A Second Chance Bk. 03 Ch. 09

As soon as the jet was in the air I had my mobile phone out and my fingers were stumbling through several messages.

'Hi beautiful Bella, got to pass on our breakfast date, been called away. May not be back for a few days.'

'Shanti, been called away on urgent business but your only plan for Wednesday night is to surrender to me after the fights have finished -- and tell that man of yours that I may keep you for a day or two.'

Shanti responded first, 'Damn ... wanted you in front of the camera today. And do you really think that you can handle me for more than one night man?' I could hear her rich West Indian voice in her response and my cock was starting to get very interested.

'Knew you were going to try and get me in your porn shoot today and would have done you too -- but this is serious business -- and tell Jay that I'll send you back when I've finished with you and not before.'

I had beaten Shanti in a no-holds barred match the Wednesday before and she had been the prize just as Angela had been the prize when she had wrestled Shanti's partner earlier in the night. After that fight there had been some trash talk about Jay owning my woman and I would have done the same thing in return but Shanti had been hurt in our fight and any talk of claiming my prize was put off till she had recovered.

In Jay and Shanti's eyes the fact that I couldn't take Shanti straight after the fight had given me the right to demand even more and I wasn't going to argue with that. Shanti was tall and lithe and an absolute stunner so having even more time to enjoy her was an absolute bonus ... and it gave me even more chance to trash talk Jay and make him suffer even more.

Shanti posted a laughing emoji, 'Man you're making me wet ... I will be so disappointed if you can't live up to your hype ... and I might just tell Jay that you're gonna keep me till Friday.'

'Shanti you're beautiful and I can't wait till Wednesday night.'

'Keep telling me that man and I'll stay till the girls get home.'

We ended our chat there and I went back to a response from Bella that had come in while I was chatting with Shanti.

Bella's response was a simple 'Oh' and a sad emoji.

'I'm sorry babe I'm not running away ... I wish I was holding you in my arms right now ... but I can't. Is Eamonn causing you any problems?'

'No, tried to ring me a few times and tried to use his key to get in here and into the office but the locks were changed Friday afternoon because a key went missing.'

'OK how about I organise a bodyguard for you till I get back or until you can get a restraining order served on him?'

'You would do that for me?'

'Of course I would.'

'Damn you're making me cry.'

'I'll call you in a few minutes when I've organised things.'

I called a guy I knew who thought he owed me a favour and organised for Bella to have someone at her door ... or her office door ... 24 hours a day and then I called Bella.

"What's that funny roaring noise?"

I chuckled, "I'm at 20,000 feet in a small jet heading north." Before she could respond I gave her the details.

She thanked me and then said, "I don't want to scare you but I can't think of any place I would rather be than in your arms right now."

"You're not scaring me Bella, I would really like to be holding you in my arms right now and, if everything goes to plan, I'll be doing that on Tuesday afternoon. I'll call you as soon as I can and I'll text you if I can't call."

For the rest of the flight I sat back and tried to get my hear around the fact that, in just a little over a week, I had gone from being a lonely hermit to having four women who all wanted to spend time with me and each of them knew of the others and seemed to have no problems with them.

What made me so special and why were they so comfortable with sharing me? I had no idea, but I wasn't going to let that go to my head and I knew that I had a fine line to walk if I wanted to keep them all happy and have none of them feeling that I was just using them.

Once I had dealt with that I went over what The Old Man had told me to get me to come back into his fold. The bastard knew what buttons to push and he had pushed them hard.

"Your ladies are sailing into a trap Steve," I was still trying to abuse him for having me picked up at the airport when he spoke, and those few words shut me up completely. "There is a person on that boat who the Chinese would very much like to kill because they want to send a strong message to a neighbour and an equally strong message to some of our neighbours.

"They want to avoid using their own forces as much as possible because they want some plausible deniability but everyone will know that they were behind it. So they have done a deal with a Triad group to do their dirty work for them. Foot soldiers for that group are already in Queensland preparing to launch an attack on Drayson's yacht as it sails up the coast tonight.

"They plan on using small boats to intercept the yacht. They will board it, kill everyone onboard and then rendezvousing with a Chinese sub that is currently loitering further out to sea.

"We have the group, and the sub, under surveillance and we could take the group out now but we're a bit short of operatives at the moment so we will need some additional bodies from either the Army or the Queensland police and either way there will be prisoners and that's the last thing we want.

"However, we can forget the Army and the Police if you will agree to take part in this operation. With you we'll have the bare minimum and that's a risk but it's a better choice the using the Police. We can't control them and we need some control in this operation.

"The Triad group will be using small boats, as I said, and our plan is that a small team will hit them while they are launching the boats ... and take no prisoners. Our intelligence is that they are definitely not sailors and have no boating experience so we think that, with the element of surprise, you and two others ... you've worked with them before ... can get the job done.

"There's a RAAF jet out there on the runway ready to take you to Amberley where you can meet the rest of the team. Good luck."

I was climbing into VIP jet when I realised that the bastard hadn't even asked if I would go ... he just knew that I would ... and there had to be something more that he had failed to mention that would give us some advantage other than just surprise and some hope of not getting killed ourselves.

We were wheels down at Amberley RAAF base when a message popped up from Dee, 'Excited about where we are going but I'm missing you big time.'

'Love you babe, can't wait to see you back home.' The Dassault Falcon 7X rolled right into a hanger and as soon as it stopped I was out the door to meet the two other guys who were going to be working with me.

Greg Preston, tall and skinny, always seemed to wear riding boots and spoke with a slow drawl. He looked like a typical Australian stockman, but he was a brilliant strategist and could turn a potential disaster into a perfect result.

Davey Jensen looked like a typical family man. A little too much weight, not quite enough hair on his head and the beaten look that comes with having a nagging wife, but he was none of those things. He was tough, resilient and totally reliable and I knew that I could trust both of them with my life.

Davey was waiting by the door of the hangar office and he beckoned me over as soon as he saw me exit the plane. The office was empty except for Greg and once we had got the handshakes and 'how are you going' greetings over they took me over to a table where a large local map of the Queensland Sunshine Coast was rolled out.

Davey was a Sunshine Coast local so he handled most of the briefing.

"The Old Man says that a Federal Police source is telling them that there are 15 guys in the hit team and they want to hit the boat around midnight as it passes the entrance to the Noosa River. These guys are definitely not professionals, but they're committed so we can assume that they're not going to back out at the last minute.

"At the moment they're hiding somewhere in the Sunshine Coast hinterland with three boats that are only slightly larger than your average tinny ... think half-cabin cruisers that your average fisherman might take offshore if it's not too rough.

"So they're going to need a boat ramp to launch their vessels but they're foreign nationals so they're going to stick out like sore thumbs if they try to use any boat ramp when there are local fishermen around ... and of coursed they don't want to draw attention to themselves.

"So their plan is to launch a little after sunset and wait offshore till they get word from their controllers that the Black Goddess, that's their target, is approaching.

"Most boat ramps around here are pretty quiet at that time of a Sunday but there could still be some locals about and they need that risk. However, there's one ramp on what we locals call, the Noosa Northshore, that's a little remote and you almost never see anyone around from mid-afternoon on a Sunday ... even at high tide."

He pointed to a spot on the map, "They've done some of their homework and they've done some scouting and that's the boat ramp, the Moorindil Street Boat Ramp, is the one they have chosen. That's good for us too because the only houses around there are quite some distance away, and there's nothing on the opposite riverbank either so we should be able to get the job done and leave without being spotted.

"But they're going to have two problems. It's easy to get lost trying to find that particular boat ramp so they might not even make it to the boat ramp. If that happens The Old Man wants us to wait in place for further instructions.

"The second problem is that if they've actually been to that boat ramp it must have been at high tide because that boat ramp is tidal and at low tide it's unusable. Around the time they will be there to launch their boats the tide today will be on the ebb and it will be hard for them to get a boat in the water.

"Of course they're going to try and that will mean that they will be sitting ducks for us," he paused to pin a large photo of the boat ramp and surrounding area over the map. It had obviously been taken from the water and it showed that the boat ramp wasn't much more than a natural sandy slope into the river surrounded by scrub and mangroves.

"As you can see from this photo there's plenty of cover for us to use ... but make sure you lather yourself in insect repellent because the mozzies can eat you alive. There's also a total lack of neighbours near the boat ramp and there's nothing but mangroves across the river from the boat ramp.

"It's a shame that The Old Man couldn't find it in his heart to give us an extra guy but three of us can take them out. If we get really lucky and they get a trailer or a vehicle stuck in the sand as they try to get the first boat in the water then two of us should be able to do it.

"If we don't then some of them may try to escape so what I suggest is that two of us take up positions in the mangroves on either side of the ramp while the third guy hides in the bush back that faces the boat ramp so he can pick off anyone who tries to run for it.

"Of course he could end up hitting the two guys down at the ramp so we will have to keep that in mind when things start getting exciting."

They say that simple plans are the best and this one was about as simple as it could be but the fact was that we simply didn't have enough men to guarantee that we could take out the enemy if something went wrong.

If they scattered into the mangroves then we would be doing well just to extract ourselves. If some of them managed to get to some cover then we could expect to take some fire ourselves and we couldn't afford to take casualties.

We were all experienced and we could all see how things could go terribly wrong, but we had a job to do and there was no way I was going to take a step back.

Davey held up an Uzi sub-machine gun. "This is the weapon of choice for the heroic Aussies who will see off the foreign invaders this afternoon so grab one and let's start cleaning them." We had all used them before so he didn't have to give us a demonstration.

We were all sitting around one of the desks stripping and cleaning our guns when Greg asked the obvious question, "Has anyone told us why we are doing this?"

Davey looked at me, "I think the Old Man might have told you more than he told me," and I nodded.

"The Black Goddess is a very expensive boat that belongs to Roger Drayson, the mining magnate. On board with him are Colin Spaski, another mining magnate, Brandon Chesky another guy who is heavily into mining, a very senior representative of the Vietnamese government, four very attractive women that the likes of you and me could never afford and 10 crew.

"As far as the public is concerned, they are on a pleasure cruise up the coast to Cairns," Davey snorted and Greg chuckled, "yeah, the women are providing the pleasure." And as I said that the ache in my chest returned.

"The reality is that the mining guys have formed a consortium that wants to open up a very remote, but very rich, coal field in the mountains in what was the old North Vietnam. This cruise is the chance for the three mining guys to convince the Vietnamese government that they should give the mining guys the go ahead to start the project.

"The problem is that there is a very powerful neighbour in the region that does not want anyone to assist the Vietnamese government to do anything so here is the perfect opportunity to scare any future investors, show the Vietnamese government that this foreign power can reach and destroy them wherever they are and finally show the world that the Australian government can't even wipe its own bum.

"However, said foreign power doesn't want to openly do the dirty work so they are getting a criminal gang to do the dirty work for them ... although one of their subs is sitting off the coast right now and we think that it's there to pick up the hit team and get them out of the area once the job is done."

Greg laughed, "I think I'm almost sorry I asked, ignorance is bliss and I could use some of that right now."

"Yeah, I'm sure we all could Greg," Davey agreed. "When we've finished cleaning these there will be some lunch brought over for us and then the plane Steve arrived on will fly us over to the Sunshine Coast airport where we'll be met by someone who will drive us to where it's all going to go down.

"We should be safe to get into position by 1500. It's stinking hot and humid over on the coast so every boatie who uses that boat ramp should be home and enjoying their aircon and a beer or three by then.

"Once the job's done a different vehicle will be used to take us out of there and drop us back at the plane and that will then fly us back here."

Simple plans are the easiest ... I kept repeating that to myself in an attempt to keep my PTSD at bay ... but it didn't help with the mozzies. Crouching in the middle of their breeding ground made us delectable targets.

My first glimpse of the enemy improved my outlook ... a little. They all looked as though they had never left the big city before and had no idea how to dress for the outdoors. I swear that one guy was still wearing a suit and tie and another was wearing decorated cowboy boots.

They stuck out like sore thumbs while we, in our black battle overalls and camouflage paint blended into the mangroves in the dim twilight. In other circumstances I might have felt a little sorry for them but they were here to kill Angela ... and I couldn't let that happen.

We watched as they expended a great deal of effort to get the first trailer down into the water and finally, when the driver did manage to get the trailer relatively straight, his 4WD promptly sank up to the rear diff in the soft sand and silt.

There was much crashing of gears as he tried to get the vehicle moving again but all he succeeded in doing was getting the front of his vehicle bogged as well and that completely blocked access to the ramp. They couldn't all fit in one boat so they had to do something.

There was much chatter as they stood around trying to work out what to do and finally one guy, who appeared to be in charge, ordered the others into the mud and water to try and launch the boat that was on the trailer in the hope that would somehow improve their chances of getting the tow vehicle out of the sand..

There seemed to be much arguing about doing that, I guess no one wanted to get their clothes dirty but in the end they gathered around the boat and tried to push it off the trailer.

"I count seven on my side," Davey's voice was calm over the intercom.

"I count seven on my side," I added. A coldness began to settle over me, we were about to go to work.

"And I count one guy back with the other vehicles trying to avoid doing any work." Greg's voice contained no sign of humour, it was just a statement of fact.

"Can you take him out Greg?" Davey had continued as our team leader.

"Yeah, when you're ready."

"Then let's get the job done."

They were so busy arguing that they didn't hear the unmistakable sound of our Uzi's being cocked and they were still arguing as Davey and I stepped out of the mangroves and cut them down. In less than a minute they were all dead ... including Greg's shirker.

The noise had been deafening and it had sent the wildlife fleeing leaving nothing but complete silence when the firing stopped

Blood swirled through the water as the gentle little waves lapped over and around the bodies as we moved among them making sure they were all dead.

"Got one still alive here," I said to warn the others and then despatched him with a single shot to the head from my sidearm.

I prodded a couple to make sure they were dead and another one showed some signs of life so another single shot sent him on his way too. Once we were sure that none of them were left alive, we jogged up the access road for a few hundred metres and then melted into the bush that lined it.

Davey called up our pick-up vehicle and ten minutes later we were on our way out of the area. A small truck and an SUV passed us and the drivers of both vehicles gave a friendly wave.

"It's the clean up crew," Davey said, "although they're not going to be doing much cleaning. I believe that they're going to salt the area with a few hints that those guys were taken out by members of a rival gang. Don't know whether that will stick or not but it might make life interesting in the world of the Triads for a while."

40 minutes later our driver dropped us at our aircraft, parked in a remote spot far from the Sunshine Coast Airport's terminal, and after waiting a few minutes while a domestic flight touched down we were wheels up and heading for Amberley.

Back at Amberley we were relieved of our weapons and debriefed before we were given back our personal belongings. I was then sent back to the plane and on the stroke of midnight I was on my way back to Canberra.

As soon as I could I checked my messages. There was one from Bella telling me that Eamon had met her bodyguard, one from Dee and one from Angela.

Dee's message made me laugh, 'Been given the job of looking after the most important guy on the boat and all he wants to do is fuck my brains out. I'm never gonna last till Cairns.'

Angela's message renewed that ache in my chest, 'Had sex with a virgin but it doesn't make up for missing you ... I want you so badly ... can't believe I love you so much.'

I looked at the time she had sent the message and found that it had only been sent a few minutes before I got on the plane ... so I tried calling her.

"Hello?" Almost a whisper ... is someone else close enough to listen in?