Tiger by the Tail

by John Ringo

  Mike’s jaw worked. “Make sure Inara gets aboard before the sharks come.”

  “Works.” Adams contacted Yosif. “Inara, you are go.”

  * * *

  Cheok Yi Jung drew hard on his cheap, Korean cigarette as he stared out over the dark water, cursing his luck. Stuck on the damned watch boat while everyone else gets happy-happy!

  The lanun were celebrating a major haul, spoils from a freighter that had netted them almost twenty thousand U.S. dollars, a fortune in these waters. Many of the pirates had wanted to go to Singapore or Malaysia to blow it, but their leader, Yeung Tony, had insisted that they stay off the grid. So they had brought their booze, drugs, and prostitutes out to their hidden base and the party had begun in earnest a few hours ago.

  But Jung was marooned out on the watch freighter as punishment for almost screwing up the entire job. He had been the tekong, or driver, responsible for keeping the small boat steady next to the large freighter. The lanun would stand ready with their climbing poles, made of bamboo stalks with a mangrove root lashed to the top end to form a hook. When the boat drew close enough to the target’s stern, the tekong keeping it steady in the rough wake, they’d hook the railing and scramble up the bamboo to the deck. Five could climb the tough bamboo and get aboard in a dozen seconds, razor-sharp parangs clamped in their teeth. From there, they would seize the bridge, round up the crew, rob them and loot the safe, and get the hell off. The whole operation could be done in under five minutes if the pirates knew what they were doing. And Yeung’s crew definitely knew what they were doing.

  However, once the assault had begun, a rogue wave had broadsided Jung’s skiff, sweeping it away from the freighter just as his lead men had latched on with their poles. Two men had been left dangling in midair, but scrambled up to the deck before they could fall overboard.

  Not only did Jung forfeit his additional share of the loot—tekongs usually got extra pay for their hazardous job—but he was stuck out here for the night, all because of something that wasn’t even his fault.

  Jung listened for a moment, hearing the faint shouts and squeals of the girls, mixed with tinny, throbbing K-pop, drift out over the water. A door creaked open to his right, and he glanced over to see a pirate—he couldn’t tell who—drag a captured crewman onto the deck. As the man pleaded for his life, his tormentor stabbed him in the chest, then threw the body overboard. Jung knew the killer might be the next one to die—Yeung Tony had been wanting to expand into kidnapping for ransom, but it was hard to release a dead body back to its family. It’s still better than the mainland.

  He had grown up in the slums on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city. At night, he and his sister would climb the tallest tree in their neighborhood and stare at the bright lights of far away downtown, dreaming about what it must be like to live there. With both parents dead from cholera, they had spent their days foraging in the streets, picking through garbage and shoplifting on the rare occasions they could sneak into one of the tiny shops along the dirt road.

  Jung had killed his first man when he was twelve, stabbing a gap-toothed Malay who was trying to rape his sister. They’d fled the tin-roofed neighborhood he’d known all his life and headed into the city, where things were even worse. One day, Jung had woken up to find his sister simply gone, as if the city had swallowed her whole. With nothing left and nothing left to lose, he’d joined one of the local street gangs, and quickly turned to piracy. After a few years, his childhood memories had blurred, until it seemed like this had always been his life. At least here he had a place to sleep, and friends to watch his back. Even Tony was a fair leader—although Jung was still pissed about losing his extra share and missing the party.

  Taking one last drag from his cigarette, he flicked the butt into the water and turned to go. As he did, his leg bumped the railing, and his ragged shorts caught on something sharp.

  What the— Jung bent over to look at the small, four-pronged grappling hook, each tine covered in sound-deadening neoprene. It was latched onto the railing hard—as if it was supporting something—or someone—below.

  Straightening, he turned toward the bridge, opening his mouth to scream a warning to the rest of the crew. As he sucked in a breath heavy with ocean salt, he sensed something moving behind him before everything cut to black.

  * * *

  On the luxury yacht Big Fish, Patrick Vanner, former Marine and head of intelligence for the Keldara, rubbed his temple and took a sip of his strong, black Indonesian coffee. Nothing like fresh roasted—as in picked off the vine less than forty-eight hours ago.

  “Are you all right, Patrick?” Greznya, his top intel puke and new wife, watched him with a concerned expression on her gorgeous face.

  “I’m fine—just a bit of a headache, that’s all.” At least he hoped that’s all it was. The three bullets he’d taken on the blown Florida op occasionally still made their aftereffects known. Sporadic headaches were the most common, but he’d been suffering some haloing in bright sunlight, which could usually be counteracted by dark sunglasses and limited exposure. The downside was that he didn’t get to watch Grezyna sunbathe as often as he would have liked. Out here, that was practically a crime.

  Taking another sip of coffee, he stood and surveyed the room.

  “Status report?” he asked his team.

  “Team Yosif has reached the target and has engaged the enemy. Team Jayne reached their LZ twenty-one minutes ago and is moving into position. Lasko is on overwatch above us, and the Kildar and the master chief are observing on the trawler,” Greznya reported.

  Vanner nodded. They’d soundproofed the large cabin, but if the Keldara sniper went green, they’d still hear the reports of the Barrett twenty feet overhead.

  “General ship traffic on radar quiet. Nothing approaching within ten nautical miles,” Irina said.

  “Monitoring of communications on naval and law enforcement bandwidths also ongoing—nothing urgent to speak of,” Daria said a moment afterward.

  “Communications of commercial vessels in the area also quiet. Nearest AIS is over two hundred klicks. It would seem that everyone is avoiding area,” Greznya, who was pulling double-duty, said.

  “Given all the pirates migrating here in the past few years, I can’t blame them.” Vanner nodded in satisfaction, then clenched his teeth as a bolt of pain shot through his temples. While the Keldara men had all been tasked as front line fighters, the women were put on fire support and intelligence gathering details. They handled both equally well, with Irina, Daria, and his beloved Greznya—none of them more than twenty-one years old, and all staggeringly beautiful—managing multiple information feeds on a local and regional basis. “How’s the translator program coming along?”

  “Operating at seventy-eight percent efficiency. It appears to be taking longer to assimilate the local dialects.”

  “Unsurprising, since there’s probably hundreds in the region alone. All of the raw pickup will be great for our database, though.”

  After their op in the criminal city of Lunari, in Albania, and the difficult op in Florida, Vanner had realized that they really needed a translate-on-the-fly program. No, even more than that; they needed something that could take in multiple streams of raw verbal data, create its own dictionary for each language, and extrapolate for dialect, slang, etc. Not only did it have to handle what was being said now, but scale to incorporate the inevitable shifts in language from year to year, including business terms, street slang, specialized terminology, and anything else that might come up in the future. Although Vanner was proficient in eight languages and knew enough to get by in a half-dozen others, often the amount of raw data the girls could pull was way too much for one person, or even a team, to process efficiently.

  They had been tweaking a suite that handled most of what they needed, but it been dealing primarily with European Romance languages over the past few months. The Kildar’s East Asian op had fit perfectly with Vanner’s desire to expose the program
to languages with no relation to the cluster that had developed on the European continent. After this, he’d have to hit Africa and South America, and maybe some of the indigenous tribes north of the Arctic Circle—assuming any were left—and he’d have a near complete library of the major languages around the world to tap into. And then comes the app, he thought with a grin, but first steps first.

  Vanner sipped his coffee. “Maintain overwatch. Holler if anything interesting happens out there.”

  * * *

  As the pirate fell, Vanel scrambled up the rope one-handed. When he got a grip on the railing, he climbed over, keeping his pistol trained on the body sprawled on the filthy deck. The subsonic 9mm bullet had made a neat hole that now leaked a mix of blood and clear fluid from the back of the pirate’s head.

  There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth, and every sense felt heightened. He saw everything, smelled everything, felt everything. The slight movement of the rough deck under his feet. The stink befouling the crotch of the dead man’s rough shorts, overpowering his rank body odor. The last wisp of cigarette smoke leaking from the man’s open mouth. The clarity of the empty deck through his night vision gear. Vanel had never felt more alive. There was no guilt, no fear, no hesitation, only the thrill of executing his mission. After confirming his kill, Vanel holstered his pistol and unslung his carbine before reporting in. “Inara Four on deck. One tango down. Deck is clear.”

  “Roger.” Moments later, the other five team members had climbed up and assumed their positions, holding until Yosif gave the orders to move. Three seconds later, two men had stashed the body and were heading to the engine room to secure it and sweep forward. The second pair was opening the door that lead amidship, and Yosif and Vanel were climbing silently to the bridge.

  On the narrow catwalk, they paused outside the door, listening for any sign of conversation or awareness of them from the small, dark room on the other side. Their surveillance had indicated anywhere from two to four pirates manned the bridge at any one time.

  Pulse hammering in his ears, Vanel heard the engine room team report in. “Engine room is secure. Ready to cut power on your mark.”

  Yosif glanced at Vanel, who raised his H416C and nodded. Ready. Reaching for the door handle, the team leader replied, “Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.”

  Inside the bridge, the console lights winked out. The second they did, Yosif turned the handle and pushed the door open. Hand back on the stock of his silenced rifle, he entered and turned right, advancing along the wall.

  Vanel entered the door and went left. Immediately he encountered two pirates, one in the battered captain’s chair, the other standing next to him. The standing man was just turning to the black-clad, masked figures that had burst in.

  Vanel put a three-round burst into each one’s chest, controlling his carbine’s recoil and keeping his sight locked on. His shots dropped the nearest man to the floor and made the sitting victim slump back into the chair. Neither made a sound as they bled out, filling the air with the coppery tang of blood. He heard the metallic cough of Yosif’s weapon on his right, but didn’t take his eyes off his two tangos.

  Not seeing any other motion or targets in the room, Vanel carefully stepped through wisps of gunsmoke toward the bodies. He cleared their hands, then signaled that his side was cleared and safe. Yosif confirmed the other side was clear and checked on the rest of the team. Yosifs Two and Three had taken out four tangos while sweeping forward to the bow. Yosifs Five and Six had cleared what appeared to be a crude crew quarters, dispatching three more pirates, for a total of eleven tangos down so far.

  Sixty seconds later, the two below teams had finished clearing the entire rest of the ship. After receiving reports from both, Yosif contacted the trawler. “Kildar, this is Inara Leader. First objective has been secured, eleven tangos KIA, no casualties on team, over.”

  “Roger that, Kildar and master chief are en route.”

  Yosif and Vanel headed down to the main deck to form up with the rest of their team and greet their leader. As they waited for the other ship to approach, Vanel took a look at what they were about to deal with in the second phase of the operation. He’d seen it in the photos, but taking it in for real was something else entirely.

  “Father of All, what have they done out there?”

  * * *

  After deploying the back-up insertion team to reinforce Team Inara, Mike and Adams had gotten in a Zodiac inflatable equipped with a noiseless electric motor and sailed to the trawler. Climbing up the rope ladder that had been lowered for them, The two men stood on the bridge, which had been cleared of bodies, and scanned the pirates’ base two hundred fifty meters away.

  “That is one helluva feat of kludging,” Adams said of the haphazard tangle of boat parts, tin sheets, cargo containers and driftwood that made up the enemy headquarters. It sprawled in all directions, built with little rhyme or reason, with crude rooms tacked on wherever they were needed. Rope bridges, some as high as thirty feet off the ground, connected several areas to one another, while the dock area was a mass of skiffs, crude rafts, and even bright blue chemical barrels, all lashed together to make a slowly undulating platform. Raucous Asian dance music blared over the water, and bright lights illuminated crude balconies where the pirates smoked, snorted, or shot dope and enjoyed the attention of local hookers. “Usually pirates are hit-and-run, with no fixed HQ. These guys must be pretty goddamn confident to build all this out here.”

  “Yeah.” Mike focused on the blue barrels dotting the dock area. “Hopefully those barrels are either empty or still sealed. Don’t need any of our guys exposed to any chemicals in the water.”

  “You want to change the insertion?” Adams asked, finger on the transmit button of his radio.

  “No, they should be all right. It is part of the night’s work, after all. Just make sure everyone cleans up really well afterward—no telling what they might catch in or out of the water.”

  Adams grunted agreement. “Too damn bad we couldn’t get a girl on the inside. I know Katya was practically begging to get out there for recon.”

  “Yeah, but as a round-eye, she would attract way too much attention. Even with her capabilities, it would have been too risky for her to feed us any intel. Also, it would have been too difficult to school her in the not-so-niceties of Southeast Asian prostitution quickly. That said, it does make me wonder about the possibility of acquiring some Asian women for future jobs on this side of the world. Our talent, while very good, just doesn’t blend in well enough here.”

  “Of course, sometimes that can be an advantage, too,” Adams pointed out.

  “Yeah, maybe in the cities, but not out here.”

  The radio clicked, and Mike answered.

  “Go for Mal.”

  “Simon here,” Vanner replied. “Team Jayne is in position.”

  “Roger that.” Mike scanned the pirate base one last time, spotting a strange conglomeration of heavier metal, what looked like welded steel plates on a high point above the base, overlooking the entire small harbor. Near as he could tell, it looked almost like a small bunker. What the hell is that? His senses twitched, that feeling that something wasn’t quite right kicking in. He clicked his transmit button. “Order all teams to switch to AP ammo. Team Jayne to begin flanking assault in five minutes from my mark. Team Inara, deploy to secure dock area.”

  “Roger.”

  “Gonna be a bitch and a half to clear all those damn little rooms and cubbies,” Adams remarked.

  “Yeah, but it makes for excellent close-quarters and broken terrain training,” Mike said. “Besides, these fucks shouldn’t prove to be that much of a challenge. Ideally, they will all be too drunk, stoned, fucked, or any combination of the three to mount an effective defense in the first place.”

  Adams grinned mirthlessly. “Well, that is why we let them party before moving in, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  His rebreather and fins back on, Vanel and the rest of Team
Yosif had debarked from the trawler to the Zodiac. When the go order came, they had all swapped out their magazines as ordered, entered the water again, and headed for what passed for the dock area.

  Three minutes later, Vanel’s head broke the surface, which was covered by a thin film of oil and other noxious chemicals. Wiping his facemask with a gloved hand, he decided to keep breathing from his tank while scanning the floating material for tangos. He had already removed his night vision goggles to avoid being blinded by the ambient light.

  The next few seconds were the most critical part of establishing their beachhead. Six of the swimmers were on the left side of the dock area, with the other six inserting on the right. If any were spotted, they risked being caught on open, unstable ground between the pirates and the water.

  Vanel shucked his rebreather and fins again, grimacing at the acrid, chemical taste of the air around him. Slowly, silently, he hauled himself onto a dugout boat lashed to two barrels. His black wetsuit blending with the shadows, Vanel began low-crawling over the uneven terrain. His goal was the first row of rough buildings, about fifteen meters away. There he would clear the area and provide cover for the rest of his team as they advanced.

  Halfway over, a door made from a corrugated tin sheet burst open and a half-dressed man and woman staggered out. Whooping and shouting, the pair headed for the main dock, their feet thumping on the wooden planks.

  Vanel slid into the water, ducking behind a nearby barrel. The triangular space was barely large enough, but he managed. “Inara Four to Leader.”

  “Go, Four.”

  “One tango and a female are on the dock five meters away.” Vanel peeked up just enough to see the two sharing a bottle of something as the man began groping the half-naked woman. “Cannot reach target without possibility of detection. What are your orders?”

  There was a slight pause. Vanel waited patiently, figuring Yosif might be kicking this up the chain of command. They tried not to harm innocents whenever possible, but Vanel doubted the Kildar would allow the presence of one whore to compromise the entire mission.