Brute Force

Chapter 5

Dickey Ng leaned on the painted steel railing alongside the raised house of the 900-foot mega ship, watching a wispy line of black smoke twist up from among the stacked containers on the deck below. Off the bow of the huge vessel, the surface of the indigo water jumped with small, confused waves, as if Neptune held his great cup of ocean with a shaky hand. Ng stood still for a long moment, pondering his four rules, the inviolable laws that had kept him alive and in business for the last eleven years.

Rule Four seemed all the more pertinent considering the development of this new plume of smoke. He made his way forward, padding down the metal stairs toward the rows and stacks of multicolored metal containers that took up the bulk of the ship. They were known as TEUs — or Twenty Foot Equivalent Units — and the CCC Loadstar carried over 13,000 of these ubiquitous metal shipping boxes.

Dickey Ng only cared about one of them. He’d followed PVMU 526604-1 from the time it had been loaded with palletized tractor parts in Guangzhou. A little money in the right hands made certain he was the one charged with “stuffing” the container, to ensure that the contents could not shift during the movement of the ship while in transit — and thus the last person to see it before it was sealed. He didn’t know what was in the wooden crate marked with the red peony flower that he’d strapped to a wooden pallet of parts for small garden tractors, but he was fairly certain it was some sort of weapon. Weapons and art were his two most common assignments. There was no law against smugglers profiling their clients, and considering all the inshal-lahs and alaikums going on between the men who’d set up the transportation arrangements, he had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t moving a piece of art. He was being paid two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars to see that the crate was delivered safely to the United States. His four rules made sure that would happen.

Making his way forward the length of two football fields without drawing the attention of the bridge watch took time. Ng moved slowly, staying low and out of sight in the narrow walkways between the towering stacks of metal boxes. He told himself the smoke was nothing. Perhaps it was only one of the sailors hiding out to smoke a cigar, or even some vent in one of the ship’s systems that he was unaware of. He was, after all, a smuggler, not a sailor, and the only paying customer on the CCC Loadstar.

Flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, the mega ship operated with a crew of twenty-six but kept four cabins open for world travelers and adventure seekers. Ng had signed on in Guangzhou, staying out of the way during the frenetic first few days of the journey as the ship stopped to load more TEUs in several more Chinese ports, then Hong Kong, and finally Kogo-shima in southern Japan before heading out to open sea. For the last ten days, life on the ship had settled into a comfortable routine of watches and chores for the crew — made up of primarily Malaysian sailors — and cigarettes and boredom for Ng.

Raised in the teeming streets of Singapore, Dickey Ng found it difficult to breathe with all the fresh air of the open sea. While it wasn’t exactly quiet, the sounds were far too one-dimensional for him. He missed the frantic honk of traffic and the constant buzz of people milling in the back streets. Singapore was a nanny state, but it was his nanny state. Even in a place where nearly everything was against the law, there were so many people stacked on top of each other that a person could blend in, get lost in the crowd.

This was the same sentiment — and the reasoning — he used to complete every job he accepted.

There were plenty of people who could fill a shipping container with plastic dolls that were stuffed with Korean Ecstasy or teddy bears packed with Baggies of uncut heroin. Flat crates of Russian AK-47s fit perfectly in the hollow walls of refrigerated containers.

But customs officials knew all that as well as any smuggler. They tore apart a large cross section of Chinese-made dolls and ripped the stuffing out of the bears. The first place inspectors looked for hidden weapons were the hollow walls of reefer units. Every up-and-coming customs inspector he’d ever seen was looking, not so much for contraband, as to make a name for him or herself — to find that big haul of illicit goods that would garner them a fat promotion. If those goods had something to do with terrorism, their hero status would be set in stone. In the East, customs officials looked for bribes. In North America, they wanted to make the news.

So, Dickey Ng followed Rule One and got himself and whatever he happened to be moving lost amid the thirteen thousand twenty-foot-equivalent metal containers stacked on the CCC Loadstar — all part of the eight million moved from Asia to the United States every year.

Ng was around the corner, still fifty feet away from the origin of the smoke and unit PVMU 526604-1, when he smelled cooking fish. He smiled to himself. Azmin, the skinny deckhand, was well known for never getting enough to eat. Ng rounded the stacks to find the young Malay squatting on his haunches beside a can of burning Sterno, grilling a flying fish he must have found on the deck.

Ng began to relax, until Azmin looked up and met his eye.

“You are a watcher,” the young man said, using the grease from his cooked fish to smooth his ridiculously sparse mustache. “I thought the smoke might bring you so we could have a talk. You don’t remember me, do you?” He looked altogether too smug for Dickey Ng’s taste. “But we met five years ago in Hong Kong. I was supposed to be on that ship but I got sick. You were a passenger then too, but you had a different name.” Azmin shook his head and rose to his full height, doing his best to intimidate Ng. “I can’t remember what your name was then, but it was different.”

“What do you want, Azmin?” Ng said, pretending to be frightened.

The young sailor grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want a piece of whatever you are getting for whatever it is you are doing. My family is poor. I only do this sailing shit to support my wife and kid, you know. I figure you must have something big going since you travel with a fake name and all. What is it? Gold? Precious stones? Cut me in and your secret’s safe with me.”

“How was the fish, Azmin?” Ng asked, cocking his head to one side.

Azmin just stared at him. “The fish?”

Ng struck fast, slamming the web of his hand into the young Malay’s Adam’s apple, stunning him and making him lift both hands defensively.

“Fish bones,” Ng said. Shoving one shoulder at the same moment he pulled on the other, Ng spun the panicked sailor and snaked an arm around his neck, drawing him in like a constricting snake to squeeze the life out of him.

“I heard,” Ng said, holding the young man firmly while he struggled, “that some people are so embarrassed when they begin to choke that they wander off and die alone. Such a pity…” Ng jerked his arm tighter across the faltering sailor’s throat. “You were all the way out here in the stacks with no one to hear or see you or come help when you choked on a fish bone. It must have been awful to die… so alone.” Feeling Azmin go limp in his arms, Ng held him for another full minute, and then slammed his head backwards against the edge of a container, just to be sure. “It’s a violent thing,” he muttered, “choking to death.”

Ng stooped down beside the body and grabbed a handful of cooked fish from the makeshift grill. Prying open Azmin’s jaws, he shoved it in, using his finger to push it far back into the dead man’s throat.

Finished, he wiped the grease from his hands on Azmin’s filthy shirt and stood to make his way back to his cabin.

“Rule Five,” he whispered to himself. “Never enter into a smuggling agreement with a fool.”