Malcolm sighed, bleakly. It was so . . . frankly inconceivable, that a mere mercenary should be so difficult. Ah, well. Needs must . . .
"General Rivers, I want you to go see him and see what he'll take. Don't commit us to anything yet. See what he might take that isn't in the form of dollars. The President doesn't want to go to congress over this. Maybe we have something he wants . . . weapons . . . gold . . . I dunno. But the President wants him and what the President wants—"
"I'll leave day after tomorrow, Mr. Secretary. But I can't promise anything."
9/7/467 AC, Motor Yacht Suzy Q, Xamar Coast
The storm trick wouldn't work more than once. At least, it wouldn't work twice in a row. The classis needed something else, rather, several somethings else.
The Suzy Q was one of those things. Oh, she was a real yacht, all right, one hundred and ten feet worth of outrageous luxury. Even the girls aboard were luxury models, hookers taken from the Wappen von Bremen and paid a hefty bonus for sunning themselves topless on the forward deck. Everyone had been surprised that so many of the girls had volunteered when asked. Six had been needed, thirty-two had volunteered, and that was even before the danger bonus was mentioned. Who knew; perhaps they had begun to think of themselves as legionettes.
Whatever the motivation, they did a very impressive job, sunning and stretching, nonchalantly showing off their assets to the fishing boats they passed. The classis assumed, not unreasonably, that at least some of those boats reporting directly to Pirates-R-Us.
In anticipation of that, the boat was not quite so yacht-like under the surface. Both sides and the stern had been heavily reinforced with resinated aramid-fiber armor plates. Three .41-caliber machine guns were positioned, each side, to fire outward, as was a seventh to fire astern. The machine guns had been modified with a special jacket for water cooling. They could fire for half an hour or more before the barrels overheated. As a matter of fact, the half hour was about as much as the testing committee had cared to check. No one really knew how long they could fire without a let up. Besides the .41s, under the forward deck a single front-shielded 20mm was poised to be raised by hydraulics. An additional seven Cazadors and an equal number of sailors posed as crew in civilian dress, over and above the hidden seventeen slotted to man the machine guns and 20mm.
The Cazadors didn't get the girls' danger bonus, though they drew normal combat pay.
Centurion Rodriguez, admiring the girls from the wheel house, thought, Screw the bonus; watching the girls is bonus enough. Standing next to him the Suzy Q's skipper, Warrant Officer Chu, had much the same thought.
Both were making plans for their next scheduled visit to the von Bremen.
"Sweet duty," mused Rodriguez.
"That it is," agreed Chu. He pointed at the boat's radar screen. "But it's about to get a lot less sweet."
"Suzy Q this is Ironsides; company coming."
Chu picked up the microphone and answered, "We see 'em coming, Ironsides. No problem, just the one boat."
"Shall I have the girls start their routine?" asked Rodriguez.
Chu noted the distance on the screen by eye. He shook his head slightly. "No . . . wait a bit. They won't be here for half an hour. But why don't you have the Santisima Trinidad close it up some?"
* * *
The pirate vessel was crammed to the gills with mujahadin. At least, they liked to style themselves as holy warriors; it gave them a warm and fuzzy feeling to be doing the work of God while filling their pockets.
"And aren't those some bits of divine workmanship?" asked the boat's chief, rhetorically, looking over the exceptionally well-breasted and tanned girls standing by the target's bow and gesturing frantically. "And won't they bring a good price at market."
He'd asked rhetorically but his assistant had been listening even so. "The boat itself will bring a better one," he said, "and anyone who can afford that boat and those girls will probably bring a better ransom still."
"Oh, look," tsked the pirate chief. "We've frightened them; they're running below. Well, that won't matter. Cheat of us our gaze now, we'll enjoy your bodies all the more later."
The chief turned to his assistant. "Fire a shot across their bow and tell them to kill engines and prepare to be boarded."
* * *
Women end up whoring for any of a huge number of reasons. Some, albeit few, actually like the work. Others have no other skills. Some are lazy, and those often do very poorly even at hooking, while others just want to raise a lot of money in a hurry and then retire back home where no one knows what they've been and done.
Jaquelina Gonzalez's reasons were none of those. At the age of fourteen, she'd had the poor judgment to get involved in one of Colombia Latina's innumerable guerilla wars. Worse, she'd chosen the wrong—the losing—side. Undocumented, fleeing for her life, with no assets but those God had given her and no skills that anyone wanted, she'd found herself drifting into whoredom as a better alternative to starvation. Unofficially, she was the leader of the girls on the Suzy Q, and one of the senior hookers on the Wappen von Bremen, as the girls counted such things.
For the life of her, she could not have answered why she'd volunteered for this job. Maybe it was merely to get away from the von Bremen for a while. Maybe it was something else.
Whatever her reasons, Jaquelina had serious doubts about her wisdom once the pirate vessel got close enough for her to see the men waving their rifles and machetes. Rape? Well, she'd been raped before and survived it. Torture? Yes, she made the mistake of being captured once and so she knew about torture. Come to think of it, though she really didn't like to think of it, the two—rape and torture—had gone together.
"Come on, ladies," she ordered, "time for us to go below."
She waited at the hatch, shoving the other girls ahead of her, before she, too, went below to the armored compartment built especially to house them. Just before descending, Jaquelina heard a familiar blast from forward of the ship.
* * *
The pirate chief saw a portion of the forward deck begin to rise and was very quick to add up two plus two and come up with "Holy fucking shit; it's a trap." When a three meter long section of the port side of the boat swung out he directed an RGL gunner to fire, "For the love of Allah and the hope of seeing your family again!"
The RGL flew true and a gaping wound appeared in the target's side. Dimly, through the smoke from the blast, the pirates could see what had to be a machine gun and perhaps a body slumped over it. Two more shells flew in short order toward the rising 20mm, missing it but hitting the shield and sending the men waiting to man it sprawling. The Xamaris had little time for congratulations as two more openings appeared, even as a much larger gun continued to rise on the deck.
The 20mm sat unaimed and unmanned until a couple of Cazadors could be rousted from below. When they arrived, the larger gun began to toss out its shells, knocking down the Xamari pirates in groups.