War Tactic

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PROLOGUE

The South China Sea

Yanuar Wijeya squinted at the ship in the distance as he stood on the bow of the Penuh Belut, a rust-eaten, twenty-five-meter dhow, or Arab freighter, that served as the mother-tender to his two fast-attack motor craft. Salt spray flecked his face. In his gnarled fingers he held a pair of binoculars, only one half of which still worked. The other set of lenses was badly cracked and stained. With one eye closed, he could see his first mate, Mhusa, in the lead fast-attack vessel. The deceptively soft popping of gunfire, mild at this distance, told him that his men were already taking fire from the Filipino freighter.

The freighter was a large one, many times the size of his own craft. While it could have outrun the Penuh Belut, it had no chance to flee the motor craft. The captain of the Filipino vessel had opted to turn and fight rather than let Mhusa’s crew use the freighter for target practice.

Wijeya wore combat boots without laces on otherwise bare, callused feet. His cut-off jeans were bleached yellow-white from dirt, oil and the pitiless sun. The handle of a machete jutted from the MOLLE-equipped scabbard on his back, which also bore a pistol-grip shotgun. In the rhinestone-studded belt that barely held his pants above his hips, Wijeya carried two Indonesian kerambit knives. The ring-handled knives with their curved blades were the only reminder of his homeland, which was otherwise a place he was happy to leave behind. Also behind his belt was a pitted Soviet Bloc Makarov pistol. Wijeya had himself pried the pistol from the fingers of a dead man.

From the pouch tied to his belt, Wijeya took a khat leaf, telling himself he would permit himself no more this afternoon. The drug was a pleasant one, a stimulant that sharpened his senses, helped him keep his edge. He had, however, seen too many men fall under the spell of the leaves. He had no desire to hollow himself out, or worse, to become distracted and sick if the supply were to dry up. Khat, like every other luxury aboard the Penuh Belut, ebbed and flowed. There were days that they were rich and days that they were poor. Until very recently, the poor days had far outnumbered the rich ones.

But not so much now.

As if his benefactor could read his thoughts, the satellite phone in Wijeya’s pocket began to vibrate. Sighing, the pirate captain pulled the device out and pressed the glowing green key. The voice he heard was familiar. Its owner had never wasted time saying hello to him, or asking after the well-being of his crew.

“Are you on schedule?”

“We are doing it now,” Wijeya answered. He was not an uneducated man. He spoke English well; he had attended the National University of Singapore, a final gift from his once-affluent parents. His father had been a supremely arrogant man, unable to see the folly of his ways even when a series of reckless investments had left the family destitute. The thought made Wijeya want to laugh. His benefactor reminded him often of his father. It was the haughty way both men spoke. Perhaps, one day, the invisible man on the satellite phone would swallow a gun barrel the way Wijeya’s father had.

The thought brought a smile to the pirate’s lips.

If only my father could see how far I’ve come, he thought. There was real bitterness in him, he knew. But a man was what he was. He remained as he had been made.

“We are taking the ship now,” Wijeya said. He pressed the working half of the binoculars closer to his eye and recited the registration number of the vessel. “This is the one you specified, yes?”

“Yes,” said the voice. “Are you in the correct position? The locations have been calculated for specific impact. It’s a pattern. I don’t want you to deviate from it.”

“This you say to me every time we speak. I waited until we reached the coordinates you specified. I was careful. I am always careful.”

“See that it remains that way,” the voice warned. “Your success in the region is thanks to the XM-Thorns I’ve been sending you.”

“Yes. This I know,” said Wijeya. “Very well. You promised us more. And more rifles. More ammunition for them.”

“You will have it,” the voice promised. “Put in to your usual port and I’ll make sure the provisions are waiting for you. I always do.”

“Yes,” said Wijeya. “This I know.”

“No prisoners this time,” said the voice. “Leave none alive.”

“But—” Wijeya began.

The line went dead. Wijeya took the phone from his ear and stared at it. Always, it was the owner of the voice who cut off the transmission. Never had the mysterious speaker bothered with parting sentiments. The pirate switched the phone to standby, noting the battery charge percentage, and tucked it back into his pocket.

He told himself that this invisible man, the voice, was a means to an end. He had first encountered emissaries of the voice while in one of the ports of call his crew frequented. Those had been lean days, scratching out a living taking whatever vessels they could, never daring to attack a ship much larger than their own. Controlling the crew, in those days, had likewise been difficult. It was back then that Wijeya had been forced to fall back on his Silat training; the martial art of the blade that, when he had learned it as a child of privilege, had been little more than theory to him.

Again he laughed to himself. When his father had agreed to pay for private lessons from a wizened old man from a nearby village—a man renowned for his Silat prowess—no doubt Wijeya’s parents had thought the move one to keep their rebellious son out of trouble. Give him the discipline of a martial art, they had thought. Give him something to fill his idle hours. Yet today Wijeya had killed no less than four men in personal hand-to-hand combat with his kerambit knives. Three of those had been crew members who sought to take the title of captain from Wijeya. One had been a drunken fool in a port town, who had been quicker with a switchblade than Wijeya would have thought the old drunk capable. The scar that now curled across Wijeya’s abdomen was proof of that.

He told himself to focus on the task at hand, to stop wool-gathering while his face grew slick with droplets of sea foam. Once more he pressed the working lens of the binoculars to his eye. Behind him, he could hear Lemat, the little Frenchman, bearing the walkie-talkie. Lemat’s approach was wreathed in static. Wijeya smiled at his own joke.

“Captain,” said Lemat. “The launches report they are ready.”

“Tell them to begin the attack,” Wijeya directed, never taking his eye from the motor craft circling the target freighter. Sporadic gunfire continued from the deck of the target ship. That was a surprise, honestly.

Shipping lines, despite the increased dangers to their freight from pirate crews like Wijeya’s, had felt the turn of the global economy just as had everyone else. They were always looking for ways to cut costs. One of the methods they employed was cutting back crews, which left little extra manpower for such things as guards. Wijeya knew that some of the ship captains had taken it on themselves to purchase, quite illegally, arms with which to equip their men. The idea was that in the event of pirate attack, the crew would take up weapons and fight off boarders. Every major shipping company had corporate policies forbidding this practice, but men had a way of ignoring rules that could get them slaughtered.

Still, it would not matter. Not in this case.

“Move us in,” Wijeya told Lemat. “Prepare to support our boarding crews.”

Lemat gave the order. The Penuh Belut began to vibrate beneath him as her diesel engines thrummed to life. Large quantities of black smoke began to spew from the aft section of the old boat. Wijeya knew every inch of the dhow’s deck plates, every streak of rust, every weld. He had spent more years aboard her now than he cared to think.

“Sir?” Lemat prompted. He held the walkie-talkie to his ear. “Mhusa asks if he may fire rockets.”

“Tell him above the water line only,” Wijeya said. He waited while Lemat relayed the order. Moments later streaks of smoke joined the motor launches and the upper decks of their target. The explosions that rang out scattered men from the deck of the larger ship. Soon, automatic gunfire from Wijeya’s attack boats carried across the water.

The automatic weapons were nothing special, but they were reasonably new and all in good working order. Kalashnikov rifles were plentiful in this part of the world. A man with enough cash could purchase a warehouse full of them for twenty dollars US each. But Wijeya’s benefactor saw to it that the flow of ammunition for the weapons, new and reliable magazines, and parts for repair was steady. The voice knew Wijeya’s major ports of call in the area and never failed to arrange for supply drops.

More important than the automatic weapons, however, were the XM-Thorns. The high-tech rocket launchers had given Wijeya the power to take on craft many times his size. The rockets and their launch tubes were made of a high-tech, carbon-fiber and alloy combination that resisted salt corrosion, making the weapons light and easy to store aboard ship. With the XM-Thorns, it was possible for Wijeya’s launches to attack even a cruise liner if they so chose.

Large craft had a number of weaponry that could be employed against pirate ships. The bigger the enemy craft, the greater the danger. Some of the weapons employed by captains in the region were approved by their corporate masters and some were not. While cowardly businessmen disapproved of giving crewmembers SKS rifles or handguns, they were happy with anything that was not a gun that could still drive away the likes of Wijeya. One of the most popular options, given the vast quantity of water available, was high-pressure hoses. Another, employed mostly by the affluent cruise liners, was a sound cannon. Wijeya, before his benefactor had found him, had once been on the receiving end of such a sound weapon. It had been…unpleasant.

But everything had changed one day in a seedy bar in Manila. Wijeya and what was left of his crew at the time—Mhusa, Lemat and two or three others—had been drinking away their latest failure, determined to use up the last of their coin. Staring into the bottom of a dirty glass full of rum, not sure what he would do next or how he would survive, Wijeya had thought perhaps he was destined to keep failing at life. Bitter recriminations had rolled through his mind, waves crashing on the breakers of his failed dreams.

But then a stranger had handed him a business card.

Wijeya remembered looking up at the stranger. The man had the look of a go-between, a messenger. Nothing about his features was remarkable. The stranger had nodded once at the card then disappeared into the smoky darkness of the bar.

On the card was written nothing but a phone number. It had taken a few more drinks before Wijeya’s curiosity got the better of him. Expecting some sort of scam, some kind of confidence routine, he had dialed the number, prepared to take out his frustrations on whoever answered. It would feel good to shout at someone. Perhaps then he would get into a fight. With the cracked receiver of the bar’s pay phone to his lips, he listened to the ringing at the other end while sizing up the other patrons in the bar.

There, he thought. That one. The one with the fat face and the loud mouth. He looks like he might be Samoan. I will enjoy putting my fist through that face.

But then a voice had answered the telephone call.

Over the course of many telephone calls to come, Wijeya would come to know that voice, the voice of his benefactor, very well. The voice had told him that a very special man was being sought, a man who could take instructions exactly. The reward for following such instructions would be wealth and success, more than any pirate could ever want. The means through which this would be done were simple: all a good pirate needed to conquer even the largest vessels was the correct weaponry. Would the latest XM-Thorn rockets, capable of sinking even a cruise ship, not be sufficient to such a task?

Wijeya had told the voice he thought it might be.

And so Wijeya had entered into the service of the mysterious voice. He supposed he would never know how long the voice’s agents had spied on him, watched him and evaluated him before Wijeya was finally given the business card. It did not matter. He did not care. All he cared about was money. Thanks to his benefactor, thanks to the voice, there had been plenty of that.

Wijeya had often considered the possibility that his was not the only crew his benefactor had chosen to finance. This simply made sense. Whatever the voice might be trying to accomplish, the pirate attacks were clearly being coordinated across a large area. That explained why the coordinates were so precise, and it also explained the voice’s insistence on strict timetables. A single pirate ship that started attacking where it was not supposed to could easily run afoul of other crews funded by the voice, could it not? At least, that was how it seemed to Wijeya. Not for the first time, he pondered what it was his benefactor might be trying to do. And then…what would happen to Wijeya and his crew when the voice achieved its goal?

In the back of his mind Wijeya knew that there was great danger here. It might not be near. It might be many years yet in coming. But he was not stupid. He knew that his benefactor had something more in mind than simply advancing the lifestyles of pirate crews. Wijeya’s attacks were very specific, conducted at times and locations of the voice’s choosing. Sometimes the targets were also specified, and other times it was enough that he find any vessel within a given range of coordinates. Just what this was accomplishing for the voice, Wijeya did not and could not know. But he knew he was a pawn. He knew that when his usefulness to the voice ended, he would either be cut loose to make his own way or he would be killed.

The former was, fortunately, the more likely. A man of wealth and power who had little time to spare on hellos or goodbyes would hardly occupy himself with the assassination of one such as Wijeya. It was far more possible that one day the calls and the weapons would stop coming. At that point, it would be up to Wijeya to leverage the success they had experienced thus far.

Already, he and his crew were several steps ahead of most typical pirates. They were not scrounging just to eat. They were actually making a profit. Most of his men drank and whored their way through whatever shares they earned. Mhusa, who cared as little for money as he did for the future, gave most of his earnings away. Lemat was investing his and probably had a foreign bank account, as well, but then, Lemat was always overqualified to be a pirate. He had been some kind of accountant or businessman in his previous life, before a disgrace had prompted him to leave. How a man like that managed to adapt to life at sea, Wijeya did not know. But Lemat had already managed to serve with distinction aboard a cruise ship, acting as purser, before he’d been caught embezzling and thrown in prison. Wijeya had caught wind of it in yet another portside bar. Sailors talked. He had needed someone who could help him with the financial aspects of his business. So he had bribed Lemat’s way out of jail and spread around enough money to ensure the Frenchman’s freedom that Lemat was beholden to Wijeya from that point on.