Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

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 Basrah, 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-Basrah 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?”