Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (6 page)

             
Larry signaled that he was ready when I was, so I took off.  It was less a sprint and more a fast jog, but it got me across to the cluster of houses in less than a minute.  I dropped to a knee, already slowing my breathing, and waited for Larry, who had stayed in place until I got across.

             
Larry joined me at the cluster, but rather than just following my lead, he put out a hand to keep me from moving, and started toward the opposite corner.  Continuing to make sure I covered the other way, I followed him, figuring that he’d seen something coming across that I hadn’t.

             
He had.  He peered around the corner, then edged back and motioned for me to look, while he took up rear security.  I switched places with him, and eased my head around the corner.

             
There was a Bongo truck sitting at the corner of the next cluster of compounds, maybe one hundred fifty meters away.  It was warm, and there were two men standing near it, both carrying AKs.  Bingo.  I took a long look around, to see if there were any others in sight, but they were the only ones.  I moved back from the corner, and motioned to Larry that we’d go the other way.  I wanted to circle around and see if we could get eyes on any more hanging around.  If we could get a good idea of the exterior security, we should be able to pinpoint the target building.  The number of vehicles outside might clue us in to how many there might be inside, as well.

             
That, unfortunately, was more easily said than done.  Looking around the other corner, I could see the corner of a large compound in the vicinity of the target area, along with another man with a slung PKM.  But there was nothing but open ground to the side; in order to get a good angle on the target building, we’d have to cross at least another hundred meters, and this time within the field of view of the dude on the south side of the compound.  That was bad news.  Worse, any other way to get a better view would entail getting within twenty-five meters of the target compound.  No fucking way.

             
I checked my watch, using my hand to shield the glow.  It had been ten minutes since we left the truck.  Decision time.

             
I peeked out at the guy on the south side of the compound, trying to see if he had night vision.  It didn’t look like it, and as far as we’d been able to see, most of the insurgent groups weren’t nearly that sophisticated yet.  Some of them were; we were pretty sure that Jaysh al Mahdi had everything the IRGC had had ten years ago, mainly because it had been given the IRGC’s castoffs.  But anyone like these freelancers was still going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment.

             
The dogs started barking up a storm off to the north, and the guy I was watching turned to look toward the noise.  Perfect.  I ordinarily don’t like relying on luck, but here it was, and so I moved.

             
One hundred fifty meters isn’t far.  If you’re sprinting, it’s even shorter.  If you’re trying to cross it fast but quietly, without drawing the eye of somebody who will shoot at you if they see you, it’s a long fucking way.  But I made it, even as I watched the sentry as best I could the whole way.

             
He had moved to the corner of the compound, and was yelling something to the guys at the Bongo truck.  Probably wondering what the dogs were making a racket about.  I didn’t care.  I slid into the narrow roadway between another cluster of walled compounds and a soccer field, and took a knee in the shadows by one of the walls.  Larry made it in behind me, having followed when I moved.  That was almost just reflex, by now.  I should have filled him in, but there hadn’t been time.  Training and many years of working together had smoothed such things out.  Now if one guy saw an opening and took it, the others just kind of went with the flow, unless it was something monumentally stupid.  We generally did a pretty good job of avoiding monumentally stupid, but shit does happen.

             
As I peered out and scanned the compound, I breathed a faint sigh of relief that I had dodged monumentally stupid once again.  There was no sign that we’d been heard or spotted, and I had an excellent view of what I was now sure was the target compound.

             
It was pretty good-sized.  There was a two-story outbuilding in the corner of the wall, and I could see the roof of a sizeable building within, including a two-story section on the south side.  It looked almost big enough for a school; for all I knew it was.  These fuckers had no qualms about using schools and hospitals for their operations.

             
I figured directions and distances as I watched.  There were two more sentries on the rooftop; one of them was smoking, which meant he was fucked when it came to night vision.  Both appeared to be carrying AKs, nothing fancy.

             
Even as I watched, white light started to show on the outer wall, and then a black Opal sedan came up the road from the southeast.  The sentry on the ground just waved to it as it drove past, headed for the Bongo truck; I had to assume this was whichever HVT wasn’t already on site.

             
We didn’t have time to dawdle; I made a quick estimate of bodies on site, increased it by a third, and took as much of a mental picture of the compound as I could, focusing on obstacles and possible points of entry.  It was going to be a very quick and dirty intel dump, but it was better than nothing.  I looked back at Larry, and pointed toward the truck.  He nodded, and we got moving.

             
We didn’t take the same route back; that’s always a bad idea in bad-guy country.  Instead, we ducked through the dusty side streets, and came out only about two hundred meters from the Bear, but over six hundred from the target.  We moved across the open ground to the truck fast; we were running out of time.  I could almost swear I heard the helos inbound already.

             
“Albatross, this is Hillbilly.  Coming from your five-o’clock,” I sent over the radio.

             
“This is Albatross.  I have eyes on you,” Bryan replied.  “Come on in.”

             
I trotted up to the cab.  Bryan was already getting out and moving over to the hatch.  There really wasn’t room for three guys in the cab.  “Do we have contact with Mike’s team?” I asked.

             
“Just established,” he replied, as he unlatched the hatch cover.  “They’re ten mikes out.”

             
“Just enough time,” I said, as I pulled myself into the cab and grabbed the mic.  Larry was already coming around to the driver’s side.  “Nick, put me through.”

             
“You’re on,” Nick said.  I heard the click of the circuit changing.

             
“Speedy, this is Hillbilly,” I called.

             
“Send your traffic, Hillbilly,” Mike replied, in his slow drawl.

             
I proceeded to give him everything I had—estimated numbers, equipment, the location and surrounding reference points.  I gave him my best description of the target buildings, and advised him that it appeared that the second HVT had just arrived on site a few minutes before.

             
“Copy all,” Mike replied once I’d finished.  “Hang around until we have visual, in case we need you to talk us on,” he said.  “Once we’re solid, take off.  I know you guys have places to be.”

             
So we sat there for a few more minutes, until we could hear the low roar of the incoming Bell 407s.  I could just barely see their heat signatures with my PVS-14s; they were running blacked-out and low.  A moment later, my radio crackled.  “Hillbilly, Speedy.  Give us a glint so we can confirm your pos.”

             
I pulled the IR strobe out of my pocket, turned it on, and held it out the window, over the roof the cab.  “Roger, good strobe.  I have visual on you and the target site.  You guys are good.  We’ve got this.”

             
“Good hunting, Speedy,” I replied.  “We are gone.”

             
Larry started the truck, and we rolled out of town as the two helos swooped down on the target site like stooping hawks.  The bad guys never even knew we had been there.  That was what I called a good night’s work.

Chapter 4

             
We hit our first check just outside of Saqiyah.

             
Saqiyah is less a town than an outlying farming district of Tikrit.  There’s a gravel pit that doesn’t look like it’s still in use just past the fields, where farmland becomes desert and the farmhouses are kind of clustered together in places, but there isn’t what anyone could really point to as a municipal center.  It’s just a hodgepodge collection of farms and houses that got a name slapped on it.

             
It was also where we were going to have to go to get to the bridge across the Tigris that would lead us into Tikrit.  Or at least that had been the plan.

             
The sun was starting to come up as we started to come out of the desert.  Our little side job in Yehyava had taken longer than I’d banked on.  Everything was starting to turn that pale shade of gray that is too bright for NVGs, but too dark for the naked eye to see much.  It was still bright enough to see that we had a problem.

             
There was a long, long line of vehicles, mostly semis and tanker trucks, stopped on the road.  Even from where we were, we could see the checkpoint at the big roundabout that formed the major intersection just north of the gravel pit, and the Humvees rolling slowly up and down the road.  The Iraqi security forces were out in numbers.

             
“This doesn’t look good,” Larry said.

             
“No, it sure doesn’t,” I agreed.  “Fuck.  We can’t afford to get stopped, particularly not in daylight.”  We might,
might
be able to pass ourselves off in the dark.  During the day, there was no way we wouldn’t be immediately spotted as Americans, and then there went any hope of being covert.  “I’d say we’ve got some confirmation that something’s going on in Tikrit, if they’ve got security this tight.”

             
“Maybe,” Larry said, as he tapped his hands on the wheel.  “Could be that things have started heating up again, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.”

             
“That’s a distinct possibility,” I allowed, as I scanned around us.  “We’ve got to get off this road and find a way around.”

             
“Damn straight,” Larry said, “provided we can do it without the security forces coming after us for getting out of line.  Where’s the next bridge?”

             
I was already looking at the map.  “Samarra Dam.”

             
“Fuck.”  Larry started edging us out of the flow of traffic and onto the side of the road.  “We ain’t making it in there today.”

             
“No, we’re not,” I said.  I was concerned that if there was this much security around Tikrit, how much would there be around Samarra Dam?  It wasn’t like the dam was a huge target, now was it?  Fuck.  I picked up the mic again.  “Nick, we’ve got trouble.  See if you can raise Jim.”

             
“On it,” Nick answered.  “What’s up?”

             
“Lots of Iraqi security on the way in.  We’re going to have to go around.  I need to find out if Jim at least made it in.”

             
“Give us a minute,” Nick answered.

             
Larry got us off the Kirkuk-Tikrit road, and headed for Route 55, which would take us southeast, in the general direction of Samarra.  I kept a close eye on the security forces I could see; I couldn’t tell if they were Army or IPs, but we were driving alongside the road on the wrong side, and I was more than a little concerned that it might attract attention.  Of course, this kind of maneuver was going on all the time in Iraq; the traffic laws were more than a little fast-and-loose.  I relaxed a little when I saw another truck about a dozen vehicles behind us pull the same turn.  I hoped that when we turned onto 55 that it would just be passed off as a trucker who’d missed his turn.

             
The intercom crackled again.  “I’ve got Jim,” Malachi told me.  “Switching you over.”

             
“Hillbilly, this is Kemosabe,” Jim said.  “Send your traffic.”

             
“What’s your position, Kemosabe?” I asked first.

             
“In the desert, about eight klicks south of Tikrit,” he replied.  “We ran into a lot of security on the outskirts, and had to redirect to Samarra Dam last night.  We tried to pass you the word, but our comms have been all fucked up.  Almost like somebody was jamming everything down here during the night.  It just cleared up.”

             
I frowned at that.  We hadn’t run into any jamming that I knew of, but if it had just lifted, we might not have been under its umbrella.  That raised a whole other set of thorny questions.  The heightened security was one thing.  The possible jamming was something else.  Put together, provided they were connected, and provided there really had been jamming (and not just comm trouble, which was entirely possible), and things got downright ominous.

             
The whole time, there in the back of my mind was the thought that something was indeed going down, and we were still out of position.

             
“We just got to Saqiyah ourselves,” I explained.  “We got a little delayed on the way.  We are diverting to Samarra Dam, but we’ll probably have to lay up during the day.  Can you get any closer to the IA base there?”

             
“Not without attracting too much attention,” was the answer.  “There are patrols all over the place around Tikrit.  Something’s definitely going on.”

             
I looked over at Larry.  “When’s the last time you heard of Iraqi security forces patrolling this aggressively?”

             
“About never,” he answered, as he steered us carefully toward the stream of oncoming traffic, trying to find a hole.  There wasn’t one forthcoming anytime soon; none of the Iraqi truckers wanted to hold up long enough to let us through.  Probably figured that if they did, somebody would find a way to cut in front of them, which wasn’t outside the bounds of probability.  “Jeff, I’m starting to wonder if this is really just about pushing the Kurds out of Kirkuk,” he said.  “This smells like a pretty major undertaking.”

             
“Crossing swords with the Kurds
is
a pretty major undertaking,” I pointed out.  “They found that out years ago.  You’re right, though—if they’re taking these sorts of security precautions, it does sound more like a major offensive.”  I punched the dash.  “And we’re out here, out of fucking position!  Fuck!”

             
“We’d still be out of position even if we hadn’t stopped in Yehyava last night,” Larry pointed out.  “Jim isn’t in the city, either.”

             
There was a click, as Nick broke in just as I was about to ask Jim if he had any ideas.  “Jeff, if that Mech Division is planning to push out, we might be in a better position than we think.”

             
“I’m not following you,” Jim said.

             
“Think about it,” Nick said.  “They need to cross the Tigris to get to Kirkuk, or any of the other Kurdish provinces.  Where are they going to do that?  Here, at Samarra, or way up by Tal’Azbil, which is way the fuck out of the way.  They really only would do that if they were planning on going after Erbil.  Which is possible,” he conceded, “but I think we’d see and hear about more activity if that was the case.  Erbil’s not the flashpoint right now, anyway.

             
“So, with Jim to the south, he can spot them if they head for Samarra, and we can find a spot to hunker down out here, where we can watch the Kirkuk-Tikrit road.  We might not be able to get in and see what they’re doing in Tikrit, but we can see where they’re going.”

             
There was a pause, as we thought over what Nick had said, and Larry finally spotted enough of a gap to surge forward, up onto the road in front of a rusting, red-painted semi-truck, whose driver honked angrily at us as Larry rumbled past in front of him.  In some places, that action right there might have drawn unwelcome attention; here, it was business as usual.

             
“You’ve got a good point, Key-Lock,” Jim said.  “What do you think, Hillbilly?”

             
“I think it’s the only way to go, now that Key-Lock’s brought it up,” I said.  “The only problem I have with it is that it means we’re not so much collecting information as we are turning into a tripwire.”

             
“I don’t have any better ideas, given the situation,” Jim answered.  “Trying to get in there is going to mean certain compromise, and that probably isn’t going to end well.  Some of these guys might not hate Americans as much as AQI or Jaysh al Mahdi, but they don’t love us, either.”

             
“Something else to consider,” Nick pointed out.  “If they were jamming last night, and it’s lifted, what does that potentially mean?  It tells me they’re getting ready to push.  Being the tripwire that sends up the flare that these guys are coming may be the only thing left to do, anyway.”

             
“Alright,” I said.  “We’re going with the tripwire plan.  Kemosabe, get your team where you can observe the main road between Tikrit and Samarra.  We’ll do the same on this side of the river.  I don’t need to tell you not to get cornered.”

             
“No, you don’t,” Jim replied.  “We’ll send you all the reports we send to Erbil.  See you on the other side.”

             
“Roger,” I said.  “Out.”

             
Larry turned us onto 55, and we started rumbling off to the northeast.  There was still traffic heading toward Tikrit, but it wasn’t as thick as on the Kirkuk-Tikrit road.  We’d have to time our turnoff carefully, but it would be easier.

             
I was keeping my eyes out, watching for any sign that the security forces patrolling around Saqiyah had seen our U-turn and were coming to investigate.  I hadn’t been impressed with the due diligence of Iraqi security forces that I’d observed so far, but the kind of lockdown that it appeared they had around Tikrit was new, so I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.

             
It didn’t take very long for us to find a turnoff that took us off the main road and into the fields.  It was a little bit more interesting going from there, as the roads were narrow dirt tracks and it would have been all too easy to get stuck or slide off into a canal.  The canals weren’t deep, but they could still present problems to a truck this size.  It wasn’t like the Bears were great off-road vehicles.

             
Larry found us a spot near a farm that was, as far as we could tell after about half an hour of observation, abandoned.  The fields were fallow, there were no vehicles near the house, and no movement except for the ubiquitous feral dogs.  It was about 1200 meters from the main Kirkuk-Tikrit road, which in this terrain, was plenty close enough.

             
“Think we really need to get in the back?” Larry asked as he shut the engine down.  “It doesn’t seem like there are too many people around to come snooping.”

             
“Do you really feel like banking on that?” I asked.  “You know as well as I do how people can just come walking up and decide to take a look at something that seems out of place.”  Both of us had experienced missions where hides had been compromised by somebody who had been nowhere in sight wandering over for no particular reason and peeking in a loophole.

             
“You’ve got a point,” he conceded.  “But I don’t like the possibility of somebody coming up and investigating the truck when nobody’s there to run them off or drive away.”

             
We had established something of an SOP for using the Bears, but hadn’t really had a chance to work it out in the field.  Our SOP, given the distinct lack of Arabs on the team, had been to park it in a strategic location, where we could have eyes-on an objective, then get everyone back in the tank or the bucket before the sun came up.  That way, there was just a truck parked on the side of the road, with no sign that it was anything other than what it appeared to be.

             
Now, on the ground, that wasn’t feeling like such a good idea.  Even aside from the possibility of security forces deciding to investigate the apparently abandoned truck just sitting there, which I would do, considering how much abandoned vehicles had been used as VBIEDs in this country over the last couple decades, there was also the factor that if somebody came along and found a perfectly functional truck just sitting there unattended, they might very well decide to help themselves.  Hell, it wasn’t like the rule of law had really stuck in this country for a long, long time.

             
“I think you’re right,” I admitted, as I looked around.  “It might be better to be able to just drive away if somebody gets too close, especially this close to an Iraqi Mechanized Division.”  I filled Nick and the guys in the back in, sent our POSREP to Alek back in Erbil, along with the updated situation and mission profile, got our weapons out and ready in case we had to break out, then settled in to wait, and watch.