Mirage

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Container was in play.

That’s what it was called, The Container. Capital T, capital C. The. Container.

That it was finally in play had sent bells ringing at the CIA, FBI, Homeland, Treasury, NSA, and just about every other acronymic entity in Washington, D.C. Cabrillo wouldn’t have been surprised to know his old friend Dirk Pitt and NUMA had been read in on The Container.

The rumors swirling around it were the stuff of legend and myth. No one was certain how or why The Container came into being or who was behind it, but from every souk and bazaar, from one end of the Middle East to the farthest island of Muslim Indonesia, word of its contents had spread.

In the first years of America’s invasion of Iraq, massive amounts of cash were used to buy loyalty, as was custom in many parts of the region, though loyalty ran out when the money did or someone had a better offer. That left Washington in the position of having to pour unimaginable streams of cash into Baghdad, Başrah, and every hamlet up to the Kurdish border with Turkey.

Oversight of this bounty was thought to be foolproof but in actuality was an utter joke. Vast sums of cash were siphoned off by yet another layer of corruption in a corrupted society. The problem for those partaking of Uncle Sam’s largesse wasn’t how to get the money but how to get it out of the country. Sure, individuals could smuggle a few bundles of hundred-dollar bills, but what about those on top of the scheming and stealing? Packing a hundred K across a desert outpost was one thing. But what about the billion in hard currency that was unaccounted for? It would take a tractor-trailer to move it, or a container.

So that’s what happened to it. It went into a conex shipping container and then it sat in a warehouse because those who stole it also knew the Americans would never stop looking for it. So they did what Arabs were especially good at. They outwaited their enemies. It took years, but eventually the U.S. drew down its forces. Patrols no longer guarded every street corner and intersection. Tanks and up-armored Humvees disappeared. Black Hawks and Cobras no longer buzzed over the cities in multitudes that rivaled a hornet swarm. After a decade, the Americans wound down their presence in Iraq until the crime bosses decided it was finally safe enough to move the cash. It would need to be laundered, of course, and a deal was struck with several banks in the Far East. To do it locally would set off alarm bells among the international monetary watchdogs.

So The Container would have to be shipped to Jakarta. The question arose as to who would smuggle it out of Iraq. American and other NATO warships still patrolled the Gulf and boarded vessels with disturbing frequency. They needed a smuggler. Several names were discussed in a heated exchange between the crime bosses who’d amassed the fortune until one was finally selected: Ali Mohamed. He was Saudi but could be trusted. He and his ship were away from the Gulf when the decision was made to finally move The Container, so there was a delay of two weeks before he could do their bidding. And then the day arrived when his ship docked in Iraq.

The Container was in play.

There was only one slight problem with their plan. They had underestimated their enemy’s patience.

The Americans never forgot the money that had slipped through their fingers. Over time, they began to learn of the existence of The Container and made several logical deductions about its dispensation. They knew too that it couldn’t be laundered in Iraq or any neighboring country. It would need to be shipped overseas.

That was where they laid their trap.

Because the American Navy and her NATO allies controlled the waters of the Persian Gulf, they controlled which ships were boarded. Three ships were selected to go unmolested even though it was well known that they were smugglers. The ships made only infrequent trips up to Başrah, but their illegal cargos always reached their destination. Where other smugglers were caught in boarding raids or were forced to toss their cargos over the side while being pursued, these three cargo ships seemed to live charmed existences. They were never boarded, or, if they were, nothing illegal was ever found.

So it was little wonder that the crime bosses would choose among these three. To narrow the odds further so that the bosses would choose the one ship they wanted chosen, the American spymasters had played one more trick. The three ships and their legendary captains were one and the same.

Juan Cabrillo and his ship, the Oregon.

Without a doubt, this was the most sophisticated and time-consuming gambit the Corporation had ever pulled. It was the brainchild of Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s old CIA boss. Every few months, the Oregon would be reconfigured to look like one of three ships and sail into the deepwater port of Umm Qasr, Iraq. At first, CIA agents had to pose as the clients needing goods smuggled into or out of the country, but eventually the criminal underworld heard about these three smugglers who seemed never to get boarded. It took five years, but it worked. Whenever one of these three captains was willing to risk a run under the American’s noses, there was a crime boss willing to hire him.

Now the years of preparation were about to pay off. The government would get its billion dollars back, and, just as important, should be able to trace which Americans had helped the Iraqis to amass the money in the first place.

Langston had taught Cabrillo years ago that for a democracy to flourish, it must have an incorruptible bureaucracy. This whole operation was about punishing someone who had profited from his position of power.

The Oregon looked like her old tramp freighter self, but with a red hull, cream upperworks, and a blue band around her yellow funnel. She appeared a little more shipshape than normal, but that was part of her disguise as the Ibis.

Cabrillo too was disguised as he stood next to the harbor pilot overseeing the final stages of docking the ship. His skin was darker than normal, and his hair and thin mustache were nearly black. His eyes were made brown with contact lenses.

The pilot keyed his walkie-talkie. “Okay, snug fore and aft lines.” He crossed through the bridge to the starboard side, switched channels on his radio, and told the tug pressing the freighter to the big Yokohama fenders to back off. He turned to Cabrillo, extending a hand, “Welcome back, Captain Mohamed.”

Cabrillo shook it, and the pilot pocketed the pair of hundred-dollar bills as smoothly as he handled the ship. There was no inherent need to bribe the pilot, since this is the last time the Ibis would ever dock in Iraq, or any other port in the world, but the Chairman liked to keep up appearances.

On the dock down below sat an eighteen-wheeler, with a container on its flatbed trailer, and two Toyota minivans that looked as though their odometers passed a hundred thousand about ten years ago. A sedan parked near them didn’t look much younger. Towering over everything was a skeletal crane with a boom that could stretch fifty feet over the water. Lights rigged from it bathed the dock in an artificial twilight. This was an older section of the harbor. The cranes for unloading containers from the massive panamax freighters were farther up the roads. The tankers, which made up the largest portion of traffic coming into and out of Umm Qasr, were loaded out at sea using pipelines.

Juan had his own handheld radio, and he called down to the men near the gangway to lower the crane. It rattled through its chain fall and came to rest on the concrete pier. “If you will excuse me…”

“Of course.” The pilot stepped aside to wait for the captain to conclude his business on the dock. He would then guide the ship back out into the open waters of the Gulf beyond the al-Başrah Oil Terminal.

Cabrillo took a second to square his uniform shirt into his black trousers and make sure his shoulder boards were even. Eddie Seng met them at the head of the gangway. He acted as first officer on the Ibis, while Hali Kasim played that role on the other two incarnations of the Oregon in this grand ruse.

The two men strode down the gangplank together. A customs official, this one truly corrupt, stood by as men piled out of the minivans. There were no visible weapons, but Cabrillo knew all of them were armed.

That was the other tricky aspect to this whole deal. Three different criminal syndicates collectively owned The Container along with their unknown American partner or partners. No one trusted one another, so there was tension on the dock even without the presence of a container full of cash. No one spoke as a few minutes elapsed. Then three more vehicles approached. They were all Mercedes SUVs, black with dark-tinted windows. Each would be as well protected as a bank’s armored car.

The bosses had arrived. More guards alighted from the vehicles when they stopped, and these men did nothing to hide the compact submachine guns they carried. Finally, the crime lords themselves exited from the backseats of their SUVs. They wore casual, Western-style clothes and looked as innocuous as tea merchants. Each was followed by a Westerner. These men were larger than their Iraqi hosts, and while they wore civilian clothing, each moved with military precision. They wore baseball caps pulled low and wraparound sunglasses despite the sun having set an hour before.

As Ali Mohamed, Cabrillo greeted the three crime bosses by name. He’d met two of them in the past and had dealt with the other’s son on previous deals. That boss was well into his seventies and his son was about to take over, but for something as significant as The Container, he wanted to be here himself.

After the flowery exchange of greetings and displays of respect, the men turned earnest. Cabrillo pointedly wasn’t introduced to the Westerners, and these men remained well back from the base of the gangway.

“I see more than four guards here,” Cabrillo said at length. “That was our deal, four men only.”

“Do not worry, my dear captain,” the boss from Baghdad said. “Until this container is on the ship and away from port, we like to afford it extra protection. You will only have four men with it on the ship, as promised.”

“I wish them to be unarmed,” Cabrillo pressed. This had been a negotiating point from the beginning.

“I wish it too, but, alas, we must insist. What was it Ronald Reagan once said, ‘trust, but verify’? Four groups are represented here, four men on your ship, as well as four guns to, ah, verify, yes? Perhaps you will need their help if you are attacked by those mongrel Somali pirates.”

Cabrillo laughed and said truthfully, “I think we can handle the Somalis. The last batch that attacked us fared quite poorly.”

“You know what is in this container, yes?”

“I have not been told, but I can guess.”

The boss, who had been convivial up to this point, lowered his voice and hardened his eyes. “It would be in your best interest not to guess. Anything happens to it and everyone you’ve ever known and loved will die.”

Juan waited a beat to reply. “There is no need for that. We have done business in the past and will continue to do so in the future. You pay me well for my risks. I pay my crew well. Everybody is happy. I see no need to add troubles to my life and theirs by upsetting that balance.”

The Iraqi kept his face stony before nodding and saying, “Very good. I think we understand each other.”

“Yes, we do. I will be at dock 43C, Port of Jakarta, in ten days.” Cabrillo added, “As you trust me with this container, I so trust you that we will not be greeted by Indonesian police when we arrive.”

“No worries,” another of the bosses said. “Our al-Qaeda contacts have reached out to their Jemaah Islamiyah brothers in Jakarta. Idiot fanatics, the lot of them, but useful. They will make sure your arrival goes unmolested.”

Juan could see that the guy from Baghdad didn’t like the mentioning of their al-Qaeda connections, so he quickly filled the uncomfortable silence. “Then I believe we are ready to load.”

The customs official came forward to sign off on the seals of a container he’d done everything in his power not to notice.

Juan watched the three Westerners shake each other’s hands. One called just loud enough for him to hear, “Good luck, Gunny.”

Cabrillo winced. He’d hoped the American armed guard would be of a higher rank than gunnery sergeant, because it would be easier to see who was above him on the military food chain. At least now he knew the man had been a Marine. The sergeant had a duffel thrown over a shoulder, and Juan could clearly see the outline of an assault rifle inside it. The Iraqi crime bosses conferred with their men, doubtlessly going over communications protocols for the hundredth time. Juan had to wonder at the trust it took to turn over a billion dollars to a subaltern who most likely resented your status even as he licked your boots.

The Chairman tried to shake each man’s hand as they stepped onto the gangway, but none took up the offer or reciprocated when he gave them his cover name. The three Iraqis and the three Americans marched by in silence, though each man studied their surroundings with predatory eyes. Four tough hombres, Juan thought, and wondered how they would get along over the next ten days.

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.