Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Because there’s rules,” he said.

  “Rules?”

  “Yeah,” he said, stopping now that we were out of sight and sound of the others. “The security guys over there? In the yard? They know there’s gonna be some shit going down, time to time. Deal is, they won’t shoot at us, we don’t shoot at them. They catch a guy, he’s fucking caught. End of story. Don’t fuck that up for us, okay?”

  I nodded. We started walking again, through the piles of wrecked, burned, or simply rusted-out shipping containers. There were dozens of them, dropped onto the point of land between the stinking creek and the fenced stack yard. Pardee stayed close to our guide, while I stayed back and watched the shepherds as much as I watched the bearded man. If he was leading us into an ambush, the dogs should be able to sense it and give us warning. Then he surprised us.

  “So you’re looking for the colonel?” he asked over his shoulder, as we picked our way through a jumble of sheet metal and hydraulic hoses.

  “Might be,” I said. “How do you know him?”

  He laughed. “Same way you guys do, probably. We’ve done some business.”

  “Here?” I asked, indicating all the accumulated junk. Even as I said that, I noticed that there was a clearly defined path through all the wreckage.

  “No, mostly on that nice big boat of his,” he said. Then he stopped and held up a hand. “Okay—from here on in, we don’t talk. Make sure those dogs don’t bark, either. See those three cans?”

  There were three containers, badly dented and rusted out, that appeared to have been dropped in a line. The doors were long gone. Then I realized that they were lined up, front to back. A steel tunnel, or covered bridge, which crossed the creek and landed us on the bank below the chain-link fence up above. A perfect place for an ambush, too. There was light shining down the bank from the light standards in the yard, but that tunnel was black as the grave.

  “Stay to the left-hand side, you won’t fall through,” he said. “I’ll go first, you all come single file, and quiet-like. No lights, no talking.”

  I gave Frack a command, and he trotted up to join the bearded man, who looked down in momentary alarm at the big black dog that was now his new best friend. “In case there’s a bad guy hiding out in all that mess,” I said. “He’ll let you know, and then he’ll tear some shit up, if he feels like it.”

  Starting with you was the unspoken message, but Beard just shrugged and said okay. Pardee followed him and Frack. I went next, with Frick behind, in case the problem erupted behind us. I had my .45 out, too, rules or no rules. Pardee had his uncovered, but still holstered.

  Nothing happened. We picked our way through the darkness of the three containers, our footfalls echoing quietly in the wobbly steel tube. I could sense big holes in the floor to my right, and could actually smell the creek. We used the tie-down fittings to stay upright against the slope of the tunnel. Once I heard one of the dogs scrabbling for footing on the metal floor, but the bearded man kept going, forward and up toward where the final container brought us almost to the edge of the fence. There was a well-worn track going the final ten feet from the last container to the bottom of the fence. I went forward to join our guide just inside the container.

  “They have to know about this,” I said quietly, pointing to the worn path with my chin.

  Beard shrugged. “There’s lots of scams working in this place,” he said. “The people who run it expect a certain amount of wastage, as they call it. The trick is to keep it in bounds. That’s what the colonel likes to say. Keep it in bounds, not too much, nobody getting too greedy, and they’ll look the other way.”

  “For a piece of the action, you mean.”

  He nodded. “Up to a certain level. This seaport here is a union shop. Teamsters. Longshoremen. Merchant marine. Railroad.”

  “The helping-hands unions.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he smiled. “Sweethearts, every one of them. Some guys want a piece of the action; the big bosses just want peace in the valley, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  I said I did. He pulled out a small set of binoculars and began to scan the area of the stack yard along the main river. Pardee continued to watch him, while the shepherds sat down and waited for new orders.

  “What was the colonel’s interest in this place?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “Was?” he asked, giving me a sideways, suspicious look.

  I’d screwed up, but I pretended not to notice. “Some people want a word with him, so they hired us. If he’s on the run, he’s not likely to be doing regular business, here or anywhere else, right now. Not our problem either way. I’m just curious.”

  He went back to scanning the lanes and the rows of boxes piled out in the yard.

  “The colonel, he’s in the import business,” he said. “He’s moving illegals.”

  Now, that was a surprise. The notion that Trask had been moving Mexican field workers across the American border wasn’t much in keeping with his rant about how the country was going to hell. Then I remembered the sudden swarm of foreigners out of that one container.

  “You talking wetbacks in seagoing containers?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” he said. “They don’t put the colonel’s meat in cans. Those big-ass ships bring ’em in like passengers. And, according to the colonel, these aren’t tomato pickers. These are journeymen who can do complicated shit. People who can run a lathe, do CAD-CAM, X-ray techs, or guys who can operate a big Caterpillar tractor.”

  “They come up in the ships from down south?”

  “Right. The crews are all in on it—they’re getting paid off, too. The ships feed ’em and maybe even work ’em. They go in a can just before the ship lands.”

  “And then?”

  “Then those cans go out there, into the stacks. The ones with people in ’em go on the bottom of a stack, every time, real convenient-like. Then the colonel, he comes in with the boat, uses some of us to help him move them out.”

  “Help how?”

  He shrugged. “I take a crew of those derelicts in, stir up some shit. You saw those people. They get desperate for their next bottle, their next rock, I offer cash. I send them in under the wire. They go pretend to bust a box, along come the cops, there’s a big deal, lights and sirens, all the while the colonel’s moving his goods in a different part of the yard.”

  “Where does he take them?”

  “Away,” Beard said.

  “Who’s paying for all this?” Pardee asked.

  “The companies who’re gonna use ’em here in the States,” he said. “Like the colonel keeps saying: This is a seaport. Skilled people are just another commodity.”

  “Where does he take them?” I asked again.

  Beard looked over at me with a disappointed expression, as in, He doesn’t tell us and we don’t ask. “You really want to go in there, or did you find out what you came to find out?”

  I looked over at Pardee. Busted.

  “That’s what I thought,” Beard said. “Can we go back now? Lieutenant?”

  I’d begun to wonder why he’d been so forthcoming about what was going on down here. The bearded guy was grinning at us now. Then he fingered a slim government ID card from a slit in his belt. His name was J. B. Houston.

  “ICE,” he said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And you would be the retired sheriff’s office lieutenant with the two German shepherds that the local Feebs are so fond of.”

  Pardee was shaking his head disgustedly. Houston looked around to make sure none of the tramps had followed us and then indicated the fence. “Let’s go up there, and I’ll show you something.”

  I’d been trying to think of something intelligent to say but had failed entirely, so we followed him up the hill, slipped under a loose skirt of chain-link, and walked out into the stack yard. We were at the most remote end of the yard and a good half mile away from the active pier and the unloading activity. I kept looking for video cameras on the light standards but didn’t see any. H
ouston took us into the space between two rows of stacked containers and then knelt down on the concrete at the base of a stack.

  “See this?” he said, pointing to what looked like the top of a soup can buried in the concrete. “See how all these cans are stacked exactly the same way? This is a reader. Each can has a transmitter tag, which identifies the container by number, source, and destination. Every stack has a reader, and every reader is networked to a control room at the head of the yard.”

  He stood up and pointed to the lowest container’s double doors, where there was a lead seal and what looked like a padlock on each of the three operating rods. Upon closer examination, I could see that the locks, too, were actually electronic devices of some kind.

  “Break the seal and open any door out here, that smart-tag there tells on you and sets off a strobe light on the top of the nearest light pole. Unless of course, someone in the control room disables that reader at a specified time.”

  “Can someone open the box from the inside?”

  “Actually, yes. After they had a couple of incidents of illegals suffocating in containers, they modified all the cans so that if you get locked in, you can pull the latch plates off from the inside and bust the doors. Still be an alarm, though.”

  “Seems pretty damned secure.”

  “It is.”

  “So all that stuff about you and Trask moving illegals out of here? That was all bullshit?”

  “Nope,” he said. Then he waited for us to get the picture.

  “You’re saying that’s all being done under government supervision?” Pardee asked.

  “Yep,” Houston said.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Well, here’s the theory, as it was explained to us snuffies who work the port: Homeland Security decided that it would be better to know who was moving through this port in the way of aliens, especially skilled people, than to play cops and robbers and never know what or who they might have missed.”

  “That’s a lot like saying the government is selling cocaine so that they’ll have good statistics on the drug market.”

  “Well,” Houston countered, “you seeing any big progress on the control of illegal immigration into this country? You seeing bills getting through Congress?”

  We all knew the answer to that.

  “You’re not seeing that,” he continued, “because the major corporations who own the politicians don’t want effective immigration control. Same deal for national ID cards. Why in the hell are we stuck with a Social Security card for identification that ties in with every aspect of our personal finances? Stupid—or intentional?”

  “I hear you,” I said, not wanting to get into it with yet another politically frustrated citizen.

  “I can’t prove all that, of course, but there would have to be some pretty high-priced top cover for this kind of program, don’t you think?”

  I thought back to what Ari had said about foreigners at the power plant, and wondered if that was just another manifestation of what was going on there. This was the second eye-opener I’d collided with here in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The first had been a military-operated civilian detention center. Houston must have read my mind.

  “There’s a war on, Lieutenant,” he said. “J. Q. Public seems to forget that. And there are two fronts: one overseas, where regular soldiers are learning about street fighting from the jihadis. Then a second one here on our so-called borders, where the umpteenth guy in one of these shipments through here or any of the other ports might be a legitimate CAD-CAM wizard. Or he might be the final member of a cell that’s been building for five years, the one guy who can actually wire up the satchel nuke. By becoming part of the pipeline, we get a look.”

  “And they only have to get lucky once,” I said. “We have to be lucky every damned time.”

  He nodded.

  “So what happened the other night, when that container erupted with stowaways?”

  “Somebody fucked up,” he said promptly. “It’s a government program, remember?”

  I smiled. “Why are you telling us this?” I asked.

  “Two reasons,” he said, again looking around. “One, word’s out among the working cops here on the waterfront that you won’t take go-away for an answer. I figured you might as well know what you’re poking your nose into.”

  “And two?”

  “Two: I want something. What’s happened to Trask? Jungle drums are saying nobody can raise him.”

  “Your boss checked with the Bureau?” Pardee asked, giving me a warning look over Houston’s head.

  “Bureau doesn’t share for shit. They’re not part of Homeland Security, as I’m sure you guys remember.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Why not tell him? Why wouldn’t the Bureau want that information to get loose? I told him what little we knew, or at least surmised, and he whistled in surprise.

  “But there’s no positive ID?”

  “Nope, and there may not ever be one. The fella who runs the marina where Trask keeps his boat told me he goes off into the night all the time, so maybe that’s what he’s done, and it’s somebody else who went dunking for neutrons.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  I shook my head, remembering the shape of the body and that boot knife. “I think it’s Trask. His boss at Helios thinks it’s Trask.”

  “He’s got a hidey-hole somewhere back in the jumble,” Houston said, “but he’s not there. I checked.”

  A pair of headlights surprised us, coming around the adjacent stack. I hadn’t heard a vehicle, and neither had the dogs. Then I saw why: It was an electric golf cart that rolled up to where we were standing. The two men inside acknowledged Houston and then gave us a pointed once-over. The driver seemed to be especially interested in the dogs. They weren’t in uniform, per se, but they had the look of federal officers.

  “They’re cool,” Houston told them. “Tell Hanson I’ve got word on the colonel. I’ll be on the air at the regular time.”

  The driver nodded, and they went humming away into the night without having said a word. At least they had recognized Houston, scruffy clothes, long hair, and all. He looked at his watch. “We need to get back,” he said.

  “You out there in that jungle all by yourself?”

  “No, I’ve always got one backup. The kid with the face metal? They rotate people through the homeless network once a month or so. The real derelicts are clueless.”

  We started back for the fence. “Any of those people ever cotton to who you really are?” Pardee asked.

  “Occasionally,” Houston said, lifting the chain-link so we could get through. “But then I tell the colonel. He takes ’em somewhere in that steel jungle over there, and they don’t come back.”

  “He’s killing people?”

  “No, I don’t think so. There was one guy, a real whack-job, way off his meds, heard voices all the time. He started going on about spies, narcs, other wild shit, and aiming some of it at me because I kind of control the campfire. The colonel showed up one night, took him off for a little talk. We saw the guy again, maybe three days later, at the fire. Dude couldn’t speak a coherent word.”

  “A suddenly mute schizophrenic—that would be a relief.”

  “Scared-out-of-his-squirming-gourd mute,” Houston said. “Sat there, shaking like a leaf, and babbling about monsters and snakes out there in the container jungle. Freaked the rest of ’em out. Hell, it freaked me out. He wandered off after a coupl’a days, never saw his ass again. After that, somebody acts out, all I have to do is mention that I’m seeing the colonel that night, and all the regulars get big-eyed. Nobody fucks with me.”

  “How long you been under?” I asked, as we re-entered the container tunnel.

  “Going on two years,” he said.

  “Damn! Hope you’re not married.”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “But, looking on the bright side, there’s a ton of overtime.”

  It was after midnigh
t by the time we got back to the beach house. We sat out on the front porch having a beer and some leathery leftover pizza, kicking around the next steps. I still wanted to focus on Allie: I needed to develop a detailed timeline of her visit to Wilmington. She’d made that single report back to the office the day after beginning her surveillance of the dallying lawyers. Got the goods, will be back tomorrow. But what was that personal business she’d gone to do? Who’d seen her? Who’d she talked to? How’d she end up at that convenience store? She hadn’t filed a report, and I actually hadn’t seen her videotape, which I now remembered I’d promised to share with the Bureau people. It might be in her car—maybe get ahold of that, see what it showed.

  Tony amplified that idea. See how many miles she’d burned up on the trip. My people always set their odometers when they go out on assignment so they can log and then later write off the business mileage on their personal vehicles. See if there was any paperwork, bridge tolls, ferry tickets, hotel parking stubs, anything to indicate she’d left Wilmington. I said I’d call Bernie Price, find out what they’d done with her vehicle, which they’d supposedly recovered from the gas island at that convenience store.

  “In other words, we need to do some scut work,” Tony observed.

  “It’s what we do,” I said. “It’s usually what pays off, too. Any better ideas?”

  No one had a better idea, so we went in. It was late, but I wasn’t ready for sleep yet. I got a jacket out of the closet, poured a glass of Scotch, and went back out to the front porch with the shepherds. It was cold and damp enough for fog, but there was just enough of a sea breeze coming in from the estuary to keep the fog at bay. All the neighboring houses were dark. Channel buoy lights blinked here and there out there in the light chop on the river, and a large container ship slid soundlessly across my view, bound for the Atlantic and away.

  A Southport cop car came along on a slow roll through the neighborhood. It went past our rental, stopped, and then backed up. The shepherds got up to watch from the top of the steps. A fifty-something uniformed cop with an Irish face, a prominent belly, and sergeant’s stripes got out and put his cap on. He then walked casually up the front walk. He stepped up to the porch, patted each dog on the head, and asked if he could have a word. I pointed to one of the wicker rockers, and he sank into it with the sigh of a man who does not like to spend time on his feet.