Free Alone and Unafraid (American Praetorians Book 3) by Peter Nealen Page A

spite of the mosque in the middle of the neighborhood, Hayy al Kafaat was pretty well pacified, so a convoy of PPF trucks running through at high speed wasn’t all that much to remark on, aside from the gunfire that had just ripped through the morning only a few blocks away.  Fortunately, most people, if they don’t know what’s going on, aren’t going to jump in when things get hairy.  They’ll duck for cover, and that was what most people were doing.  They didn’t know what had happened, they didn’t know what was going on, and so they hid until the shooting stopped.
    That didn’t mean we could relax at all.  We had to cross Highway 6, which was still seeing quite a bit of traffic as the people tried to get on with their lives in spite of the war going on in their backyard.  If we were going to run into trouble, it was there.
    The bridge over the canal was about three vehicles wide, and there were about a dozen cars and small Toyota pickups waiting to get onto the highway as we came screaming up the road toward the highway.  There was just enough room to squeeze by between the piled up cars—several drivers were trying to push out ahead of the others.  Traffic in Iraq is pretty anarchic by nature.
    We didn’t even slow down as we scraped by, the edge of the road spitting gravel from our tires into the water on one side.  I’m pretty sure at least one rear view mirror got knocked off in the process, too.  Then we were pushing out onto the highway.
    The lead vehicle didn’t stop or even slow down; the driver just floored it across the two lanes between the canal and the median.  There was a sudden burst of honking horns and screeching tires as cars braked frantically to avoid collisions, not always entirely successfully.  The convoy stayed tight as we ripped across the road, bounced over the median in one of the spots that thankfully didn’t have bushes growing out of it, and then replicated our little near-pileup on the far side.  There was a checkpoint about three hundred yards down the road, but there was too much traffic between it and us for the PPF troops there to interfere before we were racing down the street to the southwest, leaving the highway and a lot of really scared and pissed-off drivers behind us.
    We were getting into what were traditionally Jaysh al Mahdi-friendly neighborhoods now.  The Mahdi Army had no love for the PPF, and we were running with four black-and-white PPF trucks.  The al Khazraji might not be wearing their PPF uniforms, but the trucks were going to be target indicators enough.  We’d have to ditch them as soon as possible, but we didn’t really have time to stop in the middle of the city and swap vehicles.  Nothing’s perfect; sometimes you’ve just got to roll with the punches and keep going.
    Fortunately, whoever Hussein Ali had in the lead vehicle—I thought it was Azzam, but couldn’t be sure—was pretty canny when it came to navigating a potentially hostile neighborhood at high speed.  He wasn’t taking a straight route ; he kept our turns pretty random to keep anyone watching from being able to predict where exactly we were going.  Hopefully that was going to keep us from getting cut off or bombed.
    The houses and compounds flashed by, all of us trying to watch every door, gateway, and window at once.  The gunners were holding on for dear life, especially as we whipped around some of those corners.
    Unfortunately, cell phones have sped up reaction times, particularly in cities.  By the time we broke out onto the wide highway we called Route Hamilton for no reason I’ve ever been able to figure out, the militia was waiting for us.
    There were two technicals and an old up-armored Humvee sitting on the old soccer field in the middle of the city-block-wide median when we popped out of the side streets.  They were over four hundred meters away, but that’s plenty close enough when machine guns are involved.
    The Humvee gunner spotted us first.