Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians) Read Online Free

Hunting in the Shadows (American Praetorians)
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stronger than ever, and three times as belligerent.  That chaos had occasionally spilled over into Kurdish territory of late, in spite of the often quite competent efforts of the Peshmerga.  With things in Iraq, and along the “Green Line,” which was the unofficial border between Iraq proper and Iraqi Kurdistan, getting increasingly tense, our security operations soon expanded well beyond just pulling overwatch on the oil fields.
    In short, Liberty Petroleum had found itself holding a vested interest in Kurdish security.  Given that those interests probably meant we’d have a chance to kill a lot of jihadi bad boys, we were fine with that.
    Haas nodded to us without a word as he beckoned the guy we’d picked up into the other room.  That room actually had a door instead of the curtains that were strung across most of the other doors in the safehouse.  The guy went in and Haas followed, closing the door behind him.
    Jim and I dropped our gear near the door, across from where Larry was sitting on watch with a KSG shotgun across his lap.  Larry was a mountain of a man, going bald, with a dark goatee.  He had been a teammate of mine when we were both with MARSOC, before we’d gotten out and gone private sector.   We had become teammates again in Praetorian, and had been side-by-side through Djibouti and Somalia, and into Yemen.
    “How’d it go?” Larry asked.
    “Bad guys were trying to get our friend there,” Jim replied as he grabbed a bottle of water from the corner.  “We ended that.”
    “Not only that,” I put in, “but our friends the Iraqi Police had a checkpoint set up less than a mile from here.”
    “That’s not good,” Larry said.  “They pushing the Kurds again?”
    “That’s what Rizgar said, after he pulled our asses out of that particular sling,” I answered.
    “Alek’s going to want to know,” he pointed out.
    “I know,” I answered, as I caught the water bottle Jim tossed to me.  “I’ll call him as soon as we’ve got some results from Haas’ debrief of our boy in there.”  I cracked the cap off the bottle and took a swig as I swept aside the curtain into the back room we had set up as our comm center.
    It was pretty spare as such things went; we were in a safe house, not a Forward Operating Base.  The necessity of being ready to break out and run, not to mention keeping a low profile, meant that our setup wasn’t much different from a small recon team’s in the field.  A laptop, a satcom setup, and a shorter range VHF radio were all we had set up.  Batteries and the backup radio were still packed in kitbags on the floor.
    Little Bob was sitting against the white concrete wall, the VHF radio handset to his ear.  He looked up from the laptop when I walked in.
    “Any word from Bob or Juan?” I asked.
    Little Bob shook his head.  We called him Little Bob for two reasons.  One, he was fucking huge; he could give Larry a run for his money on sheer physical size.  Two, we already had a Bob on the team, and he had been with us a lot longer than Little Bob.  “Nothing besides their normal check-ins,” he said.  He had a surprisingly soft, high voice for such a big dude.  It wasn’t squeaky, or feminine, but it didn’t sound like he’d spent the better part of a decade living in shit and yelling at subordinates or superiors, depending on the circumstances.  He had—the guy had done five years with the 75 th Ranger Regiment.  He just didn’t sound like it.
    “From what I could hear out there, it sounded like you and Jim found some excitement tonight, though,” he went on, pointing toward the door with his chin.
    “You could say that,” I replied.  “Some bad guys were on the target, and some pushy Iraqi Police tried to stop us about four blocks from here.”
    He frowned.  He was one of the newbies on the team since I’d taken it over from Alek, but he was no dummy.  We wouldn’t have hired him if he had been.  “They’re getting bolder.  You
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