Area Denial (Maelstrom Rising Book 7)

by Peter Nealen

  Of course, they were all technically on R&R. This wasn’t in any way, shape, or form a formal Philippine government operation. They would all deny everything if it was brought up by anyone but those aforementioned political masters. But they were still Philippine spooks, and that meant they couldn’t be entirely trusted.

  Hank wasn’t even sure he trusted them not to lose their heads when the shooting started. He’d never worked with the CIA, but he’d heard stories, and he knew a few guys who had worked for them, including Vetter. The movies were all BS public relations.

  Not that the implicit entrapment had deterred Lovell any. Their stereotypical surfer was currently up in the bow, in shorts and nothing else, regaling the Philippine ladies with his wit.

  “Well, if they’re bait, then Amos is about to bite.” Spencer glanced over his shoulder, though with a combined expression of concern and longing.

  It had been a long time. For all of them.

  Not that the previous months before they’d embarked on this op had been exactly brimming with female companionship. The war had precluded that. Hank had managed a few dates, but none had ever gone much of anywhere.

  “I’m not worried about Amos, strange as it may sound to say that.” Hank glanced at Bronsted, who was hanging back by the boathouse but nevertheless obviously entranced by the girls’ charms. A clear, feminine laugh echoed across the yacht. “Amos is a heartless tomcat. He won’t be taken advantage of. It’s some of the more straight-laced guys I’m worried about.”

  “That, and the fact that half of us are in swim trunks and t-shirts?” Spencer glanced out at the ocean. There were a few more pleasure yachts and fishing boats, mostly out of Brunei, on the water, with the people aboard mostly super-rich Westerners, Arabs, or Chinese—the kind of people who could still afford to take vacations, even as the world burned—and mostly in the same degree of undress as those Triarii on deck, as well as the women. Right at the moment, everything appeared perfectly safe. And for the moment, it probably was.

  But where they were going was anything but.

  While there were a lot of tourist traps along the Malaysian coast of Borneo, the unrest and economic fallout over the last year or so had reduced the tourist traffic to next to nothing. Into that vacuum had stepped the pirates.

  So, as the Serendipity motored away from the small islands, they were heading toward the recently-shuttered Taburan Eco Resort. Recently shuttered, and, if intel was correct, now the launching point for one of the more vicious upstart pirate bands on the Malaysian coast.

  Hank wasn’t sure if he hoped the pirates took the bait or not, especially as his eyes fell on the professional but nubile young women in the bow. If this went badly…

  He tried not to think about that as the islands receded behind them.

  ***

  “They’re not taking the bait. Why the fuck are they not taking the bait?”

  Lovell had clearly gotten tired of the game with the girls. Which seemed a little quick, since they’d only been cruising up and down the Malaysian coast for a day and a half. Of course, Lovell usually managed to seal the deal in a matter of hours, so when the NICA women had played coy—even if they weren’t just playing the angles for intelligence purposes, there were four of them and eleven men aboard—he’d quickly lost interest.

  “Maybe they’re taking in the scenery.” Hank shrugged. “Maybe they’ve got a juicier target somewhere. You know, some tanker or liner with insurance, instead of a spoiled rich brat’s yacht. Or maybe they’re just doing it to piss you off.”

  Lovell didn’t rise to that bait. Which was fine with Hank. The waiting was wearing on him again; that, and the fact that one of the NICA chicks, a pretty woman with her hair highlighted blond named Althea—at least, her pseudo was Althea—had decided to work on him. She was flirting every chance she got, and while a part of him was more than willing to play along, the irritable part of him that recognized he was damned near old enough to be her father, and that he was the mission commander and therefore an intel target, just got angry.

  He knew that poking Lovell wasn’t the best way of dealing with that, but he was bored, he was irritated, and he couldn’t drink. And the fact of the matter was, the pirates weren’t going along with the plan.

  Before Lovell could come up with a retort, Hank turned and headed up to the flying bridge over the boathouse. They’d been trailing their coattails along the coast for hours on end without a reaction, but maybe this time he might see something.

  Spencer was already up there, though he was on alert, and he was therefore supposed to be below, out of sight, with his gear on and his weapon at hand. He had his binoculars to his eyes, looking southeast, toward the Malaysian coast.

  “You see something?” Hank tried not to sound too hopeful.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Spencer didn’t take the binoculars from his eyes. “Not to get your hopes up, or anything. But there’s a speedboat on its way out from the river mouth.”

  Hank snatched up the other pair of binos and searched the water between the yacht and the low, green line of the island in the distance. There. It wasn’t a big boat, only about twenty feet, painted blue and with a high prow and its outboard motor sending up twin rooster tails of spray. It was far enough away that he couldn’t make out a lot of detail about the four men in the boat, but he could see that they were armed.

  “Showtime. Get below, Cole. You know the play.” He lowered the binoculars and checked that he was ready for what was to come.

  Spencer clapped him on the shoulder without a word and headed down the ladderwell aft of the bridge. They were prepared, but this was about to become much more unpredictable, and much more dangerous.

  Sometimes, Hank reflected, it doesn’t matter how prepared you are. When the enemy throws you a curveball, you’ve just got to hope you don’t blink at the wrong time.

  It took a few minutes for the boat to catch up. Hank was at the wheel, blithely keeping the Serendipity on course, and the ladies were sunning themselves on the bow and stern, accompanied by Lovell, Carrington, Bronsted, and Thomas. The rest of First Squad, along with Spencer and Jim Shevlin, were below, jocked up and ready to get their kill on.

  The boat pulled up alongside, as Althea leaned out over the rail and waved. One of the pirates, a skinny, gap-toothed man with a scraggly goatee, leered at her, but somewhat to Hank’s surprise, the pirates weren’t firing their weapons into the air, or even waving them threateningly. They all seemed calm and professional, which just seemed weird when one considered what was about to happen.

  At least, what the pirates thought was about to happen.

  While the pirate coxswain held the boat steady alongside the Serendipity, one of them, with an AK slung in front of him and an ancient-looking Chinese chest rig on, stood up in the bow, grabbed the rail, and started to haul himself aboard the yacht. One of the NICA officers, who’d introduced herself as Mahalina, leaned out to harangue him in Tagalog. Hank couldn’t understand her, but her tone communicated what she was saying pretty clearly. Who the hell do you think you are, coming aboard uninvited?

  Of course, Mahalina knew that this was part of the mission, but she was playing her part to a tee.

  The pirate ignored her as he clambered aboard, followed by two more as the coxswain stayed in the boat. With their weapons in hand, they moved toward the bridge, still calm and almost nonchalant, though the swagger as they watched the unarmed Triarii and the girls, staring at them with varying degrees of almost-believable shock, was palpable.

  Hank turned toward the first man as he came up the ladderwell to the bridge. “You turn boat around!” the little man demanded, hardly even looking at Hank. That was the last mistake he ever made.

  Hank’s off hand snatched up the bottom of his loose-fitting shirt, as his gun hand closed on his P365’s grip, snatching the pistol out of its inside-the-waistband holster. The off hand met the gun hand as he punched the subcompact straight out, his finger already taking up the slack in
the trigger before he’d even spotted the sights.

  The first two rounds punched into the little man’s chest, just above his chest rig, a split second before the third hammered through the T-box across his eyes, so fast that he hadn’t even had a chance to start to fall. He was already dead before the third bullet scrambled his brains, but the signal hadn’t traveled through his nervous system yet.

  The pirate crashed over backward in a welter of blood as Hank transitioned to the next man, but not before Bronsted shot that one through the head from less than six feet away.

  Spencer came boiling up out of the ladderwell, his M5 in hand, geared up and ready to go, with Shevlin right on his heels. Both men looked around at the carnage and the women with their fingers in their ears, before Spencer looked up at Hank. “You could have left us one.”

  Hank nodded toward the boat. “We did.”

  Spencer and Shevlin quickly moved to the side, where the pirate boat’s coxswain was already trying to heave away from the yacht. Two leveled rifle muzzles didn’t quite deter him, but Shevlin’s warning shot past his ear did the trick. They didn’t usually use warning shots, but they wanted this guy alive.

  “Hey, fuckstick! You speak English?” Shevlin had said from the get-go that he probably should have been one of the guys below, because he wasn’t exactly the most diplomatic personality.

  Althea leaned out and yelled at the man in Malay. That got his attention. “What do you want me to tell him?” Her flirtatiousness had fled, replaced by cold professionalism.

  “Tell him to lead us in. We want to talk to his boss.”

  ***

  By the time they reached the muddy river mouth snaking its way out of the jungle and into a sandy delta next to the old resort, Hank was already back in greens, jocked up and armed. The first part of the message had been sent. The stick had been shown and applied. Now would come the carrot.

  The sun was starting to go down behind the Serendipity as she put down her anchor. Hank, Spencer, Carrington, and Althea got into the pirate boat, leaving the yacht under Lovell’s command. All three men were in greens, chest rigs, helmets, and NVGs, with rifles in gloved hands. Althea wasn’t as heavily armed, but she was in khakis and battle belt, and carried a Ferfrans SCW. Her hair was tied up in a severe bun. The flirty, pretty woman in the bikini was gone, replaced by a cold-eyed professional.

  At a curt command from Althea, the pirate, looking a little sick to his stomach, steered the boat toward the beach, where about half a dozen other, similar boats were pulled up on the sand. They were getting some attention already, though Hank was confident that any of the Triarii aboard the Serendipity could spot trouble and engage accurately before things got out of control.

  He could see about a dozen figures on the shore and around the thatched huts of the former resort. Most appeared to be armed, but they weren’t shooting yet. They didn’t seem to be sure what was going on, and so they were waiting to see what happened next.

  What happened next, as the pirate beached the boat, was that Hank got out, his M5 slung in front of him, as Spencer and Carrington lifted the body of the man Hank had shot aboard the yacht and hauled it over the side of the boat.

  That was the other reason the coxswain had been looking sick.

  The two Triarii heaved the body onto the sand, then stepped back, hands on rifles, watching the pirates higher up the beach. With Althea at his side, Hank stepped forward. “Who’s in charge of this clusterfuck?”

  Althea struggled a little, translating that. Hank realized he should have used a slightly less idiosyncratic way of saying it. But she got the message across.

  A short man, going slightly fat, wearing a stained white wife-beater and green fatigue trousers, swaggered down from the biggest building. “Saya adalah pemimpin,” he said loudly. He had what looked like a Browning HiPower with all the bluing worn off stuck in the waistband of his pants.

  “That’s him.” Althea kept her voice even. She wasn’t afraid of this man, not really. Not with the Triarii at their backs.

  Maybe she should have been. Hank had not had great experiences with civilians who weren’t scared when they had good reason to be, during his short tenure in the private security realm between his retirement from the Marine Corps and his new career with the Triarii. Their bravado was usually not due to bravery, but rather stupidity, which tended to put everyone, security and client, at greater risk, simply because they were convinced that nothing bad could ever really happen to them.

  Hank pointed to the corpse at his feet. “Your boy picked the wrong boat to try to hijack. Now he and two of his buddies are dead. They didn’t even get a shot off.”

  Althea translated. The pirates got noticeably upset, and some of them started to bring their weapons up, but Spencer and Carrington snapped their own rifles to their shoulders, covering the nearest and most aggressive. Hank didn’t move. “I wouldn’t. We came in close enough that it’s an easy shot, and there’s a machinegun up there, too.” A harsh buzz dopplered past overhead, followed by a second, and he glanced up at the sky. “Not to mention that one of those will make an awful mess of whoever it goes after.”

  “What do you want?” the pirate chief asked through Althea.

  “Just to talk. We could have easily landed down the coast, moved in under cover of darkness, and slaughtered you all. Like I said, your boarders didn’t even manage to fire a shot. We didn’t need to keep this one alive.” Hank hadn’t moved, but just stood there, the setting sun at his back, his feet planted on the beach, his rifle in his hands but pointed at the ground. “The rest of you would be dog meat, especially around two in the morning.”

  The pirate chief finally, though grudgingly, waved toward the hut behind him, turning to lead the way. Hank and Althea followed, trailed by the buzz of the quad-rotor drones overhead.

  They followed the chief into the hut, which was traditionally built of cane and thatch, with the steps leading inside cut out of a log leaned up against the bamboo porch. The interior was dark, lit only by a single battery-powered lantern.

  The chief sat down on a mat on the floor, cross-legged, pointedly keeping his hands away from the pistol in his waistband. Hank stayed standing, his rifle ready, turning so that he could watch the chief and the door. Althea sat down with her back to the door, facing the chief. Hank kept his expression neutral. After all, he was running the meeting.

  At least, he was supposed to be. If Althea had her own agenda—and since she was a spook that was a very real possibility—then this could get weird really quick. He just hoped that if it came to it, he could dump the pirate chief fast enough and get them both down the beach while the drones blew everything to splinters without getting shot.

  “What is it you want?” The chief looked up at him, pointedly ignoring Althea. She was the terp, after all, and a woman. She translated dutifully, anyway. At least, Hank hoped that was what she was doing. “You made your point, that you could have killed all of us. But you didn’t, so you must want something else.”

  Hank nodded to Althea, who pulled out an envelope. Watts—once he had gotten over his distaste for the plan—had been initially talking about handing over a tablet, but the efficacy of using paper instead had been quickly pointed out by the ground pounders. They’d had to seal the envelope in a plastic bag to keep it dry, but there was no risk of either losing the tablet due to battery issues, or accidentally putting too much data on it.

  “These are the course tracks and timetables of about a dozen Chinese freighters that will be moving through here, heading into the South China Sea, over the next two weeks.” Hank gave Althea time to translate, watching the pirate’s expression as she did so. The man was suspicious, wondering just why the men in green who’d just killed three of his men as easily as swatting flies would be giving him this sort of intel. “The cargoes are listed. All of them are strategically valuable, and therefore extremely monetarily valuable. We’re not asking for a cut. Consider the information a gift. Along with the cargo that we
have aboard the Serendipity: several cases of weapons, explosives, gear, and ammunition that had been bound for the New People’s Army.”

  The chief reluctantly reached out and took the envelope. “You have to have some reason for doing this.”

  Hank snorted. “Of course I do. The Chinese are supporting pirates off the coast of Australia. Turnabout is fair play. You get valuable cargoes, the PRC gets hurt, and we’re happy. And trust me, from what I just showed you today, you want us to stay happy.”

  “If we start attacking Chinese ships, the Chinese marines will come after us.” He was looking for a way out.

  Hank pointed to the envelope again. “There’s a frequency written down in there that we’ll transmit periodic intelligence updates on. The codes are included as well as the transmission schedule. We’ll update your target list over that channel, as well.” He grinned humorlessly. “And don’t worry; we’ll be bouncing that transmission through multiple repeaters. The Chinese won’t be able to track it back. Just in case you were thinking of handing that information over to them to try to get into their good graces.”

  The pirate still didn’t look convinced, but he started to look over the target list anyway, if reluctantly. Then he stopped. His eyes widened a little. Hank saw the greed burn in those eyes. Got him.

  Most of the freighters they’d tagged were coming from Africa, laden with oil, coal, diamonds, rare earth minerals, and other resources, resources that China was starved for. Despite the questionable morality of unleashing pirates on their enemies, Hank took some solace in the fact that most of those resources were essentially stolen already, extracted from poorer African countries as payment for predatory debts that they’d never otherwise be able to pay, debts that they had in more than one case been tricked into.