Big Pete (Privateer Tales Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

transport ship full of armored Marines and then complain about damage to your city? We had no mission. We were headed back to the FOB to pick up some maggots and take a couple of days of R&R, hopefully not in that order.”
    She stepped up and slapped me with an open hand. “You’ll keep a civil tongue while addressing an officer,” she reprimanded. I’d forgotten that Skamper was a derogatory term that loosely implied these guys were still tribesmen from the jungle.
    “Yeah. My bad,” I replied.
    “What was on the ship that you wanted to recover?”
    It was a common interrogation technique. She’d ask me a bunch of different questions and cover a lot of bases. I could expect to hear these questions a few hundred times over the next several hours, most likely with little to no sleep. She’d keep moving the questions around, chipping away at me until I gave up something useful. The fact was, I didn’t know anything useful. War hadn’t changed a lot over the last dozen centuries. We poked each other with pointy sticks until someone went home.
    The city of Manaus was at the center of a long running war over mineral resources in the Amazonian basin.  My team and I were ultimately just the pointy end of the stick. Someone else had all of the brilliant ideas and it’s not like any of that brilliance ever trickled down to me. My guess was she already knew that - otherwise a more sophisticated interview team would be handling me.
    “Nothing on the ship that I could see,” I said.
    “Where’s the pilot?” she asked.
    I tried to hide my interest in her question but it took me off guard. She picked up on it. We were both crappy at this game. She’d told me something valuable and I’d turned right around and told her something even more valuable. Now she knew that we hadn’t recovered Lieutenant Irawan. I was more than a little pleased that they hadn’t either.
    The Lieutenant suppressed a smile and stood to leave. No doubt she was going to send out a search team for Irawan. Peralta fired off a series of orders in a language I didn’t understand. It sounded like Spanish, but in this region it could be any number of different dialects. My AI would have translated, but I wasn’t wearing any intelligent clothing. Just before the door closed, I caught a glance of the connecting room. It wasn't a normal military base. I was being held in an office building.

AVENGING ANGEL
     
    My head was screaming, so I lay back down on the cot. I was looking forward to letting the med-patches do their work. Frak, what I wouldn’t give for a glass of whiskey. The Skampers had left the lights on, I supposed to keep me awake. If they thought that’d prevent me from sleeping, they were nuts. Find me a grunt who can’t sleep in the middle of a crowded room of monkeys singing the Hallelujah Chorus and I’ll show you a grunt who hasn’t seen combat.
    I wasn’t sure how long I’d been down, but I estimated no more than two hours. When you sleep in a room, you get a sense of the rhythm of sounds around you - from the ventilation system to the opening and closing of doors. I didn’t sleep with one eye open, so much as with one ear open, so when I heard the change I knew it was time to get up and pay attention.
    Something was out of place, but I couldn't immediately identify what that something was. My eyes stayed closed and I placed my hand against the wall. For ninety seconds nothing happened and I was about to dismiss my feeling as just nerves. Then I heard a low rumble and the wall shuddered beneath my hand. If you weren’t paying attention you would likely have missed it. In my cell, I had nothing else going on, so it got my full attention.
    It made no sense. If Command wasn’t willing to send in a team to rescue Lieutenant Irawan they certainly wouldn’t send anyone after me. But no one uses explosive charges on a building they control. No, the Skampers had an uninvited party guest and I was all about turning up the music.