Tiger by the Tail Read Online Free PDF Page A

position. Lasko is on overwatch above us, and the Kildar and the master chief are observing on the trawler,” Greznya reported.
    Vanner nodded. They’d soundproofed the large cabin, but if the Keldara sniper went green, they’d still hear the reports of the Barrett twenty feet overhead.
    “General ship traffic on radar quiet. Nothing approaching within ten nautical miles,” Irina said.
    “Monitoring of communications on naval and law enforcement bandwidths also ongoing—nothing urgent to speak of,” Daria said a moment afterward.
    “Communications of commercial vessels in the area also quiet. Nearest AIS is over two hundred klicks. It would seem that everyone is avoiding area,” Greznya, who was pulling double-duty, said.
    “Given all the pirates migrating here in the past few years, I can’t blame them.” Vanner nodded in satisfaction, then clenched his teeth as a bolt of pain shot through his temples. While the Keldara men had all been tasked as front line fighters, the women were put on fire support and intelligence gathering details. They handled both equally well, with Irina, Daria, and his beloved Greznya—none of them more than twenty-one years old, and all staggeringly beautiful—managing multiple information feeds on a local and regional basis. “How’s the translator program coming along?”
    “Operating at seventy-eight percent efficiency. It appears to be taking longer to assimilate the local dialects.”
    “Unsurprising, since there’s probably hundreds in the region alone. All of the raw pickup will be great for our database, though.”
    After their op in the criminal city of Lunari, in Albania, and the difficult op in Florida, Vanner had realized that they really needed a translate-on-the-fly program. No, even more than that; they needed something that could take in multiple streams of raw verbal data, create its own dictionary for each language, and extrapolate for dialect, slang, etc. Not only did it have to handle what was being said now, but scale to incorporate the inevitable shifts in language from year to year, including business terms, street slang, specialized terminology, and anything else that might come up in the future. Although Vanner was proficient in eight languages and knew enough to get by in a half-dozen others, often the amount of raw data the girls could pull was way too much for one person, or even a team, to process efficiently.
    They had been tweaking a suite that handled most of what they needed, but it been dealing primarily with European Romance languages over the past few months. The Kildar’s East Asian op had fit perfectly with Vanner’s desire to expose the program to languages with no relation to the cluster that had developed on the European continent. After this, he’d have to hit Africa and South America, and maybe some of the indigenous tribes north of the Arctic Circle—assuming any were left—and he’d have a near complete library of the major languages around the world to tap into. And then comes the app , he thought with a grin, but first steps first.
    Vanner sipped his coffee. “Maintain overwatch. Holler if anything interesting happens out there.”
    * * *
    As the pirate fell, Vanel scrambled up the rope one-handed. When he got a grip on the railing, he climbed over, keeping his pistol trained on the body sprawled on the filthy deck. The subsonic 9mm bullet had made a neat hole that now leaked a mix of blood and clear fluid from the back of the pirate’s head.
    There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth, and every sense felt heightened. He saw everything, smelled everything, felt everything. The slight movement of the rough deck under his feet. The stink befouling the crotch of the dead man’s rough shorts, overpowering his rank body odor. The last wisp of cigarette smoke leaking from the man’s open mouth. The clarity of the empty deck through his night vision gear. Vanel had never felt more alive. There was no guilt, no fear, no