Area Denial (Maelstrom Rising Book 7)

by Peter Nealen

  “Hostages.” Hank’s voice was grim. “There’s been a lot of K&R involved with these attacks.” Kidnap and Ransom was a major industry in international piracy. It could be a lot more lucrative than actually stealing whatever was aboard the target vessels.

  “Makes sense.” Smythe was still frowning, though. “This is a whole lot of ocean for them to be hitting ships this far from Indonesia and Timor, though. Why now?”

  “You’ve got three guesses and the first two don’t count.” Hank raised an eyebrow as Smythe looked him in the eye.

  “China?” Smythe asked quietly.

  Hank nodded. “More than likely. The Aussies just tried to disentangle again, so they’ve got to be punished in every way possible. And we’ve seen the PRC use criminal elements as proxies for offensive warfare before; quite recently, in fact.”

  Smythe nodded. He knew Hank’s history. He knew what had happened in Texas, and in California before that. What was still happening, in places the Triarii hadn’t secured yet.

  The captain looked at the radar plot again. “They’ll be on us pretty soon. Within the next thirty minutes.” He pursed his lips. “What did you have in mind?”

  “They ain’t boarding.” To Hank, that was blatantly obvious, and he’d gotten to know Smythe well enough during the long passage from the Gulf of Mexico to know that he didn’t really have to spell that out. But all the same, Smythe was a fisherman and a seaman first and foremost. Not a fighter.

  That was why the Triarii were aboard.

  “I’d be inclined to agree.” He pulled up the chart. “I’m not sure if we can outrun them, though.”

  “Didn’t have running in mind.” Hank was already turning toward the hatch again. “That’s what we’ve got sixty-eight shooters and two disappearing Thirties for. Just make sure your boys don’t freak out when the shooting starts.”

  ***

  The three pirate boats slowed as they came in closer to the Jacqueline Q. Their gunwales lined with armed men, mostly wearing sleeveless shirts and rolled-up fatigue trousers, they spread out around the trawler, matching course and speed. The Jacqueline Q hadn’t slowed or deviated from her course by much, though Smythe had tried to turn away from the oncoming boats, even if only for show.

  Hank waited below the gunwale on the starboard side, just behind the disappearing armature of one of the 30mm cannons that had been mounted forward for defense—or offense, if the situation called for it.

  After all, the Jacqueline Q wasn’t exactly a fishing boat anymore.

  He cursed quietly under his breath as he watched the drone feed on his tablet. He’d have much preferred to be able to watch their attackers with his own Mark One Eyeballs, but that would have risked giving the game away if he got spotted peeking over the gunwale.

  Two of the pirate boats hove in on the starboard side, while the third hung back to the stern. That was a problem. He looked down into the hold. “Jim, see if we can get a LAW to the stern without the pirates noticing.”

  Jim Shevlin had joined the section after Texas. An older man, with time in both the Army and law enforcement, he’d taken to the role of the section’s gear NCO easily. He was no Tony Velasquez, but he was a good dude, and he’d actually been a Triarius longer than Hank had.

  The lanky, balding man just nodded, grabbed up two of the green tubes, slung them over his shoulder, and hustled aft.

  Hank turned his attention back to the tablet. The pirate in the black wife-beater, a yellow bandana tied around his head, with two bandoliers of 40mm grenades dangling around his neck and an M16 with an underbarrel M203 grenade launcher in his hands, had stood up in the bow of the closest boat. Two more pirates with ladders were right behind him, the hooked boarding ladders held in both hands, their weapons slung on their backs.

  The pirate with the bandana on his head lifted his M16 and popped off a flare from his M203. It arced over the bow of the Jacqueline Q, hissing and sputtering with red flame. Then he lifted a megaphone. “You stop engines! Prepare to be boarded!” His English wasn’t great, but he’d clearly learned enough to board Australian ships, or any other English-speaking vessels passing within his sphere of influence.

  “Can I smoke these assholes now, Hank?” Marco Rodriguez was the younger of the Rodriguez brothers, and the most openly aggressive of the two. With the section spread out doing a lot of Combined Action work with local militias in Texas, Hank hadn’t gotten to know either brother all that well before the training workup and the voyage from Port Arthur. But he knew him well enough now to know that he occasionally had to keep a tighter leash on him. Even if Lovell had already laid down the law.

  “Give it a minute. Let Jim get those LAWs aft.” He wanted to get this done in one fell swoop.

  Marco muttered to himself, but held his position. He was a good Triarius. He might complain, but he wouldn’t jump the gun.

  Hank briefly thought of an old proverb from his distant career in the Marine Corps. “If Marines ain’t bitching, there’s something wrong.”

  The pirate boat drifted closer, lots of weapons pointed up at the trawler, which so far had exhibited no reaction to their approach. Smythe was up on the bridge, he and Satoshi already down and away from the windows, just in case.

  “Now.”

  With a faint hiss, the modified hydraulic lift elevated as Marco Rodriguez pivoted the 30mm cannon outboard, cranking the barrel down to bring it to bear on the nearest pirate.

  Hank had popped up to his own firing position along the rail just in time to see the pirate leader’s eyes go wide as he realized what had just happened.

  A moment later, Rodriguez opened fire. The cannon, a home-built, reverse-engineered version of the Orbital ATK M230LF 30mm chain gun, could reach out to nearly 4 kilometers. The fifteen yards between the boat and the Jacqueline Q’s hull was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Flame spat from the massive muzzle brake as the cannon thundered, earsplitting booms rolling out across the water. The effects on target were devastating.

  The first pirate to get hit, one of the ladder carriers behind the guy with the 203, just disappeared, blown in half by the massive round that passed through him like he wasn’t even there to smash a massive hole in the hull. The boat immediately began to take on water as Rodriguez played his fire back and forth across the boat, the boomboomboom echoing and making the reports of the other Triarii’s 7.62mm M5s sound like muted pops in comparison.

  Hank barely saw the destruction Rodriguez was wreaking. He’d known that Marco would take care of the lead boat, so he’d sighted in on the second, along with most of the rest of Lovell’s First Squad. That vessel was still a little bit farther out, but thirty yards is still pretty easy, even with both platforms moving on the swell. His first shot had still been low, taking the pirate in the loose, light blue shirt in the stomach. The man doubled over the impact, red soaking his shirt, and fell into the bow, as the rest of the squad raked the boat with semi-auto fire.

  Then Brule opened up with the squad’s Mk 48, and damned near sank the launch all by himself.

  More gunfire rolled out over the ocean from astern, as LaForce’s Second Squad opened up on the rearmost boat. A rolling, hollow boom announced the launch of a LAW rocket.

  Hank came off his sights for a moment to take stock. The lead boat was fully swamped, barely floating in a wrack of smashed boards, leaking oil and fuel, blood, and body parts. Rodriguez had ceased fire, mainly because he’d turned everything in front of him to wreckage and shredded meat. The second boat was foundering, though a couple of the pirates were still trying to return fire, AK rounds going overhead with little snaps.

  Brule raked the boat with another burst, and the fire ceased.

  The higher-pitched whine of an outboard rose somewhere aft, and Hank turned to see the third boat in full flight, putting up rooster tails of spray as the pirates ran for it.

  “Fuck.” He gritted his teeth. “What did I give ‘em LAWs for if they were gonna miss?” He scrambled down from the gun
wale. “Amos, make sure we snatch up anybody who survived.” He ran down the deck toward the superstructure aft.

  He could almost have sworn he could hear LaForce cussing, even though he was too far away, with too much metal and too much spray between them. Etienne LaForce would not be happy with whoever had taken that LAW shot.

  Ducking through the forward hatch, he clattered up the ladderwell to the bridge. Smythe and Satoshi were still up there, Satoshi looking more than a little like he was seriously wondering why he’d agreed to come on this float, while Smythe looked relieved that it was over.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  “We’ve got a squirter.” Hank moved to the starboard portholes and looked aft. He could just see the white shape skipping over the waves as the pirates tried to get away. “We need to come about and go after them.” He thought of something suddenly and keyed his radio. “Five, this is Six. Have we got our jammers up?”

  “Up and going hard,” Spencer replied. “Ever since they got within a mile.”

  “But we won,” Smythe protested. “They’re running. They’re not a threat anymore.”

  “Not an immediate threat, no.” Hank straightened and looked the skipper in the eye. “But what happens when they get back to their buddies and word starts to get out about a fishing trawler with a lot of guns on it?”

  He saw the realization dawn in Smythe’s eyes. “Oh. Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah.” Hank nodded grimly. “As soon as they came after us, they were never getting back. One way or another.

  “Bring us around and get us moving. I’m going to call in the Bell Challenger’s helos. Just in case.”

  Chapter 2

  “Winkler’s going to be doing eight counts and scrubbing the deck until we get to fuckin’ Palawan.” Etienne LaForce, short, stocky, and still sporting the thick, black handlebar mustache that he’d worn as long as Hank had known him, was fuming. “Anti-tank assaultman, my ass.”

  “How many times has he fired a LAW from a moving deck?” Spencer asked.

  “It’s not that different from shooting a rifle,” LaForce growled. “Even if he hadn’t flinched.”

  “He what?” Lovell looked up from where he was watching the drone feed as the Jacqueline Q cut through the water, her engines thrumming, in hot pursuit of the fleeing pirate. The enemy boat had its outboard wide open, though, and was slowly opening the gap. “He didn’t anticipate recoil where there ain’t none?” When LaForce nodded furiously, Lovell threw his head back and laughed uproariously. “Holy shit! I ain’t seen that since that first rotation out to the NTC! I thought Winkler was supposed to be a vet?”

  “Supposed to be.” LaForce was clearly offended to the very pit of his soul. Not only because Winkler had missed, but because one of his squad had missed, and now Lovell could gloat about it.

  LaForce and Lovell had patched up a lot of their mutual dislike over the last year, especially as the section had been thrown into some pretty hairy situations, but there was still a cordial bit of headbutting that was bound to happen between the two of them. Their personalities were just too different. Plus, Lovell had long made it a source of entertainment to try to push LaForce’s buttons and watch the fireworks. The short, stocky, fiery Cajun had made it far too easy.

  “At least you guys got to shoot at bad guys.” Tomas Navarro was the new guy, so to speak, at least among the section’s squad leaders. An experienced and seasoned veteran of Kosovo and several interventions in Africa, as well as a former Texas Ranger Border Recon operator, Navarro knew his stuff. Which was good, because with everything else the section had been through over the last year, there could have been a lot of resentment about a newcomer taking a squad leader slot. “We just got to stare at empty ocean.”

  “You weren’t the only ones, Tomas.” Chan’s First Squad leader, Ignacio Ramos, looked pretty grumpy about it. “We just got to stare off the port side while your section got all the action.”

  “Don’t worry, we ain’t exactly heading for a beach vacation.” Hank was watching the drone feed, where the little battery-powered fixed wing was circling above the fleeing pirate.

  “I don’t know, everything online that I could find talked about Palawan being the most perfect island on earth.” Lovell grinned. “Should be plenty of little brown beauties, not to mention at least a few tourists.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on the tourists.” Spencer was checking over the deck to make doubly sure that there weren’t any obstructions that might snag the S-70 helicopter that was on its way from the former container ship, the Bell Challenger. Like the Jacqueline Q, the Bell Challenger still looked like her former type, but she’d been extensively modified into a disguised helicopter carrier. She carried six S-70s and four AH-1Z Vipers.

  Almost fifty such disguised warships had filtered out of Port Arthur and into the Pacific over the course of about a month. They were converging on the Philippines now, which was the only reason that the Bell Challenger was within range for this.

  The Jacqueline Q didn’t have a pad the helo could actually land on, but one could get low enough to the deck for a squad to board, up by the bow.

  Hank had only half listened to the conversation, watching the drone feed and the radar plot that Smythe had linked to his own tablet alternately, thinking. Finally, he grabbed the intercom to the bridge.

  “Smythe, it’s Foss. Go ahead and slow down a little.”

  “They’ll open the gap more.” Smythe wasn’t arguing so much as he was looking for clarification. It was a weird sort of dynamic they had going. By the law of the sea, the vessel’s captain was absolute master aboard ship. But Hank was the mission commander, at least until they got to Palawan and linked up with Doug Vetter, the retired Delta Sergeant Major whom Colonel Santiago had put in charge of this entire little maritime guerrilla force. So, Hank ultimately had the final say, especially when it came to combat.

  “I know, but they’re acting squirrely.” His eyes were still fixed on the drone feed, and the distance and bearing information on its margins. “They were heading northwest when they first broke off, but now they’ve turned to the northeast.”

  “They’ve got to have a mothership somewhere.” Smythe might have been a fisherman by trade, but he’d learned a few things once he’d signed on with the Triarii, especially as piracy had gotten more rampant as the rest of the international system unraveled. “They’re way too far out from land for boats that size not to have a bigger ship to work off of.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of it,” Hank answered. “But I also think they know they’re being followed, and once they got a little distance and started to calm down, they started to think things through. Now they’re trying to lead us away from the mothership until they can lose us in the dark.” He checked his watch. “Which is coming in about two hours.”

  “We can maintain contact.” Smythe was proud of how fast his ship was, as big as she was. They’d maintained an average of ten knots for most of the journey, but she could get up to twenty.

  “That’s not the issue. If they just disappear, especially if they called in their target, then the pirates on the mothership are going to start to wonder. Might come looking. Might go back to Timor, or wherever their hidey-hole is, and get more pirates to come looking with them.” Hank shook his head. “No, I want that mothership. And that means falling back so that they think they’ve lost us, then picking them up after dark in the birds.”

  Smythe paused for a long moment. Hank looked up at him, one eyebrow raised. “What is it?”

  “Is this really the mission?” Smythe was noticeably hesitant. The crew and the infantry sections had had plenty of time to get to know one another, but there were still some gaps in mindset there. “We’re still a week out from our initial objective. Should we really risk things by hunting down a bunch of pirates now?”

  Hank considered a short answer, since he really was currently the mission commander. But he owed Smythe more courtesy than that. This wasn’t Phoenix.

  “Tw
o things. One, like I already said, if word gets out that there are armed trawlers creeping around in the South Pacific, it’s going to get back to the Chinese. Sure, they’re going to find out sooner or later, but when they do, we want it to be on our terms.

  “Two is a corollary of One. I’m pretty sure the Chinese are the reason the pirates have been getting closer and closer to the Australian coast. So, that makes these pirates targets. Our mission is to hurt the Chinese in what they consider to be their backyard, which is the entirety of WestPac. So, we’re going to hurt their allies, too.

  “It’s that kind of war.”

  ***

  The sun was disappearing below the horizon when the first S-70 came growling down out of the darkening sky toward the Jacqueline Q’s deck. The pilot flared slightly, static making the tips of the rotors glow on NVGs, forming an ethereal ring around the bird as it came to a hover, about three feet above the deck.

  Hank forced himself to relax. He’d barely noticed that he’d been tensing up until he’d realized he hadn’t taken a breath in over a minute. This kind of air operation was always dicey. It had been before his time, but he still remembered the video of a mishap back in 1999 when a CH-46 had come in on a GOPLAT with Marines from 1st Force Recon Company aboard. The helicopter’s landing gear had snagged on a cable, and when the pilot tried to pull off, it had flipped the bird over, dumping it upside-down in the ocean.

  Six Marines and one Corpsman had disappeared into the deep.

  But this time, there were no cables for the helicopter to snag, and Spencer had laid out IR chemlights to guide the bird in on night vision. Everything was lined up, and so far, so good.

  “Let’s go.” He led the way from the superstructure, LaForce and Second Squad right behind him. There was only room aboard the helo for one squad plus. The Dash Two bird was still circling off to the west, waiting for Dash One to pick up the Triarii and pull off.