Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (18 page)

He stiffened, his mouth tightening.  “Fine.  Yes, he was trying to grill me about you and your operations,” he said.  “But I didn’t tell him anything.  I just said that I don’t want to have anything more to do with you, and that I’m not interested in talking about you.  He tried to push, I told him to fuck off.  End of story.”

I studied him for a moment, my eyes narrowed.  He stared back at me defiantly.  “I’ll take you at your word,” I began.

He cut me off.  “Great.  I’m fucking thrilled.  Now get the fuck out of my face.”  He stormed off.  I stared after him for a moment before shaking my head and heading back toward the vehicles.  We still had plenty of work to do.

Still, Cyrus worried me.  He obviously
was
disgruntled about the company, and while he claimed he hadn’t told Collins anything, there wasn’t much we could do to make sure he
didn’t
tell tales.  He was a threat, like it or not.  I found I hoped he was leaving that night, and that I hoped we could trust him to keep his mouth shut.  If not, we could find ourselves in a world of shit in short order.

Chapter 12

We met up with Ventner and his boys for the movement brief about half an hour before we were supposed to leave
—hardly enough time at the best of times.  That sort of shit happens when you’ve got jihadis crashing the party with VBIEDs and assault teams.

The meeting point was at the parking lot between the helo pads and the greensward in front of the Embassy itself.  It was presently crowded with armored Suburbans, Land Cruisers, and HiLuxes, including a couple that we’d managed to get quietly fitted with
machine gun mounts in the back.  State didn’t know about those yet, and probably wasn’t going to be happy when they found out, but fuck ‘em.  If we were going to be rolling openly—in daylight, no less—then I wanted that threat there at a minimum.  Never mind what we’d have inside the cabs.

When we got there, the only people there were Ventner Dynamics guys and us.  There was no sign of anyone from State at all.  With only about thirty minutes before we left, that was bullshit.  It was also no surprise to any of us.

Ventner was at the front of the last line of Subs, gathered around the hood with several of his guys.  They had a photomap of Baghdad spread out over the hood, studying it.  A glance showed several marked points of interest, including checkpoints and previous attack sites.  The bad guys had a tendency, going back to the American occupation, to reuse ambush sites.  Occasionally it backfired on them, but most of the time, it kept working.  Why?  Lots of reasons, complacency and contempt for the enemy being the main ones.

Ventner looked up as we approached, already kitted up and armed.  A grin creased his face, and I was struck by how many lines appeared.  Joe was getting old.  “Good to see you guys,” he said.  “Shall we get the nitty-gritty done before the delicate flowers show up?”

We gathered around, and he ran down the basic scheme of maneuver.  I was glad to see that Ventner followed the
same “prepare, don’t plan” model that we did.  He laid out the general route, the possible alternate routes, and several general attack scenarios to be prepared for.  “I’m not going to go into great detail on how we’ll respond to attacks,” he said, I think mainly for our benefit.  “Our companies have different SOPs, and the more detailed you get on such things, the less like the details the reality turns out to be.  Big Boy Rules, gents.  Be flexible; you see a hole, fill it.  If you see bad guys, shoot ‘em.  Keep your head on a swivel.  Above all, don’t get bogged down, don’t get sucked in.  If we’ve got to stop for a downed vehicle, we keep it as brief as possible.  End-state is getting these people to the airport and on that bird, and then getting back here.  Keep focused on that, and we should be fine.”

It was a pretty good brief, all told.  He got the necessary information out there, didn’t clutter it up with micromanaging, and once it was done, we all had to brief back the routes, primary and alternates.  He wanted to make sure that everyone knew the way, in case a vehicle got separated, or even if a driver went down and had to be replaced.

We were wrapping up the last walk-through-talk-throughs when the first of the passengers started showing up.

They looked nervous, most of them.  I guess I’d been expecting bluster and arrogance, as I’d come to expect from any suits, whether they were State, Homeland, Agency, or any of the alphabet soup that’s gotten even more extensive and indecipherable over the last few years.  Even the Liberty Petroleum people we’d been working for a few months before had been insufferable much of the time.
  But these folks just looked scared.

Given what had just happened at the gate, I’d be surprised if a lot of them weren’t scared.  The war had just come home to them in a way most of them probably hadn’t seen before.  They had to be anxious to get somewhere safer.

Ventner’s boys set to getting the cargo situated in the Subs.  We couldn’t take buses for obvious reasons—they’d never built an up-armored bus for this sort of thing—so it was going to be a big convoy of Suburbans.  We were taking about fifty people to the airport, with another sixty or so security personnel.  Was it overkill?  Maybe.  I’d rather have more guns than we needed than not enough.

Ventner stepped over to me while we were getting the HiLux gun trucks ready to go.  “Hey, Jeff,” he said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard any of the news lately.”  I shook my head in a negative.  I’d been busy, and I hadn’t turned on the TV in my billeting since we’d gotten there.  “Saleh made a statement about the attack this morning.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at him.  “Well, don’t keep me hanging, Joe,” I said.

He chuckled, then went dead serious.  “Leaving aside all the political bullshit he spouted for the usual audience, he’s blaming the attack on JAI.  He said he’s moving more forces into the Green Zone to deter any further incursions from the Sunni-dominated parts of the city.”

My eyes narrowed.  “Sounds kind of convenient,” I said.  “Haas couldn’t even find anything to identify who the attackers were with, but somehow Saleh knows?”

He nodded.  “I think he knows the same way the Japanese knew it was the Chinese who attacked that bridge in Manchuria.”

“You think it was actually Saleh’s IA?”

“I think it was either them or
the Mahdi Army,” he replied.  “He’s tightening the noose.  Sooner or later, he’s going to have everybody left in this compound locked up ‘for our own protection.’”

“That’s a hell of a hostage situation,” I said.  “We’ve already seen how those tend to work out.”  Tehran had been the first such in
modern American history; Djibouti had been the largest since then.  This would be comparable, just with a lot more firepower between the hostages and any would-be rescue force.  If there was even any coming; the US hadn’t been able to get a MEU in place to try to rescue the hostages in East Africa, and that was over a year ago.  From what I’d been hearing, the US military’s logistical situation hadn’t improved much since then.  The lack of a FAST at the Embassy didn’t raise any hopes, either.

“All the more reason to get these people out as fast as possible,” he said.  “I just thought you needed a heads-up.”

“Agreed,” I said.  “Thanks, Joe.”

He went back to the Subs, and I finished checking the HiLux. 
It was getting down to showtime.

Of course, some of the State people were almost as bad as Iraqis.  The last passengers on the manifest showed up with about three minutes to spare before we were supposed to leave.  Typically, they were some of the more important personages, which didn’t endear them to me or any of the rest much.  Of course, the closer we got to darkness before departing, the happier I’d be, but the attitude behind it, coupled with the fact that their flight was probably going to leave without them if we didn’t make it in time, made it irritating as hell.

“All right, Hillbilly,” Ventner called on the radio.  “We’re ready to move when you are.”  I was in the lead truck, Jim had the second, and Mike’s team was bringing up the rear.  Hussein Ali was staying back for this one; there were way too many questions that would be asked if we had Iraqis running security on this one, especially since the Embassy’s local guard force had vanished into the night about a month ago.

We left through Red Gate, which the Ambassador had ordered reopened less than two hours after we’d closed it.  Like I’d expected, it was all about “messaging.”  We couldn’t let the big, bad jihadis know we were scared of them, could we?

“Messaging,” my ass.  “Messaging” should have taken a back seat to practicality in defense.  Too bad the Ambassador was a career politician who’d never held down a real job in his life, never mind actually served in the military, where he might have learned about such things.

I gave the lone Marine and the half-dozen Stahl contractors on guard duty a sardonic wave as we drove past.  The Marine was standing in the guard shack, while the contractors were standing by possible firing positions throughout the ECP.  The look on the Marine’s face was a combination of envy and “better you than me.”  I’m sure he’d be glad to go home, but wasn’t thrilled with the idea of running the gauntlet to do it.

Marcus was driving again, and took a hard left on Al Kindi Street, where he floored it.  We weren’t going to do the Blackwater “full speed, force everybody off the road while mean-mugging everyone on the road” bit, though I understand that was mandated by State at the time, but we weren’t going to mosey along, either.  The threat was too high for that, and with this big a convoy, speed was most definitely security.

There was no reaction as we raced down Al Kindi to the Qadisiyah Expressway.  Of course, there wasn’t a lot of traffic, thanks to the economic hardships that the years-long war had imposed on the country and the war itself.  Even so, people still tended to go to work, go to get food, and otherwise stay inside, out of the way, hoping the next bomb or firefight didn’t go off in their own neighborhood, so there were a few cars out.

I was expecting the first check at Qadisiyah Bridge.  I wasn’t disappointed.

The first warning sign was the broken-down sedan parked under the bridge.  While the VBIED ambush had become a little outdated in countries without the force disparity that Iraq had seen in the early 2000s, with a known route and known target, why not?  If it works, it works, and jihadis had shown a definite proclivity for reusing tactics that worked.

Car bombs in the Middle East had gotten pretty sophisticated over the years.  I still remember some of my platoon sergeants and senior team leaders in Libya talking about the early VBIEDs in Iraq.  You could usually tell them by sight, as they were loaded down with the heavy steel of the artillery shells that they were using to supply the explosives.  Nowadays, they were more likely to have Semtex or PETN packed in the doors, and the suspensions beefed up so that the weight of the bomb didn’t show externally.

This sedan looked perfectly innocent.  It wasn’t sitting low on its suspension or anything.  It was just its placement that looked off.  “Turn off,” I told Marcus.  No way in hell was I going past that thing if I could help it.  It was entirely possible that there was a follow-on ambush up the road.  In fact, I was counting on it.  The car under the bridge might even be empty,
parked there solely to steer us into the real ambush.  That overpass presented too much of a chokepoint to take the chance, though.

I keyed the radio.  “This is Hillbilly.  Possible car bomb under the bridge; we are diverting to a secondary route.”

I got acknowledgements from Mike and Ventner, who was, true to form, riding along in the lead Sub with the ranking State personnel, one of the minor attaches.  Marcus hauled us off the Expressway and north toward Nisour Square.  We didn’t want to go all the way to the square if we could help it, but we might have to.

There was still quite a bit of the security apparatus left from the Green Zone’s heyday
; heavy concrete jersey barriers lined the street and the median, making it impossible to go over the median and get on the southbound lane to get back on the expressway.  We were still canalized, and I didn’t like it.  “Heads up,” I said, unnecessarily.  “I think the real deal’s coming up pretty soon here.”

I’d barely stopped talking when the first IED went off.

Marcus was on it; he spotted something that keyed him in and he swerved to the left and stomped on the brake.  The explosion still rocked the vehicle and shrapnel and bits of concrete embedded themselves in the armored glass.  Fortunately, he’d spotted it soon enough that the tires were intact.

“Push!” I snarled. 
As much as I might like to move out and hammer the ambushers, this was not the situation to do that in.  While there might be more surprises waiting ahead, staying on the X was never a good idea, and we had too many passengers to make assaulting the ambush practical.  We had to move.

I glanced back to the bed to see how Bryan had weathered the detonation.  He was up and behind the M60 we’d fitted
to the gun mount, and even as I looked, he opened fire.

Fighters were starting to swarm out of the residential buildings on our left, and small arms fire was starting to snap around us.  I wished for about the tenth time that these up-armors had windows you could open; Bryan and Little Bob on the guns in the beds were the only return fire we had.

Marcus mashed the gas pedal, spinning the tires as he cranked the wheel to get us straight on the street again.  In moments, with the engine roaring, we were out of the kill zone and heading for the square.  There was no other way around; we’d have to chance it.

Another glance back and I saw the rest of the vehicles holding tight, coming after us.  A couple of the Subs
were the Dillon Aero refits that had miniguns in pop-up turrets, and the Ventner guys were hosing down the sides of the street as they went.  It was effective, as the incoming fire slackened considerably while we raced out of the ambush.

We screamed around Nisour Square’s roundabout, slowing down only enough to keep from flipping vehicles.  The guys behind the miniguns were still up and covering the sides of the road, all attempts at a low profile abandoned.  In my opinion,
since we’d gone out in daylight, we shouldn’t have even bothered in the first place.