Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) (40 page)

             
“Are we sure he’s there?” I asked Hassan.  Hassan asked Hussein Ali, who nodded emphatically as he replied.

             
“If the bombs are armed, he is there,” Hassan said.  “Hussein Ali knows this man from a long time ago.  He says he is certain he is there.”

             
“What about anyone else?” I asked.  “Is his family in there?”

             
Hussein Ali shook his head.  “He says no, that this man keeps his family in Qom,” Hassan reported.  “He knows this man very well.”

             
There was still the possibility of collateral damage, but if these fuckers were going to put out IEDs on pressure plates in open streets, I’d play their little fucking game.  “Tell him to keep his men in the trucks.  I’ve got another way to take care of this.”  Without waiting for an answer, I ran back to the HiLux, hoping and praying that I didn’t set off another IED as I went.

             
Instead of climbing back in, I went to the bed.  “Hand me our special toy,” I said.  Larry threw back the tarp and pulled it out, passing the long tube over to me.

             
The RShG-1 looked a lot like our RPG-27s.  It wasn’t quite the same, though.  Instead of the HEAT round, it was equipped with a thermobaric round that the Russians had developed specifically for smoking Afghan and Chechen jihadis out of their caves, holes, or buildings.  Actually, it wasn’t so much for “smoking them out,” as it was for “cooking them inside.”

             
Carrying the tube, I ran far enough to the side to make sure our truck and any of the militia’s trucks were clear of the backblast.  Taking a knee, I opened the rear sight and leveled the weapon at the door.  The target was apparently so confident in the security afforded by his IEDs and whatever measures he had inside that he hadn’t even arranged for a closed gate.  The compound was open.

             
I pressed the trigger, and the warhead
bang
ed across the short distance, smashing through the thin metal door.  An instant later, every window and door in the building blossomed with bright white fire, and part of the roof blew off.  The concussion was earthshaking; the blast actually rocked the trucks on their wheels, and bits of building whickered past my head.  I ducked, almost going face down in the dirt.  Yeah, that was a little close to use one of those.

             
I ran back to the truck, tossing the spent tube to Larry.  Hussein Ali was out of his truck, yelling into the radio when he wasn’t yelling at the militiamen in the back of his own truck.  He sounded pissed—likely because his men were paralyzed by what had happened to the other two trucks.

             
Now that I wasn’t so worried about being attacked from inside the target building, we had to get any survivors from the IED blasts out of the kill zone, stabilized, and loaded up to get them back to the factory.  I was afraid that our raids were going to be cut short by this.  The odds of the Iraqis continuing to perform after that were slim.  These weren’t seasoned soldiers, most of them.   Hell, getting them to go into that kill zone to get their wounded comrades was going to be enough of a bitch.

             
Hussein Ali wasn’t fucking around, though, and in short order, without any of us having to say anything, he was herding his men toward the stricken trucks, at gunpoint at least once.  The more I saw this guy in action, the more I respected him.  I still didn’t exactly trust him, but I respected the hell out of him.

             
Right at the moment, I wasn’t inclined to think too hard about how he knew the former target from before.

             
We weren’t able to get to the wounded from the IED blasts quickly.  We had to pick our way, in the flickering light of the burning house, watching attentively for more IEDs the entire time.  Some of the triggers that had come out in the last ten years were simple, ingenious, and damned near impossible to spot until it was too late, and that was in broad daylight.

             
By some luck, or the grace of God, we got to the first truck, or I should say the remains of the first truck, without incident.  By then I was anxiously checking my watch about every thirty seconds.  The longer we were on site, the longer the PPF was going to have to come after us, and in spite of the massacre we’d pulled off almost thirty minutes before, we still weren’t in a good posture to deal with them.  The fact that most of the surviving militiamen were considerably less than enthusiastic at sticking around didn’t improve the situation any.  Most of them were being kept at their duties by the force of Hussein Ali’s personality.

             
There wasn’t a lot left of the truck.  Most of the entire front, minus the engine block, had been reduced to mangled, twisted shrapnel.  The driver, passenger, and both of the outriders in the bed were unmistakably dead.  Only the gunner was still clinging to life, and he was on the edge.  Both of his legs were gone above the knees, and one arm was only hanging on by a scrap of skin.  He was still alive, but he had seconds left at the rate he was bleeding.

             
Larry got to work immediately, driving both knees into the man’s thighs, just south of his groin, throwing his full weight down to pinch off the femoral arteries, while he threw a tourniquet on the man’s mangled arm.  The guy was screaming and trying to struggle; he’d been just about unconscious until Larry landed on him.  Fortunately, Larry’s big enough that the wounded man’s struggles didn’t even rock him.

             
Those struggles were getting weaker and weaker.  There was a nasty gurgling in the man’s screams.  I tried not to pay attention, keeping my focus outward, to where the bad guys might be coming from.  I radioed over to the other half of my element.  “Albatross, Hillbilly.  Sitrep.”

             
“Nobody’s left here, boss,” Bryan replied.  “Any of them who survived the initial blast bled out pretty quick.”

             
“See if Hussein Ali wants the bodies secured, and scoop up any intact weapons or ammo, then get back to the trucks,” I instructed.  “I don’t want to be here any longer than absolutely necessary.  We’ve already overstayed our welcome.”

             
“’Welcome’ isn’t the word I’d use,” Bryan came back.  “We’re already bagging the bodies.  Back at the trucks in five.”

             
“Make it two,” I said.  I could have sworn I’d just seen movement off to our northeast.

             
Remember what I said about hajjis not wanting to do much after dark?  Well, apparently when the entire city has turned into a war zone is an exception to that rule.  After another few seconds I was able to make out that we did not have the only militia forces on the streets in Basra that night.

             
The burst of gunfire cracking by overhead made that pretty obvious, actually.

             
Nearly twenty men in civilian clothing came boiling out of the side streets, shooting wildly in our general direction.  The militia who had ventured closer to the blast sites with us returned fire with equal enthusiasm and only slightly better accuracy.

             
I was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Larry, who was still trying to stabilize the severely wounded militiaman.  Visibility sucked, between the flickering light of the burning trucks and the burning house, the smoke, and the dark.  I flipped my spare PVS-14 in front of my sights.  With all the smoke and the extraneous light sources from the fires, it was still pretty hard to see.  It was enough, though.  I started returning fire.

             
I shot at one guy in a light-colored dishdasha, missed, and followed up with a rapid pair.  I think one of them hit him, because he dropped to the pavement and started trying to crawl away.  I let him go; there were too many still mobile bad guys with guns to worry about.

             
Their fire was getting closer; they were almost too close to miss.  Rounds were smacking into the wreckage of the truck and kicking up puffs of dust and gravel on either side.  I shot three men in rapid succession, smashing them off their feet with double-taps, and then grabbed Larry by the shoulder-strap.  At about the same time I noticed that the fire from our side had slacked off quite a bit.  Looking around as quickly as I dared, I saw that the militiamen with us had fled back to the intact vehicles.

             
“We’ve got to move, or we’re not getting out of here!” I yelled at Larry, who had abandoned working on the wounded man, and was shooting at the incoming Jaysh al Mahdi, or Hezbollah, or whoever the fuck they were.  The wounded man wasn’t moving, or making a sound; I was pretty sure he was dead.

             
More enemy fighters came around the corner to the east, across the wide open space that could have been a soccer field or a parking lot.  I shifted fire, emptying the rest of the mag at them, and they scattered.  Two dropped.  I ripped out the magazine and rocked in a fresh one, just as another long burst of AK fire crackled by my head and smacked into the ground just to my right.

             
“Turn and go!” I yelled at Larry, as I got into the lowest kneeling position I could, and returned fire, barely spotting the low silhouette of the man just barely leaning out from behind a building to the northwest and sticking his AK out to fire blind.  I fired two rounds and he vanished, his AK clattering into the street.

             
Larry was already up and moving, sprinting back toward the south corner of the house.  I almost didn’t hear his bellowed, “Set!” over the noise of the firefight, but the rounds going the other direction helped.  I got up and moved, sprinting as low as I could crouch, praying that I didn’t get shot on the way.  I said a little prayer of thanks as I ate shit and plowed into the ground next to Larry that the enemy militiamen were standard Third World marksmen.  They couldn’t hit shit, and fortunately for me, that included a running man at twenty-five yards.

             
I picked myself up, painfully, and too slowly under the circumstances, and got my rifle back in my shoulder.  I snapped off a pair of shots at some more militiamen who were running toward us.  One of them fell, tumbling ass over teakettle in the dirt, and a second tripped over his dropped rifle.  I punched Larry in the shoulder, and then squeezed back into the cover of the corner as he got up and ran for the truck.

             
Someone else ran over and took a knee next to me, shooting at the oncoming hostiles.  I recognized the rattle of an AK before I glanced over and saw Hassan.  I grabbed him with my off hand and shoved him back toward the trucks.  “Get on the truck!” I yelled at him, as I fired off another pair, missing entirely.  The smoke was getting thick.  “We’re leaving!”

             
Heavy fire snapped by overhead.  A quick glance back showed me Larry in the bed of the HiLux, which had pulled a little bit closer, laying his FAL over the cab and firing as fast as he could pull the trigger, providing some covering fire for the two of us.  A fast look around showed me that just about everybody was back on the vehicles, aside from Hassan and me.  I gave him another push toward Hussein Ali’s truck, and sprinted for the Hilux.

             
I almost slammed into the side, wrenching the passenger door open.  I craned my neck to look out the open window once I’d squeezed myself inside, and saw Hassan climbing into the Ranger, while the Kord gunner went to town on the open area.  I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t been shooting before, but on reflection he may not have been in position.

             
I looked around again.  There was just our vehicle, the Ranger, and the big truck.  “Where the fuck are the other two technicals?” I demanded.

             
Paul already had us in gear and moving, and the FMTV was already moving to follow us.  “They up and ran as soon as the shooting started,” he told me.  “Getting hit by a mob with rifles and possibly RPGs was probably too much after having two of their trucks get blown up.”

             
“Fuck!”  I punched the dashboard.  We still had three more targets, now with no outer cordon.  I rummaged around on the floor in the dark, trying to find the ICOM.  “Hassan, this is Jeff,” I called once I found it.

             
“Mister Jeff,” Hassan said.  “You are all right?”

             
“I’m fine,” I told him.  “What about everyone on your truck?”

             
“Kareem is wounded in the shoulder, and Hasibullah is dead,” he reported.  “Everyone else is fine.”

             
“Tell Hussein Ali that we might be able to continue the mission, but it will be much harder,” I said.  “Does he know where the other two trucks went?”

             
“No,” Hassan said.  “They became frightened and ran away.  Hussein Ali is very angry.  He says he will punish them when he finds them.  But he says we cannot continue with so few men.”

             
I’d been afraid of that.  I still thought we could pull it off, but then, my team hadn’t suffered any casualties yet that night.  The bulk of our militia force was now either fled or dead.