Life as a New Hire Ch. 28

"Officer Cresky is here as an observer," Vincent clarified. "We have come to touch base with you. Our taskforce has been told you are being cooperative and we would like to keep it that way."

"We were also informed that you had a woman of Japanese extraction with your party," George cut in. I looked over my shoulder then to the left and right.

"She doesn't seem to be around," I shrugged.

"Is she still on the plane?" George made to move past me and see for himself. Moving toward the plane was okay. Moving toward the four Fatal Squirts and Saku was not. Since Sakuniyas hadn't exhibited the slightest desire to inform people before she bifurcated them, I grabbed his elbow.

"Slow down, Tex," I cautioned him. He was looking at my hand as if he was planning out the series of martial arts moves he was going to break me down with. Very Jason Bourne of him.

"We were told she was a...ninja," FBI Vincent said with deep-seated scorn. I let go of George.

"She is. Why do you want to talk with her?" I asked Vincent.

"It is part of the ongoing investigation," he evaded. Tiger Lily had used the interruption to sheppard our youths along while Saku covered the movement with her body. George headed for the plane.

"Well, with an explanation like that, I'm sure she will show when she wants to, Vincent," I sighed.

"She is not part of Havenstone's deal with Javiera. You can be a dick like George there, or you can trust me enough to believe I'm not going to burn any bridges with Special Agent Maddox and FP Castello," I stated. "Do understand, I am not your snitch, CI (confidential informer), or some scumbag turning State's Evidence to save his own skin.

My people do not view themselves to be American citizens, or citizens of any other recognized nation. They do not consider their numerous infractions of your laws to be criminal and they aren't afraid of you. A few of us started this morning shooting people, setting them on fire and watching them burn to death.

Now, before you make your final mistake of this meeting, think about what I've told you," I advised him. He dissected my words and body posture with the skills of a professional cop.

"I would like to talk to your ninja – Ms. Miyako Yuki," he requested. Miyako had a last name and it meant – Snow. Game of Thrones?

"Yes?" Miyako responded. I gulped. Vincent nearly leapt away in surprise.

"You ARE a ninja," he croaked.

Miyako looked up at me, gave me a wickedly little grin then shared it with Vincent.

"I confess to nothing," she beamed.

"Ms. Yuki, last night at approximately 8:30 pm Tokyo time, a series of violent criminal actions happened in five of Japanese largest cities," Vincent told her.

"Ms. Love thinks you can provide some insight into how that might tie into the attack in Arizona," he tried to incite a reaction from Miyako and failed.

"I do not know," she replied in a flat voice. "I will contact some of my associates and give you what information I am allowed to share. Cáel, we need to go now."

"Rachel!" I got her attention. "We need to leave now. Vincent..." I kept going.

"Agent Loire, please," he stated firmly.

"Whatever. I'm inviting you to come along with me. Leave George the keys. He gives me the creeps," I finished.

"What...there she is," George was coming back down the jet's stairs. "We need to..." he clued in on the rapidly loading Amazons.

"You can't dictate the progress of this investigation," Loire said.

"I'm not...Vincent. I go on a first name basis. I am not telling you how to do your job," I tried again. "I'm allowing you to sit in as the intelligence arrives and not get it watered down by some third party.

My people don't trust you and yours, but I trust Javiera and Virginia – Agent Maddox. I told you that we do not consider ourselves Americans. We are part of a tribal identity, culture and faith that predates the United States, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Code of Hammurabi. I understand your disbelief and that doesn't matter. We believe it and that DOES matter.

Got it? Good. That's your concept to juggle. Now, my side's problem is wondering how the US government let roughly 350 heavily armed Special Forces from the People's Republic of China into your country so they could attack us this morning, threatening 500 of our children. Your team dropped the ball and my side isn't feeling the love.

Still, we are honoring our deal to accommodate Javiera's investigative team. If you want to sit in the lobby at Havenstone, be my guest. By making the offer, I've met my good faith obligation to her."

"Why not George here?" Vincent thumbed toward a rather smug George who somehow thought he held the key pieces in this dilemma. "He's our foreign intelligence expert."

"Delilah, shit going down in Japan," Pamela tapped in the Range Rover's driver side window.

"Okay," I sighed. "First off, we need guys like you – honest, fair-minded law enforcement. I can get a 'George' whenever I want one. We don't need him."

"Hey now," George protested. "You don't know me. The taskforce is working on multiple foreign terrorist angles."

"Thanks for lying to us, George," I glared.

"I'm not lying," he protested.

"Then you are a delusional idiot, neck deep in shit and wondering if someone is ever going to cut the lights on," I countered. Mushroom, or lying professional espionage prick...

"I don't think you are an idiot. I think you employ mercenaries and some of your former subcontractors showed up on my Dad's doorstep a few weeks back," I seared him with my banked rage. How did I know this? I didn't. I was testing him to see what his reaction would be.

"Hold that protest one second. Vincent, you come downstairs one night and find me fucking your oldest daughter on your favorite lounger. What do you do?"

His look said it all.

"George, I fuck your wife, make a video and it gets posted to the cloud. What do you do?" I redirected the blow.

His outrage was a second too slow and Vincent caught that. Vincent? Vincent raised his daughter right. I was screwing her on his favorite chair, he'd politely, but firmly, invite me to another room and explain the facts of life if I planned to keep seeing his 'little girl'. Summary; the man trusted his offspring. A good father was what Havenstone needed.

George – his wife cheating would never be his fault and he'd immediately go into cost analysis mode...over his wife's infidelity. Fuck-nut. He was also playing the same game with me, my father's death and how those dead men tracked back to the CIA. I didn't believe they were with 'The Agency'. I believed they were hired killers the CIA used for 'unpleasant' tasks and it was those crimes they were interested in keeping secret.

"How do you know I have daughters?" Vincent turned his investigator's mind back to me.

"A calculated karmic guess, Vincent. You would seriously rock as a father of young ladies," I grinned. "As a man who regularly preys on the feminine gender, I can get a good sense on the quality of their parenting in the first thirty seconds. I'm rarely wrong."

"And my wife?" George mocked me. "The snap judgment of a barfly?"

"Eh...I don't have a clue. I wanted to piss you off and I did," I sneered.

"Special Agent Loire," George snapped back. "Let's go." Vincent tossed him the keys.

"Officer Cresky," I'll be keeping a close eye on our targets and keep in regular contact."

George was smart enough to not argue. We had all taken our seats in the GL-550s when Delilah came sprinting over. The drive into Manhattan was done with a bevy of phone calls. Miyako made some clearly coded message drops. Rachel touched base with Elsa while Delilah had a 'chat' with someone on the other side of the Atlantic.

I missed Aya, but she, as war leader, had to stick with the rest of the Fatal Squirts and that put her in car #2, headed for Caitlyn's townhouse. Aya's mom had sent away three kids of varying heights and got four tiny mites back. I continued to get more than I deserved. I called Hana Sulkanen to set up another meeting with the Earth & Sky.

I got a lot more.

"Hana, this is Cáel Nyilas," I started. "I know I haven't even begun to pay you back for your earlier favor...and I need another one. I need a back-channel meeting with that person at the Kazakhstan consulate."

"Cáel, I need to know why," she answered. I sensed something behind that request.

"This morning, a few hundred men of most likely Han ethnicity tried to kill me," I confessed. "I'm worried that the conflict will spill over to my Kazak friends' way." Long pause.

"Cáel, our family business is heavily invested in oil and natural gas exploration throughout Central Asia," she worried over every word.

"Twenty hours ago we lost contact with our petrochemical operations in Karamay, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, PRC (People's Republic of China)," she made the leap into critical trust. "That is $10.75 billion worth of energy to the PRC and we can't raise anybody at our regional offices or any of the sites. I just got off the phone with our director of operations in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan.

He reported air raid sirens, rolling blackouts and police activity all over the city. Cáel, that's the largest refinery in Central Asia, bar none. This is bad – B-A-D and not only for our corporate interests, but the entire regional economy. Also, do you know where Aksai Chin is? Well, according to their new website they've declared the creation of an independent provisional government, free of Chinese control, and are asking Pakistan for recognition.

Does any of that make sense to you?"

"Where is Aksai Chin?" I mumbled.

"I had to look it up to," Hana sighed. "It is PRC territory and its southwest of Tibet, but that area is somewhat in disputed by Pakistan and India. It is a desolate land in the ass-end of nowhere."

(Historical sidebar)

Everyone knows the first blow struck against the United States in World War Two was at Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. What few recall, is that it was NOT the surprise airstrike that began its attack at 7:48 a.m. While the aerial assault had already been launched when the casus belli occurred, there was a theatrical trailer before the feature presentation.

A US destroyer engaged and destroyed a Japanese min-sub while it attempted to enter the military harbor at Pearl at 6:37 a.m., more than an hour earlier. At that point, the US was at war, yet telegrams weren't swarming to and from the US War and Navy Departments.

Those government agencies weren't sounding the clarion call to all bases in the Pacific and the Far East to man the defenses, sally forth with the warships (the Pacific Fleet and Asiatic squadron) and launching the US Army Air Corp to find and engage the forces of the Empire of Japan (EoJ).

There were multiple reasons for this, but the crucial one was that the US thought it had more time. Contingency plans for fighting the EoJ and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) were, with minor tweaking, three years old. Since there was no US war plan for a first strike on Pearl Harbor, no one in the US Navy understood how fucked they were about to get.

In contrast, the Japanese plans weren't finalized until a month before the attack, so they knew precisely what they had to do. A final bit cultural bias correction (for Americans) is that, for the IJN, Pearl Harbor wasn't even the pivotal move. In the long term, the destruction of Battleship Row at Pearl meant little.

US striking power was going to be pretty minuscule for the first six months of the war, no matter what the outcome of the surprise attack turned out to be. The Pacific War was a sideshow. The Japanese 'must win' was on the other side of the world in places like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Burma. Those regions had the raw materials Japan needed.

The Philippines was a US possession with its own sad, underequipped and inadequate military. No matter what happened at Pearl Harbor, the forces in the Philippines weren't going to get an ounce of aid from the mainland. The Japanese had to take the Philippines because it sat astride the main sea route from the riches of Southeast Asia to the Japanese Home Islands.

The US had been mobilizing for a year and had been spoiling for a war with Japan for six months, yet it had nothing ready to send to the Philippines. They kept thinking they had more time. The British Empire had already been fighting in Europe for two years and they also knew a war with the Empire of Japan was coming, yet they kept putting off the needed reinforcements and force modernizations in their possessions, too. They also thought they had more time.

The Dutch...eh, you couldn't blame the Dutch for their pathetic effort. Their homeland had been overrun by Nazi Germany in 1940, so they had nothing to spare for their greatest colonial possession (yes, in 1941, tiny, little Holland owned the massive Dutch East Indies, aka Indonesia).

How does this relate to the tale? The Seven Pillars was playing the role of Imperial Japan, the Amazons were the US Pacific Fleet, the 7 Ninja Families were in the position of the Philippines, the Black Lotus were British South East Asia and the prize was the Earth & Sky/Dutch East Indies.

(End of sidebar)

The 9 Clans, the Amazons and the Earth & Sky ALL knew they were going to have to fight the Seven Pillars in their near future. The 9 Clan expected the Seven Pillars to drop like a ton of bricks on their ancient enemies, the Black Lotus, in Southeast Asia, even though the key financial support for the Black Lotus was the Ninja Clans and their influence in Japan.

In retrospect, knocking off the ninja first made perfect sense. Without the Ninja, the Black Lotus would be in dire financial straits. Duh. The Amazons had thirty years to make a contingency for the Seven Pillars launching a preemptive attack. So many of their children gathered in one spot was a perfect target...and no Amazon planners had seen it coming.

The Amazons, despite their global air/sea-lift capability, thought their bases in the western North America were safe. Even then, they were thinking global military strategy, not diplomatic blackmail. Attacking the camp gave no serious strategic advantage. Even wiping out the entire complex wouldn't noticeably weaken the Amazon's war-fighting capability.

The Seven Pillars' plan was to buy time by holding the children hostage. Either the Amazons would make concessions, or at least negotiate until the 7P could cripple the 9 Clans and the Earth & Sky before the Amazons launched their expected counterstroke. Even the actual calamity at Summer Camp wasn't a terrible blow to their stratagem.

The Amazons were seen as a peripheral nuisance, even though they had freeholds in both Indonesia and Australia. They were bit players in East Asia. The Seven Pillars knew the Amazons would be coming for them eventually. They had gambled with the lives of a few hundred of their elite troops and lost.

The failure of that mission was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. In Asia, tens of thousands of Seven Pillar operatives, troops and pawns sprang into action and the ninja and Earth & Sky were in deep kimchi. So, if the Seven Pillars was in the midst of their Asian pseudo-secret blitzkrieg, what the fuck was going on in Aksai Chin?

It made no sense to everyone in the loop except me...and less than ten other Amazons. Historically, both Germany and Japan started their global ambitions in the mid-twentieth century with surprise attacks and both succumbed because they failed to appreciate the qualities of their enemies.

Only one quality mattered at this critical juncture. It was the military genius leading the Earth & Sky. Yeah, he barely had a week on the job. It turned out to not really matter. The E&S knew precisely who'd they had to beat in order to succeed – the Seven Pillars. For sixty years, they'd been ramping up their resources and refining their plans.

I invented a saying I was going to tell Temujin if we ever met; 'don't dance on the graves of your enemies until you know the strength of their children'. More on that later.

"Hana, set up the meeting and give me the number of whomever runs security over there," I requested.

"I'll do what I can to set up the meeting, but let me handle the security matters," she counter-offered. "Jormo won't like you having any part of our procedures."

"I understand that and his low opinion of me. I also know that this is a case of who you know being more valuable than what you know," I pleaded. I really owed Hana.

"These people feel obligated to me on a personal level. It will be more than business if I make the request, I promise you," I urged her. Pause.

"Deal. Keep me informed Cáel," she requested before hanging up. Vincent looked me over.

"Did you just conspire with some sort of corporate entity to interfere in the internal security of one, or more foreign countries?" he quizzed me. My answer caught him off-guard.

"Yes, I did. Please don't arrest me," I met his gaze. My open confession floored him.

"That's why you didn't want George here," he nodded. I wanted to do summersaults into a handstand. A bright man who wasn't an insult to all masculine virtues. This guy had to meet Felix, who I imagined was starting to feel awful lonely at work.

"Cáel, when we get Virginia back, we keep him," Pamela grinned. Our minds were in synch. "Are you divorced?" she asked Vincent. He mulled over his obligation to reply.

"Widower," he confided. "Medical malpractice three years ago."

"My sympathies," she nodded. "I hope you are ready to get back in the dating pool."

"Excuse me?" he sounded perturbed. "My private life is none of your business."

"Giving you a bodyguard that you look relaxed around is our business," Rachel caught on.

"I'm a federal agent. I don't need a bodyguard," he countered.

"I will make you a deal," Pamela smirked.

"Pick any person in this car. If you can take them in a combination of unarmed, armed, pistol and long-arms, I'll shut up about the bodyguard," Pamela challenged him. I saw it in his eyes. He was about to call me out. Instead he gave Rachel and Pamela a second look.

"You," he indicated Pamela. He hadn't chosen the oldest.

He had picked the one the rest of us deferred to. Good man.

"Very well," Pamela shook his hand.

"Hey Agrippina Minor, do you even remember what bullets and guns are used for?" I teased her.

"Suck it up, Caligula," she responded.

"I throw bullets to trip up my enemies up so I can catch them and beat them with the butt of my Barrett boom-stick," she mocked me.

"Bruce Campbell is an under-appreciated comedic talent," Vincent offered.

"Quick," Delilah reached forward from the rear seat. "Do you have any daughters of dating age?"

"Oh...I suggest you show us your daughters so we keep them safe from Cáel," Rachel clued in. "He's a great male, but requires constant supervision."

"Male?" Vincent looked at me.

"Yeah. When you and I roll into Havenstone, we'll double the male population in the building," I informed him.

"Brian is gone," Wiesława enlightened me.

"Oh..." I grunted. Brian's attitude had made his departure inevitable, that sanctimonious bastard.

"Gone?" Vincent prodded me. He was right to suspect nefarious 'goings on'.

"Wiesława, where did Brian get stationed?" I asked.

"Sydney...Austria...no, Australia...the continent," she worked through her imperfect English.

"Yeah, I recall Brian having a thing for didgeridoos," I mused. A minute later.

"He's been kidnapped and smuggled to another country, hasn't he?" Vincent asked the group.

No one said anything.

"Thank you for not lying to me," he remarked. "Was he a bad person?" Trick question.

"Vincent, if you want, we can arrange a phone call so you can talk to the guy," I offered. "I think he's currently a locust-wrangler in the Outback."