by AJ Stewart
The closest man looked at his colleagues and got no response, so he edged to the window. He jutted out his chin as a form of question.
“English?” Manu called through the window.
The man nodded. “Yes.”
“We’ve been sent to back you up.”
The man frowned.
Manu unclipped his PAMAS G1 pistol and held it up for the man to see, and then he nodded at the mob behind him.
“We’re here to help,” he said, offering the smile again. He was built like a rugby player, which all of his Legion brothers suspected he had been, but his smile was as bright as sunrise on a cloudless day. The smile coupled with the imposing frame was one hell of a combination. The man looked at the gun and then at the crowd out his door. Then he smiled back.
“Yes,” he said.
He unlocked the door to the gatehouse and opened it a fraction. Manu turned to face the crowd, only a handful of whom had eyes on him. He held his sidearm across his chest for all to see, and Gorecki and Thorn slipped into the gatehouse behind him. Manu edged his way back and sideways through the door and the guard pushed it closed behind him and flicked the lock.
“Help,” said the guard as he turned to Manu.
Manu smiled. “Yes. First, we will check the perimeter.”
The guard frowned.
“Fence,” said Manu. “We check fence.”
The guard nodded and repeated the word fence.
“You stay here.”
The guard nodded again. “Okay. Okay.”
Gorecki stepped out into port grounds and Thorn followed. Manu repeated his backward movement, nodding to the guards as he moved.
“We come back soon,” he said.
The guard smiled. “I’ll be back,” he said in an attempt at mimicking Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Manu stepped out into the sunlight and closed the door. The men turned to look around the port. It was a dirty open space littered with trucks and shipping containers of different colors and loading equipment in various states of disrepair. There was a large rig by the river, designed to unload cargo. It stood motionless, like a sleeping dinosaur. A ship sat under it. It wasn’t a massive container ship but it was bigger than Manu expected.
Thorn spoke. “We’re looking for an Iraqi plate. Number was 181-46.”
“It will be in eastern Arabic numerals,” added Gorecki.
The three men nodded to each other and split without another word. Gorecki turned right and walked along the fence, where a line of trucks sat with containers on them. Manu did the same to the left. Thorn headed toward the glistening river to where another group of trucks sat waiting with shipping containers on their trays.
It took only a few minutes. Toward the far end of the facility, away from the gate. Third in a line of parked trucks, Gorecki found a Navistar brand truck. It looked tan in color but wore so much dirt that it impossible to be sure. But he saw the yellow license plate with the script that read ١٨١٠٤٦. 181-46.
“Got it,” he called into his radio. “South end of the yard.”
As the other two men made their way to him Gorecki looked over the truck. There were multiple problems. The load was a standard intermodal shipping container, or CONEX box. Stacking containers of inconsistent size and strength made it difficult to maximize shipping loads. Standard sizes made it possible to fit more on each ship, making shipping more efficient. The box Gorecki looked at was an ISO standard twenty-foot container. Tan in color like the military used, where he knew the color was called sand. The US Army had actually registered it as an official color. Gorecki didn’t know who they would register such a thing with, but it was the sort of thing the military would do. The container had been painted that color. It wasn’t original. Every ISO standard container had a series of identification codes painted on them that provided details of the manufacturer, ownership and usage classification of the container. Gorecki found those markings painted over.
The same codes were repeated on a CSC plate, a steel plate attached to every ISO container that outlined the same codes, plus the maximum load capacity of the container. The plate told Gorecki that the owner of the container was a shipping company with an address in Karachi, Pakistan. He took a picture of the plate despite expecting it to be irrelevant. Containers got sold, containers got stolen. Ownership details were kept up to date only if the owners wanted to ensure proper tracking of their shipments. This was not the kind of shipment anyone wanted authorities tracking.
The tare weight of the container was 2,300 kilograms. Someone had made a notation in marker below the CSC plate that the gross weight was 22,303 kilograms. It was well under the maximum capacity of twenty-five thousand kilograms and it told Gorecki three things. One, the cargo inside weighed over twenty metric tons. Two, that was a lot of guns. Over six thousand of the M16 rifles that the Americans preferred. Or five million of the 5.56×45mm NATO rounds that the M16 fired. Or even 1,250 FIM-92 Stingers, man-portable surface-to-air missiles that were popular all over the Middle East. Or a combination of any number of other munitions.
Twenty tons wasn’t a lot of munitions in the scheme of a large army, but in the hands of militants they could do a lot of harm. The third thing the weight told Gorecki was that they couldn’t use any old truck to move it. It was too heavy for a standard tray truck, of which there were plenty in the port yards. Over twenty tons of cargo needed something more substantial. The rig that the load was attached to was an older model, Navistar 5000-MV. It was a military-grade version of an International tractor rig, originally designed to carry heavy loads across the United States via the interstate freeway system. For a moment Gorecki considered the fact that the truck was American, not Russian or Chinese or even Indian. But he brushed the thought away. Time was short. There was no knowing when the meet at the market might end, and how long the American sergeant might be delayed by his flat tire.
Manu and Thorn arrived. Thorn climbed the outside of the truck cabin and clambered onto the container. Gorecki was about to direct Manu to find a similar transport when he noticed the symbol. Or part of the symbol. A thick black line. It was a circle, or at least the upper half of a circle. Two arcs that leaned toward each other, but at the very top the circle was incomplete. As if someone had erased the top section. But Gorecki knew it wasn’t just a circle, or even part of a circle. It was a very specific symbol. A symbol that had been designed by Dow Chemical Company in 1966. The design criteria had been specific. The symbol should be instantly recognizable but not mean anything at the same time, such that it would be possible to educate people what the symbol stood for. The idea worked. Now that his eye was on it, even part of it, Gorecki knew exactly what it was.
The majority of the symbol was covered in a thick layer of road dust. Gorecki rubbed his hand across the placard that featured the symbol. The placard was heavy plastic and was slotted into an aluminum frame that was affixed to the container with rivets. He brushed his hand across again and wiped a wide strip of the placard clean. It revealed that the top circle was one of three incomplete circles, each joined together toward the center but incomplete at their outer edge. They formed a kind of triangle of circles. There was a fourth complete circle in the center, running through each of the others like a Venn diagram.
It was the universal symbol for a biological hazard.
There were many reasons for it to be on a shipping container. It could be biological waste, like blood or body fluid or even clothes or bedsheets that had been tainted. It could have been used containers of plasma or blood matter or even saline. Anything that had come into contact with the inside of a human was considered biological waste, like hypodermic needles. There was a lot of biological waste in a war zone. But Gorecki couldn’t even sell the idea to himself. The US bases in Iraq had massive incinerators where such things were burned down to carbon. They weren’t shipped anywhere. Particularly in an ISO container that was linked to an arms deal. Gorecki shivered at the thought of biological weapons getting into the hands
of militants. Especially with the Americans withdrawing. There was no good news there.
“Manu, allez!” he called.
Manu’s attention was toward the sky, watching Thorn. Gorecki pointed to the biohazard symbol and waited the second it took for Manu’s jaw to drop. Thorn’s head dropped over the top of the container.
“We have trouble,” Thorn said.
Gorecki spread his hands as if to ask what?
“We can’t get into this container.”
“Why?”
Thorn held up a small box. It might have been a walkie-talkie or a shortwave radio that he used to listen to the football results. It wasn’t either.
“I’m picking up multiple RF signals.”
Gorecki shook his head. Thorn was like a walking encyclopedia of electronics, but sometimes he just couldn’t spit things out in plain French.
“So?” said Gorecki.
“Topographical motion detection. Like little beams all over the inside of this container. Not just a motion sensor, but a motion sensor we can’t hide from.”
“Can’t you disable it?”
“Of course. But it takes time. There are multiple nodes. Each needs to be disabled individually.”
“Or what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an audible alarm. Maybe a radio frequency alarm that triggers an alert on a cell phone nearby. If they are really worried it could be hooked into a GPS satellite so it triggers anywhere in the world.”
Gorecki glanced back at the biohazard symbol. Definitely the kind of thing that someone would be really worried about. He turned to Manu.
“We need to get this thing off this truck.”
Manu looked at the CSC plate and nodded, and then took off running. Thorn continued scanning the container. Gorecki pulled at the lever that held the chains on the container taut to the trailer bed. As he did there was a crackle across his earpiece.
“Thorn? You guys on air?” It was Fontaine.
“Mon adjudant? It’s Gorecki. We have a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
“We can’t get in the container.”
“Can you swap it out?”
“We’re looking into that. It’s a heavy load. Very heavy.”
There was silence at the other end.
“And mon Adjudant? There’s a biohazard symbol.”
More silence.
“Gorecki, the target is on his way. He left the vehicle behind. Repeat, he is on his way. If you have to, steal the whole damned truck.”
“That might not be possible, mon Adjudant. There is a protest at the gate. US Army is in attendance. We can’t just force our way out.”
“Do whatever you have to. The target must not get that container.”
Chapter Fourteen
The target was considering his options. The taxi dropped him a block short of the port gate. The taxi driver saw the angry gathering around the gatehouse and declined to go further. Dennison looked over the scene. About two hundred men, chanting some kind of babble, a few banging on the door of the gatehouse. A handful were pulling at the hurricane wire fence. It wasn’t giving way, but they weren’t really trying. If they got energetic about it the fence wasn’t keeping two hundred angry men out.
Options. He could wait. The truck was inside, the shipment on it. He had the key. One of the guards in the gatehouse was tasked with keeping an eye on the load. The mass of humanity at the gate might lose their energy and dissipate. Then he could walk in and start the truck and drive out. But there was a chance the mob at the gate might go the other way. Their energy might build and they might pull down the flimsy wire gate. And then there might be looting. He’d seen it happen. And he couldn’t risk it happening to this shipment. So he had to go get it, and he had to do it now.
Then he saw the men to the side. US Army. No doubt there to keep order. No doubt ordered to keep out of things, if possible. A visible deterrent. It worked most of the time with the civilian population. But they would get involved. If they had to. If they were ordered.
Dennison opened the small canvas pack he carried and pulled out his uniform coat. Heavy for the conditions, which was why Dennison preferred not to wear it. But his rank insignia was pinned on the front of the shirt, and that was important, so he buttoned the coat and immediately felt his arms start to sweat under the long sleeves.
Dennison tossed his pack over his shoulder and walked toward the group of soldiers. They were the military equivalent of mall security guards. Not that many security mall guards faced snipers and car bombs in their day-to-day work. But it meant that there was unlikely to be an officer present, which was just how Dennison wanted it.
The first soldier he came to was a private first class. He looked Dennison over and took a good while to process what he saw, but once he did he stood erect and front on.
“Sergeant,” said the private.
“Private,” said Dennison. “Who’s in charge?”
“Corporal Exum,” he said nodding to a tall, thin black man standing by the fence. The corporal had watched Dennison’s approach and now stepped forward. Dennison smiled to himself. He liked it when the guy in charge was a couple of pay grades below him.
“How can we help, Sergeant?” asked the corporal without emotion.
“What’s going on here, Corporal?”
“The natives are restless, Sergeant.”
“Serious?”
“Not at this point, Sergeant.”
“I need to get in there, Corporal. We have a transport in there that needs to be moved.”
“In there?” The corporal frowned. It was unusual that an army transport would be in a civilian port. At least in a port that the army had not commandeered.
“Yes, Corporal, in there.” Dennison offered the corporal a look, a raise of an eyebrow. It was a look shared between noncommissioned officers throughout the army. A conspiratorial nod that said the commissioned officers make these dumb decisions and we just do what we’re told.
The corporal nodded. “You have a driver, Sergeant?”
“I’m it. I guess the drivers have all been sent home already.”
“Got that, Sergeant.” The corporal gathered his men. He didn’t bother issuing orders as they had all been listening to the exchange with Dennison. The men formed a wedge and copied the moves that the PSCs had used to gain access. They followed the line of the fence, not moving fast but moving steadily.
“Make a hole,” called the lead private. Dennison didn’t know if the kid had seen that in a movie or if his dad had been a navy man. But he said it in a good firm voice which made their intention clear. They buffeted a few men out of the way, and the throng spread some. They had two advantages over the PSCs who had gone in to secure the port. The first was their uniforms. The civilian population didn’t mess with the army unless they wanted to get messed with. And the second was the M16s strapped across their chests.
They reached the door of the gatehouse and it opened immediately. The guard had watched them approached and wasn’t going to question the army either. Dennison stepped through the wedge of men.
“I’ll need to get out, Corporal.”
“We’ve got it, Sergeant.”
Dennison nodded and stepped through the gatehouse. One of the guards came forward to him and he handed over the paperwork. The guard looked at the paper, at Dennison and then at the paper again. He nodded firmly and pointed into the yard to the right, where the truck was parked. Dennison ignored him. He took the bill of lading back and looked across the vast dirty space. Trucks and containers everywhere. Now he just had to find his shipment. Dennison stepped out into the yard and turned left. The guard made to tell him he was going the wrong way but he spoke no English so Dennison waved him off.
“Savages,” he said to himself.
From the guardhouse they couldn’t see the truck. One of the guards had been watching the three private contractors walk away in three directions but he had focused on the man that went right. The guard was forc
ed to split his watching between the man and the mob outside. The man seemed to walk past where the truck the guard had been paid to watch was parked, obviously checking the fence as they had said they would. The sound of the mob grew outside the gate and took the guard’s attention. He knew things could get ugly there. Hungry people got desperate. The guard had been paid to watch over the truck that had come in but he had not been paid enough to stay in place if the mob got aggressive. He was not armed. He had a family to think about. He glanced back toward the truck but he could no longer see the contractor.
Gorecki wiped sweat from his brow and cursed the drill to go faster. He had run around the truck, unfastening the chains that held the container to the trailer. Then he had attached a socket to the drill Thorn had tossed down to him, and he worked on the bolts that held the CSC plate on the container. The first two came out easily. The third was corroded and held tight. He banged the socket hard against the bolt in the age-old method of getting stuck fasteners unstuck. Then he placed the socket back over the bolt head and fired up the drill. It whined and spun and a spark shot from the motor. The bolt moved a quarter turn.
He heard the sound of the men at the gate rise, like a flock of birds that had been spooked, followed by the roar of a diesel engine. He turned to the gatehouse. It was about two hundred meters away so he couldn’t see clearly. But there seemed to be more bodies in the gatehouse than there had been. The US soldiers had moved in. They had gotten involved after all. That told him the target was on his way. He refocused on the plate and pushed hard on the socket and it groaned and turned. And then turned again. He eased the pressure and the bolt came out. He dropped it into his palm and worked on the fourth corner. The bolt came out easily but the plate stayed in place. It wasn’t just bolted. It was glued.