Tiger- Crusade

by David Smith

  B’Stard considered this only briefly. ‘No, all things considered I’m sure they’re up to no good. I can smell their guilt.’

  She turned and left the room. ‘Be patient. Keep digging. They’ll slip up somewhere.’

  --------------------

  Dave was drained.

  It had been and endless battle, fought on four fronts simultaneously. His team had fought the good fight, staying strong and covering for him as much as he’d covered for them.

  Whilst they could be fractious and childish at times, he was proud of the way they’d all watched each other’s back, and fought as a team more than ever before. Chief Money had held the Accountants at bay and the Senior Officers had fended off the best efforts of Captain B’Stard.

  They’d even managed to stymie the Feds, who’d been increasingly irritated by the crew’s deliberate but skilful lack of co-operation. Dave had noticed a distinct drop-off in the number of irate calls he’d taken from them since they’d started interviewing Chief Money’s Locally Recruited Enlisted Persons.

  Almost everybody on the ship had been approached by the tenacious Ms. Rice, who was trying to drum up support among the crew for a class action for ‘temporal displacement’ to be taken against the Fleet.

  Apparently, the loved ones of Tiger’s crew had been robbed of six months of communication and interaction by the Fleet’s wilful deployment of a down-trodden and over-worked crew in dangerous and unpredictable circumstances.

  To Dave’s amazement nearly everyone had declined her offer of representation even though it was on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis.

  There had even been an unexpected and pleasant surprise from another direction as Lieutenant Taylor seemed to have finally resolved the issue with the replicators. Dave had no idea how he’d done it, but over the last few weeks people had actually been getting what they’d ordered.

  Dave could only surmise that he’d changed the patterns in the memory core, as the food from the replicators tasted different now, spicier, and more vibrant. It was certainly appealing to more of the crew, who were flocking to the replicators in unprecedented numbers. The below-decks trade in replicator rations had reached an all-time high, with some crew willing to pay huge sums of money for a decent meal.

  For all that, Dave knew in his heart of hearts that they couldn’t avoid the inevitable. Park, Lieutenant Sato and Susan had kept the Professional Standards Auditors out of his way, but every time he saw them they’d point out there was no way they could vet every professional and personal log and statement recorded by the ship’s computer: there was just too much of it.

  As a crew they’d been wildly derelict in terms of professional conduct, and there was no doubt that they’d broken pretty much every Fleet regulation and even Federal laws.

  He was on the Bridge reading a confidential report from Sato about the progress of the Professional Standards Audit, when there was a beep from the Navigation console.

  Lieutenant Dolplop’s mechanical voice said ‘Incoming vessel, sir, on bearing oh-two-two by three-four-three.’

  Dave was so tired in befuddled it took him several seconds to understand that this was yet another unexpected visit. Lieutenant Janice Lyle was manning the Helm and after the gentlest of orgasms she sighed and said ‘Well that’s odd . . . she seems to be a Revenue Service Cutter, sir.’

  ‘Revenue Service?? What the hell are they doing out here?’ Dave grumbled impotently. In truth, he knew exactly what they were doing: Someone on Hole or at Fleet Head-quarters must have mentioned that there was trade going on across the border between the Federation and the Sha T’Al.

  An unscrupulous trader named Kennickie had found that common everyday aspirin had an extraordinary narcotic effect on the Sha T’Al and had shipped tonnes of the stuff across the border completely illegally.

  That had really been the root of Tiger’s troubles. The drug had destroyed Sha T’Al society in several star-systems, which had encouraged the Tana Empire to try to encroach.

  The Federal Revenue Service were responsible for ensuring all cross-border trade was in accord with trade protocols between the two relevant states, and also to ensure tax was levied where appropriate.

  In this case, pretty much everything Kennickie had done was illegal, and paying import or export taxes would have been a completely alien concept to someone like him. With no trade protocol in place with the Sha T’Al they’d be treating the case as smuggling.

  Bearing in mind that their misadventures had already attracted the unwelcome attention of JAG, Starfleet Finance, FLEA and FUCAS, it actually seemed quite reasonable that the FRS wanted a piece of the action too.

  The cutter identified herself as the FRSV Paul Revere, and dropped into orbit just below Tiger. As she drew alongside, she hailed them.

  ‘This is the Federal Revenue Service Cutter Paul Revere. Stand by to receive a team of Revenue personnel.’

  Dave didn’t even have a chance to reply before the channel went dead.

  Dave sighed and rubbed his tired eyes, before calling the Steward of the Officer’s Mess, Chief Butler: ‘Steward, looks like we’ll have more guests. Do we have any more free cabins on Deck 5?’

  The Steward took the news with his customary unflappable calm. ‘Actually, no sir, but if you give me a few hours I’m sure I can sort something out.’

  ‘Ok, if you would please.’ Dave closed the channel and headed for the turbo-lift. With a heart-felt sigh he added ‘Lyle, you have the Bridge. I’ll be down in the Transporter Room. I think I may as well stay there, I seem to be needed there more often than on the Bridge.’

  --------------------

  The Revenue team had already arrived by the time Dave reached the Transporter room.

  There were just two of them, both standing bolt upright, waiting impassively. As Dave entered they span to face him.

  Both were wearing immaculately pressed Revenue Service uniforms, smart white shirts and sharply pressed light grey trousers with rank insignia on the shoulders and the service’s crest on the breast pocket. Dave had never met Revenue Service personnel before but the amount of ribbons and gold braid on one shoulder made it immediately obvious who was in charge.

  ‘I’m Lieutenant McNabb, this is Sergeant Pincher.’

  ‘Welcome to USS Tiger, Lieutenant, how can we be of assistance?’ Dave said holding his hand out.

  McNabb didn’t acknowledged Dave’s hand, looking around himself with an air of disdain as he replied. ‘We’re investigating reports of illegal cross-border trading. We’ll need access to your ship’s records and I want all of your personnel ready to attend interviews when needed.’

  Dave shoulders slumped. He couldn’t even work up the energy to be polite about.

  ‘You’ll have to take a frickin’ number: we’ve got investigators from JAG, Fleet Finance, FLEA and the union here already, so good luck with it all.’

  Dave was so fed up he missed the look of utter astonishment on the Revenue team’s faces as he stormed out of the Transporter Room.

  --------------------

  The days were a blur. Endless interviews, endless evasion, countless half-truths and out-right lies. Dave trotted out his fictitious stories so often he began to forget the truth of the matter, but he stuck to his guns and so did the crew.

  The Feds were aggressive, JAG were persistent, the Union seemed quite sly, and the FRS were blunt to the point of being rude, but they all met the same stone-wall defence. The defence was based on ignorance as much as innocence, but Dave was just thankful that it was working.

  His only real concern now was the Professional Standards Audit. Although Susan could stall and evade, Lieutenant-Commander Cannon was correct when he said that she had to obey vocal commands.

  The computer had clearly had no qualms about delaying the inevitable, but Dave knew that she would never be able to delay the JAG team long enough for PO Park and Lieutenant Sato to remove all of the incriminating evidence and still doctor the ships logs to remove references to
individual personal failings.

  He’d left it to Sato to prioritise their efforts to sanitise the ships records, but in his heart of hearts he knew that he was asking her to bail out an ocean with a sieve. It wasn’t a matter of what JAG found, but how much.

  They could lose all the overtly illegal actions, but virtually every log entry by the officers included references to being in Sha T’Al space, or travelling backwards in time, or interfering in the politics of another universe. All of these implied a breech of one Fleet regulation or another.

  It was like sitting on a ticking time-bomb, and always at the back of his mind was the nagging threat of all-out war between the Tana and Sha T’Al.

  He’d seen Izzy several times over the last week but she always seemed to be too busy to speak to him, and generally ignored any small-talk he tried to make. At least she was still giving him a daily status report, although there was little progress to show for her efforts.

  With each report, Dave grew more and more anxious. Izzy had noted that the Sha T’Al had attacked and destroyed Tana broadcast relay stations close to the border. They really couldn’t afford to be sat here playing ‘dodge the question.’

  Chapter 6

  Whilst Dave had been doing his best to ignore the Federal Agents, they got on with a line of enquiry that they hadn’t mentioned when they came aboard. As well as the apparent breach of Federal Law, their trip to this sector had presented them with a chance to make enquiries into an unresolved incident that had become something of an obsession for the Agency.

  Agent Orange had come a long, long way the meet Crewmen Ezekiel Moss and Stephanie Kwok. They’d wanted to interview both of them for a long time, and it was an astonishing coincidence that both of them had turned up aboard USS Tiger.

  They decided to interview Moss first, and invited him to their suite. As Moss entered, Agent Orange didn’t look up from the notes on his pad as he gestured for Moss to sit. Eventually, still not looking up, he began the interview. ‘So, Crewman Ezekiel Moss . . . ‘

  ‘That’s me!’

  ‘What can you tell me about the violence between drug cartels in Mexico and the southern United States back in April, 2283?’ The Agent finally looked up at Moss, although his eyes were hidden behind the impenetrable dark glasses.

  Moss shifted in his chair before replying ‘Only what I saw in the media a couple of years back, sir’ with a shrug. ‘Something about a struggle between rival crime syndicates to control drug traffic between Colombia and the USA?’

  The Agent remained silent and Moss felt obliged to continue.

  ‘I gather Chinese triads and Mexican gangs fought and a lot of bad people got killed. So that’s a good thing, right? From your perspective?’

  Orange regarded him carefully before replying. ‘It wasn’t just bad people that got killed. Over a hundred civilians, forty-three Federal Agents and Police Officers, dozens of Mexican civic officials . . . a lot of innocent people died too.’

  ‘Ah. Not good then’ admitted Moss.

  ‘Oddly,’ continued Agent Orange ‘most of gang leaders who were killed weren’t killed by the various law enforcement agencies involved. Most of the senior criminals seem to have been executed by opposing cartel troops or by hired assassins.’

  Moss shifted in his seat almost imperceptibly. ‘I’m sorry to hear all this, but what has any of it got to do with me?’

  Agent Orange leaned forward, never taking his gaze from Moss’ face.

  Moss could hear the faintest of noises, which he guessed were coming from the earpiece tucked into the Agents right ear. He was clearly in communication with another member of the Feds team.

  He knew this meant he was being monitored by sensitive devices that would allow analysis of his physiological response to the questions being asked. FLEA made use of Physical Response Analysis Tools as a matter of course. Although their data was inadmissible as evidence, it gave operatives clear indications as to which lines of enquiry were worth pursuing.

  Steadying himself Moss put years of training into practice, calming himself, forcing his heartbeat to stay at a reasonable level, carefully shifting his eyes to make analysis of his blush response more difficult to judge.

  The Agent paused, staring at him all the while, looking for the slightest twitch from Moss.

  ‘San Alvarez is a small town just outside Ciudad Juarez on the Mexico-US border. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘Can’t say I have’ lied Moss, expertly.

  Orange continued. ‘It’s famous in FLEA circles. It became the main route for illicit drugs being exported to the US. In April 2283 the two biggest crime syndicates fought a brief but bloody battle for control of the town.’

  Moss shrugged. ‘Sorry, I still don’t see what this has to do with me.’

  Agent Orange straightened himself, still not taking his gaze off Moss for a micro-second. ‘I’ll get straight to the point then, Moss. A triad enforcer that we only know by his code-name, Basilisk, led a team that completely wiped out the leadership of the rival syndicate in San Alvarez. It was a slaughter.’

  ‘We mobilised to try and restore order, but it was too late. Hundreds of people died, innocent and guilty. By the time we got there in numbers, the battle was over and both sides had more or less exterminated each other. We figure on nearly four hundred drug-traffickers dying, but we believe one of the key protagonists, Basilisk, escaped during the chaos.’

  ‘We lost too many good men that day, but we never found Basilisk. There were nearly five hundred dead, but we identified everyone without finding anyone who might have been Basilisk. Reviewing the data from whatever security cameras survived the battle led us to believe he literally just hopped on a bus to Cuidad Juarez, changed his identity and then crossed the border into El Paso in Texas.’

  ‘Cameras and security systems are everywhere these days, Moss. There were no direct clues, so we did things the hard way. We identified and eliminated every single person who arrived in El Paso that day, one by one.’

  Moss concentrated hard, his breathing remained steady and his heart never missed a beat. Inside he was laughing at the irony of it all, but from outside, he looked as confused and dumb-founded as he had since the start of the interview.

  Orange was still explaining the FLEA’s interest in Moss. ‘One of the odd things that we found was you, Moss.‘

  Moss remained impassive as the Agent got the point where he clearly expected a reaction.

  ‘You appeared out of nowhere, Moss. There are no records of you arriving at El Paso on any form of transport and no records of you living in El Paso at that time. When we looked into it there were no records of you being anywhere for several years. You simply didn’t exist for a period of about four years. I find that odd. Very odd.’

  Moss leaned back in his chair and relaxed. ‘Is that all it is? That’s simple enough to explain.’

  Moss had had his cover story prepared for years in anticipation of a moment like this.

  ‘I hit a rough patch. I’d rather not go into the details, but if you checked further back in my credit history you’ll already know that I’d stacked up some significant gambling debts in Vegas a few years previously. I skipped town quickly, ended up lying low working on a farmstead near El Paso for a few years. It was only bed and board in return for hard graft but that suited me fine as I didn’t want to be found.’

  ‘It was a hard life, but it got me straightened out, and I’d got used to the life when the farmer died suddenly and the bank repossessed the farm. All of a sudden I was homeless. I thumbed a lift for a few days. Got as far as El Paso and worked cash-in-hand for a few days to gather enough cash to get a ticket back home to New Orleans. No mystery there, sir. Just a bad judgement and bad luck.’

  His performance was flawless. His face never betrayed him and his heartbeat and breathing remained rock-steady throughout. He watched impassively as Agent Orange evidently received another message through his ear-piece.

  ‘Ok, Moss. You can go. But we might need
to speak to you again’ said the Agent grudgingly.

  Ezekiel Moss stood and left, breathing a gentle sigh of relief as soon as he was away from the FLEA sensors. That had been close, but not for the reasons that FLEA had expected.

  He had been at San Alvarez at that time and witnessed the carnage that unfolded. Ironically, Basilisk had been his contact that day within the Chinese Tai Huen Chai triad. Basilisk had come to the party a bit late in the day but had hired him to eliminate targets within the Los Zetas cartel with almost complete indifference.

  Going by the name Long-shot, Moss had developed a reputation as a hitman par-excellence, and his business had been brisk during the drug wars. Looking back on it now, he’d been stupid, but at the time, full of his own success, he’d got cocky. He started taking more and more contracts, and the more he took on, the less time he had to research what he was doing and for whom.

  He’d never met any of his clients face to face: that would have been ridiculously unprofessional. They weren’t in any way acquainted and never spoke of each other without using their respective code-names.

  On that day, alarm bells rang when he carried out his two hits, only to be immediately contacted to take on a third hit just a few blocks away. He’d carried out that hit, only to be given another contract, but by a different client. And then Basilisk had contacted Moss to take-out some seriously ‘hard targets’, offering a million credits per hit, but with the condition that the hit was carried out immediately.

  More and more targets followed. Mexican, American, Colombian, Chinese . . .

  Foolishly he’d taken them all on. He wasn’t even sure how many people he’d killed that day, but he’d stayed to complete his contracts even though it was clear that the situation was spiralling out of control. With hundreds being killed all around him (not including his own victims) it was obvious that it was only a matter of time before the various law enforcement agencies moved in en masse.

  He didn’t realise how much trouble he was in until Basilisk had contacted him and tried to arrange a meeting. The alarm bells finally broke through his self-envisaged armour of invulnerability and he hacked into the local Police data-base and began checking the marks he’d eliminated. It quickly became clear that both sides of the battle had been contracting with him, and with growing horror he realised he’d probably executed Basilisk’s bosses as well as his enemies.