Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) (4 page)

“He doesn’t,” I said.  “He and I see eye-to-eye on that; the more the team knows, the better.  He said there are ‘a lot of tangled threads’ involved, whatever the hell that means.”

“But he wouldn’t go into it?”

I shook my head.  “Not over the phone.”

He looked bemused.  “Those sat phones are encrypted.”

“Yep.”

He nodded slowly.  “Whoever he’s concerned about has some serious technical capabilities, then.”

“Not that that necessarily narrows down the list all that much in this day and age,” I pointed out.  “The obvious candidates would be the US
, Russia, or China…”

“But the private sector has been catching up fast, especially in the last few years,” Haas finished.  “The cyber-war dimension has gone more and more
asymmetric in the last decade.  I know for sure the Iranians have some capability, and with some of the support they’ve been getting, both directly and indirectly from outside, some AQ factions have the capability, too.  For damned certain quite a few organized crime syndicates can play in that arena.”

After another long pause, I asked quietly, “You have any idea what’s going on?”

He shook his head and spread his hands.  “I’m sorry, man.  Even if it is the same Renton, I haven’t seen the man in years.  I have no idea where he went or what he’s into.”

I
was even more uneasy as I left than I’d been when I got off the phone with Alek.

The meeting with Daoud al Zubayri didn’t go well.  He was distracted, distant, and flippant throughout, in spite of the fact that I was going over the security plans and threats for his section of the city.  There was a lot of empty smiling, nodding, and complete lack of communication, in spite of the fact that the guy spoke pretty good English, and Hassan was translating into Arabic to make sure everything was clear.

As I walked out of the meeting, I leaned over to Hassan.  “Was it just me, or was he…not all there?”

Hassan shook his head.  “It was not just you, my friend.  He has something on his mind, something he does not want you to know about.”

“Any idea what?” I asked.  “I know you see some things that go on around here that we don’t.”

He thought for a moment as we walked out into the courtyard behind the police station.  “There was a man who came from Baghdad yesterday,” he said carefully.  “He came and spoke to Commander al Zubayri, but not to Hussein Ali or anyone in his unit.  That might have something to do with his behavior.”

I suppressed a sigh.  That didn’t sound good, especially after Alek’s news about General Saleh.  Couldn’t we catch a break somewhere?  Actually have a good stretch of time where things
weren’t
going to hell in a handbasket?  “What kind of relationship with Baghdad has Daoud and his family had?”

Hassan looked around.  “Not so much with Baghdad,” he said.  “He never had a hand in it, but several of his family worked with Moqtada al Sadr in the war with the Americans.  I have heard that they also had some hand in moving support from the Qods Force to insurgents; then, after you left, they became involved with the government, as it moved more and more toward the Iranian camp.  Commander al Zubayri only came to join the Mullah al Hakim after the government began to disintegrate.”

That had my attention.  Daoud had always been cagier than his counterpart, Hussein Ali, as crusty and taciturn as the old bastard was.  This was a part of his history I’d never heard.  While it was his family history, in Iraq, family history and personal history are inextricably intertwined.  “Do you think he’d join up with General Saleh if offered the opportunity?”

Hassan didn’t even hesitate.  “No question. 
His loyalty is only to himself and his family.”

“What about the Mullah?” I asked carefully.  I knew Hassan admired Al Hakim, as much as I was cynical enough not to trust the old man.
  I’d met the Mullah enough times to know that, in spite of his protestations of Sistani-like moderation, the man was a politician, first and foremost.  If he saw greater advantage in siding with Saleh, and by extension the same Iranians we’d fought for control of Basra, I expected he’d do it.  For damned certain he wouldn’t have any qualms about throwing us under the bus.  We were Americans, after all.  Americans were synonymous with bad guys in a lot of Iraq anymore.

“I do not think Mullah Al Hakim will turn away from his cause,” Hassan said after a moment.  “He is very politically wise, but he is stubborn about an independent Basra.  He has fought the Iranians too hard to embrace them along with Saleh, and make no mistake, my friend.  Saleh is taking his orders from Tehran and the Council of Guardians.”

So, Daoud was double-crossing Al Hakim as well as the rest of us.  But where did Hussein Ali stand?  Damn it, we had real work to do—we’d just gotten Basra out from under the Iranian thumb, at least mostly, and now we were trying to put a damper on the Sunni Islamist factions pushing in from the west.  Plus we had Collins “Project” to worry about.  And now this. 

“
What will Hussein Ali do?” I asked.

Hassan thought for a long moment before answering carefully, “There is very much bad blood between Hussein Ali and the Iranians.  He was fighting alongside the British when Basra was under their occupation.  There is also history between him and General Saleh.”

“What kind of history?” I asked.

Hassan really looked uncomfortable.  “You will have to ask him.
  It is not my place to say.”

So it was probably personal.  That could be good news, or really, really bad news.  Finally, I looked him in the eye.  “What about you, Hassan?  Where do you stand?”

He didn’t blink or hesitate.  “I have lived under both Sunni extremists and Shi’a extremists.  I do not want to live under either, ever again.”

I nodded.  That was answer enough.  I clapped him on the shoulder.  “Stay close.  I think things could get…interesting around here.”

Hassan and I had gotten to know each other well enough over the last couple of months that he didn’t need any explanation of my use of “interesting.”  He nodded, and patted the Tabuk slung on his back.  “I will, my friend.  I will.”

Chapter 3

It was the middle of the night, and the first time I’d gotten any sleep in over two days.  So naturally, I got shaken awake at 0300.

“What the fuck?” I growled.  I’d been deep asleep, thankfully without dreaming about lost comrades for once.  My eyeballs hurt just peeling them open.

“We’ve got a visitor,” Larry said.  “Sorry to wake you up, but he said he needed to talk to you.”

“Motherfucker…” I grumbled at no one in particular.  This was what I got for taking the team lead spot.  “Give me a minute.”  I grabbed my boots and started pulling them on.  “Who is it?”

“He says his name’s Renton,” Larry said.  I was at the point where I didn’t even pause in lacing my boots up.  So, our new spooky friend was being true to form and showing up in the dark.  I briefly wondered if any of the PPF knew he was
there.

I strapped on my .45; sleeping with it on my hip had quickly become a non-starter.  I briefly considered grabbing my rifle, but under the circumstances, I decided the pistol should be enough, at least initially.  A pistol is, after all, what you use to fight your way to the long gun you should have had all along.

Dressed, armed, and as awake as I could be expected to be, I followed Larry to our little ops room.  Most of the rooms we had to use in the old Basra police station were small; the PPF got most of the space for their own use.

The room was empty except for Mike and a PPF trooper.  I frowned, taking a second look at the PPF guy.

He was wearing the uniform, and looked the part, except for something…just so slightly off about him.

“You must be Jeff Stone,” he said, in perfect American English. 
That was when I figured out what was off about him—he didn’t carry himself like an Iraqi.  He grinned and the look on my face.  “It’s amazing what some black hair dye, a deep tan, a uniform, the right accent and mannerisms, and some documents can accomplish.”

The longer I looked at him, the more I could see that he wasn’t an Arab at all; his facial features were markedly Caucasian, not Semitic.  His eyes were gray—although that was not unheard of in Iraq, albeit it was rare.  “You must be Renton,” I said flatly.

“In the flesh,” he replied, pulling off the PPF cap and setting it on the table while he scratched his scalp.

“And you just walked in here.”  I have to admit, I was impressed.

“Drove, actually,” he said.  “It looks more official when you show up in a car, and, generally speaking, most guards are less likely to scrutinize somebody who looks official enough.”  He looked around.  “We need to talk.  Somewhere secure.”

I nodded curtly.  “This room is about as secure as we’re going to get.  They tried bugging us
. Once.”

He eyed me.  “What happened?”

I smirked.  “We got our terp to figure out who was listening in, grabbed him, accused him of spying for ISIS, and were winding up to shoot him when al Hakim intervened and apologized.  They haven’t tried since.  We check regularly.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Unorthodox, but I can see how it would work out.  Although…granted, what’s coming might be inevitable under the circumstances, but making the Mullah lose face like that might make it a little more palatable to him.”

“Alek said you think he’s going to get in bed with Saleh,” I prompted.  “In spite of the fact that Saleh’s pretty pro-Iranian and Al Hakim just fought tooth-and-nail to drive the Iranians out of here.”

“They’ve been talking back and forth for the last week, both with messengers and electronically,” he said.  “We’re pretty sure that
Al Zubayri is going to go with it, though frankly we’re not sure which way Al Hakim or Al Khazraji is going to jump.”

“We’re pretty sure there’s too much bad blood between Hussein Ali and the Iranians for him to go for it,” I said.  That earned me a calculating look, but no comment.

“What we are certain of,” he continued, “is that any Americans in Saleh’s way are going to end up on the chopping block.  He blames the US for the chaos; never mind the Iranian, Baathist, or Salafist influences that have kept this country in turmoil for almost two decades now.  To him, all of this could have been avoided if we hadn’t invaded in the first place.  Westerners in Iraq are a great dishonor in his mind and those of millions of his tribal and sectarian allies.”

“Convenient,” I commented.  “
But then, we have been the great scapegoats in this part of the world since long before 9/11, anyway, so it makes sense.”

“True enough,” he said, perching on the edge of a table that barely looked sturdy enough to support his weight.  “Unfortunately, this time he might just have real cause to think that.”

“Collins’ Project,” I said flatly.  I was pretty sure that was precisely what Renton was here to talk about.

“The same,” he confirmed.
  “How much do you know about it?”

“Not a lot, aside from the fact that he’s doing for the bad guys what we’re trying to do
for Al Hakim’s organization,” I replied.

“
Collins and his operation have been providing material and technical support to Salafist organizations, up to and including ISIS,” he explained.  “It started out as a staggering bit of political naiveté, back when the civil war in Syria had only killed about a hundred thousand people, and Assad had, presumably, used chemical weapons in Damascus.  While public opinion and ultimately a vote in Congress kept any direct intervention from happening, or any open aid from being sent to the rebels—who were already well on the way to being completely co-opted by Salafist Islamists, even if they weren’t all AQ—as almost always happens, things started to go down behind the scenes.  Certain people weren’t satisfied with the orders they were getting from Congress, so they started bending the rules.

“Collins was an up-and-coming operations officer at the time.  He’s
one hell of a careerist, and he saw an opportunity.  He got himself assigned to the op, which started as strictly logistical and intel support for the Free Syrian Army.”

“Obviously it didn’t stay that way,” Mike said.

“No, it didn’t,” Renton replied.  “The FSA was getting increasingly marginalized, and Jabhaat Islamiya, Al Nusra, and ISIS were moving to the fore, regardless of how much they fought amongst themselves.  Somebody—and we don’t know if this was Collins or somebody further up the chain—started making the case that just sticking with the failing secular rebellion wasn’t going to put us in a good position if the Islamists took over.”

He shook his head.  “You wouldn’t believe some of the justifications that have cropped up, mostly in papers that are classified so black that I could probably disappear into a deep dark hole just for reading them. 
The main one seems to be that we should help the winners, to try to foster better relations after the war is over and hopefully to steer even the Islamists in a more moderate direction.”

I snorted.  “Where have I heard that before?
  It sure didn’t work in Egypt or Libya, did it?”

“Never underestimate a bureaucrat’s need to be right,” Renton said grimly.  “At any rate, this op has gotten more and more out of control in recent years.  With Assad’s fall, it should have
been shut down, but somebody has a vested interest in keeping it going.  Strategically, they’re interested in finally ending the shadow war with Iran that’s been going on since 1979.  But I’m also pretty sure that there’s somebody high up who’s getting plenty of money out of Qatar or the Caliphate to keep driving this along.”

“So where do we come in?” I asked.

He pulled a thumb drive from his boot and held it out.  “The contract is twofold.  The first part is aboveboard enough, and provides the cover for the second part.”

I took the thumb drive from him and inserted it into a laptop sitting on one of the desks that crowded the small room.  I don’t know if he noticed, but it was a sterile, relatively cheap rig that we’d bought at a local telecom store, wiped, re-formatted,
and that was air-gapped from any comm system we had running.  If there was anything nasty on that thumb drive, it was getting isolated and burned.

The files on the thumb drive
included several maps, a whole shit-ton of images, and about four PDFs.  No PowerPoint, thankfully.  The first file was a layout of the US Embassy in Baghdad.

“Between the budget cutbacks and security threats,” Renton explained
as that came up on the screen, “embassy personnel have been steadily reduced over the last couple of years, to include embassy security.  The MSG detachment is only about eleven Marines now; when the Embassy first opened, it was twenty, and has been as high as two hundred, depending on the threat level and the FAST Marines coming and going.  Most of the compound is presently abandoned, which has created all sorts of security problems.

“There have been increasing attacks by ISIS, as well as the Jaysh al Mahdi, which is quite active in the city again, particularly around Sadr City, to absolutely no-one’s surprise.  My associates and I suspect that Saleh is utilizing the Mahdi Army the same way the IRGC uses the Baseej; as irregular auxiliaries.  So far, Saleh’s forces have left the Embassy alone, but there have been displays that suggest that might not last; for instance, only two weeks ago, he blocked off all approaches with armor, ostensibly in reaction to ISIS and other dissident activity in the area, but the message was pretty clear.”

“He can shut everything down if he wants to.”  It wasn’t a question.

“Essentially, yes.  It was made even more blatant when he moved four Avenger vehicles in place around the Embassy as well,” he said dryly.

Yeah, that was sending a message, all right.  The Avenger was a Humvee fitted with eight Stinger missiles.  Since ISIS didn’t have a lot of air assets—the new, Islamic Front-dominated Syrian government had most of them from Syria, and the ones they’d seized from the Iraqi Army and Air Force they couldn’t get enough pilots for—the Avengers had clearly been there to announce that any helos or Ospreys coming in to relieve the Embassy could be shot down.

“
We have started drawing down the Embassy’s personnel,” he said.  “Two months ago there were about three thousand left.  Through various channels, we’ve been able to start getting them out a little at a time, mostly through having people go home to the States on R&R and just not come back.

“In the meantime, we’ve gotten extra contractors in to plus up security on the compound.  They are all technically subcontracted through CP International.”  We all nodded; CP was a relative newcomer next to a few of the companies floating around out there, but they were an up-and-coming powerhouse in the corporate PMSC world.  Contracting CP to provide added security wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
  “Most of them come from Stahl Limited or Ventner Dynamics.”  That did raise a couple of eyebrows.  Stahl was a pretty vanilla company, but Ventner had earned itself a black mark with the State Department after a huge firefight in Tripoli while I was in Libya as a Marine.  As near as I’d heard it, Ventner hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary; they’d just made the mistake of leaving too many bodies while protecting diplomatic personnel.  Said diplomatic personnel can be a bit squeamish at the best of times.

There was a long silence.  I frowned at the overhead imagery on the screen.  “
And you want us to join the plus up,” I said.

“Exactly,” he replied.  “They need mobile assets, and you guys are good at that.  Ventner and Stahl have most of the perimeter security sewed up tight, but with the situation getting as fragile as it is in Baghdad, they need eyes and ears outside the compound, that don’t necessarily answer to State or the Agency.  That’s where you guys come in.”

“Stahl and Ventner are both solid outfits,” I acknowledged.  “Though I’d like to hear how you got Ventner in past State; they’re on about the same terms with the powers that be back home as we are.”

He smiled tightly.  “You’re assuming we told the State Department who they were. 
Remember, as far as anyone at State is concerned, they’re all ICs subcontracted by CP.”

I studied him carefully.  “You’ve talked about your ‘associates’ a lot, and they seem to have a lot of money and reach.  Who the hell are you working for?”

“Someone with similar interests to yours,” he said.  “Suffice it to say that they are pros, they
will
pay you, and they won’t sell you down the river for political points.  They have a vested interest in defending Americans and seeing as many jihadis dead as possible.  To that end, that thumb drive has every bit of information they could cram on it to assist you, and any support we can get to you we will, though it has to be understood that under the circumstances that is going to be fairly limited.  Fair enough?”

Mike and I traded a look.  He was asking us to take a hell of a lot on faith, but then again, Alek had seemed to be on board when I talked to him.  Alek’s not quite as paranoid as I am, but he’s no babe in the woods, either. 
If Alek wanted to go ahead with this, I could dredge up just enough faith to follow his lead.

“Fair enough, for now,” I answered.  “
You said the contract is twofold.”