The boss from Baghdad threw Cabrillo an ironic salute and then waved his hand over his head. High above the pier, the crane operator had been waiting for this signal. The diesel generator that powered the crane’s motors came to life in a bellow of exhaust smoke. In seconds, the cables began to pay out, and the lift cradle, designed to hoist the standard-sized container, descended on the parked semitrailer. It settled with a metallic thunk and then automatically clamped onto The Container’s four corners. Cables were reversed and the box was lifted.
Juan took a second to study the bosses and the three Americans on the dock. All of them were watching The Container with the same rapt expressions of greed soon to be realized. They had sat for years on a fortune they could not spend. In just a couple of weeks they would be given numbered accounts that could buy them anything their dark hearts desired.
The crane operator shifted The Container out onto the boom so that it swung over the Oregon’s rail. The hatch had already been pulled on the number 2 hold, and The Container soon vanished inside. The semi had pulled away as soon as the trailer had been cleared, and another rig was in place with an identical container.
She was not built for the container trade, but the Oregon’s hold could still accommodate twenty of them in stacked rows. The others were empty and were being shipped back to the Far East, where they were destined to be filled with goods ready for export once again. For good measure, five more empty containers were deck-loaded once the hatch was back in place.
The bosses had retreated to their respective SUVs for the hours it took to load the ship. Cabrillo had watched the process from the bridge while the four armed guards were shown cabins that none of them had any intention of using. There was a single door into the hold, and even though the money was buried under a mountain of empty containers, all four intended to guard it for the week and a half it would take to cross the Indian Ocean.
Max Hanley joined the Chairman, carrying a thermos of iced tea and two glasses. Though it was cooler at night, the temperature still hovered north of eighty. Cabrillo would have preferred a beer, but he was playing a Saudi, and who knew how many men were watching the ship through sniper’s scopes from the roofs of the nearby warehouses. He bet each of the bosses had at least two teams. He smiled to himself, thinking of when the last team to show up realized all the good spots to watch the transfer had been taken.
“Penny for them,” Hanley said, pouring tea over fresh lemon wedges.
“Sulky snipers.”
Max considered the non sequitur for a moment before getting Juan’s joke. “Kinda like which of the goons down in the hold gets to actually lean against the door.”
“I assume they’ll take shifts.”
“Paranoid bunch.”
“Billion dollars, my friend. Wouldn’t you be?”
“It would be awfully nice if Uncle Sam would let us keep it. I’ve even come up with a couple of ideas for how we could steal it.”
“Me too,” Juan admitted, then added with a larcenous grin, “but merely as a mental exercise.”
“Of course.”
Both men knew that neither was serious. Oh, they definitely devised plans to get their hands on it, but neither would ever consider actually stealing the money.
“I just reviewed tape with Linda and the shots Eddie got with his lapel camera.”
“And?”
“We don’t have much. The three Americans who stayed behind looked up only when the container was swung aboard, but they were in pretty deep shadow. Plus the hats and shades. Facial recognition might not even be possible. They never got close enough to Eddie for a decent pic.”
“I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. What about the gunny?”
“Plenty of good snaps as he came aboard and was given the nickel tour of his cabin, the mess, and the door to the hold.”
“Have they come up with a name yet?”
“Pentagon is going through their database as we speak. Once we have his ID, they’ll go through all his duty stations and former COs, and then we start looking up the pecking order. Do you give any credence to Overholt’s idea that the American Mr. Big will meet the ship in Indonesia?”
“He wasn’t here, that’s for sure. Mr. Big wouldn’t know a gunny from a hole in the ground. He’s too high up for that. I’m guessing one of the guys here today was a major who served over the gunnery sergeant and the other is a mutual friend of both Mr. Big and the major.”
Max thought about this. “Ages seem right. Gunny and the major worked together, became friendly. They hatch the plot, take it to Mr. Big’s buddy to give them protection from above, and all of a sudden we’ve lost a billion in Benjamins. They’d still need a lot of help just to move that much cash.”
“Most certainly. That’s where the Iraqis come in. They supply the labor while our little cabal of traitors supplies access to the money.”
“I should tell Langston to have the Pentagon concentrate on majors once we have the gunny’s name.”
Just then, the harbor pilot returned from the head. “Ah, and who is this, Captain Mohamed?”
“My chief engineer, Fritz Zoeller.”
Max greeted the man, using an outrageous German accent, before insisting that he had to return to his engine room as the loading was about complete.
An hour later, the ship reached open water, and the pilot transferred to a small boat to return to port. There was a full moon, so only the brightest stars shown from the cloudless sky. As usual, the waters of the sheltered Persian Gulf were as calm and as warm as bathwater. The radar plot showed plenty of activity. The big returns were tankers, ferrying oil out of the Gulf or heading north to have their monstrous hulls filled with crude. Other, smaller blips were the countless fishing vessels that plied these waters. Most now were modern craft, but a few lateen-rigged dhows still roamed the Gulf as they had for hundreds of years.
Radio traffic was heavy, with crews chatting with one another to keep awake during the long night watch. Not knowing if any of the four guards would venture up to the wheelhouse, Juan ordered it manned at all times. Cabrillo acted as officer on deck while Hali Kasim draped himself over the wooden wheel in an effort to stay awake. Juan enjoyed standing watch, even at night, while his communications expert was bored out of his mind. At midnight, just as if they were really conning the ship, they were relieved.
Over the next two days it continued like this, though there was really no point in maintaining the ruse on the bridge. The four men tasked with guarding The Container only left the hallway outside the hold to use the head. They must have formed some sort of loose pact, because they slept in shifts. Food was brought to them from the galley by one of the Oregon’s regular kitchen staff dressed not for the ship’s opulent dining hall but in the stained whites of a short-order cook.
By now, they knew the lone American among them was Gunnery Sergeant Malcolm Winters USMC (Ret.). The Pentagon had e-mailed dozens of pictures of officers Winters had worked with over his twenty-year career, but neither Cabrillo nor Eddie could identify any as one of the other Americans on the pier. They were expecting more photos soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They came at sunup on the third day of the trip. Just as Cabrillo had suspected, there were three boats — low, cigarette-style powerboats — that surged out of the predawn darkness like sharks circling in for the kill. They had less than a foot of freeboard showing, so they had never appeared on radar. There would be another vessel out here with them, a mother ship waiting over the horizon that would have towed the powerboats to the ambush point. There were five pirates on each craft, coffee-skinned Somalis who had turned this stretch of the Indian Ocean into one of the most dangerous places on earth. Juan suspected it was the crime lord from Başrah who had tipped them off and told them what ship to stalk. Başrah was a port city, after all, so he would have contacts in the pirates’ leadership.