Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (23 page)

Suddenly, there was a long burst of automatic fire outside.  It was followed by two shorter bursts, then my phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was Hassan.  “The reinforcements are dead,” he informed me.  “But I think it would be a good idea to go now.”

“Agreed,” I said.  “We’re coming out.”

Little Bob had just come out of the cache room, and gave me a thumbs-up.  I keyed my radio.  “This is Hillbilly.  Collapse on the gate; we are leaving.”

I got acknowledgements from the guys on cordon, and then we were jogging out of the building toward the van, which Yusuf had pulled right up in front of the gate.  Hassan was standing by the open door, cradling a PKP in his hands.  I still had my NVGs down, and the PKP was glowing a little on thermal.

There was a technical only a few meters away, absolutely riddled with bullet holes, as were the half-dozen or so corpses lying on and around it.  Hassan had waited by the van with the PKP, and when the ISIS reinforcements
had showed up, he’d hit them from behind while they were focused on the target area.

We squeezed into the back of the van; it had been a tight fit even before we were lugging a couple of duffel bags of ammo and explosives.  But
, like a clown car belonging to a particularly violent circus, we packed in.  The door slammed and Yusuf was flooring the pedal, dragging the van away from the curb and trundling down the street, before more ISIS fighters could show up.

I’d call it a good night’s work.

Chapter 14

The first thing I became aware of, aside from the fact some asshole was shaking me awake, was that my head was splitting. 
I’ve
got
to stop getting so close to explosions
.

When I opened my eyes, it was still dark, so I hadn’t been down for very long.  That just pissed me off even more.  “What the fuck?” I snarled.

“Easy, Stone,” a voice said.  It was Phil, Renton’s man in the Embassy.  “I’ve got news, and it couldn’t wait.”

I sat up, closing my eyes against the throbbing pain in my skull.  “Give me a second.”  This was work, so professionalism had to triumph over pain and exhaustion.  I swung my feet onto the cool floor, waited for the wooziness to subside a little, then opened my eyes.  “All right, give it to me.  Do I need to write any of this down?”

He shook his head.  He hadn’t turned the lights on, and I had to assume that one of the team had let him in.  We generally kept our doors locked and weapons close at hand, even inside the wire.  He held out what looked like an SD card.  “The audio is on here, but I’ll give you the quick-and-dirty.  We got our hands on Collins’ phone numbers, and we’ve been monitoring them, particularly the ones State doesn’t know about.  Two of them are the ones he’s been using to keep in contact with ‘Tremor’ and Van Pelt.”

I took the SD card.  “Who’s
Van Pelt?” I asked.

“Simon van Pelt is an
old hand who went off the reservation over ten years ago,” he explained.  “He did some time in Special Forces, got kicked out for negligent homicide, then kicked around the contract circuit for a few years.  He was fired several times, cropped up in Afghanistan alternately bounty hunting drug runners and providing security for them, depending on the month and who was paying him.  He’s become one of the Project’s top operators, usually going around in local garb.  We think he’s killed at least five high value targets since he got here last year, including two judges and a police chief.

“
The thing is, he may be an unscrupulous asshole, but he’s very good at what he does.  He’s never been fired or kicked out of anywhere for being incompetent; he’s been fired for being apparently a functional sociopath.”

I rubbed my eyes.  They were still gritty and sore, and the headache wasn’t going away.  “Collins seems to be selecting for that,” I commented.  “What’s this guy look like?”

He proceeded to describe “Ghost” almost perfectly.  “We’ve seen him.  He was at a meeting yesterday.”  I thought it was yesterday.  I checked my watch.  It was indeed.  “Apparently most of the advisors don’t know who he is; they call him ‘Ghost.’  They think he’s a spook.”

“He’d definitely cultivate that image, from what we know about him,” Phil said. 
“He’s no spook, though, not by training.  Any field craft he’s picked up has been OJT.”

I held up the SD.  “So, give me the short version.”

His teeth flashed in a short grin in the dimness.  “If you guys are trying to drive a wedge between the Project and ISIS, I think it’s working,” he said.  “There are five phone calls over the last week between ‘Tremor,’ Van Pelt, and Collins.  They are getting shut out of more and more of ISIS’ daily operations, and the distrust is growing, apparently because of the number of times ISIS personnel have mysteriously gotten hit and massacred shortly after a meeting with Project personnel.

“That’s the good news.”  He sobered.  “The bad news is, I think Collins suspects you guys are behind it.”

“Has he said as much?”

“He’s bitched about you guys showing up, and he’s speculated that you guys don’t seem to be doing much in the way of security here at the Embassy.  He’s also noticed that these strikes started after you guys got to Baghdad.”

“Is he in a position to move against us here?” I asked quietly.

“Not
on the inside,” he replied.  “His position is too low-level; something that was required to make him obscure enough to be able to run this side operation without attracting too much attention to his absences and ‘unofficial’ communications.  He doesn’t have a lot of pull, no matter what he tried to say to throw his weight around with you guys up north a couple of months ago.  Renton suspected he might have backup at the Embassy, but I haven’t been able to finger anybody; I think the Project is trying to keep its footprint on the inside as small as possible.”

I sighed.  “But he’ll figure something out.”

He nodded.  “Likely.  He’s a smart son of a bitch, there’s no doubt about that.  He wouldn’t be running the Project if he wasn’t.  I’d expect him to have some kind of surprise lined up outside, in the city.  That’s where he can get to you, when nobody else around here can see.  That way, he can blame it on the Islamists when you guys get blown up.”  He turned to leave.  “You guys need to watch your backs.”

“No need to tell us twice,” I grumbled after him as the door closed behind him.

An hour later, Phil’s warning was graphically
reinforced.  Mike tossed three small, unimpressive black plastic boxes on the table in our ops room.  “These were on the undersides of our vehicles,” he said.  “Fortunately, we check the vics every time we get in them, even in here.”

I picked up one of the devices.  It was rectangular, about the size of my palm, and had three lights on it, that had been covered over with electrical tape.  It was a pretty common, com
mercially-available GPS tracker, with a magnetic attachment point on the back.  The fact that they’d only show whoever was monitoring them where we were cacheing the up-armors before we switched to the more deniable beaters we had stashed around the city didn’t take away from the ominous nature of the discovery.

“
Three guesses who put them there and the first two don’t count,” I said dourly, as I tossed the device back on the table.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said.  “I think there are actually a couple of possibilities, starting with your new team member.”

I didn’t answer at first, mainly because he had a point.  Black had been meticulous in trying to fit in, without being obtrusive about it.  He kept his mouth shut unless he had something useful to say, and he’d performed admirably on the hit on the school/FOB.  But all that could be a blind, if he was playing both sides against the middle.

“I’ve got good reasons for keeping Black close,” I said finally.  “I’m not saying you’re wrong; I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know that we can trust him.  But so far his intel has paid off, and until he ceases to be useful, we’re going to keep using him.”

“Even when he’s got a gun at your back?” Mike asked carefully.  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Jeff, but using him as a source is one thing.  Taking him into your team is something else altogether.  If you need another gun, hell, make Hassan a team member; he damn near is one already, and after Basra, I’d say we can trust
him
.  This Black guy…I just don’t know.”

“It’s a balancing act,” I admitted, “and possibly one that we shouldn’t be playing right now, but, again, I have my reasons.  As good as Hassan is, I need him working the role he is right now.  And if we let Black start to think he’s going in a shallow grave as soon as he’s no longer useful, he’s going to clam up.  I need him open.”

There was a long pause, then Eddie asked the question.  “
Is
he going in a shallow grave when this is all over?  I seem to remember that part of the contract was that the Project just disappears.  We can’t keep an eye on him the rest of his life.  Or ours, for that matter.”

There was an even more uncomfortable silence as Eddie’s words hung in the air.  “That remains to be seen,” I said finally.  “We’ll figure that out when it’s over.  Assuming we all survive it.”

And on that stark note, we got back to planning our next strike.  The relationship between ISIS and the Project wasn’t going to collapse by itself, after all.

“Where the hell is Mike?” I asked for about the fifth time in the last hour.  His team had left the Embassy by a different route, but they’d left about the same time we did.  We’d gotten to the safe house almost two hours before, and there was still no sign of them.

Jim, Hassan, Hussein Ali, and I were trying to plan our next move, but, even apart from the handicap of not having a third of our force there for it, the distraction of wondering where the guys were was getting in the way.  Since the Iraqi house had a dearth of chairs—none, really—we were standing around the board we’d taped to the wall, which was pretty conducive to anxious pacing.

This wasn’t quite the same as a couple months before, when Larry and I had had to hide in a canal in Basra for most of a day; that had just been the two of us, not an eight-man team in two or three vehicles.  They should have showed already.

The radio crackled from the pile of gear on the floor.  “Vehicles coming in,” Little Bob called.  “I’ve got the recognition signal.”

Jim and I charged out, with Hassan not far from our heels.  Two of Hussein Ali’s boys, Ahmed Two and Jamail, were pulling the gate shut behind the van and HiLux that had just rolled into the now-crowded compound.  The van had barely stopped moving before Mike was stepping out.

“Sorry we’re late,” he said.  “We had to shake some company.”

“You were followed?”  I frowned; that wasn’t good.

He nodded, his perpetually long face looking grimmer than usual.  “They were pros, too. 
No way they were ISIS; we haven’t heard of anything like that kind of spycraft from them.  It took the better part of an hour, going all over town, to finally get rid of ‘em.”

“You’re sure you shook them all the way off?” Jim asked.  “They couldn’t have gotten another element on you?”

Eddie had joined us from the HiLux.  He shook his head.  “We made damned sure we were clean; we even split up and rendezvoused twice up north.  They lost us.”

“If they weren’t ISIS,” I ventured, “were they Project?  If Collins suspects we’re behind his recent troubles…”

Again, he shook his head.  “They weren’t Caucasian; I got a good enough look to tell that much.  They were either Arab or Persian.”

Jim scratched his beard.  “That doesn’t narrow things down much.  We’ve pissed off enough people in this neck of the woods that it could be Iranians, Caliphate, or any number of Iraqi factions.  Or even somebody we don’t realize we’ve pissed off yet.”

“Well, if they were as professional about it as Mike says,” I said, “then that actually does narrow it down a bit.  It almost certainly wasn’t ISIS, JAI, Jaysh al Mahdi, or AAH.  That leaves Caliphate, Qods Force, or ISOF.”

“Aside from having to look over our shoulders, which we were doing already, how does this really affect our operation here?” Jim asked thoughtfully after a moment.  “Whether it’s any of the above, we’re not set up to tackle them
and
ISIS at the same time.  The ISIS/Project link is what we’re getting paid for, and it’s just good tradecraft to make sure we’re clean going into and coming out of safe houses.  So, we stay out of these other assholes’ way while we deal with the fucktards we’re getting paid to deal with.  We can worry about Saleh’s goons, the Iranians, or the Caliphate later.”

“True enough, as far as it goes,” I replied, as we headed back indoors.  The Iraqis didn’t have a lot of air assets—they hardly had any, as a matter of fact, and most of those were split up by the disintegration of the Iraqi Army—but what they had might get interested in a bunch of guys with rifles hanging out in a compound with four vehicles inside.  “
It’ll make movement more difficult at least.  At worst, they get a line on us while we’re occupied with ISIS, and we get hit from another quarter.  This just got a lot more complicated.  Still, it doesn’t change the overall mission; the Project and ISIS may not trust each other much right now, but the break hasn’t happened yet.  Until it does, we keep pushing.”

Abu Ghraib. 

The most notorious prison in Iraq, largely thanks to a bunch of dumbasses acting like frat boys when they were supposed to be guarding enemy prisoners, had become an ISIS forward base in the last few years, as part of the fluctuating back-and-forth between Iraqi Security Forces and ISIS between Fallujah and Baghdad.  It was almost as well fortified as Fallujah itself.

So, naturally, we were sitting there figuring out how to smuggle a bomb into it.

Our surveillance on the Project personnel had eventually showed that Tremor, Ghost, and another dude Black fin
gered as a guy called Barracuda came to Abu G once every week to two weeks to meet with some of ISIS’ front-line commanders.  Barracuda apparently wasn’t a Baghdad operative; it sounded like he was based in either Mosul or Tikrit.

Mike had initially had the idea to hit the place just after the meeting, much like we’d done with the school in Yarmouk.  Unfortunately, Abu Ghraib was one hell of a harder nut to crack than an old school turned into a half-assed FOB.  We’d bounced it back and forth for a while, until somebody came up with the bright idea of sneaking an IED in, and setting it off after the meeting.  Provided we moved right, and managed to infiltrate the compound without getting compromised, we’d be at a lot less risk than trying to kick in the door.