Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (18 page)

             
It was a concern for the after-action and follow-on planning.  I shelved it as I followed Jim through door.

             
The door opened onto the main room of the house, with four other rooms opening off of that one.  The main room had several chests and some rugs on the floor, but no one was in it.  I was starting to wonder if somehow Abu Qadir had slipped the net while we were jocking up for the hit, and we were in a dry hole.

             
Larry moved straight to the first door on the right, as soon as the room was clear, with Paul on his heels.  They flowed straight into the room, as Bryan and Juan moved past them, heading for the next one.  Jim and I were already heading for the first room on the left as soon as we cleared the main entranceway.

             
This wasn’t a hard hit.  We were lightly kitted out, and we weren’t kicking doors or throwing flashbangs.  The most light we showed consisted of short flickers of red-lens flashlights; we weren’t even using NVGs.  They would have showed too much of a silhouette.  Stealth was the order of the night, and so far it was holding.

             
Jim paused at the door, which was barely cracked open.  I reached around him and pushed it the rest of the way.  He flowed in and I followed, riding the door around to the stops, though more slowly than I would have under most circumstances.  We hardly made a sound as we swept our weapons across the room, ensuring there was no one with a weapon about to try to shoot us.

             
There were three figures lying on the sleeping mats on the floor.  One was waking up, but the other two had not stirred when we entered the room.  Jim moved quickly to the one who was squinting at us groggily, and put his face in the mat.  I stayed where I was, covering the other two.  We were careful that Jim didn’t cross my line of fire, or get between me and any of the men on the floor.

             
The man closest to me came awake with a start, and stared at the red flashlight beaming into his eyes from beside my rifle muzzle.  “Iskut,” I hissed. 
Be quiet
.  He apparently got the message, especially as he glanced over as Jim pounced on his comrade, hastily gagging him and zip-tying him.

             
The guy looked back at me, his eyes like saucers, and started to say something, but Jim’s hand clamped down on his throat like a vise.  “
Iskut
, motherfucker,” he growled.  In short order, the guy was trussed and gagged, and a bag slipped over his head.

             
We roughly pulled and prodded the three of them into the main room.  Larry and Paul already had two more there.  Bryan and Juan came out of the fourth room and signaled that the house was clear.

             
Now we had to check to make sure we had our target.  Lo and behold, the first bag to come off was over Abu Qadir’s head.  He blinked at the red lens that was shining in his eyes, and was trying to say something, but the Gorilla Tape over his mouth wasn’t having any of it.  “That’s him,” Larry said quietly.

             
“Let’s get ‘em out of here,” I said.  I keyed my radio, and said one word.  “Scotch.”  We’d gone to brevity codes for communications while in the city.  We didn’t know what kind of direction finding equipment the Iraqis had these days.  The less we were on the radio, the better.

             
“Roger,” was the only reply.  Nick and Bob were heading in with the trucks.

             
We started manhandling the prisoners toward the door.  The geometries got a little interesting—we had to arrange ourselves so any one of the prisoners could be shot if they tried anything froggy, without hitting either one of the others or each other.  We’d had a lot of practice over the years, though.  It went smoothly enough.

             
Little Bob and Malachi were in the courtyard, on a knee, facing out the cracked-open gate.  We forced the prisoners down into a corner of the courtyard, behind Little Bob, while we waited for the trucks.

             
So far there was no sign that we’d been made.  I still didn’t let myself think that we were out of the woods.  Extract is the most dangerous part of any mission.

             
There was the low purr of an engine outside the gate, and the crunch of wheels on gravel.  “Buffalo Trace,” Nick sent over the radio.  Extract in position.  Little Bob pushed the gate open, and we were moving.

             
I led, with Larry behind me, then Paul, pushing two prisoners.  Juan had two more, and Jim had one.  Malachi took up the rear as we came out onto the street.

             
The street was still quiet and dark.  We piled the prisoners in the backs of the trucks, and then jumped in after them.  I climbed in the passenger side of Nick’s truck, and Jim got in Bob’s cab.  As soon as the doors slammed, we were moving.

             
To this day I don’t know if we were spotted, and the IED was command detonated, or if they had pressure plates strung out on the street, and had wired them in after dark.  All I know for sure is the roadway to my right suddenly exploded, slewing the truck halfway around and shattering the windows.  They were safety glass, fortunately, but I still caught a few fragments.  If I hadn’t been looking down at that precise moment, I’d have lost my eyes.

             
As it was, I was thrown against Nick, pain lancing through my head and shoulders as shattered glass lacerated me.  My ears were ringing, and I wasn’t quite seeing straight as I pulled myself upright.  Nick was shaking his head and trying to get us back on the road.  After a moment, I could hear him bitching, “Fuck, fuck, motherfucking bullshit, not again…”  Nick had been caught in the IED blast in Kismayo that had killed Hank, Rodrigo, and Danny.  He was not happy to experience it again.

             
I sat up.  My ears were roaring, partly with the aftereffects of the blast, partly the straining engine of the truck, and partly what I realized after a moment was the flapping of our shredded front right tire on the pavement.

             
I tried to shake my head and immediately regretted it.  I twisted around in my seat to see out into the bed.

             
At first it looked like utter carnage.  Malachi was flat in the bed, and looked like he was covered in blood.  Larry was crouched on the other side, bleeding from several wounds, but conscious.  Juan was nowhere to be seen.  Larry was yelling at me, but it took several seconds to make it out through my dazed hearing.

             
“Juan fell out!” he was shouting.  “We’ve got to go back for him!”

             
Nick heard him before I did, or at least understood him first.  A glance had told Nick that I needed a few to get my head back together, so he stomped on the brake, and Larry jumped out.  I was still trying to get the warped and shrapnel-perforated door open so I could go back and check on Malachi.  I really didn’t give a flying fuck about the prisoners at this point.  If they bled out, too fucking bad.  I was worried about my guys, in the befuddled way one thinks when one has a minor concussion.

             
My head was starting to clear.  Larry was running back toward the truck, helping Juan, who was limping slightly, but seemed otherwise alright.  Malachi still wasn’t moving.  I finally got in a position where I could kick the door hard enough to get it open.  I spilled out on the street, checking my weapon to make sure it hadn’t gotten damaged in the blast.  It appeared to be in working order.

             
A series of low pops sounded from the direction of the rear vehicle.  I looked up to see Bryan and Little Bob firing at several dim figures down the street, coming out of the compound across the street from the target.

             
Our desire for stealth might have been playing against us.  The .300 Blackout can be loaded for supersonic or subsonic.  We had gone with subsonic, as it didn’t make much more noise than the bolt cycling.  However, it meant that we lost some muzzle velocity.  It still hit like a train, since the subsonic rounds were half again as heavy as the supersonic rounds.  But for suppressive fire to be effective, it helps to make some noise.  That
crack
of a bullet breaking the sound barrier next to your head is a big incentive to get your head down.  At most, you’d hear maybe a swish as one of these went past, provided it didn’t hit you.  Of course, bodies dropping in the street have a certain suppressive quality as well.

             
I got to the back of the truck and started checking Malachi.  It didn’t take much to see he was pretty fucked up.  The side of his face I could see was a mask of blood and shrapnel, and his arm looked pretty mangled.  I hauled myself into the bed and started checking him for life threatening bleeds, as Larry boosted Juan into the bed.

             
The truck rocked as Larry pulled himself in.  I yelled at Nick, as I continued searching Malachi’s limbs for arterial spurts, “Can we drive on that tire?”

             
“Far enough to get out of here,” he replied.

             
“Go!” I barked.  We had to get the hell off the X.  Juan and Larry opened fire on the figures spilling out onto the street with a series of muted pops.  One of the prisoners tried to sit up, and Larry put his knee down on him, crushing him into the bed.

             
I was satisfied that Malachi was going to live.  He might be out for the rest of the deployment, but he’d live.  I still had my SBR hanging from its sling, and brought it up as we started grinding our way out of the kill zone.  Aim was shit; we were moving too much on that bad tire.  The engine was making nasty grinding noises, too.  I just hoped we could get to an RV point with the birds before the truck completely shit the bed.

             
Around us, the neighborhood was waking up.  Two men in white dishdashas ran out of an alleyway on my side of the truck, brandishing AKs.  They were acting like the typical Arab gunman I’d run into over the years—lots of posturing, no aim to speak of, literal spray-and-pray.  “Allah will make the bullets hit,” seems to be their operating mantra.  Glorified gang-bangers, really.  I put the red dot on the first one and thumped two 200gr bullets into his center mass.  He dropped like a rock.  The second guy ripped off a burst in our general direction and I smashed him spinning to the dust with another pair.

             
We bounced and rocked off the pavement, cutting toward the main road leading north out of Arrafa.  It would have been bad enough if the truck had been in good shape.  With a flat, it was fucking murder.  I can only applaud Nick’s driving that he managed to get us across the dusty stretch without flipping the truck.

             
A glance backward confirmed that the second truck was right on our tail.  We had pretty much ceased fire as we left the hardball; we’d only waste rounds and stood a pretty good chance of hitting somebody we didn’t want to hit, bouncing around like that.  Unfortunately, the bad guys had no such inhibitions.

             
Small arms fire crackled overhead and two cars came roaring out of the night, trying to cut us off before we could hit the main hardball.  A couple of the idiots in the cars were shooting out their windows at us, even as they came off the pavement and onto the uneven dirt.  A round smacked off the doorframe next to me, but most of them seemed to be all over the place.

             
Larry was still up and on his gun.  Juan was trying to protect Malachi from the worst of the jarring.  Nick was still cussing under his breath and wrestling with the steering wheel, even as we bounced up onto the main road and turned north.  I felt the truck almost go completely out of control as we went over the edge of the pavement.

             
I got on the radio, once I found it.  My headset had been knocked off in the IED blast.  “Chickenhawk, Hillbilly,” I called.  “Prairie Fire.”  That pretty much said, “We’re in trouble, come get us.”

             
“Roger, Hillbilly,” Sam said.  “Two mikes.”

             
We had two minutes to keep these bastards off us, and several of us weren’t in the best operating condition.  Worse, the wobble from the shredded tire was starting to get really bad, and was slowing us down.

             
I still couldn’t hear for shit; my right ear especially was ringing up a storm.  I wouldn’t hear the helos until they were right on top of us.  But we were in a spot that wasn’t too closed in, just past the Kirkuk Petroleum Education Institute.  The helos would be able to come in here, albeit one at a time.

             
“Strobe on,” I sent over the radio, as I pulled my IR strobe out.  If the bad guys had NVGs, it didn’t matter now; they already knew where we were.  I reached through the broken rear window and punched Nick in the shoulder.  “Stop,” I told him, probably a little too loudly.  “We’ll hold here.  Sam’s one mike out.”

             
Nick put on the brakes, and we slewed to a stop.  I bailed out, still a little shaky, and took a knee next to the truck, bringing my rifle up to aim in at the two cars that were closing fast.