message to all Americans in the Middle East that they had better follow the laws in all cases, or they’d face the same punishment.” He paused for a second. “I think this Collins, if he is just a State hack, is cut from the same cloth. He may be a representative of the US Government, but he’ll actively work against Americans for the local authorities. I don’t know if it’s official State policy now or not; if it is, it’s buried where most Americans can’t see it.”
“If it’s policy, I would expect it’s unofficial policy,” I said. “They may be stupid, and things might have broken down enough in the States right now that most people away from DC are too involved in their own problems to give a damn, but I don’t think they’re so stupid as to put something like that in writing.”
“Either way, it sounds like we need to keep a close eye on Collins,” Larry said. “He could be trouble.”
“He will be trouble,” Haas said. “The other possibility is worse. While the government has been telling Americans for years that the GWOT ended years ago, they’re still trying to muddle around in the covert arena. They can’t seem to get around the politically-correct bullshit, but they can cause plenty of chaos, in the name of ‘managing’ some of these hot spots. It could be that Collins is involved in one of these operations, and that we’re disrupting it.”
“That would suck,” Bob said from the side of the room. “What do you think is going on, if that’s the case?”
Haas shrugged. “Who knows? These idiots have thought up some real doozies over the years. These are essentially the same people who, in spite of everything, listened to the ISI exclusively during the Soviet-Afghan War, and supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at the expense of guys like Massood. A little over a decade later, Hekmatyar was killing our people, the Uzbeks and Tajiks we shunned before were our most reliable allies in Afghanistan, and the big brains in Langley still treated the Paks as our friends until they couldn’t avoid the reality anymore, since Bin Laden was found in a Pakistani Army garrison town.
“These are the same people who thought it was a good idea to train and harbor the MEK, which was still on the US terrorist list, just because they were anti-Iran. The people who dream up these hair-brained schemes aren’t the ones who have to live or die with the consequences. As a result, it really could be anything.”
“Well, isn’t that just fucking ducky?” Juan said. “It’s apparently not enough that we’re dealing with ISOF, the Revolutionary Guard, and whatever terrorist groups are running around the country, now we might be in the middle of Mr. Secret Squirrel’s Amateur Night? How could it get any worse?”
“Shut the fuck up,” half a dozen of us chorused at once.
“Never, ever taunt Murphy like that,” I said. “As soon as you say that, Murphy will make you his bitch.”
&n
bsp; “Come on, man, you should know better than that,” Bryan put in.
“We’re really fucked now,” Nick said. “Thanks, dude!”
The meeting sort of devolved from there.
Chapter 14
I checked my watch. 2355. Bob saw me, and started quietly humming Iron Maiden’s Five Minutes To Midnight.
“Shut up, fucker,” I whispered. He grinned in the darkness, but stopped humming.
We had been filtering into the neighborhood of Hurriyah Semti for the last hour. For the moment, we were all on foot; the trucks would come in later. Men walking made for less of a signature than a bunch of pickups and microbuses pulling into the same area, even over the course of an hour or so.
Our kit and weapons were almost identical to the hit on Abu Qadir. Light, local, and quiet. Bob and I were hanging out near a closed cigarette stand on the street corner two blocks from the target house. Looking across the street, we could see Larry and Juan waiting, trying to act like two guys smoking and talking, even though neither of them was actually smoking.
We were waiting for Hal’s team to get the cordon set. The most important segments were going to be Bing and Mack, who were getting into position with suppressed .338s. They’d initiate the hit.
The reason we needed the snipers was evident when I glanced down the street toward the target. There was a single man sitting in a chair in the open gate of the target compound. There was another one on the roof that I couldn’t see at the moment, but I’d gotten a glimpse of him earlier.
Hal had determined early on that the target had his own personal security detachment. We hadn’t picked them up during the meeting with Abu Qadir in the Arrafa Canteen, but they’d been there. They were pros; Hal’s guess was that they were from Ansar Ul-Mehdi, the IRGC’s secretive security and counter-intel service.
This was going to be quite a bit trickier than hitting Abu Qadir; these were trained shooters, and they were obviously alert. Worse, we hadn’t had a lot of time to plan or rehearse. I’d managed a quick rock drill or two with my team, but everything with Hal had had to be coordinated by short comm transmissions and innocuous-sounding cell calls. I wished we had more time, but this guy hadn’t stayed in one place longer than twenty-four hours the entire time Hal and his boys had been tracking him.
Hell, we still didn’t know for sure who the guy was. We had pictures, which was better than some of the ops we’d run in Libya when I’d been a Marine, but we had no name or history. Hal had lost the guy twice in the last week, the second time only picking him back up by chance. This was our window, and we were taking it.
“Amber,” Hal whispered through my earpiece. His team was in place.
“Bock,” I sent, and started moving down the street toward the target. Game time.
There was a hard snap overhead. The Iranian in the chair jerked backward and slumped to the ground. I hadn’t heard the other shot; they were too close together. But I got the “clear” word from both Bing and Mack, so we were moving. I broke into a jog, Bob at my heels.
The team stacked up, four and five, on either side of the gate. A quick glance, a nod, and we were flowing into the courtyard, clearing it before moving on to the house itself.
Like most Iraqi houses, it had a covered concrete porch in front, with the second floor extending on pillars like a balcony above it. The windows were arched and metal framed, but dark. As soon as the courtyard was clear, we were moving to the door.
The door was locked. Little Bob got out the sledgehammer, stepped forward, and slammed it into the door, just below where the latch ought to be. The door didn’t budge. Fuck. He reset, swung again, and this time it popped out of the metal frame with a resounding boom. He donkey-kicked it the rest of the way open, then rolled out of the way as Bob led the way in.
No sooner had he stepped through the door than Bob’s DDM4 spat twice. That first breach attempt had been enough, and the bad guys were up. I was on his ass, my own SBR up and sweeping to the left, even as Bob went right. A second member of the target’s PSD was getting up off the floor, holding a bullpup Khaybar. I shot him twice in the chest, and continued to sweep the room, even as I moved to make room for the rest of the stack.
There were two doors and a staircase leading off the main room of the house. One of the doors led to a kitchen; I quickly cleared it with Nick, then was back in the main room. The second door led to a small “guest room,” the nicest room of the house, where guests were entertained during the day. Bob came out, shaking his head, and started toward the stairway.
He looked up the stairs from behind his rifle, then staggered backward as unsuppressed gunfire hammered down the stairway, blood spurting from his neck. I sped forward, turning to return fire up the stairs, when a small, oblong object bounced down the steps.
Bob, choking on his own blood, reached out, grabbed the grenade, pulled it into his chest, and rolled over to put his back to the rest of us.
I threw myself flat. There was no time to think about it, no time to curse Bob for giving himself up. There was only time to see what he’d done, and get down before the fucking thing went off.
Even muffled by Bob’s body, the bone-shaking thud of the explosion rocked us all, as the overpressure slapped the walls and reverberated back on the team. My ears were ringing and my head hurt like a bastard as I picked myself up off the tile floor. I yanked a nine-banger from my kit, grabbed Nick up off the floor, and moved to the stairway. Pulling the pin on the nine-banger, I lobbed it up the steps, aimed my suppressed AR at the top of the stairs, and followed it up.
The nine-banger hammered out its brilliant concussions, and I charged into the flashes, smoke and noise. The Scout light on my rifle flickered, as I strobed it into the Iranian’s eyes at the top of the stairs. He was already rattled by the nine-banger, and I took just long enough to make sure he wasn’t the target before I put a 200 grain .30 caliber bullet between his eyes. The disoriented look never left his face as he dropped to the floor with a thud that I couldn’t hear.
Nick, Little Bob, and Larry were right on my heels. Through the pain and the disorientation that told me we all probably had at least minor concussions from the blast, we all instinctively knew that we had to push the fight and secure the target.
The stairs opened onto a T-shaped hallway, with a door immediately to the right. I took the hall, while Nick, Little Bob, and Larry stormed the door. It splintered under Little Bob’s boot, and I flowed in behind the rest as they moved into the room.
It was empty, except for a chest of drawers and a couple of sleeping mats. There was only the one door, so I immediately turned and covered on it, waiting for the rest to get themselves sorted out. It didn’t take long. I felt a knee hit the back of my thigh, hard, and I moved back out into the hall, turning hard right as I got to the corner of the hallway.
Just as I did, another Iranian, with a black rifle I didn’t immediately recognize, popped out of the next door across the hall. We both fired at the same time.
There was a vicious hammer blow to my front chicken-plate, even as my hammer pair smacked him on either side of the sternum. Blood and tissue splashed out his back onto the doorframe, and he fell on his face. I dead checked him by way of a third round in the head. The body jerked with the impact.
I didn’t dare look down at where I’d been hit. I pushed down the hall, my rifle now lowered to where I could just see over the sights, ready to kill anybody else who presented themselves. My chest ached, my head was still pounding, I could barely hear, and I was focusing hard on what was in front of me in order to avoid thinking about the shattered corpse at the base of the stairs.
I didn’t even follow our SOP, moving to stack on the door instead of covering the rest of the hall, and the door at the far end. Nick covered for me, stepping out to aim down the hallway, even as Larry kneed me to signal he was ready. I burst into the room, stepping over the slumped corpse in the doorway.
There was nobody in my corner, but Larry’s Honey Badger was spitting round
s at the other side of the room. I panned across, checking each corner, table, and chair with a glance, and converged on Larry’s target, at man in a white shirt and dark trousers, his shirt now splashed with crimson, another Khaybar slipping from his grasp to clatter on the floor as he slid down the wall.
Larry moved forward to check the body, giving a thumbs-down to indicate the guy was dead, then shaking his head. It wasn’t the target. Which I supposed was good; we needed the Qods Force guy alive. I had to keep reminding myself of that.
We moved back out into the hallway, Nick taking the lead to advance on the door at the end of the hall. There wasn’t really room to stack up; we’d have to bust through and take our chances. Not ideal, but what is in this business?
Nick hit the door hard, kicking it open savagely, and following the splintered panel into the darkened room. His weapon light strobed, lighting the room in an eerie stop-motion sort of way. I could see enough over Little Bob’s shoulder to see that Nick was facing the wrong way to engage the guy dressed in brown that was raising an MP5 to his shoulder.
Little Bob, however, was perfectly placed, and tracked four rounds up the guy’s chest into his head.
Lights continued to flash, lending a surreal, photographic quality to the scene as we cleared corners and deadspace. The submachine gun wielder had been the only one there. The window was open, however, the cooler evening breeze coming through and stirring the curtains.
I peered out, making sure I didn’t silhouette myself or reveal myself in what light there was outside. “Dave, Hillbilly,” I called. “We have a squirter.”
“Roger,” Hal replied. “I just got eyes on him, moving south between the compounds. It looks like he’s jumping walls to stay out of the street.”
The slippery little fuck was smart. “Roger. Don’t let him out of this block. Close the cordon in.” I’d be damned if I’d let that son of a bitch get away now.