by Peter Nealen
The fourth guy panicked, and turned to run, opening his mouth to yell. Larry pumped four rounds into him as fast as the rifle would cycle, smashing him on his face in the dust. Unfortunately, he fell outside, and the moonlight was going to be on his body soon. I grabbed my push-to-talk. “Kemosabe, Hillbilly, we are at point Charlie, need extract thirty seconds ago.”
“Roger, Hillbilly,” Jim answered. “We are one mike out. Stand by.”
I pointed to the front. “One minute. Let’s move.” We flowed through the rooms toward the front of the ruined house, keeping coverage back toward where we’d left the bodies. As soon as one of the other militiamen saw them, or even noticed that Hamid was late and started to wonder where the others were, all hell was going to break loose.
I didn’t like what had gone down. Killing during an infiltration or exfiltration meant things had gone bad, and you’d probably done something wrong. Granted, in this case, it was just sheer bad timing, but it was messy, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the fact that we had no idea who we’d shot, either. The only thing that mattered was that they had been armed, and a threat, but we had no idea if they were jihadis, Iranian sympathizers, or just the local version of the neighborhood watch. They’d still have probably killed us, but that didn’t make it sit any better.
Tires crunched outside, and I got one word from Jim. “Go.” I pointed, and Larry led the way, Little Bob and our unwilling guest in tow, while Nick and I covered the back of the house. I tapped Nick and he got up, jogging out to the microbus, where Bryan and Paul were on a knee at the back, covering the street. I glanced over my shoulder to see that he was in, and got up to go. At that very moment, I heard the yelling in Arabic from behind the house. I sprinted out the front door for the back of the van.
Hissing, “Last man,” at Bryan as I went past, I vaulted into the back. The seats had been stripped out, and there were curtains over the windows. It was crowded, even more so when Bryan and Paul piled in and slammed the back doors. “Go!” I barked at Jim, who floored the pedal. The results in a microbus were rather underwhelming, but we were well down the road by the time the militiamen got to the front of the house. A few desultory shots snapped past and one banged into the frame of the van near the roof, but then we were around a curve and accelerating.
Only then did I allow myself to close my eyes. When I did, all I could see was Bob falling backward, blood spurting from the bullet hole in his neck.
Chapter 15
I was sitting on the floor in an old abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Chamchamal, next to the body bag. I didn’t react when somebody came through the door. I didn’t pay any attention to the unpleasant noises coming from the back, where Haas was busily interrogating our Qods Force guest. He wasn’t being gentle about it, either. I gathered it had something to do with a hammer and a pair of pliers, but that was Haas’ part of the game, not mine.
The team was settled in, security was set, gear and weapons were taken care of, I’d brought Alek up to speed, and now we had nothing to do but wait. I waited next to Bob’s body.
Bob had been the new guy on the team just before the contract that led us to East Africa. He’d had a chip on his shoulder that we’d done our best to knock off at every opportunity. We were Praetorian’s founding team, after all.
He’d gotten his first real taste of combat and loss in Djibouti. The one guy on the team who’d ever really gone easy on him, Colton, had been shot and killed during the raid that rescued the most hostages out of that entire misbegotten operation. It had hit Bob pretty hard. I still remembered him flailing at the ground with a shovel in a desolate wadi just outside the city, where Colton’s bones are still buried.
He’d gone on to be a solid operator, and a good friend. He had still been a smartass, but the FNG had been replaced by a brother. A brother who was now gone, just a shredded hunk of meat and bone wrapped in a rubber bag.
Footsteps crossed the concrete floor. A pair of Lowa hiking boots and khaki trousers came into my peripheral vision. Jim sat down with a sigh, his hand coming down on my shoulder. I looked over at him. His eyes were red, his lips tight.
“It never gets any easier,” I said finally, my voice sounding hoarse and broken to my own ears. “How many have we buried so far, Jim? And it’s still the same every fucking time.”
Jim swallowed before he could answer. “No, it never does get any easier. It’s probably going to get worse, too. It’s what we do, who we are. This job will probably put all of us in the ground eventually.” He blinked back tears. “I just hope I’m not the last one standing.”
I nodded. Finally I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I put my head in my hands and wept. It was quiet, at least. My shoulders shook and my throat got raw as hot tears squeezed out of my eyes. Grief and rage mingled until they were the same damned thing. Jim’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
I knew we’d all accepted the risk. We were here in the middle of a burgeoning war of our own volition. We’d all gone in with our eyes wide open to the fact that we could be going home in a bag, if at all.
But Bob had been my brother. Rationality and understanding don’t erase the loss of a brother. Whether or not he’d known and accepted the risks, whether or not he’d saved all of us by his dying act, didn’t matter next to the pain of his death.
Worse even than the grief at Bob’s loss, and rage at his killers, dead though they were, was the guilt. The nagging thought that if I’d been a couple steps faster, I’d have been in a position to take those rounds instead of Bob. The thought that I had been his team lead, and so I’d let him down. That I was ultimately responsible for his death.
I knew better. I knew that in war, shit happens. People die. You don’t get to choose who lives or who dies. You can only do what you can, and that’s limited. In the long run, maybe I’d be able to finally accept that when it came to Bob’s death. Right at the moment, it just hurt.
Finally, the sobs receded, as I choked them back down and forced control again. The ache still stuck in the back of my throat, and I knew from experience it would be there for a while. I dashed the water and snot off my face. “When’s the truck getting here?” I croaked. Alek had sent a truck to pick up the body for transport to Sulaymaniyah, where it would be put on a plane to eventually get back to Kansas, where Bob would be buried. Tom would be at the funeral, but none of the rest of us would make it. We still had a job to do.
“Another half an hour,” Jim said. His cheeks were wet. “They just checked in that they were leaving Sulaymaniyah.” I nodded.
Thirty minutes. Thirty more minutes with my friend before he was taken away, to where I’d never see him again, unless or until I could get to Kansas and visit his grave. I wrapped my arms around my knees.
It was going to be a long half an hour. And not nearly long enough.
Haas walked up beside me as the truck pulled away, Bob’s body in the back and Imad riding shotgun. Imad had been with us most of the way in East Africa, and had been adamant that he would escort Bob at least to the plane. I knew Alek would have come, if he hadn’t had his hands full coordinating four teams across northern Iraq.
Haas didn’t say anything until the truck was out of sight, heading back up the road toward Sulaymaniyah. Finally, taking a deep breath and still trying to swallow the lump in my throat, I turned to him.
“Thanks for holding off for a minute,” I said quietly.
“Not a problem,” he replied. “I’ve buried enough friends over the years. I didn’t know Bob, but I know where you’re at right now.”
I nodded my understanding, and led the way back into the warehouse. “He didn’t give anything up already, did he?” I asked, as the door closed behind us.
“No, he hasn’t,” Haas sighed. “He hasn’t so much as made a sound, past telling me that his name is Hassan Kalhar. He’s a pro, which we already knew from how hard it was to find him in the first place. I can break him, but it’s going to take time.”
I frowned. “Time may
not be something we’ve got in great supply,” I said. “Everything we’ve gotten so far is pointing to this being bigger than just general destabilization. They’re building up to something, and unless we can get in front of it…” I trailed off, frustrated.
“That’s actually why I came to find you,” Haas said. He waved a hand somewhat dismissively at the back room where Kalhar was taped to a plastic lawn chair. “We might get something out of him in a while, but right now just taking him out of circulation is going to disrupt their operation. The trick is going to be finding how to exploit that, and quickly.
“Over the last few months, I’ve worked on cultivating some contacts with a few of the Shi’a militias that have some ties, however loose, with Jaysh al Mahdi, and therefore with the Iranians. A lot of these guys aren’t too different from those poor bastards you had to kill last night; they’re glorified neighborhood watch organizations, who have affiliated with some bad guys largely because they trust the sectarian bad guys over the corruption of the ‘authorities.’ I know a few who are uncomfortable with some of these ties, and might be willing to trade information for other forms of support.”
“What kind of support?” I asked. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we aren’t exactly the Bush-era US Army. They could throw huge amounts of cash and weapons around whenever the hell they wanted. We can’t.”
He shook his head. “Nothing like that. It may mean some side operations to help them deal with some of the more openly criminal elements that they are trying to beat back. I know, I know,” he said, holding up his hands at my raised eyebrow. “We’re not exactly at a premium on manpower or time, and this is going to stretch things a bit, but it may be the only way to get the intel we need.”
I took a deep breath, then blew it out. “No, you’re right,” I said. “Get things rolling, make contact with your sources, and start feeling things out. I’m going to talk to Alek about consolidating some of our efforts; we’re spread too thin, trying to follow too many threads at once.”
“That’s kind of the nature of this sort of thing,” Haas pointed out. “Decentralized warfare is the way of the world now. We may have to accept spreading out in teams of two to four for a while, if we’re going to be successful. I know it’s not ideal, but that’s fourth generation warfare for you.”
“Dammit,” I swore. “I fucking hate this reactive bullshit.” I ran a hand over my beard, which was greasy and crusty with dust and sweat. None of us had had a shower in a few days.
“It should get better once Liberty is away,” Haas said, “though the general nature of this operation is going to be somewhat reactive, since we’re trying to actually stop something from happening. We’d have to head into Iran itself and start raising Cain if we really wanted to disrupt this without being reactive.”
“And the enemy always gets a vote anyway,” I replied. “All right. How are you going to make contact with these sources?”
“Some of them I can call,” he said. “Cell traffic is still pretty easy to keep under the radar here. Some of them I’ll have to contact in person, which is going to take time and several other messages to make happen.” He looked over at the back room. “I’ll be able to arrange to get Kalhar somewhere more secure before I have to leave.”
“Good,” I growled. “Babysitting his ass isn’t going to help with the whole operational flexibility thing.”
“Not to mention the off chance that something might happen to him, given that his guards killed Bob,” Haas ventured.
I shook my head. “Won’t happen,” I said. “I won’t deny I want him dead, and the rest of the team is going to feel the same way, but we don’t act on what we feel, we act on what we have to do. He’s safe, until he’s been wrung out. Then he goes in the ground.”
Haas just nodded. Whether it was an understanding of the overall situation, or sheer cold-bloodedness, I’ve never been quite sure. The man just never displayed the slightest queasiness at such things. Maybe he’d just been in this world too long, much like the rest of us.
Less than two hours later, we had something.
“A meeting,” Haas said, putting the phone down. It was a cheap local job, bought at the souk near Chamchamal’s ancient citadel. “In Basra.”
“Basra?” Larry asked. “As in, right next door to Iran, pretty much autonomous from Baghdad, most officials and Provincial Police Force officers appointed by Tehran? That Basra?”
“Are you familiar with a different Basra I haven’t heard of?” Haas asked.
“We don’t have any assets there,” Jim pointed out.
“I do,” Haas answered. “A few friends and contacts from the old days, when the Brits were running things there.” I raised my eyebrow slightly at that. We still didn’t know a lot about Haas’ background, but the fact he’d been running around Basra back in the ‘oughts said a lot about his experience.
“I’ll start making contact,” he said. “It’s going to mean I’ll have to leave soon, probably before I can finish breaking Kalhar.”
“This thing in Basra is solid?” I asked.
“As solid as we can expect,” Haas replied. There was always a caveat in intel, especially in the Middle East.
I looked around at Jim, Larry, and Nick. Bob’s absence was palpable. The others nodded, or in Jim’s case, he just stroked his beard and looked thoughtful. Jim did a lot of beard-stroking anymore; before East Africa, he’d always stayed clean-shaven. After, he kept what was now an epic beard that covered his face almost from eyeballs to neck.
I turned back to Haas. “If this is solid, let’s move on it. I don’t want us still standing here with our dicks in our hands when the IRGC makes its big move. Like I said, we’ve got to get ahead of this thing. That means finding out what it is, or finding their cadre and hunting them down.”
“I’m in favor of the second one,” Nick said.
“I am too,” I replied. I cocked an eyebrow at Haas. “Which one is this little meeting promising to facilitate?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “We’ll just have to see.”
“What are the odds that this is legit and not just some hajji promising he knows something just to use us as a hammer in a tribal vendetta?” Jim asked.
Haas smirked. “About seventy-five percent,” he answered. “Look, this is Iraq. Tribes come before anything else. Always have, always will. And if these people think it will benefit them or their tribe, they will smilingly tell you the sky is green on a perfectly clear day. That’s why I’ve always, always made sure I can corroborate any information I dig up here, and not from somebody in the same tribe. Trust me, gents. I know my business.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Watch your six. When are you leaving?”
“Probably tonight,” he said. “I’ll make arrangements for Kalhar to be secured so you guys are free to move instead of babysitting him. A few of my associates who have been working in Liberty’s intelligence cell are staying with me. They’ll take care of this sort of thing.”
“We’ve got some of our own people that Tom hired for just that purpose back in Erbil,” Larry said. “They can be here in pretty short order.”
Haas thought for a second. “That might work better for now,” he allowed. “My guys won’t be able to move out without raising questions that I don’t think we want our soon-to-be-former employers asking.”
“I’ll have Alek send a couple of guys out,” I said. “Do you think we need more than two?”
He shook his head. “This guy’s no stud; provided they know what they’re doing, they shouldn’t have a problem with him. And three people are going to have a lot less of a signature than a full PSD.”
I smirked. “They know what they’re doing. They’ve had more than a little experience in this particular area.” Will and Lester had both been involved in prisoner transport and interrogation under several black programs that I had never heard of. Tom had vetted them carefully for just that purpose. Granted, the likes of Tim had slipped through the cracks,
but I’d worked enough with these two that I trusted them. The fact that both of them had quit in disgust when their respective agencies had decided to start concentrating on Americans with “anti-government” views even as Hezbollah and AQ attacks had started increasing in frequency across the country considerably raised my estimation of them.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Haas said. He paused for a minute. “Look, this could involve some touchy shit, particularly in Basra. The PPF has split loyalties every which way, there are still a lot of Sistani’s followers who will happily kill Sadrites or IRGC if they know that’s who they’re dealing with, but figuring out who is who is going to be a bitch. I know you guys are good at snooping and shooting, but this could well turn into something a lot trickier than what you might be used to.”
“Sounds like Djibouti all over again,” Jim said, “just without the mobs and the sudden surprise influx of heavy firepower aimed at the government.”
“Maybe without the mobs,” Haas pointed out. “For now. With Qods Force becoming this involved on this side of the border, who knows what might happen.”
Later on, I came to really, really wish he hadn’t said that.
I woke up from a dream where I was in a bar having a beer with Hank, Colton, and Bob. I shuddered, and took a moment, sitting up on my poncho, my head in my hands. I hate dreaming about ghosts. They had been clear, alive, and just like old times. It made the realization that it had just been a dream that much more of a kick in the nuts.
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, knowing I wouldn’t get any more until I shook off the strangeness of the ghost dream, I got up, grabbed my plate carrier, belt rig, and rifle, and headed out to one of the security posts. I may as well let one of the other guys on the team get some sleep, since I wouldn’t be for a while.