by Peter Nealen
Vetter snorted derisively, and Ayala actually blinked. She hadn’t been expecting that. “I’ve worked for them. They’re way too squeamish to do what we’re here to do. And they’re the ones publicly parroting the line that the fighting in San Diego, LA, Seattle, and Portland, never mind West Texas, was all just because of ‘rogue elements.’” He shook his head. “No, Ms. Ayala, we’re far from CIA. We intend to actually get some results.” He pointed to the tablet in her hands. “We’ve already done that, at least on an informational level. I think those photos should speak for themselves. Especially given the video that follows.”
She hadn’t noticed that part, apparently, and as she scrolled down the screen, her eyes widened slightly as she watched video footage of the confrontation with the Chinese maritime militia aboard their fishing boats. She looked up at the Triarii, some newfound respect in her eyes, as she handed the tablet off to Prieto. “So, you have already run some risks, I see.”
“And we’re just getting started.” Vetter folded his arms as he sat back on the couch. “Though that does depend on you, as well.”
Prieto handed the tablet to Liwanag, and spoke rapidly to Ayala in Tagalog. She answered shortly, and Liwanag nodded. Then Ayala turned to Vetter.
“Ordinarily, I would not agree to bringing in outsiders—especially Americans—to deal with our problems. The Spratly Islands are our concern. We are not a US territory anymore. However…” She glanced at Liwanag.
“Violence on Mindanao has intensified and spread over the last several months.” The younger Philippine politician said. At least, Hank assumed he was a politician. He might have been one of Ayala’s staffers, or possibly military. “The Moro Ikhwan is out of control. They have done more damage than the Islamic State did when they took Marawi. They haven’t made the same mistakes. They haven’t just taken a central location and tried to fight all comers. They have a warren of hiding places all over the island, and they have bombed and kidnapped enough that more and more of the AFP have been detailed to fight them. It means that we have considerably more limited resources available to deal with the situation on Palawan, never mind the Spratly Islands.”
“Manila sees the open violence on Mindanao as a greater immediate threat.” Ayala sat ramrod straight as she spoke. “They are not entirely wrong, but if this ‘footnote’ on Palawan and Second Thomas Shoal, not to mention the Spratly Islands as a whole, is allowed to fester, we will wake up one day firmly under Beijing’s thumb. I have no more desire to see that than to see the Philippines become an American colony again.” She clearly didn’t like the history between the Philippines and the US, and from certain points of view, Hank could see why. But she was also pragmatic enough to want to work with whatever tools were available.
Prieto said something quietly, and Ayala thought it over for a moment. “We could arrange a ‘training’ contract between your…private concern and the Tiradores.” Habu might have twitched a little. The Light Reaction Regiment was a professional organization with its own training pipeline. It had been set up by American Special Forces, yes, but that had been well over a decade ago. It was now definitely its own organization, and its shooters were world-class. To suggest that they needed foreign contractors to train them—even if it was a cover story—had to stick in his craw a little. But he stifled it quickly, and when Hank glanced at him, he saw only the professional mien, and maybe a little bit of a glint in his eye at the idea of taking the fight to the Chinese. “After all, it would not be the first time that American trainers ended up in combat in the course of training Philippine soldiers.”
Hank had heard about that. More than once Special Forces or SEALs working with the Armed Forces of the Philippines had ended up in live-fire combat with either the Islamic State or Abu Sayyaf. This would be no different, except that this time, the “trainers” were actually there to take the fight to the Chinese.
Vetter nodded. “I think that would be an excellent way to proceed, Ms. Ayala. It provides both of us a certain degree of cover, while still allowing us to do what needs doing. All without any ‘invisible chains.’”
Ayala eyed him at that. That very phrase had been used by anti-American Philippine politicians for quite some time. Vetter throwing it back at her was a challenge, in a way, while also establishing exactly where they all stood.
She nodded, though, and stood up for the first time. The Triarii did likewise, and Liwanag and Prieto followed suit. There were several handshakes, though with fewer platitudes than Hank had expected, dealing with politicians. It seemed that Ayala was determined to live up to her hard-nosed rep, and the other two weren’t going to deviate from her lead.
As Habu led them out of the suite, he grinned. “You know, the original Tiradores were trained by American deserters. Seems like history repeating itself a little, no?”
“Except we ain’t deserters,” Vetter growled. “Let’s get to work.”
Chapter 11
“The NPA hit Naval Station Cunanan last night. Mortared the gate and then ran into the jungle.” Chan joined Hank at the bow of the Jacqueline Q, looking out over the cerulean blue water at the distant, white clouds to the north, as the setting sun turned the western horizon orange and gold.
Hank glanced at him. They’d been back at sea for three days and as many nights, “fishing” off the coast of Palawan. It had been a long three days.
Following the meeting with Ayala, Liwanag, and Prieto, the Triarii had sat down in a secure location with Habu and his fellow Light Reaction Company leaders to do some serious planning. The Tiradores hadn’t been idle since the fight in the north—idleness clearly wasn’t an LRR habit—and Habu thought that they’d located the local NPA cell’s primary headquarters. They still had surveillance on it, a small recon team hunkered down in the jungle, watching and reporting every bit of traffic and every move made around the small farm about twenty-five miles south and inland of the rendezvous point that Hank and his section had surveilled almost a week before. The Tiradores could swoop in at any time. It was doubtful that the NPA would have a chance.
After all, the last time the Tiradores had killed an NPA leader on Palawan, the word on the street had been, “Five shots, five kills.” The LRR took justifiable pride in their marksmanship and tactics.
They were waiting, though. Vetter and Habu had agreed that the more damage they could do to the Chinese’ proxy operation on Palawan, the better. That meant keeping the Triarii offshore, watching and waiting for the Chinese “fishing fleet” to make another run, at which point they could hit both the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia and the NPA at the same time, from two different directions.
Unfortunately, that had meant a lot of sitting out on the boat, rocking gently on the waves, watching the weather and waiting for something to happen.
The drones were making constant sweeps, extending the growing raider fleet’s eyes well over the horizon. Spencer was coordinating a lot of it, having found he had a knack for that sort of surveillance. So far, the Chinese were staying put.
That meant a lot more waiting. Hank was getting tired of it. If the NPA was opening the ball again, though…
He still wasn’t entirely resigned to the fact that this mission was going to require a lot of patience. Unfortunately, his was in short supply, despite his conversations with Vetter.
The transit across the Pacific had been a slog. He’d had far too much time to think, to remember things that had happened in Texas, most vividly Arturo’s death. The woolgathering hadn’t been good for him, and he knew it, but there were only so many books he could read, only so many intel reports he could go over, and over, and over. And the last few days, once the planning had been done, had simply been more of the same.
So, when Chan joined him at the bow, he welcomed the intrusion into thoughts going dark and murderous again.
Probably better murderous than despairing.
“Did the Filipinos get any of ‘em?”
Chan leaned against the rail. “Sounds like
they rolled one of them up. Might have shot two, but it doesn’t sound like they retrieved a body.”
That didn’t sound like a major offensive. “How many were there, do they think?”
“Maybe five.” Chan glanced over. “Sorry, man. I know, I was hoping this would be the opening bell, too.” He looked at the distant green line of Palawan off to starboard. “This whole maritime thing is slow.”
“Yeah, it is.” Hank turned back to watching the ocean and the distant clouds. The horizon was still mostly clear, except for a few ships that Spencer had already identified as legit commercial traffic, as well as the Gregorio del Pilar, still on patrol and watching for another passage by the Xuchang or one of her sister vessels. “If we’re being honest with ourselves, if we were still doing the Combined Action thing in the Southwest, it’d still be pretty slow. Sounds like the cartels have taken a bit of a break since the chaos down there a few months back.”
Chan glanced over at him with a raised eyebrow. The other man hadn’t been in Texas. He’d been running ops against PRA up in Oregon and Washington. He’d been doing much the same thing Hank’s section had been: working town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood to help the locals secure themselves against the revolutionary gangs that had been running largely unchecked in the Northwest for years. For all the sudden violence that Tango India Six Four had endured since that fateful night on the Rio Grande, much of the work before that had been day-by-day training, patrolling, and standing watch.
That forms the bulk of warfare, conventional or unconventional. That doesn’t stop the mind from dwelling on the violence and its aftermath, though, particularly in those quiet stretches.
It was why Hank had always known that he’d need to keep his boys busy after an action, especially one where things had gone wrong. Too much quiet time to think, and things could get dark. That’s where alcoholism and worse gets started.
Over the long term, though, those thoughts have to be dealt with. He hadn’t done that, and now it was telling on him.
He was pretty sure Chan could tell, too. They’d gotten to be pretty good friends on the cruise west.
Spencer had noticed. They’d had more than a few talks about it. Spencer had been struggling with some of the same issues. He hadn’t had the same attachment to Arturo, but they’d all sort of taken the kid under their collective wing. The whole section had felt that death, especially since it hadn’t needed to happen.
“Did you see the overall brief for today?” Chan seemed to sense where Hank’s head was, and was subtly steering the conversation away from the shadow of the past.
“No, not yet.”
“There’s some halfway good news in it.” Chan spat over the side. “Tyler Dorff got taken off the board.”
Hank frowned. “Never heard of him.”
“He was a PRA bigshot up in Seattle.” Chan’s tone turned bitter. “Typical of the PRA, he had a list of drug and sex trafficking charges as long as my arm, but nobody would touch him, because of who he was. He was a ‘revolutionary,’ had meetings and public appearances with the mayor and the city council, hobnobbed with the Big Tech people, you know the type.”
“What happened? Did he finally overstep himself?”
Chan nodded with some satisfaction. “It seems that he murdered one of his recent liaisons, who happened to be a college kid with some connections. He resisted arrest, flipped out, and was killed in the gunfight that followed.” His eyes were hard. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer asshole.”
Hank grunted. “Unfortunately, there are plenty in the wings, ready to follow in his footsteps.”
“This is true. The good part is, though, that they’re already stabbing each other in the back at the cyclic rate to try to take his place.” Chan grinned humorlessly. “They’re eating each other, just like they always do. Maybe a few of them will get sifted out in the chaos.”
“Hank!” Spencer had just stuck his head out of the boathouse, bellowing down the length of the ship. “We’ve got movement!”
Both section leaders immediately shoved off the rail and headed for the superstructure. Hank found himself hoping that it was finally time. I need something to do. His reaction to Chan’s comment about the PRA eating each other hadn’t been hopeful. He’d immediately thought of all the dark horse targets that had come out every time one of these organizations fell into infighting. The new bosses were almost always worse than the ones that had just been taken out.
It took a couple of minutes to reach the boathouse, by which time the sun had touched the horizon, the sky above turning a deeper blue. They clattered up the ladderwell to the command center, where Spencer, Lind, and Smythe were gathered around the screens. One of those screens, with a camera mounted above it, showed Vetter and a good dozen of the other raider skippers and Triarii commanders.
“It looks a lot like the other night, except this time they’ve got a destroyer following behind them.” Spencer was clearly briefing the drone feed, which showed a rough arrowhead of white ship silhouettes against the darker ocean, all motoring southeast. Behind them was a much larger, more predatory shape, though it was maintaining its distance by about five nautical miles. “We don’t have a positive ID on the destroyer, but it seems likely that it’s the Kunming.”
“They’re stepping things up,” Chan observed. “A frigate wasn’t enough, I guess?”
“Or they’ve got something else in mind beyond a show of force.” Vetter wasn’t going to get stampeded. “Unless they’re willing to turn this up to open warfare, they’ll stay offshore.”
“And if they don’t?” That was Jackson Laki, heading up Tango India Four Nine.
“Then we’ve got missile boats already moving out onto her flank.” Vetter wasn’t going to get stampeded, but he wasn’t taking chances, either. Most of the Triarii ships had some kind of ship-to-ship weaponry, either missiles, cannon, or torpedoes. None of them were high-end, super-high-tech weapons, and they were mostly outranged by what the PLAN could bring to bear, but with the element of surprise, they could do a lot of damage. Vetter returned to the issue at hand. “Have we contacted Habu yet?”
Spencer nodded as he turned toward the camera again. “Yeah. He and his boys are waiting to close the trap from their end, just as soon as we give the word.”
“All right. The plan remains the same. Infantry sections, get ready to slam the door behind the so-called ‘fishing vessels’ once they move into the inlet. Leave the destroyer to the missile boats and the Philippine navy.” Vetter looked off-screen. “Somebody get me continuous comms with Habu. I want to know exactly when the Tiradores start moving.” He looked back into the camera, addressing the rest of the Triarii commanders.
“You know the play, gents. Let’s put the hurt on the ChiComs.”
With a chorus of acknowledgements, the other commanders signed off. Hank and Chan traded a look.
“Maybe the boredom’s over, finally.” Chan cracked a small smile. There wasn’t a lot of bravado there, though. There were a lot of things that could still go wrong. Both men knew all too well what the cost of the end of the “boredom” might well be.
“Maybe. Good hunting.”
“You, too.”
They headed below to get their sections ready to move. The gear and weapons should all be ready, but they still had some work to do before they could launch the Zodiacs.
The night began to descend with deceptive calm, as the combatants came closer, quietly getting into position for the fight to come.
Chapter 12
It was fully dark by the time the Chinese fishing vessels filtered back into the same inlet, moving through the darkness in ones and twos. They were being subtle about it, which was a bit of a switch for the Maritime Militia, which tended to be far more aggressive than the PLAN on the water.
The slow, careful movement meant that the Triarii had to move in just as carefully and slowly. The Jacqueline Q was working her way along the shoreline, staying about three or four nautical miles out to
sea, the Zodiacs ready to launch, the infantrymen waiting to jump in and go.
Hank and Chan were up in the command center, watching the drone feeds. They couldn’t provide quite the thorough coverage that they might have hoped for. The Chinese had a lot of drones out, too, and while they were still holding outside Philippine airspace—more to avoid showing their hand too soon rather than out of any concern about actually violating Philippine airspace, both men were sure—they still presented a problem as far as drone traffic went. Let the Chinese see too many drones up that weren’t theirs, and they might start to think there was an ambush in progress.
Spencer, in full gear, his M5 hanging from its sling, was bent over the laptop, watching the drone feeds. “Okay. There goes the last one around the headland. They shouldn’t be able to see us, so I think we’ve got our window. The skies are clear enough, unless they’ve got some kind of stealth drone up that we can’t see.”
“Let’s move then.” Hank pulled his helmet on and buckled the chinstrap. He was half a step behind Chan as they hustled out of the boathouse, heading down to either side of the Jacqueline Q.
The Zodiacs were just below the gunwales, dangling by steel cables from the fishing vessel’s cranes. They swayed slightly as the Jacqueline Q moved on the gentle swell, but they wouldn’t be launching with men aboard. They’d gotten this down to a science on the way out.
The cranes swung out to port and starboard as the Triarii lowered cable ladders off the sides. The boats were lowered quickly but carefully, and the coxswains were at the bottom of the ladders at about the same time the boats hit the water. From there, it was a quick matter to step aboard and get the engines started, while the rest of the teams clambered down into the inflatable raiding craft.
Minutes later, the low, dark shapes were moving away into the shadows, leaving faint wakes behind in the dark. Behind them, the Triarii raiders maneuvered to cut off the inlet from the sea, rocket pods, torpedo tubes, and disappearing 30mm cannon prepped and ready for combat. The door was about to be shut behind the “fishing fleet” and the Chinese militia aboard it.