Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (35 page)

             
“We do not have much money,” he said, “but we would be willing to hire your company to support my men here.  My men can begin weeding out the Iranian influence in the PPF.  You would help us hunt down the terrorists here that the Iranians have brought to brutalize our people.”

             
He certainly understood that we weren’t running a charity; that was something.  I also sensed a potential trap—if we relied solely on his intel, we ran the risk of taking out tribal vendettas in the name of going after “terrorists.”  Under the circumstances, however, it was a risk I was increasingly willing to take.  We didn’t have the political fallout to worry about anyway.  We were already persona non grata by virtue of being a successful PMC that killed jihadis.

             
I was also under no illusions that he wouldn’t turn on us as soon as our usefulness was at an end.  Iraqis were somewhat more tolerant of foreigners—depending, of course, on where you were—than, say Afghans, but they still wouldn’t care for foreign mercenaries being the backbone of the new order in Basra or anywhere else.  We’d become a political liability sooner or later.  We had to be ready to pop smoke before that happened.

             
That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to take full advantage of the opportunity while it presented itself.  “I think we could have a very productive relationship, Mullah,” I said.  “My company has other obligations in the north of the country, but my team is here specifically to try to disrupt the Qods Force operations.  They have been causing more trouble up north, trying to stir up war between Baghdad and the KRG.  We came here to find out what they were up to.”  Granted, we’d done a little bit more than that, but he didn’t need to know the entire story, not yet.

             
He nodded, his expression impassive, when I mentioned the Kurds.  Kurds and Arabs don’t get along as a rule, and however enlightened his sentiments about Iraqi sovereignty and sectarian tolerance might be, I couldn’t tell if he felt the same way about Kurds.  I wasn’t going to press the issue, either.

             
“Very good,” he said.  He put down the empty chai glass.  “Thank you for your hospitality.  I will leave the details of our arrangement to my friend Hassan.”

I didn’t bat an eye, but inside I thought,
that devious bastard
.  Hassan had been playing us, feeling us out even as he fed us intel.  He’d been working for the Mullah the whole damned time.  Al Hakim had probably used him to set us on the meeting between Abu Falah and the Ansar al Khilafah fighters.  We’d already been in this guy’s employ, and hadn’t known it.  It pissed me off, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t in a position to make a huge deal out of it, so I let it slide.  I could see from the glint in Al Hakim’s eye that he’d noticed my restraint.

He stood up, and I followed him.  He held out his hand, and I shook it, while putting my left hand over my heart.  He smiled, then led the way out, followed by his entourage.  Hassan stayed back.  Haas saw them to the door, then rejoined us in the main room.

“When were you going to let me know about this little play, Haas?” I asked, letting a little bit of my calm and reasonable act slip.  “Oh, right, you didn’t, you just sprung it on me in the middle of our primary safehouse, in the middle of what amounts to a hostile city.  What.  The.  Actual.  Fuck.”

He held up his hands in surrender.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I didn’t have the time or the opportunity.  This got sprung on me pretty fast; I had to move or lose the opportunity.  I suspect that was deliberate.”

I looked over at Hassan, who was looking a little smug, but that might just have been my pissed-offedness talking.  “That would make sense.”

Hassan evidently felt the change in attitude.  He spread his hands.  “My friends,” he said, “I do not see the problem.  You have help now, yes?”

“You manipulated us, Hassan,” I said.  “That is not what friends do to each other.  How are we supposed to trust you now?  How can we know we can trust the Mullah, when our arrangement was made in such an underhanded way?”

             
I was guilting the hell out of him, and I knew it.  His face fell as I spoke, though how much was because of what I’d said, and how much was because he was considering how much trouble he’d be in with the Mullah if we pulled out because we’d figured out their duplicity, I didn’t know.  I wasn’t going to pull us, not yet, simply because this was the best chance we really had to throw a monkey wrench in the IRGC’s operations.  I was going to take it, but I didn’t want our new employers thinking they could pull a fast one on us whenever they wanted.  We needed them to be aware that at any time we might say, “Fuck you, we’re gone.”  It would help keep them honest.

             
“I am sorry, Mister Jeff,” he said.  “Mullah Al Hakim thought it was the only way to ensure your cooperation.  Things are very tense here right now.  The Qods Force men, the Mahdi Army, and the Hezbollah fighters have killed many people, and people are afraid.  Mullah Al Hakim knew that we needed help that would not be afraid of the terrorists, and since the Iraqi Police are so corrupt, he thought you would be the best choice.”

             
“The fact that the Iraqi government has a price on our heads didn’t bother him?” Jim asked.

             
Hassan smiled.  “I think it made him want your help even more,” he said.  “The government in Baghdad is corrupt; the Basra PPF would not have been formed otherwise.”

             
For a long moment I said nothing, letting him sweat a little.  Finally, I blew out an exaggerated sigh.  “Well, I suppose the arrangement is still in our interests, so I’m going to go ahead with it.  Don’t think we’ve forgotten any of this, though,” I warned.  “Any more shenanigans and we’ll handle things our way, and be gone.”

             
Hassan nodded enthusiastically.  “Of course, of course,” he said.  “We must trust each other.”

             
I nodded, and went into the ops room, grabbed the sat phone, and headed up to the roof.  It was still broad daylight, but between the parapet and the trees in the neighborhood, I wasn’t likely to be observed.  I wasn’t kitted up anyway, so from a distance, if somebody saw me, I’d just look like some guy on the roof talking on a cell phone.

             
It was hot, and there really wasn’t much shade up there.  I doubted anyone else would be up on the roof at this hour, but I’d seen stranger things.  I dialed Alek’s number back in Sulaymaniyah.

             
“Talk to me, brother,” Alek said.

             
I filled him in.  “It sounds like the best chance we’ve got,” I said.  “As good as we might be, we just don’t have the manpower or firepower to go after Qomi in his hidey-hole, at least not without somebody running interference for us.  We might have the interference we need now, with Al Hakim’s guys.”

             
“Do you trust him?” Alek asked.

             
“About as far as I can throw him,” I replied.  “Trust isn’t how we’ve stayed alive this long.  But if we can work with him, we might be able to do some good before he turns on us.”

             
“You sound convinced he’s going to,” Alek said.

             
I reiterated my thoughts about the political liability of relying on foreign mercenaries in Iraq.  “He can’t afford to keep us close the whole time.  He’ll cut us loose and turn us into scapegoats as soon as his goals are met.  Maybe before, if he thinks he doesn’t need us anymore.”

             
“I’m sending Mike’s team down to link up with you,” Alek said.  “Things haven’t exactly calmed down that much in Kirkuk, but between Hal’s team and Fig’s team, they can do what they can.  You need Mike’s boys down there.”

             
“What about Al Anbar?” I asked.  “If AQI is reestablishing its hold on Ramadi and Fallujah, that’s going to be another threat vector we’ve got to consider.  And we haven’t got dick out there.”

             
I could almost see him shake his head.  “We don’t have the manpower, brother.  We’re contractually obligated to the Kurds right now, and now we’re committed to Al Hakim’s organization.  We can’t cover the whole country.”

             
“This whole trip is going to be a little on the pointless side if AQI takes over Baghdad anyway,” I pointed out.

             
He sighed.  “We’ll figure something out, brother, but we’ve got to get a lid on these two situations first.  AQI and their cronies aren’t as organized as the Iranians, and let’s face it; the Kurds are the best hope of allies we’ve really got in this region.  If we’re going to continue to operate against the jihadis, we’ve got to be friends with the Kurds.  That means helping them out.  We’ll get to the Salafis, brother, it just isn’t going to happen today.  If we had another company, it might, but we don’t.  We’ve got four field teams and the support guys.  That’s it,” he said.  “And two of the four field teams are now understrength,” he added.

             
I couldn’t argue with him.  Hell, not too long ago, I’d been feeling helpless to do anything here in Basra, with nine guys, including Haas.  Trying to fight three different fronts was beyond our capabilities, and he was right on all other counts.  We needed the Kurds, and we knew what the Iranians were up to.  It burned me that we were probably going to help the Salafists, however indirectly, by fighting the Iranians, but when you’ve got two sets of bad guys to deal with, sometimes you’ve got to deal with them one at a time.

             
Welcome to warfare in the Third World, or should I say, the Tribal World.  It’s never simple, and it will drive you insane, if it doesn’t kill you first.

Chapter 22

             
Two days later, we got to meet Al Hakim’s militia.  Of course, we didn’t get to have this meeting in a remote location, where we could get to know the militiamen, train a little with them, and get some common ground.  Nope, that would be too easy.

             
Instead, we got a meeting place in the middle of Al Maamel, an industrial section in the south of the city.  Hassan had very little information to pass, only that there was an operation, and they needed our help.  It was the first we had heard from the militia since the meeting with the Mullah.  I was not happy, and nobody else on the team was, either.  Mike and his team had arrived the night before, but given the security situation, they were hunkered down in another safehouse in Al Najibiyah, across town.  They’d be shadowing us, providing overwatch.  We hadn’t filled Hassan in on their arrival; until we had some solid assurance that we could trust Al Hakim’s people, I was going to keep an ace up my sleeve as long as I could.

             
We rolled out in the van and the Toyota, keeping things as low-profile as we could, wearing belt rigs under long shirts or soccer jerseys, and carrying rifles, extra gear, and spare magazines in shapeless bags that wouldn’t immediately scream, “Weapon!”  We still didn’t necessarily blend in all that well, being generally burlier than your average Iraqi, but it would take a good second look to tell for sure.  Sometimes that was all you needed.

             
Naturally, this being Iraq, we couldn’t do the meet at night.  Even after everything that has happened in Iraq over the last couple of decades, even the fighters do not like to be up when the sun is down.  We didn’t want to be out in daylight, but we weren’t calling this one.  Once again, they were trying to manipulate us by bringing shit up at the last minute.  Or maybe that was just planning by the “Inshallah” method.  I’ve never quite been able to tell the difference.

             
I can’t say I was impressed with Al Hakim’s boys when we pulled into the old, apparently abandoned factory that was supposed to be the staging area.  There were about fifty of them, mostly standing around smoking and joking, some sleeping, others just sitting around.  About half had their faces covered with ski masks or shemaughs.  A few were wearing green fatigues, others were just dressed in whatever civilian attire they’d come in.  A lot of AKs were in evidence, many of them with the stocks sawed off, as well as a few M4s, a couple of SIG 550s, an ancient, battered RPD, and a few RPG-7s.  We had a bag of RPG-27s under the bed of the Toyota, but again, I was keeping that a secret for the time being.

             
Nobody was on security that I could see.  While everybody was armed, most of them weren’t paying much attention to what was going on around them, concentrating on their conversations or their cigarettes.  A few were gathered in the shade by the main building, smoking a hookah and drinking tea.

             
“Now this is a high-speed strike force,” Jim said, peering over my shoulder from the back of the van.  “Real fucking ninjas, these guys.”

             
“Did you expect something else?” I asked.  “These are militia, not regulars, sure as hell not ISOF.  Worse, they’re Arab militia.”  There were some huge cultural blind spots among Arabs as far as military operations went.

             
“I don’t know about this, boss,” Larry said from behind the wheel.

             
“Look, it’s not ideal,” I said.  “It’s so far from ideal that we can’t see ideal’s silhouette anymore.  But these guys, clowns though they may be, might just be the key to stopping the IRGC cold here.  It’s not much of a shot, but it’s more than we had before.”

             
“I don’t know whether to be hopeful or depressed at that,” Jim replied.

             
“Try both,” I said, as we pulled up to the main building and stopped.  “It works for me.”

             
We got out and followed Hassan inside.  Paul and Bryan stayed back with the vehicles.  These might be our allies, but even if we got to the point of trusting these guys to have our backs no matter what, I still wouldn’t trust them not to rob us blind as soon as we weren’t looking.  In my experience, a lot of these guys didn’t have a very well-developed sense of what was other people’s property.

             
The interior of the main factory building was dim, lit only by daylight coming in through the open doors.  Pigeons fluttered through the rafters, and there was plenty of pigeon shit on the floor and the dusty machines that hulked in the main room.  It didn’t look like the factory had actually been used to build anything in a while.  There were electric lights above, but most of them were broken, and none were lit.

             
Hassan led us into a side room that I supposed had been an office, before the place had shut down.  There was a table set up in the middle of the room, and three men sitting around it in white plastic lawn chairs.  One was wearing a suit with no tie and the other two were wearing green fatigue jackets and jeans.  There were two AKs and a G36C leaning against the wall behind them.  A pot of chai steamed on a tray with a few more glasses and a jar of sugar.  There was a street map of Basra on the table, and the three of them were yammering loud and fast in Arabic.  I couldn’t make any of it out.

             
Hassan immediately went to the table and joined the increasingly vociferous conversation.  After a few moments of fast talking, and a lot of gesticulating, they stopped talking and looked at us.  Hassan turned to me, pointing to the man in the suit.

             
“Mister Jeff, this is Daoud al Zubayri.  He is Mullah al Hakim’s chief military advisor.  He is the leader of this force.”

             
Daoud al Zubayri studied us with impassive black eyes.  He was a sharp-featured man with a thick Saddam mustache, which had come back into style in the last year.  He was also bigger than any of the other Iraqis in the room; while most of us still had about thirty pounds on him, he wasn’t nearly as waif-thin as most of his men.  He didn’t look impressed.  I was just as unimpressed as he was, and I met his gaze with an equally stony-faced stare.  Diplomacy be damned, I wasn’t going to be subservient to an “ally” who wanted to act superior with the weak, undisciplined force he had outside.

             
Daoud said something in Arabic.  Hassan translated, “He says that he does not know what help you are going to provide with so few men.”

             
“My eight men are more effective than half the PPF put together,” I replied.  “We are better trained, better armed, and more experienced than his entire force, and their enemies.  That is why his boss hired us. We are a force multiplier, with more military experience and tactical knowledge than his men have.  We can provide capabilities that he may not have even thought of yet.”

             
Hassan translated rapidly.  Daoud’s eyes narrowed shrewdly.  He said something more, a brief, staccato statement.

             
“He says that the Americans and British did not do very much before, that they stayed in their camps and only patrolled in armored vehicles,” Hassan translated.  “They were safe while the people suffered under Moqtada’s terror.  He wonders how you will be different.”

             
I smiled wolfishly.  “We aren’t bound by the political restraints that kept the Brits and the US Army from getting their hands dirty.  We are here to fight the enemies of a peaceful Basra.  We are here to kill the enemies of a peaceful Basra.”

             
Daoud was studying me carefully while Hassan translated what I’d said.  I could see the wheels turning in his mind; could he trust us?  Would we actually help, or would we stir things up and then go home before the job was done?  Would we be an asset, or a liability?

             
I took the opportunity to watch the other two, the guys in fatigue jackets.  They hadn’t said a word since the byplay between Daoud and me had begun, but just watched and listened.  One of them was clean-shaven, while the other had a thick beard, and looked like he’d spent most of his life out in the sun.  I tagged that guy as the real soldier in the room; Daoud might be the “leader” for whatever reason, but the bearded guy had seen some real fighting.  When I glanced at him, he met my gaze without expression, but the wheels were turning behind them as well.

             
Finally, Daoud spoke.  “He says that he agrees, that we must work together,” Hassan relayed.  “He wants you to know that they will work with you, but he wants to be assured that you will also work with them.  He says the Coalition Forces did not always do this.”

             
I nodded.  “There were some very bad decisions made in the last war,” I said, ignoring the fact that the “last war” hadn’t really ended.  “We would not be here if that was not the case; Iraq would be at peace.”  I didn’t really believe that, either.  There were too many centuries of blood soaked into the sand in this part of the world, and the tribes had long memories.  “We are not here to fulfill some political agenda back in Washington.  We are being paid by the Mullah to work with you, and that is what we are going to do, so that together we can defeat the Iranians and the Mahdi Army, so that your people can live in peace.”

             
It was the most political speech I’d ever given.  I’m generally not so good at such things; I’ve been accused of being about as diplomatic as a baseball bat with a rusty nail in it.  Arabs, and most tribal Third World societies for that matter, tended not to like bluntness.  It was impolite, and if you came across as harder, stronger, smarter, or all three than the guy you were talking to, then you just insulted him.  In Southeast Asia they call it “losing face.”  I don’t know for sure what they call it in the Middle East, since they tend to just try to kill you or otherwise screw you over to make up for it, and restore their standing in the eyes of their peers.

             
Daoud was nodding, however, and a broad smile sprouted beneath his mustache.  He’d bought it, or at least saw advantage in buying it for the moment.  The clean-shaven militiaman was smiling as well, apparently deciding that we were all right.  The guy with the beard was still just watching impassively, saying nothing.

             
I wasn’t sure what to make of him.  He seemed older and harder than the other two; he looked to me like he might well have seen some serious fighting in the past.  Where was anyone’s guess.  There certainly was no shortage of battlefields these days.

             
Daoud waved us over to the table, and the map that was spread out on it.  I saw immediately that it was a commercial street map; we had better imagery back at the safehouse and in the vehicles.  It also showed what kind of a shoestring this operation was running on; I was reminded of the pictures and videos that had been coming out of the revolutions and civil wars across the Middle East since the first Libyan civil war back in 2011.  Whatever worked.

             
Daoud was pointing to an area in the north, across the road from Al Najibiyah.  “The PPF has set up an operations center here, in the old British FOB,” Hassan translated Daoud’s rapid-fire Arabic.  “We have six PPF uniforms, along with several men who are PPF troopers already.  They will get in with two PPF trucks, packed with explosives, and then detonate them.  In the confusion, we can get into the base and destroy it.”

             
It sounded a lot like any number of attacks on IP stations over the years.  I supposed it was only to be expected that such tactics would soon become the modus operandi for all sides, especially when the former insurgents and their handlers suddenly became the authorities, with the stationary bases and need to patrol that they’d used against Coalition forces.  That didn’t mean I thought it was the best plan.

             
I also was painfully aware of the level of training our allies had, and that anything requiring a huge amount of infantry skill was going to be difficult to pull off.  I didn’t really want to use these guys as cannon fodder, especially since trust was already an issue.  At the same time, I didn’t want to buy off on whatever half-baked plan they came up with, either.  It was a balancing act.

             
“I would suggest another way,” I said carefully.  “While that plan has its good points, why waste the vehicles?  We would only get one use out of them.  Do you have machineguns?”

             
Daoud nodded.  “We have several RPKs and two PKPs,” Hassan explained.

             
“Are the PPF trucks equipped to mount them?” I asked.

             
“Yes,” Hassan said, without waiting to relay my question to Daoud.  “One of them has a mount on the cab, and the other has a post in the bed.”

             
I took a step closer to the table, and began to point to the map.  “You could use those trucks to get closer than any other vehicle, close enough to get good lines of fire on the guard posts.  With your men and the trucks, we could set up a base of fire here, inside the walls.  My men would be the maneuver element, sweeping through these buildings.”  Yes, I was fully aware of the risks inherent in trusting ourselves to an untrained Iraqi militia’s idea of a base of fire.  This was going to be dicey, no doubt about that.  “What is the target, aside from killing as many PPF as possible?”