The Mahdi Army was a family based structure. Oh, it had peripheral families allied to it, but it was mostly clan based. So it had coalesced faster than the Warriors and eaten up some of their little bands.
The Warriors reunited, sort of, in defense against the Mahdi.
The Shia Liberation Front was a minor faction. Very hard-core Islamicists, more hardcore than the Mahdi, who were more interested in secular power. The SLF thought this was the Apocalypse and the 12th Imam was coming any day and they were preparing to fight the great fight, blah, blah.
I think the first guys in the trucks were probably a Warrior faction. But who knows or cares?
Basically, what it was were three gangs controlling the city. There was some fishing going on in the Shat and out in the Gulf. That was where most of the food in the city was coming from along with a little bit of agriculture that was getting going again.
Every now and then there'd be some open fighting in Abadan between the gangs. We'd hear about it in time, but we always knew it was going on when refugees picked up on the road from Abadan.
The SLF were the smallest faction, but they were going to be our biggest problem.
Started off with a probe. A group of three "military style" vehicles came out of north Abadan across the plain. Nothing to stop them; it was really flat. There were a couple of small wadis but nothing you couldn't negotiate.
Now, we could see Abadan. By the same token, they could see us. They had watched us put in the perimeter fencing and decided they had a way to breach it.
As the three vehicles approached the fence, the drivers jumped out of the lead truck and ran. The other two stopped. The truck hit the fence, knocked down a big chunk and then blew up.
The reaction platoon Strykers were rolling out of the gate by then. I mean, they'd had to cross nearly six miles of desert. We had time to get the reaction platoon up and going.
The truck bomb probably took out most of the mines. It also tore up the fence and some of the internal concertina. Guys jumped out of the other trucks and tried to make it up the berm.
We had guard posts on the top of the berm for a reason. They were taken under fire.
By that time we had the mortars up, too. Oh, you think we forgot indirect fire? Hell, no. We'd even set up some Paladins, 155mm tracked artillery, oriented on Abadan just in case we needed it.
Point was, the guys trying to climb the berm came under fire from the machine guns on the berm guard posts just about the time the first mortar round was starting to fall. The mortars never got properly adjusted but they were falling.
The guys on the berm got slaughtered despite the bunker being damned near a klick away. The reaction Strykers were faster across the desert, and much more heavily armed, than the trucks.
Game, set, match.
The next stage was negotiations.
A Humvee (we'd provided quite a few to the Iranians) came rolling up the road from Abadan with a white flag on its aerial. It stopped for the refugee guardpost then came rolling up to the outer gate.
We rolled out the Gate Stryker. I got called.
There was an officer in Iranian Army dress uniform. Think Hussar in an opera but gaudier. Had the epaulets and such for a colonel and covered in awards. I could read the rank but not the awards and didn't care about the latter. The uniform was a bit big for the guy but one thing or another he might have lost weight.
Colonel Reza Kamaran. He was commander of Iranian security forces in Abadan. And he demanded weapons and supplies to be used in restoring order in Abadan.
I said I'd have to get back to him on that. Not my orders. I'll have to call my boss.
It is as Allah Wills.
He said he'd wait. I suggested he come back tomorrow. He insisted he'd wait.
This conversation took about an hour. That's the way Iranians talk.
I went back to the commo shack. I tried to get ahold of the BC. He was "unavailable." I talked to the duty lieutenant for a while. The battalion was trying to feed Savannah and get the port back up. They had had no luck on either score. Shit was bad. Fucking BC's back at Stewart in the rack. Or just hiding. He's not saying much these days. Casualties from gang fire. Voodoo priests. Shit's bad.
Hmmm . . .
My senior officer is unavailable. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah. Okay, whatever.
Note. Time difference meant I had to be up in the middle of the night to talk to the BC and vice versa. Actually, if I called in the evening I'd get him in the morning. I called in the evening. He was in a meeting. I left word that we had been contacted by a local group about giving out free weapons and ammo as party favors and I was thinking about it. (The last part being a lie.)
Fucker called me back at 2AM local time.
Don't give out anything. Secure and maintain.
Says he's a colonel in the Army, yawn. Don't know. Name. Local allies.
Don't give out anything until I check with higher.
Okay. When you getting us home.
Top of my priority list. No transport at this time.
Want a security update?
Send me a memo.
Colonel came back the next day.
Where's my stuff?
It is in consultation among my bosses. Come back tomorrow. In'sh'allah.
I quit going out to meet him. I sent the BC a memo. After a week or two he quit coming out. I don't know if he'd gotten tired of the drive or died. Didn't care.
Here's the thing. The refugees, who I trusted more than this guy, said there wasn't any "Iranian Army" in Abadan. There was the Warriors, who were made up of gangs that had fractioned off the Army and police, but they weren't the Army. They were a fucking gang that didn't even give the pretense of being a formed unit.
I figured the guy was one of the Warriors, probably a lieutenant maybe captain by his age, who'd gotten the uniform and decided to come out and stroke me out of gear.
Absent a direct order, wasn't going to happen.
But it got me thinking. More.
Sooner or later somebody was going to come and try to take this shit away. And although we were supposed to "secure and maintain" it, I wasn't going to have a pocket mech division's worth of gear fall into the hands of these yahoos.
The Nepos were, at that point, just sitting there.
Well, sort of. I'd put Samad in charge of training them for guard duty and such. Not Ghurkas, but somebody that we could use as spare rifles if the crunch came.
That was kind of funny. I told him that they needed to be trained. I had them set up a short range inside the perimeter. I told him to take over. Get them to be reasonable soldiers.
Look, the rest of us were busy. I was busier than a one-armed paper-hanger keeping everything working. Shit was always breaking down, working with Fillup on security, I was finally getting the sort of busyness I prefer. Basically, I'm pretty lazy but I get bored if I'm not given something to be lazy about.
I didn't notice for a couple of weeks that I hadn't heard any shots. Well, the boys were starting to use the range a bit, but I didn't hear the sort of crackle you'd expect to find if sixty guys were being trained in marksmanship.
So I went poking around.
Found Samad and the Nepos in one of the areas that had been emptied out to make the defenses. I think it used to hold concertina.
It had been marked off with chalk in a very precise square. The Nepos were out there in what looked like British combat uniforms (turned out they were, don't know how I missed that line item) doing close order drill.