Tom Clancy's HAWX

Chapter 29

"We'll have to give the Sandies something to chew on," Raymond Harris said as he walked Troy back to the operations building from the Gulfstream that had just flown him in from Bangkok. "We'll have to show them that this is damned serious."

The "Sandies" were the firm of Sandringham Partners, Ltd., one of the other PMCs operating in Malaysia. The name made it sound like a firm of London chartered accountants, but in fact, the company was a Cayman Islands — based gang of what Harris referred to as "damned mercenaries who change sides more often than most people change their shirts."

"What do the Sandies have to do with us?" Troy asked. "I thought they were mixed up in some sort of special ops thing way down near Kuantan. We're not even really engaged in country here."

The compound in Kota Bharu Province, officially sanctioned by the Malaysian government, was Fire-hawk's base of operations for the Gulf of Thailand missions against the Cambodian Air Force, but Firehawk was not actually running operations within Malaysia.

"We're not functioning in a vacuum here, Loensch," Harris said. "Guarding the perimeter at these bases is key. It's not something that you'd notice, but you'd sure as hell notice if it wasn't being taken care of. Whenever we go into one of these Third World shitholes like this, Firehawk has to pay the right people to take care of us…. usually local people who know the lay of the land."

"I understood that, but I admit that I didn't think about it too much," Troy admitted.

"Well, it's something that I have to think about when I set up an operational base anywhere," Harris explained. "In this case, we've been paying this organization run by a guy named Buddy — that's not his real first name, but he calls himself that — Keropok, Buddy Keropok. We've been paying Buddy to take care of us, and his people have been doing a damned good job. There weren't any perimeter incidents when you were serving your first tour out here, right?"

"Right, I mean there were no problems that I knew of," Troy said.

"Anyway, Buddy and his people are also doing some other sorts of operations down around Kuantan. That's where they've been having some trouble with the Sandies. The Sandies have killed about a dozen of Buddy's people, and he's getting real pissed off."

"As well he should," Troy agreed.

"Buddy's people killed some Sandies too," Harris conceded. "But only in retaliation. It's an eye for an eye in this culture, same as any. So Buddy came to me and asked me, since I'm running PMC ops here and the Sandies are another PMC, couldn't I just talk to them and figure out a way to end this."

"Were you able?" Troy asked.

"I went down to Singapore for a sit-down with Sandringham's station chief. He's got a real nice flat in a modern building down there. I told him that Buddy's people were doing a good job of taking care of us, and asked what his problem was."

"And…"

"Turf war. Buddy's got a little contraband transfer thing going on south of Kuantan."

"You mean smuggling?" Troy asked, interpreting the phrase contraband transfer.

"I wouldn't exactly call it that, but whatever it is, it got in the way of something that the Sandies were doing." "Smuggling?"

"Probably."

"Not enough for both?"

"Trouble is that the Sandies have been fighting the rebels for so long down in that area that they essentially control the whole east coast of Malaysia. This includes contraband transfers. The rebels used to run all that, but now the Sandies do."

"And they don't want to share?"

"The Sandies are dealing from a position of strength. They have the government wrapped around their proverbial fingers since they beat the rebels. They don't feel that they need to share with anyone. I told him to cut Buddy some slack, and he said he'd think about it. He got cagey and told me we'd talk in the morning."

"That sounds indecisive."

"Well, he needed to talk to his bosses," Harris said. "And his bosses talked to our bosses, and that night, I got a call from Herndon. The Firehawk board of directors had gotten a call from the head Sandy down in the Caymans. They came up with a novel solution."

"What's that?" Troy asked, intrigued.

"The head Sandy said make us an offer, and Firehawk offered to buy Sandringham," Harris said. "The Fire-hawk board figured that if Firehawk owned Sandringham, then they would just tell the Sandies down at Kuantan to back the hell off."

"That sounds like it ought to work," Troy said, thinking that all's well that ends well.

"Except for one little detail… it didn't work. The Sandies turned down the Firehawk offer. They didn't even counter. Firehawk upped the bid and the Sandies just hung up the phone on 'em. I went back to see the bastard in Singapore the next morning, and he basically told me to go fuck myself… and take Buddy Keropok with me. That's why we gotta get involved and show the bastards that Firehawk means business."

"How can we do that?"

"We have seven F-16s here at Kota," Harris said, thinking out loud. "We'll load up with JDAMs. The Sandies have a staging base down on the coast near Kuantan. We'll just teach 'em a lesson the old-fashioned way."

"Can we do that?" Troy asked. "I mean, does our mandate, our contract, allow us—"

"Sure as hell," Harris said. "Remember when we were out in Sudan and the Al-Qinamah were hiding in Eritrea and we needed to go after 'em, but we had those damned `rules of engagement'?"

"Yeah…"

"We were allowed to fire if fired upon?"

"Yeah…"

"Well, every PMC contract that's been written has a provision that permits every PMC to defend itself…. and the lawyers have told us that this means we can go after the sources of threats just like we did with the damned SAM missiles over there in Eritrea."

"Just to clarify, then," Troy said. "Our job would be to curtail the Sandringham threat against Buddy Keropok, who is our protector here in Malaysia?"

"Screw it," Harris said. "This is a fuckin' war. We're gonna do more than that. We're gonna blow the Sandies the hell out of Malaysia."

"Do they have any airpower, any fighters that might oppose a bomb run?" Troy asked, interjecting an element of practicality.

"Nothing more than a few choppers and a Gulfstream or two."

"Should we do a recon flight over their base just to make sure?"

"Absolutely, but we'd better do it quick," Harris said, eager to get his operation off the ground. "I want to feed real-time data back here so that we can launch the strike package as soon as possible… like I mean within an hour or two."

"I'll volunteer to fly the recon flight," Troy said.

"Plan on a long day, then," Harris said. "I want a maximum effort on that target, so as soon as you touch down after the recon flight, I want you to load up and fly as part of the strike package."

"Absolutely." Troy smiled. His job was to kill bad guys, and if the bosses at Firehawk said the Sandies were the bad guys, then it was them he would kill. However, he thought it so ironic that had the acquisition negotiations, handled between people safe in their comfortable offices, gone differently, the killers and victims would suddenly have been friends. After his last mission in Guatemala, though, these ironies were no longer surprises.

"Isn't this great?" Harris asked as the two men parted company outside the operations shack.

"What's great?"

"Being able to declare a war when it needs to be declared, and then just go do it."

"As opposed to…"

"Having to wait for a big room full of politicians to argue and bicker about it and quibble over rules of engagement. That's why all wars ought to be run by the PMCs. We're a hell of a lot more efficient than governments… don't you think?"

"Absolutely," Troy said, not quite able to get his head around what Harris perceived as the logical future of armed conflict.