In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

overseas security firm, the billion-dollar glove to protect China’s trillion-dollar fist.

Both men agreed on the importance of the South China Sea to China’s future. Beneath its waters lay more oil and natural gas than was possessed by any single nation on earth, as well as important deep-sea channels for China’s ballistic missile submarines. Unfortunately for China, above those resources rumbled the second most trafficked military and commercial sea-lane in the world. Day and night, half the world’s merchant tonnage and a third of its sea traffic, including tankers, freighters, warships, and fishing vessels, traversed the sea’s waters. The South China Sea was a marginal sea, surrounded by seven other countries so that it was more of a lake, each of which claimed rights to exploit the waters. Extracting wealth from such an active sea was like hunting for a lost contact lens in Tiananmen Square.

China was not a friendly neighbor. It claimed nearly the entire South China Sea and all that lay beneath it. To enforce its claims, China deployed its maritime forces to sail the waters, seizing most any visible rock or reef, onto which it promptly dumped tons of old concrete and debris, transforming maritime features into artificial islands it then fortified and armed. Rock by rock, reef by reef, China was adversely possessing the South China Sea. It was an approach that invited conflict.

Krieger had competition for the waters, too. A Russian, Dmitri Yurchenko. Yurchenko’s paramilitary company was lobbying the Vietnamese to let Russian state oil giant Rosprom drill Vietnam’s oil claims, forcing China to either relinquish its claims to Vietnamese waters or take on Russia. Yurchenko was courting Malaysia with a similar deal, both arrangements bait awaiting a switch. For the right price, Krieger knew, Yurchenko would reverse his arrangements with Vietnam and Malaysia in favor of China. Once Beijing stepped in, Yurchenko’s Amur Tactical Resources would have a direct pipeline to Chinese leadership, and the most valuable military-services contract on earth. Krieger could not allow that, of course.

The Americans had their own interests to protect. The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet was sending destroyers, fighter jets, and surveillance aircraft through waters and airspace claimed by China, reasserting claims of the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and others while demonstrating its own freedom to navigate the South China Sea—all the while bringing the world closer to war.

Krieger wasn’t ready for war yet. He offered China a businessman’s solution to its growing South China Sea problem.

“Don’t seize islands,” he told Ho. “Buy the far shore.”

Krieger presented Ho with a plan to acquire the region’s strategic ports, bury the ownership, and take control of the entire South China Sea without conflict. They started with Orviston Wharf in Darwin, Australia, a simple purchase in Australia’s forgotten north. For China, buying up foreign ports meant improved access to resources in the South China Sea without increased friction. For Krieger, it meant laying a snare around the world’s most valuable body of water.

•   •   •

His laptop buzzed. Krieger looked down at an image of his daughter, Blaze, in a corner of his screen. She was on board a dive boat, in her bathing suit, scowling. He hit accept. “How are the whale sharks?” he asked.

“They feed them whale shark candy on Cebu,” she said. “It makes them forget to migrate.”

“What’s whale shark candy?” he asked.

“Shrimp.”

“Isn’t that what they eat?”

“That’s not the point and you know it,” she said. “I’m not going back in the water.”

“Stand by.” He muted their conversation and turned to his assistant.

“Donsol,” Mapes said. “We can fly them there in about an hour.”

He returned to Blaze. “Pack up. You’re going to Donsol. They don’t bait them there.”

“Can you still meet us?”

“Before dinner,” he said.

“I’ll take that as a promise,” Blaze replied.

He had to laugh. Fortune called him “the world’s richest security guard”—but the real boss in his family was his seventeen-year-old daughter. He closed his laptop and moved it to the corner of his desk. He checked his watch, leaned back in his chair, and interlocked his fingers.

“Okay. Bring him in.”

Mapes shut down her digital tablet and headed for the door. She was tall and lean, half Thai, half African-American, with a shaved head, dressed today in black pants and black jacket over a high-collared white blouse.

“And Mapes,” he added, “have the chopper ready by noon.”

Mapes closed the door behind her, conversation not her strong suit—but then conversation was not why he’d hired her. Sex was not the reason, either. Truth was he was afraid of what Mapes might come up with in bed. Chances were a bed would have nothing to do with it.

Mapes returned to his office, and Krieger got to his feet.

“Admiral,” he said, rounding his desk and putting out his hand. “Thank you for making time for me.”

Admiral Everett Tighe, commander of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, wore his service dress whites. “Any friend of the Navy, Terry,” he said, surveying Krieger’s office with barely disguised contempt. It was the same with all these old salts, Krieger thought. He could practically hear the adding machine spinning inside Tighe’s head, the old man calculating Raptor’s cost, taking it all personally, as if every dollar Krieger spent over the price of a Boston Whaler were an act of treason.

As treason went, Raptor possessed some Benedict Arnold–level amenities. The 190-foot Abeking & Rasmussen superyacht included dual helipads, belowdecks hangar, drive-in tender bay, and a custom submersible. Her zero-speed stabilizers allowed Krieger to slip into a ripple-free lap pool at speed or deliver his signature backhand drop on the midships squash court. All of the important areas, including this office, were armored and containable. His supervillain yacht, Blaze called it.

Tighe added, predictably, “It’s your dime.”

“Indeed,” Krieger said. “Please.”

The admiral glanced toward the sumptuous white leather lounge chairs in the room’s aft section. By contrast, the single wooden chair in front of Krieger’s desk had the look of a dunce seat. Krieger circled his desk and sat down behind it. He had plans for this meeting, and they did not involve the