Tiger by the Tail

by John Ringo

  The nearest drenched whore let out a piercing scream just as the first group of gang members crowded inside, laughing and bragging about how they were going to expand their territory. They walked right into Mike’s and Adams’ blazing pistols, which cut down the first three before anyone else even knew what was happening.

  At the same time, muffled detonations and automatic weapons fire erupted outside, audible even over the blaring rock music.

  * * *

  The charge was set, and Yosif had made sure every Inara member had their cold packs out and secured to their helmets before he blew the door.

  The lock disintegrated, but the door didn’t move. “All Father’s Sight!” Yosif cursed as he reached forward with two other team members to pry the rusted door open. Forcing it ajar with a loud screech, they began sweeping the old, dusty stairwell leading down to the third floor of the building.

  When they reached the small hallway that ended in a warped, wooden door, Yosif held up his clenched fist to halt his team. Shouts and screams, along with the thud of what sounded like many running feet, could be heard from the other side.

  Finger on the trigger, Yosif nodded for their point man to open the door. Marko pulled on it, and the rest of the team spilled out, weapons tracking everywhere—

  —Only to find themselves facing a charging horde of prostitutes and half-dressed johns stampeding toward the staircase across the way. Yosif immediately activated the plan they’d worked out in case they encountered innocents along the way.

  “Block the stairs! Blue Hand, do not shoot at third floor, repeat, do not shoot at three!” Shoving his way to the front, Yosif reinforced his men there, funneling the people in the corridor into their hallway and the stairs leading to the roof. “This way, up, everyone, go go go!”

  Although he didn’t speak the native tongue, the sight of a half-dozen black-clad men in full face helmets and masks and carrying automatic rifles was enough to get the point across to the frightened herd, which immediately followed Yosif’s motions and began heading to the roof.

  * * *

  Lasko was in his element. His first two rounds cored the guards on either side of the door, making the whores outside run for cover as the guards dropped.

  Many of the newly arrived gang members tried to take cover behind the truck, but to no avail. The frangible rounds Lasko was using gave him plenty of penetration power, even through the stamped metal of the truck, while minimizing the risk of fragments hitting unintended targets. Add the thermal scope to the mix, which let him spot anyone who wasn’t hiding near the engine, and every time he squeezed the trigger, a gang member died.

  After the fifth man’s chest was shattered by a .50 caliber round, the rest tried to dash into the building, thinking they would be safe there. At the door, they met the remaining survivors of the bloodbath inside, who were just as desperately trying to get out. The two sides hit in a frantic collision that resulted in at least two men getting shot by their fellow gang members.

  Leaving that mess for Jayne and the Kildar to mop up, Lasko turned his attention to a fleet-footed guy who had taken off from behind the engine, zigging and zagging in the desperate hope of outrunning a bullet. The Keldara sniper ended that idea and the rest of his life with a shot that tore through his chest, knocking him into the wall just before he reached the corner of the building.

  Reloading the Barrett, Lasko turned to the second floor, pleasantly surprised to discover that Vanner’s idea about the cold packs was working perfectly. Each member of the Keldara team had a large, blue-black spot on their helmets from the freezing pack. The packs would last at least ten to fifteen minutes, and clearly designated each team member as a friendly. Although Lasko was under strict orders not to engage any targets on a floor that also had Keldara on it, they had decided to use the cold packs, just to be sure.

  Anyone else was fair game unless otherwise directed from the boots on the ground. Seeing that none of the Keldara had reached the second floor yet, Lasko sighted in on a group of scrambling figures there and went to work.

  At the rate he was knocking them down, he would be finished long before those packs grew warm.

  * * *

  “GO GO GO!” Oleg shouted the moment they got the word.

  Team Jayne burst out of their hiding place and leapfrogged toward the target area. As they covered the block, they could hear shots fired from inside, along with the loud crack of Lasko’s Barrett steadily going off in the distance.

  By the time they had reached their first staging point, the group in front of the building had been whittled down to less than a third of their original number. Oleg counted at least four bodies with missing chests or heads lying in the street. One took off running away from them. He sighted in, but before he could pull the trigger, blood exploded from the runner’s chest and he crashed to the ground.

  “Damn it, Blue Hand, leave some for us!” he radioed.

  “Move faster,” came the laconic reply.

  “Securing the front entrance,” Oleg said.

  “Roger that. Acquiring targets on second floor.”

  Waving his team forward, Oleg’s men cut down the remainder before they knew what hit them. They took the backside of the truck, which now sported several holes in its body. Its windows were shattered, both driver’s side tires were flat, and it was leaking radiator fluid and oil all over the street.

  “Sweep forward!” Oleg ordered. His point men leaped to the stairs and kicked in the door, about to toss in two flash-bang grenades.

  “Hold on front door!” A familiar voice shouted from inside. A moment later, Mike poked his head out. “Get in here and sweep forward past the beaded curtain at the back!”

  Oleg’s team pounded inside and headed through the room to the doorway just as the first wave of hookers and johns came barreling down the stairs and into the hallway. Givi and the rest of the men had their weapons online, but held their fire as the panicked men, boys, and girls ran through them to the front door.

  Through all the panic and confusion, Oleg heard the Kildar shouting, “Women to the right, men to the left. Keep moving! Two lines now!”

  * * *

  Vanel watched the parade of naked women and half-dressed men and boys stream past and bolt up the stairs. When the flood slowed to a trickle, he received the go signal from Yosif and headed down the hallway to the end, which faced the street.

  Setting his shaped Semtex charge on the wall, Vanel double-timed it back to the center of the room. There he joined with Marko and Edvin, both of whom had planted their charges on this floor as well. Getting a boost from his teammates, Edvin stuck one more on the ceiling. Then they moved to regroup with their team at the back stairwell leading to the second floor.

  Yosif motioned for Vanel and Marko to head down first, with the rest providing cover. With their element of surprise gone, the stairwell could turn into a death trap in moments. Adding the impossibility of hearing what was going on below due to the gunfire everywhere, Team Inara could walk into an ambush before they knew it. While all team members were wearing Type III rifle body armor with trauma plates, neither Vanel nor Marko had any desire to get caught in hail of bullets.

  “Blue Hand, can you give us a sitrep on the second floor, over?” Vanel whispered.

  “Yes.” Lasko’s voice was interrupted by the suppressed crack of his rifle. “I am killing many of them.”

  The Barrett cracked again in Vanel’s ear and outside. He looked at Marko and nodded. “Let’s go.”

  The two men crept down the stairs as quietly as they could, hearing shouts and screams from the level when they reached the ground.

  “Inaras Three and Four, be aware that Blue Hand has engaged the enemy on Floor Two,” Vanel heard. “Tangos may be coming your way.”

  “Roger,” Marko said. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he muttered to Vanel, not into the radio. Meanwhile, Vanel pulled a flash-bang off his LBE harness and grabbed the pin with his teeth when the door was yanked open. A
blood-spattered gangmember appeared in the doorway, and was shredded by two short bursts from the Inara members.

  The man behind him scrambled sideways while bringing up a sawed-off hunting rifle and firing wildly into the stairwell. Vanel tracked him through the wall and let off two three-round bursts, hoping to wound him, or at least make him stop shooting. Right after, he pulled the pin on his M84.

  “Fire in the hole!” He shouted as Marko readied his own flash-bang. They tossed both grenades outside the stairwell and pulled the door shut. The one-million-candlepower bursts of light and 170-decibel reports, intensified by detonating in an enclosed space, brought a new chorus of screams and thuds of bodies hitting the floor outside.

  By the time the grenades stopped, the rest of the team had advanced to join Vanel and Marko. They pushed the door open and hit the room, spreading out and killing anyone still alive and holding a weapon. A flurry of single shots rang out. In less than a minute, Team Inara was surrounded by dead bodies. They had not taken a single casualty themselves.

  “Second floor clear,” Yosif said just as Oleg and Team Jayne emerged from the stairs to the first floor. “Sorry, guys,” he said, his wide smile indicating he wasn’t sorry at all.

  “Plant the rest of your charges,” Oleg grunted.

  “Oleg, since you’re here, and we do have to set our charges,” Yosif said with an even wider smile. “There is a matter up on the roof you could handle for us.”

  “Yes, about forty of them,” Edvin said with a matching grin.

  With a frown, Oleg took his team up to the roof. They returned a minute later, escorting the rest of the whores and customers through the second floor down to the first. Oleg brought up the rear, his face impassive, except for the glower he threw at Yosif and the rest of his team.

  Yosif’s smile didn’t fade until after his team had finished their work and filed out behind him to the wrecked first floor and into the street.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Now that is a suitable haul of booty.”

  Mike surveyed the group with a satisfied smile. The johns had been allowed to slip away into the night once the Keldara had relieved them of their cell phones—not that they would be in any hurry to call the police after where they had been.

  The girls were grouped by the side of the M35. Around thirty all told, they were dressed in whatever clothes they could scrounge from the building.

  A thorough search of the premises had come up with several small caches of bills and jewelry. They had also discovered a four-foot high safe. It had been blown open to reveal stacks and stacks of baht, along with around one hundred thousand U.S. dollars, a shoebox filled with jewelry, a collection of gold coins, and about ten kilos of heroin, which Mike had left on the floor in front of the safe. They had also found several sets of identification papers, which Mike held in his hands.

  For this part, Mike had brought Soon Yi with him to translate. He stepped on the bumper of the truck and held both hands up. “Ladies, all of you, please listen to me!”

  Every girl turned to him, and Soon Yi began translating in Chinese, while Jace repeated the same message in Thai.

  “My name is Michael Jenkins, and I am the one responsible for what has happened tonight. Now, I don’t know each of your situations, and I don’t really want to know. However, since your previous place of employment no longer exists—”

  He nodded to Oleg, who hit the radio detonator for all the charges inside the building. With a loud report and a huge cloud of dust, the three-story building collapsed on itself, reduced to a pile of rubble in seconds.

  “—You can now choose what you wish to do with the rest of your life. So, here’s the deal. Anyone who wants to leave right now, step forward,” Mike said.

  There was a pregnant pause, then one girl meekly stepped forward. When she wasn’t slapped, beaten or shot, several more joined her. In the end, roughly half of the girls wanted out.

  “All right, when one of these two—” Mike handed half the stack of IDs to Soon, and the other half to Jace. “—call your name, come and collect your papers.”

  Soon called out the first name, and a tiny Korean stepped forward. Soon gave her the passport, and Mike handed her a thick stack of baht worth at least two thousand dollars. Tears streaming down her face, she hugged Soon, Mike, and even Vanel, who had been holding the money, before tucking the bills away and starting to walk down the street.

  “Jesus—Soon, go get her and tell her we’ll take her to a hotel to rest and get cleaned up and dressed first,” Mike said. “Okay, who’s next?”

  They went through the rest of the group that were leaving while Mike called Chal. By the time all of the departees were set up, a small bus had arrived, and the driver recited the arrangement Mike had made with Chal word for word.

  “Good. And if I find out any of these girls end up back in the life, both you and the old man will be seeing me again, and I guarantee neither of you will like it,” he’d told the driver, who nodded so hard Jace thought he was going to sprain his neck.

  “What about rest of us?” The tall Chinese girl asked once the bus had left.

  “You have a choice,” Mike replied. “You can go back to the streets and keep trying to earn a living that way . . . or you can join us.”

  “Doing what? Same thing we did in there?” She pointed at the ruined building.

  “For now, yes. However, there will be several changes. First, you will be paid much better than you were working for them. Second, you will have a small stipend to replace whatever you may have lost. Third, you’ll have the chance to get an education . . .” Mike went through the entire harem pitch to the girls, ending with. “. . . Anyone agreeing to accompany us will be leaving Thailand.”

  To his surprise, the majority of the girls burst into laughter. “We fucking hate it here!” said a willowy Japanese girl with a detailed dragon tattoo crawling down her arm.

  “Well then, are you coming or staying?” Mike asked.

  The girls all hudded together to confer about the offer. In the end, three more decided to leave, and Mike gave them their IDs and severance pay. That left an even dozen prostitutes filing into the M35.

  Jace looked at the bevy of girls packing into the truck and turned to Adams with a befuddled look on his face. “Does this happen often?”

  The master chief shrugged. “More often than you would think. Don’t look so surprised. What Mike’s offering them is a damn sight better than anything they’d find here. Come on, get on, we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “What about her?” Jace pointed at the unconscious dragon lady lying by the side of the road.

  “Too ugly to fuck, and we got enough managers already.” Adams didn’t even glance at her as he climbed in the back of the truck. “I say let that sleeping dog lie.”

  * * *

  The rest of the night was mostly clean-up. Mike had radioed ahead to have the ship prepped for their new arrivals around tomorrow afternoon. Then he had taken them all to the Hyatt and put them up two to a room, telling them to get cleaned up and rest before shopping for replacement clothes and other essentials later that morning. He requested Katya and three of the intel girls to come ashore and help oversee the new girls’ excursion to the mall and answer any questions they had. Soon Yi agreed to serve as an interpreter, and Jace agreed to go along as both back-up translation as well as escort. Mike let him do so with a strange smile and a knowing shake of his head.

  It was a decision the former Marine soon regretted. The girls, while separately charming and delightful in their own way, devolved into a group of fashion and appearance-obsessed little girls the second they hit the mall. It also didn’t help that they saw him as their personal valet, piling bag after bag onto him until he made arrangements to collect all of the purchases from each store at the end of the trip.

  Jace’s morning passed in a grinding blur of women’s clothes shops and perfume and makeup counters. They walked from one end of the large shopping center to
the other and back again. By the time they were finished, he had a headache from all the scents he’d been subjected to, and was still so loaded down with department store bags, he could hardly see—things the girls didn’t trust the stores to hold for them.

  “Holy shit!” he said as he collapsed into the bus seat. “I’d rather do a thirty-klick march in full ruck than go through that again!”

  Sitting across the aisle from him, Soon Yi smiled. “Surely you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this?”

  Jace ruefully shook his head. “I’ve been with this outfit for less than a week, and already I’ve seen more action than in two full tours of duty as a Marine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m just not sure if this Kildar is a tactical genius, insane, or some combination of the two.”

  Soon Yi’s smile faded as he spoke. “It is very likely that he is the latter.”

  “I’m sorry, did I say something to offend you?” Jace asked.

  Soon shook her head. “No—it is a private matter.” Her smile was more hesitant this time. “Do not worry about it. It is nothing that should concern you.”

  “Oh. Well, if you don’t mind my asking, how’d you sign up with these guys?”

  She looked at the rest of the chattering, squealing whores with a sad, knowing smile. “I was also a prostitute at a pirate den that the Kildar and his men attacked and shot up. I was taken as a spoil of war, and now service the Kildar exclusively. Oh, and provide translation on occasion. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They were both quiet the rest of the way back to the dock.

  * * *

  “Damn, it was bad enough to be tripping over the intel girls on their way back and forth from the sundeck—now we’ve got these other women running every which way!” Adams’ complaint would have been more believable if he hadn’t been wearing an ear-to-ear-grin while saying it.