Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (6 page)

He looked over as I sat up, and shook his head slightly.  “Nothing yet,” he said.  “Feels like a thunderstorm’s coming, though.”

“I can imagine,” I said.  “How many of Hussein Ali’s guys are still around?”

“Not many,” he replied.  “They’re mostly out on patrol; it helps that there was a coordinated attack on the PPF base up at the old Shatt al Arab hotel at dawn this morning.  Things are stirred up enough that nobody’s noticing anyone missing yet.”

I rubbed some of the sleepy out of my eyes.  “Good.  Let’s hope it continues.”  I realized that I was hoping for more of the violence we’d been working to counteract.  Oh, well, that happens when your allies turn against you.  Welcome to Tribal Warfare 101.

I got up, scooped up my weapons and vest, and headed into the back.  If we were going to take Black with us, he’d have to be brought at least somewhat up to speed.  I was already working my mind around how to work him without necessarily trusting him.  I was increasingly convinced that his antipathy for Collins and the Project was genuine; that he had gotten into a “wrong place, wrong time” situation, but my responsibility as team lead meant I couldn’t afford to trust him.  If I trusted him, and treated him like a teammate, and turned out to be wrong, the lives of my team would be on my hands.  Combat’s one thing; getting killed because your team lead made a bad judgment call is something else.  I didn’t want that on my conscience.

I didn’t get to finish my ruminations and have that talk with Black.  Marcus caught up with me in the hallway.  He spoke quietly; there were two PPF troopers walking down the same hallway.  “Daoud just showed up at the front door with about twenty troops,” he murmured.  “He looks smug as hell, too.  We might be out of time.”

“Make sure everybody’s up and ready to move,” I told him, watching the two PPF guys strolling closer.  At least one of them I recognized; he was one of Hussein Ali’s.  Whether he was one of those coming with us, I couldn’t be sure.

“Already done,” Marcus replied.  “Everybody’s up, gear’s packed up aside from the comms, and everybody’s armed.  Jim told Daoud that we’re waiting for a report on Abu Issa al Hreitan, and that we’re going after him as soon as we’ve gotten confirmation.”  It was a plausible lie.  We’d gotten nebulous reports that Abu Issa was in the city, but no sightings as yet.  The guy was notoriously elusive, and had well over a hundred deaths on his hands.  He was one of ISIS’ up and coming commanders and a hell of a target.  Daoud wouldn’t necessarily question us getting ready to hit him, provided he hadn’t been tipped off that we knew what he was up to.

“Go get Black,” I told
Marcus quietly.  “Bring him and any gear he’s got to our ops room.  Don’t tell him shit, not right now.  The fucking walls have ears around here.  I’ll go back and see if I can get a handle on this situation.”

“Jeff, I don’t think we’re going to get out of here without a fight,” he said.  “Daoud looks too pleased with himself.  He thinks he’s got us sewed up.”

“Daoud’s an amateur,” I told him, hoping I was telling the truth.  “He’s been beside us this whole time; he’s never had to face us.  And I’m pretty sure he hasn’t factored Hussein Ali into his calculations, either.”

He
just nodded, and headed down the hall in the direction I’d been going.  I glanced at the two PPF troops as they walked past, paying us no mind at all, then headed back to the ops room.  As I went, I slipped my earplugs in.  I had a feeling things might get a little loud here in a few minutes.

Daoud had just come to the door when I got there.  He had four of his own shooters, dressed in the PPF’s tan fatigues and several different black rifle vests.  Somehow, a lot of Iraqis still hadn’t gotten past the idea that black equals
“tactical.”

Daoud had that same vacuous, irritating smile on his face that he’d had the last time I’d met with him. 
Yep, he thought he had us.  Well, we were going to see about that.

“Daoud, my friend,” I greeted him.  Let him think we were clueless.  “Come in.  I heard about the attack at the hotel this morning.”

I ushered him into the ops room.  Nick, Jim, Larry, and Little Bob were either sitting or standing around the room, casually taking up points of domination.  There wasn’t really anywhere for Daoud and his men to go very far from the doorway.  I pushed past and squatted by my sleeping mat, where my ruck was already staged.  “What happened?” I asked.  “We still haven’t gotten a lot of details.  Do you need help?”

He shook his head, still smiling.  “No, no, everything is under control at the Shatt al Arab base camp,” he said.  Daoud’s English was passable, if heavily accented.  “No, I am afraid I am here on other business.”  He looked around, not making eye contact, that same stupid smile on his face.  “You see, when you first came to help us, we had no friends, no allies.  The Baghdad government was weak and corrupt, and the Iranians were causing us more harm than the Salafists.  But things change.  General Saleh is in charge in Baghdad now, and he has offered his aid against the ISIS.”

I squinted at him.  “But General Saleh doesn’t like Americans,” I offered.  Nick had shifted his position, and was now in the corner, with both of Daoud’s goons who’d gotten in the door lined up as nice as you please.  “That means we’ve got to go.”  I let my expression go cold.  “Or is it that we have to be handed over to him for a show trial as a gesture of good faith?”

Daoud’s face froze, just for an instant.  Then he smiled even wider and spread his hands.  “My friend…” he began, but I cut him off with a nod to Nick.

Nick drew and shot both of Daoud’s bodyguards.  It was an easy pair of shots, through the armpits and into the vitals.  The first dropped like a stone.  The second took a second, struggling to turn and bring his weapon up, at which point Nick shot him in the head.  Blood and brains splashed on the doorjamb and the whitewashed wall, and he fell on his fellow.

Deafened by the blasts of the .45 in the enclosed cinderblock room, Daoud looked up at me in shock, only to stare down the barrel of my own pistol. 
“I always thought you were pretty smart, Daoud,” I said, loudly enough that he should be able to hear me over the ringing in his ears.  “But this was really stupid.  Now your boys are going to let us out of here, or you’re going to end up like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum here.”  I was pretty sure he didn’t get the reference, but I didn’t give a shit.  He knew what I was saying, even if he’d never heard of Lewis Carroll.

The door was still open.  I shifted my aim and shot the third of Daoud’s bodyguards in the face as he tried to charge in.  Another gun barked to my left as Larry dealt with number four.  Several more gunshots sounded out in the hall and
foyer; there was a sudden burst of firing from outside, then quiet.

A brown hand waved in the doorway, followed by Hassan’s voice.  “Mister Jeff!  Do not shoot!”

“Come ahead, Hassan,” I told him.  Since Hassan had pretty much attached himself to the team, he was with Marcus and Bryan instead of what I was already starting to think of as Team Hussein.

He stepped in, his vest already on, a pack with his meager gear on his back, and
that ever-present Tabuk in his hands.  “Most of Daoud’s men are dead or wounded, Mister Jeff, but Hussein Ali does not think we have much time before reinforcements arrive.  We should leave now.”

“Agreed,” I said.  I motioned to Daoud, who was looking pretty shell-shocked in addition to being deafened.  “Bag this piece of shit.  We’ll take him with us.”  I keyed my radio.  “
Dingo, have you got the Invisible Man?”  Marcus
really
hated that callsign, even more than Bob had hated the callsign “Shiny.”  That just ensured it had stuck, hard.  And no, I have no idea how he got it.  It pre-dated his time with my team.

“Roger, I’ve got him, coming to you.”  He came down the hall a moment later, as we were pushing out into the foyer from the ops room.  He not only had Black in tow, but the PPF trooper I’d passed in the hall just before meeting Daoud, this time kitted up and carrying an M4.  I remembered his name, now.  Rafiq Azzam had been a star football player in Dearborn, Michigan before his family begged him to come back to Iraq and help them.  He was one of Hussein Ali’s fireteam leaders, and one of the better ones, too.

“Albatross, Hillbilly,” I called.  “Status?”

“We’re at the trucks,” Bryan replied.  “We had a little disagreement with a few of Daoud’s men.  It’s over now.”  That had been the burst of firing from outside.  Knowing Bryan, he’d probably turned the belt-fed on them when they tried to “arrest” him and Marcus.

“How many are left?” I asked.

“Less than a squad, holed up around the corner, where I can’t shoot them from here,” he answered.  “Watch your left when you come out; you’ll be masking a chunk of my field of fire, so if they decide to pop out, I won’t be able to cover you.”

“Roger,” I answered.  “Coming out now.”

Marcus
had Black with him and Nick had hands on Daoud, whom he had divested of any weapons and quickly flex-cuffed.  He had him by the scruff of the neck, doubled over, as he steered him through the door.  Larry and Little Bob popped out the front door and took security to our left, as the rest of us pushed toward the trucks that were now lined up on the street.  Hussein Ali was standing beside a Ranger parked right behind the HiLux that Bryan was riding.

There were at least half a dozen bodies lying on the ground like broken ragdolls, all in the blood-spattered tan fatigues of the PPF.

It was kind of funny.  Two months ago, we’d been shooting at the PPF. Then they were our guys.  Now we were shooting at them again.

In thickly-accented English, he called out to me, “Well done, my friend.  We go now, yes?”

“Yeah, we need to move.”  I steered Hassan over with me.  “We need to expect the PPF to try to stop us.  Daoud was an idiot with this play, but he had to have some sort of backup plan.  If not him, then one of his subordinate commanders had to.  We don’t stop for checkpoints, and we’ve got to be ready to fight through any blocking positions.”

Hassan made sure Hussein Ali understood what I’d said.  I was sure he’d caught most of it, because he was nodding even before I’d finished speaking.

“We have RPG-29s and heavy machine guns,” he explained.  “We will put the Kord in the front, yes?  Then my vehicle, then yours.  I do not think that Daoud’s men will be expecting such a breakout.”  He paused.  “I wish we could get the Mullah out with us, but he is isolated and would not come anyway.”

“I
see.  I’m sorry,” I replied.  And I found that I was.  The old man might not have liked us very much, and we’d never been sure if we could trust him, but he’d generally dealt with us fairly while we’d worked for him.  Still, I only had seconds to devote to the thought.  We were now alone and unafraid in a hostile city, again.  It occurred to me to reiterate what we’d gone over before sunrise.  “We avoid the checkpoints; get out of the city by the shortest route possible.”  That was going to be a twisty route and through some nasty neighborhoods, but it was preferable to frontal assaults on hardened positions that we’d designed to stop an assault cold. “Let’s not waste any more time jibber-jabbering.  Let’s roll.”

Hussein Ali nodded with that faint, hard smile of his.  We shook hands firmly, then he climbed into the cab of his Ranger while I jogged toward the HiLux in front of Bryan’s.

I was the last one in the trucks.  With a roar, the entire six-vehicle convoy sped down the street.  Our breakout had started.  I just hoped it didn’t end too soon.

Chapter 5

Apparently, we’d caught most of the PPF flat-footed.

There was no resistance at all for the first mile.  Nobody even seemed to take a second look at the line of PPF trucks and unmarked HiLuxes with Western contractors riding in them.  We’d been working Basra for long enough that we’d become a common sight, and anybody who wasn’t ISIS on one side or an Iranian proxy on the other saw us as just part of the landscape.  There were still plenty of people in Basra to whom we were mortal enemies or targets, but they weren’t ready to try to stop us.

Granted, we weren’t making the PPF any new friends. 
We were staying tight, moving fast, and damned near ran about half a dozen cars off the road in the first half mile.  Frankly, I didn’t give two fucks.  My team’s survival was what mattered, and right at the moment, survival meant getting out of Basra as fast as possible. With no backup remaining in the city, speed was our security.  As soon as the rest of the PPF found out about what had happened at the police station, we’d have them
plus
every Islamist asshole in the province after us.  The faster we moved, the better our chances of avoiding any hasty ambush or blocking position they tried to put up.

It couldn’t last, though.  The PPF had a series of checkpoints set up on the major routes in and out of the city.  We’d helped them set up a few of them; the idea was to limit the number of fighters and resources th
at ISIS and their allies could funnel into Basra.  Unfortunately, they could also control traffic going
out
.

They also had a few at the major intersections in the city.  Try as they might to keep the riffraff out, both ISIS and the Iranians already had major presences in the city.  The internal checkpoints were there to try to limit their mobility.  I don’t know how much it worked; there were a lot of side streets and entire neighborhoods where the PPF never went.

We were aiming for those side streets, but we weren’t going to be able to avoid the first checkpoint out from the police station.  The nature of the canals that crisscrossed Basra had made sure of that, to our chagrin.

Th
at first checkpoint was already coming up fast.  Of course, we’d discussed getting past the checkpoints in planning, but I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with Hussein Ali’s plan.  His logic was that since he was still a PPF commander, he’d just bluff us past them.  I wasn’t sure that was going to work, especially once any of Daoud’s men who had survived our little ambush at the police station called in.

The checkpoints had started as little more than blocking positions, with a couple of trucks, maybe one of the few surviving PPF ILAVs, and some concertina wire. 
While several of the more major ones were getting more and more fortified, first with sandbags but increasingly with concrete jersey barriers, this one was still just a couple of trucks with DShKs and concertina wire.  Concertina wire could still fuck up a Ranger or a HiLux; we weren’t going to be able to just barrel over the wire if it came to it.  We’d have to fight our way through.

In spite of my discomfort, the lead vehicles slowed, and came to a stop just inside the concertina wire funnel.  Hussein Ali got out and walked over to the PPF troops manning the checkpoint.  They looked alert but not overly amped up.  One of them waved back when Hussein Ali raised his hand in greeting.

Apparently completely unconcerned about the bodies we’d left behind us, or Daoud’s men probably wanting their commander back, Hussein Ali walked up to the checkpoint, shook the sergeant’s hand, spoke with them for a moment, then returned to his truck and climbed in.  The checkpoint guards waved the convoy through, and the lead truck lurched into motion.

I couldn’t believe it.  It couldn’t be this easy.  But we rolled through the checkpoint like it was just another day, like the carnage back at the police station had never happened, and we weren’t toting Daoud along as a hostage in the back of my truck.

I was right.  It couldn’t be that easy.  As we rolled past, one of the guards who’d been listening on the radio noticed that the middle two trucks were full of Praetorians.  He started yelling, waving his arms and running toward Hussein Ali’s truck, apparently meaning to warn him that the Americans were now bad guys.

I watched as Hussein Ali extended his CZ pistol out his window and shot the PPF trooper in the mouth.

All hell broke loose after that.  Little Bob swung his PKP and lit up the right-hand PPF truck.  The al Khazraji gunners on the two lead trucks were already firing long bursts into the trucks and the PPF troopers around them.  These guys weren’t fucking around, even though they probably knew the men they were cutting down.

It was over quickly.  All six trucks were accelerating even as the gunners opened fire, and in seconds we were past, leaving at least
five or six shattered corpses, two wrecked trucks, one of which was starting to smoke, and a handful of survivors wondering what the fuck just happened.

Guaranteed we weren’t going to be able to pull that off again.  Word of our “defection” might have
just made it to the checkpoint, but word of this hit would be spreading like wildfire and the next checkpoints would be better prepared.  It was time to head into the side streets.

They were going to present their own challenges.  The side streets were narrow, often choked with trash and parked cars, and had innumerable
places for an ambush.  Our advantage lay in speed and surprise; no one knew our route but us, and we were going to be halfway making that up on the fly, anyway.

We hung a hard right just past the checkpoint, then a left, running alongside a canal. 
We were still moving fast, but not as fast as we could have on the main streets.

At first, it was still pretty easy.  Being as close as it was to the police station, in spite of the mosque in the middle of the neighborhood, Hayy al Kafaat was pretty well pacified, so a convoy of PPF trucks running through at high speed wasn’t all that much to remark on, aside from the gunfire that had just ripped through
the morning only a few blocks away.  Fortunately, most people, if they don’t know what’s going on, aren’t going to jump in when things get hairy.  They’ll duck for cover, and that was what most people were doing.  They didn’t know what had happened, they didn’t know what was going on, and so they hid until the shooting stopped.

That didn’t mean we could relax at all.  We had to cross Highway 6, which was still seeing quite a bit of traffic as the people tried to get on with their lives in spite of the war going on in their backyard.  If we were going to run into trouble, it was there.

The bridge over the canal was about three vehicles wide, and there were about a dozen cars and small Toyota pickups waiting to get onto the highway as we came screaming up the road toward the highway.  There was just enough room to squeeze by between the piled up cars—several drivers were trying to push out ahead of the others.  Traffic in Iraq is pretty anarchic by nature.

We didn’t even slow down as we scraped by, the edge of the road spitting gravel from our tires into the water on one side.  I’m pretty sure at least one rear view mirror got knocked off in the process, too.  Then we were pushing out onto the highway.

The lead vehicle didn’t stop
or even slow down; the driver just floored it across the two lanes between the canal and the median.  There was a sudden burst of honking horns and screeching tires as cars braked frantically to avoid collisions, not always entirely successfully.  The convoy stayed tight as we ripped across the road, bounced over the median in one of the spots that thankfully didn’t have bushes growing out of it, and then replicated our little near-pileup on the far side.  There was a checkpoint about three hundred yards down the road, but there was too much traffic between it and us for the PPF troops there to interfere before we were racing down the street to the southwest, leaving the highway and a lot of really scared and pissed-off drivers behind us.

We were getting into what were traditionally Jaysh al Mahdi-friendly neighborhoods now.  The Mahdi Army had no love for the PPF, and we were running with four black-and-white PPF trucks.  The al Khazraji might not be wearing their PPF uniforms, but the trucks were going to be target indicators enough.  We’d have to ditch them as soon as possible, but we didn’t really have time to stop in the middle of the city and swap vehicles.  Nothing’s perfect; sometimes you’ve just got to roll with the punches and keep going.

Fortunately, whoever Hussein Ali had in the lead vehicle—I thought it was Azzam, but couldn’t be sure—was pretty canny when it came to navigating a potentially hostile neighborhood at high speed.  He wasn’t taking a straight route
; he kept our turns pretty random to keep anyone watching from being able to predict where exactly we were going.  Hopefully that was going to keep us from getting cut off or bombed.

The houses and compounds flashed by, all of us trying to watch every door, gateway, and window at once.  The gunners were holding on for dear life, especially as we whipped around some of those corners.

Unfortunately, cell phones have sped up reaction times, particularly in cities.  By the time we broke out onto the wide highway we called Route Hamilton for no reason I’ve ever been able to figure out, the militia was waiting for us.

There were two technicals and an old up-armored Humvee sitting on the old soccer field in the
middle of the city-block-wide median when we popped out of the side streets.  They were over four hundred meters away, but that’s plenty close enough when machine guns are involved.

The Humvee gunner spotted us first.  He had the advantage of being stationary, and therefore stable.  He had the disadvantage of not being that good with the gun, and trying to hit us as we were moving.

The Humvee’s turret lit up with a six-foot muzzle flash.  Tracers snapped by overhead, but he was shooting high, which seemed to be a pretty normal thing for most of these fighters.  He was probably free-gunning it, too, the weapon swinging freely on the pintle, and therefore at the mercy of its own recoil.  One round hit the truck ahead of us with a
bang
that I could hear even over all the other noise, but the truck didn’t slow down, and the rest went by overhead with a staccato series of loud
snap
s.  The tracers looked huge, but they were flying by overhead instead of into us, and seemed to be going higher with each burst.

Little Bob was a bit better at this; he leaned into the gun and fired off a couple of short bursts in return.  He waited until we’d gotten over the curb before firing, and even then, the truck’s motion meant most of his rounds were off.  They were close enough to get some heads down, though, which bought us a little time to get across the open space.  That was really all we needed.

The crossing took seconds.  I was grateful, if somewhat surprised, that none of the trucks broke an axle going over the median.  Unfortunately, we’d been spotted and drawn fire.  Now we weren’t going to be able to just slip by.  And, we’d just ducked for cover in one of the most intensely pro-Jaysh al Mahdi neighborhoods in Basra.

The lead driver floored it, but the streets were narrow, often with cars and pickups of varying levels of repair along the sides of the street.
  We scraped by a battered-looking HiLux and almost collided with a sedan coming out of a compound gate only a few yards further on.

I had my window rolled
down and my rifle pointed out, as did everyone else in the truck who wasn’t driving.  Well, everyone else except Daoud, since he was sitting bitch in the back seat, flex-cuffed and gagged.

Somebody had phoned ahead again. 
A set of loudspeakers I couldn’t see started blaring in strident Arabic.  I hadn’t seen a mosque in the area, but a lot of them consist of normal buildings with loudspeakers mounted on the wall, so that wasn’t too much of a surprise.  It was still bad news.  We had kicked the hornet’s nest.

Hearing the yelling from the mosque’s loudspeakers, more and more people were starting to look out their windows or through their compound gates.  I was trying to watch all of them at once, looking for a weapon, an initiation device, anything.  My heart rate was starting to climb; once I was in a fight I was calm as hell, but the lead-up was always nerve-wracking.  I kept finding myself thinking
come on, let’s fucking go already
.

I didn’t see who threw it.  All of a sudden something hit the hood of the truck, bounced off, and exploded just behind us. 
I’d caught just enough of a look to see it was a grenade before it blew up.

Hassan had already opened the back window, and twisted around in his seat.  “Little Bob, okay?” he yelled back.

I couldn’t make out what Little Bob said, but Hassan turned back forward and gave me a thumbs-up.  “He is okay,” he reported.  His words were almost drowned out by the long burst that Little Bob ripped off at someone above, and then we were too busy trying to stay alive to talk much.

Fighters were starting to pop out of the woodwork.  Two appeared on a balcony to our right, one of them with an AK pointed down at us, the other with a weapon I couldn’t see clearly enough to identify as anything other than a weapon.  I didn’t have a very good shot at either of them, given that we were still moving at close to thirty-five miles an hour, and
so I made up for inaccuracy with volume of fire.  My short-barrel M1A wasn’t automatic, but it didn’t need to be.  I dumped about five rounds each, and saw both drop out of sight, wounded, dead, or just suppressed—I didn’t much care which.  If the second hadn’t had a weapon, but just a stick, a camera, or something…well, that was tough shit.  Whatever it was, he shouldn’t have been pointing it at a convoy that was already under fire.