Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (8 page)

             
“If they find us, they’ll regret it,” I replied.  I was still fucking pissed.  “Get everybody up, and ready to break out if we have to.”  He nodded, and left me to get my head together and start rousing the rest of the team, most of whom was snoring around me in the dark, cramped room.

             
Nobody was sleeping very deeply, even after the sleep deprivation of the last couple of days.  It didn’t take long at all to get everybody up, their gear ready to go, and weapons close at hand.  If we had to break out of the safehouse, we’d have to move fast.  None of us had any illusions about how quickly reinforcements would be coming if we schwacked an Iraqi patrol, even if it was just IPs moonlighting.

             
I shrugged into my vest, grabbed my FAST helmet and NVGs, scooped my M1A off my ruck, and headed for the roof.  I heard boots pounding the cement steps behind me, as Jim followed me up.

             
I came out the small doorway onto the roof, keeping low so as to avoid presenting too much of a silhouette over the parapet.  Most Iraqi buildings have flat roofs with a low parapet around them; often during the summer Iraqis will move their sleeping mats up onto the roof to sleep.

             
Herb, Gary, Mack, and Bing were already on the roof, kitted up, armed, and watching.  Bent over, Jim and I went over to Herb, who was on the south side.  “Everybody back inside?” I whispered.  If the Iraqis were looking for us, we didn’t need to have anyone out working on vehicles, exposed.

             
“Yeah,” he answered.  “The tactical vehicles are all well concealed, too.  They’ll have a hard time figuring out that we’re here.  Unless they start searching houses, anyway.”

             
“Anyone got eyes on them yet?” Jim asked.  Herb just pointed.

             
I followed his pointing finger, but at first didn’t see anything.  Shoraw Village’s houses were fairly widely spaced compared to the neighborhoods of Kirkuk City itself, but you still couldn’t see all that far.  There were no lights on, either, just like Yehyava.

             
“There,” Herb said, “due west, just coming around the outskirts.”  I saw them then, two HiLuxes, glowing on thermal but blacked out otherwise, slowly trundling along the rough dirt tracks on the western side of Shoraw Village.  The beds were full of men, though detail was impossible to pick out at this distance.

             
“Looks like they’re just probing,” I said.  “If they start searching houses, we’re going to have to break out.  Hopefully we can do that unnoticed, but if not, we’ll have to kill these guys in a hurry.”

             
My radio earpiece crackled.  “Jeff, we’ve got a UAV up,” Hal told me.  “One of the new little ones; they’ll never spot it.  We’ve got eyes on them.  If you want to stay up there, we’ll keep you apprised of their movements.”

             
“Roger, that sounds good,” I said.  “Make sure everybody’s ready to run if these assholes come up on us.”

             
“Already on it,” he answered.  “Just be ready to give ‘em a bloody nose to give us time to mount up.”

             
“Count on it,” I told him.

             
We continued to watch as best we could from the rooftop.  I hadn’t thought to bring a PDA to link in to the UAV feed, so I sent Bing down to the ops center to get one, while Jim took his place on the parapet.

             
Two more trucks came around the town from the direction of Highway 2, and joined the two we’d already spotted, which were now just sitting there, right on the outskirts of the village.  They sure looked like they were getting ready to do a sweep.  They didn’t have a cordon as far as I could see, but then, if they were IPs, I couldn’t really expect that level of professionalism from them.

             
The two newcomers pulled up to the other trucks, and several men got out.  From the roof, that was about all we could make out, just the luminous outlines of the trucks and the smaller glowing specks of the men’s heat signatures.  Soon enough, though, Bing came pounding up the stairs with the PDA, and handed it over.  Sammy was right behind him, bulky in his gear and carrying his full-length M1A, and joined Jim and me near the edge of the roof to watch the feed.

             
It turned out that there were five trucks; we hadn’t been able to see the fifth since it was behind a building from our vantage point.  This was starting to look a bit less like an off-the-cuff moonlighting opportunity, and more like an organized, planned operation.  Which fact might well mean they had had some idea of where we were operating before they moved north.

             
For a while, they just kind of milled around the trucks.  They didn’t look to be all that organized, which was a good thing, but that might just have been because they were waiting for somebody.  After about a half hour, though, they started moving to their trucks.  They didn’t all mount up, though.  Some of them did, but some stayed out, moving ahead of the trucks, toward the houses on the outskirts.

             
“Dammit,” Jim muttered.  “Looks like they are doing a sweep.”

             
“I don’t want to run from these fucking punks,” Sammy growled.

             
“I don’t, either, brother,” I told him, still watching the feed, “but we might not have any choice.”  It wouldn’t be the first time we’d have had to swallow our pride and slip away, just because we had bigger fish to fry.  It still stuck in my craw, though.

             
The trucks with their forward infantry screen started moving into the town.  I was thinking of them as troops rather than police, whether or not they really were IPs. If it came to shooting, it really wouldn’t matter.  We couldn’t see much from the roof, but stayed watching the feed.  We might need to be up in an elevated position if they started getting too close.

             
They moved in…and just patrolled.  They didn’t go into any houses, though they did stop at what looked like a house, and banged on the door.  A few minutes later, several of them came out with their arms full; they had either bought refreshments or helped themselves.  They weren’t acting like they were hunting hired killers, regardless of what their chatter was about.

             
We stayed pretty much motionless as they got to the center of town.  Three trucks turned south, where the village widened before reaching the highway, while the other two turned north, toward us.  We could see them more easily now, as they moved slowly up the unimproved main road through the middle of the village.

             
I hit my push-to-talk.  “Hal, get everybody ready to move as soon as we start shooting.”

             
“Roger,” he replied.

             
“No IR,” I told the guys on the roof.  “We don’t know if these clowns have NVGs, and if they do, I don’t want them to know we’re here until it’s too late.”

             
We moved to the parapet, keeping low.  Rifle muzzles slowly eased over the low wall, leveling on the oncoming trucks.

             
All of us had various ways of handling low-light shooting.  While everyone had a PEQ-2 or PEQ-15 IR aiming laser for their rifle, sometimes they were counter-productive.  In the old days, Americans could count on a marked technological advantage at night.  We had night vision, the bad guys didn’t.  We could flash all the IR we wanted, and the enemy couldn’t see it.

             
Not anymore.  The rest of the world, and by extension, our jihadi enemies, were getting more and more sophisticated.  We still suspected, though we couldn’t prove it, that the IED that killed Hank, Rodrigo, and Danny in Kismayo a year before had been command-detonated because they’d been spotted by a sentry using NVGs or thermals.  And we knew for a fact that cases upon cases of old PVS-7B NVGs had been sold to the Iraqis, since they were supposed to be our allies.

             
Some guys just used red dots, their scopes, or, like me, had backup iron sights set up as night sights.  I had gotten a set of offset irons with a ghost ring rear sight, and tritium dots.  All I had to do was cant the weapon, line up the glowing green dots on the target, and squeeze the trigger.  I had those dots slowly tracking the progress of the lead truck, as it appeared and disappeared between the buildings.

             
We still didn’t have a straight shot at either vehicle; the safehouse was at the end of the main drag, but still offset enough that we were only getting glimpses.  If it came to a shootout, it was going to be point-blank.

             
It seemed to take forever for them to move up the street, though in reality it was only a few minutes.  The whole time, I kept thinking,
come on, you fuckers, if you’re going to do this, let’s fucking go
.

             
Of course, they weren’t going to go ahead and get it over with; they didn’t even know for sure we were there.  But waiting for a fight to start can be as stressful, if not more stressful, than actually getting into the fight.

             
I had strapped the PDA to my forearm, and continued to watch the feed, at least until they came into direct view.  Five men with rifles sauntered up the street, followed by the trucks at a walking pace.  They were sort of in a patrol formation, though it was sloppy.  They were looking around, but didn’t look all that alert.  Two of them were gesturing to each other like they were having a conversation.  I couldn’t hear them yet, but they just seemed to be more on a lark than a patrol.  Not that I expected much more from Iraqis, especially IPs, presuming that these were IPs.

             
They stopped at the crude four-way intersection about one hundred fifty meters southeast of us.  There was a good-sized house there, surrounded by a low wall, with several trees, which were remarkably scarce in the immediate vicinity of Shoraw.  The lead truck turned onto the crossroad, while the other just pulled over and parked.  The rest of the men got out.

             
There were now about ten armed men in the crossroads, just kind of milling around.  We could faintly hear loud conversation in Arabic.  While very little could be made out, the overall tone sounded relaxed.  These guys weren’t expecting trouble.

             
I called down to the ops room.  “Dave, Hillbilly.  Are you sure these guys are looking for us?  Because they’re acting like they’re looking for a frat party.”

             
“I don’t know,” Hal admitted.  “They were talking about us when they approached, but the last few check-ins have been standard security-patrol type shit.  Maybe they were just supposed to be on the lookout for us.”

             
“This isn’t really Iraqi territory,” I pointed out.  “The Pesh run this side of Highway 2.  And I’m pretty sure they’re not Pesh.”

             
“It looks like the Pesh have pulled back into the Kurdish quarter of the city proper,” Hal said.  “They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and expecting it in the morning.  They’re consolidating.”

             
“Well, whoever these idiots are,” I said, “If they keep coming up, they’re going to find us, whether they’re ready to or not, and I don’t think they’re going to enjoy the experience.”

             
By now, they had pretty much established themselves in the intersection.  Several were leaning against the trucks, with their rifles either on the edge of the beds, or leaning against the tires.  Four others were now going over to the large house on the northwest side of the crossroads.

             
They banged on the door, and yelled when it didn’t open immediately.  It took a couple minutes, but somebody answered the door.  There was more loud talking in Arabic, then a few minutes later, they came back to the trucks, this time with a couple of chickens and several bottles.  They were shaking down the locals for food and drink.  Figures.

             
We sat there and watched them for another half-hour.  They continued to hang out in the intersection, talking loudly to each other, without a care in the world, while they passed around the bottles of soda and laughed.  We started to relax, a little.  They weren’t really looking for us; they were passing the time on patrol.  The fact that they were patrolling somewhere they weren’t really supposed to be didn’t enter into the equation at the moment.  They didn’t come any closer to the safehouse, and after a while, they mounted back up in the trucks and drove back south, down the main road.

             
We’d dodged a bullet, but the next time we wouldn’t necessarily be so lucky.  I headed back downstairs with Jim, while Sammy stayed up with the guys on security.  Inside, everybody was kitted up, sitting on their rucks with their weapons, waiting to get up and go at a moment’s notice.  I walked into the ops room, where Hal was leaning over the UAV feed, watching the trucks leave the village.

             
“I think we can go back down to fifty percent,” I told him.  “Everybody needs to keep their gear packed up and ready to move in five minutes, but we can put some guys down for a little bit.”