Dale Brown - Act of War

“We’ll request a replacement set through the San Francisco consulate—they might have temporary documents waiting for you at your port stop in Victoria,” Wilson offered.

“Bremerton,” Gemici corrected him.

Wilson made a show of checking the manifest, but Gemici was sure he knew his schedule by heart. “Yes, sir. Bremerton,” Wilson said. He stayed very close to Boroshev, putting his radiation detector right in the guy’s face as he scanned as much of his body as possible. The guy was too confused to look nervous. Wilson made a show of staring at the man’s eyes carefully. “This man’s pupils look dilated—pretty unusual for someone who was belowdecks and then outside. “You do drugs, Gennadyi?” He made a tokeing motion with two fingers up to pursed lips. “You like the weed, Gennadyi?”

“No, sir.” A hint of perspiration appeared on his forehead. “I…seasick. Very seasick.”

“Seasick, huh?” He stared at the sweat popping out of his forehead, then glared at Gemici. “You approve of your crewmen using marijuana for seasickness, skipper?”

“My men are professionals, Lieutenant,” Gemici repeated. “While on this ship, their responsibilities are to their captain, their fellow crew members, their ship, their cargo, and themselves, in that order. As long as they do the job, I do not ask questions.”

“What you do on your ship is your business, Captain,” Wilson said, “but if any drugs leave the ship while you’re in an American port, you could be in danger of having your ship and its cargo confiscated.” After a negative watch list message came back from the Stingray, Wilson cut off Boroshev’s plastic handcuffs with a folding knife. “A word to the wise.”

“Yes, sir. I will take care of it.”

A short time later, Steadman radioed to Wilson that they had finished inspecting the ship, checked and verified the crew, and the inspection team assembled on deck awaiting orders. Wilson ordered them to start boarding their intercept boat to return to the Stingray, then held out his hand to the skipper. “Thank you very much for your cooperation, sir,” he said to Gemici. “I hope the rest of your trip is safe and successful.”

The skipper sniffed but shook hands anyway. “You be careful riding that little boat of yours back to your patrol vessel, Lieutenant,” he said with a toothy smile. “Gunaydin. Have a nice day.” Wilson nodded, saluted, and was the last man down the ladder. With not some small amount of difficulty, the fast intercept craft detached from the cargo ship and finally rendezvoused with the patrol boat; in very short time the Coast Guard vessel was headed back to shore.

The bottom line, Gemici thought, as he made his way back down to the main deck with Boroshev silently behind him, is that there was simply no way any government agency could search every square centimeter of a ship that was over three hundred meters long and weighed more than six thousand tons. The major items on any inspection—the manifest, the logs, the crew, the cargo, and a visual inspection—could be anticipated and handled easily. Everything else that happened was by pure chance. But the odds favored the smugglers, not the inspectors. Unless they dry-docked this ship and cut it apart with torches, plus emptied out every container and cut open every piece of cargo larger than a suitcase, any skilled smuggler could hide thousands of kilos of anything—or hundreds of men—in it.

Case in point: The chain locker in the bow of the King Zoser. In most ships, the chain locker and anchor mechanical spaces were in the very forward part of the bow; during an inspection, it was a simple matter to open the door, see the tons of chain and the huge electric winches, and move on. They had even put in false walls to make it appear that the hull was sloping in as expected. But there was yet another compartment forward of the chain locker, accessible only through the false walls, that was even bigger than the chain locker.

Gemici looked mad enough to chew nails as they arrived at the chain locker. Boroshev was nursing the abrasions on his wrists from the handcuffs, and he looked as wobbly and dazed as ever. “You stupid ass!” the captain shouted at him in Russian. “Didn’t you hear the announcement that the American Coast Guard was approaching and preparing to board us? You could have…”

In a flash of movement, Boroshev’s left hand whipped out and slapped Gemici full in the face, hard enough to make the captain stagger backward. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, you old donkey-fucker!” he roared. “You may be the captain of this tub, but you are not my commanding officer!”

The captain wiped blood from his mouth. “Do you think that smoking dope right before entering American waters was a good idea, Boroshev?” The Russian didn’t answer. Instead he pounded on the steel bulkhead at the rear of the chain locker with a code tap, and moments later the wall started to move.

“About fucking time!” a soldier inside said in Russian, lowering his shotgun. “It’s freezing cold in there!”

“Shut up and go check the pumps and the uppermost pressure relief U-pipe on deck—they opened both of them up for an inspection,” Boroshev said. “Scan for listening devices.” The man nodded and hurried off. Boroshev issued more orders, and one by one another nineteen men hidden in the false room inside the chain locker filed out.

“They had radiation detectors, every one of them,” Gemici said. “What in hell are we carrying? What is in those pumps?”

“Your job is to get us and our equipment to Richmond, not to ask questions,” Boroshev said. “We have all used the highest level of security. Believe me, the less you know, the better.”

Gemici looked skeptical. “Tell me, Boroshev. I won’t tell another soul. Drugs? Weapons? Money? If the Americans come back, I should…”

“I said no questions. Don’t worry about the damned Americans. They left, didn’t they?”

“You think they’d try to arrest us all if they found something? They’d get off the ship, alert the entire U.S. Navy, and surround us.”

Boroshev hesitated, licking his lips apprehensively, but finally shrugged. “Well, it would be the shits to come all this way and get caught within sight of our objective,” he said, “but that’s the way it goes. But I’m telling you, we’re fine. As long as we find any bugs they may have planted, and we stay on the lookout for aerial surveillance anytime we’re on deck, everything will be fine.”

“They found your private locker too. They made the engineer’s mate open it.”

“They didn’t take anything, did they?” Boroshev shook his head. “You see? If they found anything critical, they would have seized this ship, I’m sure of it. You worry too much, you old hen. The Americans are not stupid: after the Houston bombing, they are on full alert. We can expect their security to get tighter as we get closer to port, but if we stay cool everything will be fine. When do we get out of this rough water?”

“We’ll be in U.S. waters in about two hours,” Gemici replied. “We’ll take on a pilot entering the bay, probably have to undergo another inspection—we should be in San Pablo Bay in three to four hours. They’ll make us anchor in the bay overnight, and then we should be allowed to dock sometime the next day. We should clear customs a couple hours afterward, and then start offloading the shipment.”

“Good,” Boroshev said. “We’ll check for bugs, but I tell you, we’re fine. Good job.”

Gemici was worried, but in the end he didn’t really care. His job was to get the package onto the wharf in Richmond, California; Boroshev’s job was to get it to its destination, wherever that was. When the pumps and whatever they contained hit the trailer beds and the men stepped foot on the wharf, the money would hit Gemici’s Cayman Islands bank account. Then, Boroshev was on his own.