Rogue Forces

“I…I will look into it…personally, sir,” Jaffar said, sweat popping out on his forehead. He made a slight bow, backing away. “I will look into this immediately, sir.” He almost ran headlong into Thompson in his haste to get away.

“What a butthead,” Jon said. “I hope we don’t have to put up with his shit every day out here.”

“He’s actually one of the more competent commanders in northern Iraq, Doc,” Thompson said. “He expects a lot of ass kissing and genuflecting. But he’s not the one that gets things done—he just cracks heads whenever one of his underlings doesn’t do the job. So, is that true about you detecting and tracking attacks against your aircraft?”

“Absolutely,” Jon replied. “And we can do a lot more, too.”

“We’ll give you details once we get your security clearance, Kris,” Patrick said. “It’ll water your eyes, believe me.”

“Cool,” Thompson said. “The colonel may act like a preening peacock, but when he finds the jokers who shot at you, he’ll bring the hammer down on them for sure.”

“Unfortunately it wasn’t just some bozos out on the range—we detected several other locations both inside the base and just outside the perimeter,” Jon said. “The colonel may be the best around, but it’s not good enough. He’s got sappers inside the wire.”

“As I texted you when you told me you were coming, sir,” Thompson said, “I believe the FPCON here should be Delta—active and ongoing terrorist contact. It makes Jaffar look bad to Baghdad to be any higher than Bravo. But my guys and the Army security forces are behaving as if it’s Delta. So if you’ll follow me, sir, I’ll show you to your quarters and offices and show you around the base a bit.”

“If you don’t mind, Kris, we’d like to get our area of responsibility set up and our first series of flights scheduled,” Patrick said. “I’d like to fly the first mission tonight. The support staff will get our quarters set up.”

“Tonight? But you just got here, sir. You must be beat.”

“One hundred and seventy hits on our plane with one-fourth of them from inside this base—we need to get busy,” Patrick said.

“Then we need to go to operations and see Colonel Jack Wilhelm,” Thompson said. “Officially he’s the second in command under Jaffar, but everyone knows who’s really in charge, and it’s him. He’s usually in the Triple-C—Command and Control Center.”

They all piled into another up-armored white Suburban, with Thompson driving. “Nahla, which means ‘bumblebee’ in Arabic, used to be a U.S. Air Force supply base,” he said as he drove down the flight line. They saw rows and rows of cargo planes of every size, from C-5 Galaxys down to bizjets. “In Saddam’s time it was set up to quell the ethnic Kurdish population, and it became one of the biggest Iraqi military bases in the country. They say this was the base where the chemical weapons that Saddam used on the Kurds were stored, and so this is a major target for Kurdish insurgents that we deal with from time to time, along with AQI—al-Qaeda in Iraq—Shiite insurgents, and foreign jihadists.

“Early this year Nahla was formally transferred from U.S. control to the Iraqi military. The Iraqis still don’t have much of an air force, however, so they designated it an ‘allied’ air base. The United States, NATO, and the United Nations lease facilities and ramp space from the Iraqis.”

“We build it and then get charged to use it,” Jon commented. “Swell.”

“If we didn’t pay to use it, we’d still be considered an ‘occupying force’ in Iraq,” Thompson explained. “It’s the politics of withdrawal from Iraq.

“The main fighting unit here at Nahla is Second Brigade, nicknamed ‘Warhammer,’” Thompson went on. “Second Brigade is a Stryker Combat Brigade Team, part of I Corps, Second Division, out of Fort Lewis, Washington. They’re one of the last units to do a fifteen-month rotation—all of the other units do twelve months. They support the Iraqi army with reconnaissance, intelligence, and training. They’re scheduled to rotate out within three months when the Iraqis will take full control of security in northern Iraq.”

“Do we really have half of all American transports somewhere in the Middle East, Kris?” Patrick asked.

“I’d say easily half of the Air Force’s transports are either on the ground in the theater or flying in or out of it, and the real number is probably closer to three-quarters,” Thompson said. “And that doesn’t include the civil reserve charters and contractors.”

“But it’ll still take a year to draw down our forces?” Jon asked. “That doesn’t seem right. It didn’t take that long to get our stuff out of Iraq after the first Gulf War, did it?”