Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)

by Peter Nealen

  I caught a glimpse of a blue Opal sedan suddenly swerving out of control, its back peppered with bullet holes. It smacked into a cart on the side of the road and then plowed into a red, purple, and yellow-painted storefront. More traffic screeched to a halt or smashed into crap on the side of the street, trying to get out of the line of fire. Others just kept on going where they were going, either oblivious to the shooting and crashing going on, or figuring that nothing could happen to them. Think that mindset only exists in the developed world? Think again.

  Larry cut us in behind a lumbering tanker truck, slowing down just enough not to smash into its rear bumper, and then cut a hard right turn into Al Hadi. We went from what could be a four-lane road back in the States to barely one and a half, hemmed in by blocky stucco buildings and cinderblock walls. The street was rougher, with cracks in the asphalt, sometimes filled with more trash and standing water. The ride got bumpier, especially as Larry didn’t slow down overmuch. I just held on.

  We rattled past two blocks and found ourselves next to a school. Larry grabbed the first left turn he could find and rocketed down the next narrow street, which looked a lot like the last one.

  That street ended in a T-intersection with the next block, after narrowing down so far that really only a single car could get through it. I was still looking back for the PPF car, along with any others that might have been called in so I didn’t see the white and orange taxi turn onto the street coming toward us, until Larry slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel to the side with a loud, “Fuck!”

  We barely managed to stop short of the wall at the corner as the taxi went past us, the driver honking and waving his hands at us. Larry backed us up, then rammed the car into gear and swerved back onto the street, getting us moving again as fast as possible. The only other way out of that intersection was back to the main street, and we didn’t want to go there.

  “We’ve got to get rid of this car,” I said, as Larry slewed us around another corner. He was trying to thread as much of the maze of Al Hadi as he could, to throw off any pursuit, but if there was a BOLO out for us, the car would be a dead giveaway wherever we went. “Preferably somewhere quiet. I’m not getting my charred corpse strung up on a fucking bridge.”

  “Hell,” Larry said, “you’d be dead. What would you care what they do with your corpse?”

  “Okay, smartass, less wisecracky, more drivey,” I replied. “Just keep an eye out for somewhere we can dump the car.”

  “I’ve been looking for the last three blocks,” he said. “I haven’t seen anyplace we can stop without half the neighborhood coming out to see what’s going on.”

  At that point, we turned onto a side street that intersected with the canal that ran along the northwest side of Al Hadi. I caught a glimpse of something that gave me an idea. “Head for the canal,” I said.

  “We’ll have no cover there, and nowhere to go,” Larry protested.

  “There are cars parked there. We should be able to swap out with one of them,” I said. “Or, failing that, we go swimming.”

  Larry groaned. “I really don’t want to take a dip in an Iraqi canal.”

  “Neither do I, but I haven’t got a better idea at this point,” I said. “They probably won’t come after us, and if we can get far enough, they might not know where we went.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Larry said, as he wrenched the wheel toward the canal.

  He pulled us up next to a small brown hatchback, coming to a screeching halt in a cloud of dust. I was halfway out the door before we’d even stopped moving, my rifle still held close to my body to keep it from being too terribly obvious that I was getting ready to throw down, and moved to the car.

  The hatchback was locked, and I didn’t necessarily want to break windows to get in. It might not look too out of place; there was another car a few hundred yards down that had plastic taped over the driver’s side window. But I just didn’t want to take the chance.

  We never got the chance to jimmy the door, either. Two PPF trucks came tearing down the road from the north, and we both turned and jumped into the canal.

  I plunged up to my neck in rank, green water. Trying to keep my rifle out of it was a losing proposition; I’d have to clean the shit out of it later, but at the moment, concealment was our primary concern. I looked at Larry, pointed north, took two deep breaths, and went under.

  I didn’t even try to open my eyes; I didn’t want to think too hard about what kind of infections I was probably going to get from this little swim in the first place. I stayed close enough to the side to be able to reach out and touch the mud, guiding myself by feel. I had no idea where Larry was, but I hoped he wasn’t too far behind.

  My lungs started to hurt, the oxygen starvation signals flooding my brain. I had to breathe. I didn’t know for sure how far I’d gone, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t as far as I’d been able to go when I was still a Marine. My body started the involuntary gulping that was a pretty good indicator that I was going to have to come up for air soon. I just hoped it wasn’t somewhere there was a PPF trooper looking down at the water.

  I rolled on my back as I rose to the surface, managing to just break the surface of the water with my face, instead of bursting out gasping. I still sucked down as much air as I could fill my lungs with before going back down. I didn’t even bother to look around; distance was paramount at this point. I briefly worried about Larry keeping up, but dismissed it. Larry could take care of himself. Diving to the bottom again, I struck out for the north, trying to get another twenty-five or thirty meters.

  I could taste the shit-water in my mouth as I went. It wasn’t pleasant, but I had more important things to think about. Like staying down, pushing past the growing pain in my tissues from oxygen deprivation, and trying to get as far as I could before coming up.

  When I came up again, it was in a clump of dank vegetation. I stayed up for a while this time, sheltering in the reeds, my nose just above the water level. I hurt, especially as I looked back and saw that I’d covered almost a hundred yards, underwater. Hell, I hadn’t been able to do that in the training tank back on Pendleton, all those years ago. I guess duress tends to make you perform better.

  There was a rustling in the reeds behind me. Peering through, I could just see Larry’s big, bald head sitting in the reeds, about as far out of the water as I was. He carefully looked over, trying not to disturb the reeds, and made eye contact. We didn’t say anything, didn’t even move, but enough was communicated by that look. We were both good, and we needed to stay in place.

  Above, on the edge of the canal, I could hear talking in Arabic, as the PPF looked around the car we’d ditched. It sounded like they were pretty sure it was the right vehicle, but couldn’t figure out where we’d gone. I unmistakably heard somebody who sounded like he was in charge order searches of the nearby buildings.

  I hoped like hell they didn’t look in the nearest spot, but I figured it was unlikely. As long as we stayed very still, we should be overlooked. It might take some time, but eventually, they’d leave, and we could move out.

  With another wordless exchange with Larry, I settled in for a long wait.

  It was past dark when I finally dared to move from my hiding place. I was itching from whatever was in the water, and I hurt from holding essentially the same position for almost eight hours. I eased out of the reeds, trying not to rustle them too much, and planed out in the water, starting to swim. I kept to a slow breaststroke, taking care not to splash. I heard the faint rustle and ripple behind me as Larry followed.

  In places the canal got so shallow and clogged with trash, rotting vegetation, and debris that we were essentially crawling instead of swimming. I wasn’t planning on going all the way to the end of the canal; if memory served that was where a major road crossed it, and we wanted to stay the hell away from major roads that night. Two big Westerners was one thing, two big Westerners who were dripping wet from swimming in a canal were going to attract attention, even
this late.

  About another two hundred yards down, I slowed to a stop, and signaled to Larry that we were getting out. There was a road on the west side of the canal, but there weren’t any vehicles on it at the moment. We’d cross, then go into the next canal on the other side, before trying to slip into the darkened, run-down outskirts of Tareq on the far side. I wanted to stay away from the walled, well-lit warehouse to the southwest.

  It was a struggle to get out of the canal. We were soaked, the walls were muddy and crumbling, and while the swim had loosened our muscles some, we were still both tired and sore. I was able to scramble up onto the side of the road with Larry pushing me, then I reached down and hauled him out. The guy’s even heavier when he’s soaked.

  Another quick look around for anyone watching or vehicles coming, then we jogged across the road, squelching and dripping, leaving muddy footprints on the dusty road. We slid, slithered, and stumbled down into the far canal, splashing far more than I wanted. I winced at the sound, and froze in the water, watching and listening. Aside from dogs barking in the neighborhood beyond, there was no sound, no activity.

  While narrower, this canal was almost as deep as the one we’d just climbed out of. The water came to my neck. The walls were also a lot steeper. Now that we were in it, I realized that it was going to be a lot more difficult to get out again, and was probably going to make a lot more noise. Fuck.

  Larry, apparently realizing the same thing, slid up to me and put his mouth near my ear. “It should get shallower at the end,” he whispered, barely audible even in the evening quiet. “I think this one does a dogleg and then stops just shy of the road.”

  “I think you’re right,” I replied, just as quietly. “I don’t want to get too close to the road, though.”

  “I’m just thinking of how much noise we might make getting out of this fucking canal,” he whispered.

  “If we didn’t rouse anybody getting into it, I don’t think we’ll do any worse getting out,” I said. I pointed, carefully. “There, about another twenty-five meters. We’ll get out there, and get into the shadows between those two houses.”

  With a good deal of effort, we slithered up out of the water and onto what amounted to a yard. There was short, scrubby grass on the ground, though it petered out pretty quick when we approached the road.

  Another hardball road ran toward the warehouse, and we had to get across. As tempted as I was to sprint it, under the circumstances, I kept to a calm walk as I moved into the shadows on the other side. Larry waited until I was set before following me. Quick movement draws the eye, especially in low light. Walking normally and relatively slowly made it less likely that we’d be made at a distance by some random hajji out later than usual, or a PPF car on patrol.

  Granted, there was a curfew in Basra, and if we got spotted by the PPF, we were probably done anyway.

  We started working our way into the scattered, ramshackle buildings on the edge of the Tareq neighborhood. I was looking for an abandoned building, or even a ruined one like we’d holed up in in Kirkuk a few nights before. We needed somewhere to go firm. Then I could contact Jim.

  A short distance past the road, we found it. The house was little more than a foundation, with three of the exterior walls all the way up, and the fourth only partially begun. There were stacks of bricks inside and out, and a couple of wheelbarrows just left lying around. It would do. We hunkered down in the corner, and I pulled the waterproof case with my cell off my belt.

  “Kemosabe,” Jim answered on the third ring.

  “Hillbilly. Running a little late.” If I’d said I was sorry, that meant we’d been taken. “Running a little late” meant we were held up, but still at large and in fighting shape. “We might need a ride home.”

  “The van will be there. What kept you?”

  “Tareq wanted to play on the northwest field,” I said.

  The entire conversation had been scripted. There was a reason for that. We didn’t know how much the PFF or the IP were monitoring cell calls. Since we were using the phones instead of tac radios on this particular operation, we wanted to make sure anything we said would just sound like regular everyday talk, and wouldn’t give anything away other than that there were Westerners in the city talking about mundane bullshit on their cell phones.

  In that mundane bullshit, however, we had communicated that we were free, no casualties, and that extract would be at the open field to the northwest of Tareq. Now all that was left was movement to extract and linkup. Not that that was necessarily going to be easy or safe. Extract is usually the most dangerous part of any operation, and I had no doubt that this could well be the same, especially as I saw the reflected light of a PPF car’s red and blue lights flash on the southern wall.

  We stayed in place until the lights had passed, and everything was dark and quiet again. I didn’t know if Tareq was regularly without exterior lights, or if the power was out in this part of town. In Iraq, it could be either, I’d found. The loss of oil revenue coming in from the West had hit the country pretty hard; only the Chinese oil interests had kept things above water.

  We crept out into the open, forcing ourselves once again to move normally and slowly. We had only a quarter mile to go to reach the extract point, and it would take a little while for the vehicle to get there, particularly if they were trying to avoid taking a straight-line route, which I knew they would.

  There was a lot of open ground between the houses, all of it bare dirt and dust, with the usual trash scattered around—bottles, cans, and the ubiquitous black plastic bags that they put everything in in the markets. We had to watch our footing to keep from making too much noise just from the garbage. Even the crunch of pebbles under our boots sounded horrifyingly loud.

  Just as we got to the one major road crossing we had before getting to extract, we had to duck back behind a building and drop to the ground, snugged up against the wall. A PPF car had just turned down the road, its lights flashing, and slowly cruised along through the neighborhood, apparently just patrolling. We stayed there for a minute or two after it had passed, facing in opposite directions, waiting to make sure there wasn’t anyone coming back to investigate, in case they might have seen something. Once I was sure we were alone, I tapped Larry’s boot and got up, heading across the road as quickly as I could while still staying stealthy.

  It was when we got to our extract point that we realized a flaw in our plan. In the imagery we’d looked at, the open green area at the northwest corner of Tareq had looked like a field. It wasn’t.

  We were looking at a stagnant pond, edged by reeds.

  “Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. I didn’t want to get back in the water; with the night as warm as it was, I was almost dry from the canals. The more I thought about it, though, it probably meant a better hiding place while we waited for extract. Without any further ado, I led the way into the reads, and sank down to a kneeling position, just my head and shoulders out of the water, and waited. Larry followed like a tired bear.

  A long five minutes later, a white panel van pulled alongside the road just a few yards away and stopped. The driver got out and popped the hood, dangling a blue pocket light over the engine as he did so. That was our ride. I pulled my own microlight out and flashed it three times. The blue light flickered twice. I got up and started moving.

  Bryan was the driver. He just pointed to the back doors, which swung open to reveal the open back of the van, with Nick sitting against the driver’s side seat, an M60E4 across his knees. Larry and I sloshed our way in and swung the doors shut, just as Bryan got in and started the engine back up. Then we were moving, heading back to the safehouse.

  Chapter 17

  Everyone was up by the time we got back. Actually, from the looks of things, I don’t think anybody had gotten any sleep at all since things had gone pear-shaped in the market. Jim grabbed my hand in the crushing grip he got when he’d been worried. “Starting to think you guys were dead,” he said.

  “
The PPF probably would have let everybody know if that was the case,” I said. “I take it you guys have been monitoring them?”

  He nodded. “Of course. They’re still looking for you. Something about spies or terrorists.”

  “Figures. The IA is saying something similar, why not the PPF?” I stripped off my windbreaker, which was pretty crusty from the canal water. Every piece of gear I’d taken with me was going to have to be pretty thoroughly cleaned, starting with my rifle, which I immediately set down on the counter in the kitchen and started to strip down. I looked over at Haas, who was standing nearby. “So what the fuck happened?” I asked. “Did your boy Jaf flip?”

  He shook his head. “Jaf’s still here. If he flipped, he’s being awfully ballsy about it. No, I think the point of failure was Jaf’s contact. He’s been trying to call him for the last eight hours, from multiple numbers, and he’s not answering.”

  “Did he flip, or did he get burned?” I asked, more speculating than expecting an answer.

  Haas shrugged. “No way to know, short of tracking him down.”

  I shook my head. That probably wasn’t a good use of time or resources. “Next step?” I asked.

  Haas’ lips compressed in a thin line. “The next step is a little bit of a tangent, but it’s necessary. We have to get the Jaf family out of the city.”

  I paused. It made sense. If the contact had flipped, or been burned and made to talk, the PPF knew that Jaf was involved. We didn’t know how much the PPF was under the IRGC’s control, but from today, there was obviously enough to make our lives very difficult. This was also a part of the world that didn’t think twice about going after someone’s family. “Where are they?” I asked.