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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