STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 2
Nadia: Manzanillo, Mexico
The littoral sun was always brutal in places like this. It wasn’t much better in the yard among the vast towers of container boxes: they provided shade, but their hulking skins seemed to magnify the sun’s heat, and they were perfectly arranged to prevent any sea breeze from making landfall. Beyond the skyward maze of gantry cranes, the ocean was framed between container cliffs. The water served only to reflect the sun’s glare.
Although the three of them were sweating, none of them were too fazed by the tropical heat. For the stevedore and the forklift driver, this was simply the daily reality. For Nadia, it was irrelevant, a bit of unpleasantness that would end and be followed by something else. Little bothered her. She had seen it all, experienced it all; had known pain, brought pain upon others.
She could handle the job.
Her survival depended on it.
The men were in overalls and boots. Nadia sported a black blazer and matching skinny pants cut to emphasize her lithe figure, high heels welcome for the extra inches, and oversized Chopard sunglasses that she nudged up the sweaty bridge of her dimple of a nose. All three of them wore yellow hard hats, hers ramrod straight so she didn’t look goofy.
Nadia didn’t do cute.
“Bien, aquí estamos,” said the stevedore sitting beside her, regarding his clipboard. To the driver: “Oye! Para aquí.”
The driver pulled over. Shipping containers stacked six, seven high towered over them, leaving just a strip of arid blue above. In the distance, the gantry cranes plucked shipping containers, carried them, deposited them like dinosaur birds gathering dinner. The sound was what a giant robot might make trying to mimic the rhythm of ocean waves.
“This one?”
“Si, si, ésta. Número…”
“Six one five five-TPPDSK,” she said, jumping onto the macadam, agile in her heels. That container was located on the bottom of its heap. The port’s computers had registered it as on hold; its allotted truck or train was two days away. “Open it.”
The driver and the stevedore traded a look of resignation. The driver, eyes hidden below his hard hat, waddled over to the bottom container. The double doors of its rear were guarded by four thick lock rods. An electronic keypad awaited instruction. The driver punched in a code, turned the caches and pulled open the right-hand door.
Inside was a wall of white, gloomy in the shade. Boxes. Lots of identical boxes, each about six inches high and a foot long. Each item: contraband north of the border.
“I need to see. Necesito ver, got it?”
“Is all here, señorita,” said the stevedore, showing her his clipboard. She backhanded it free of his grip, the manifest skidding along the ground. The stevedore paused, eyes on the lost clipboard, and then on her, angry but too intimidated to hit back.
“You need to show me.”
He paused, as if reconsidering their arrangement. But she knew he wasn’t going to disobey her. Not now. He returned to the container. The neatly arranged white boxes rose far above him. He whistled and snapped his fingers. The forklift driver carefully switched gears, backed up, moved in.
There was no human way to take a full accounting of the contents. Each white box was twelve by twelve inches, half as high. That was about 0.014 cubic meters. The shipping container was a forty-foot-long unit, holding seventy-six cubic meters of volume, and there were supposed to be five thousand identical boxes of cargo.
Enough to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Nadia needed to see more.
The forklift grabbed a giant’s fistful and reversed.
She stepped inside the little alcove the forklift had emptied and chose a box at random. They all bore the same green logo and four-character name of a manufacturer in Guangdong.
“El manifiesto,” she commanded. She looked at the entry on the clipboard, a printout from the seaport’s computer logs at Control: los drones, it read. Drones were only legal in the United States if they had a kill switch; Americans had become paranoid about these things since a swarm of them had left the Ronald Reagan submerged beneath the black waves, lost to an impossibly deep trench off the coast of Okinawa.
People had forgotten a lot after the Darkout, but they remembered that.
The drones in this container were rogues, but their chips were chameleons, forged in a Jin Nao fab designed to mimic US Homeland Department protocols.
She stepped out. “De nuevo,” she told the driver.
She made him go in three more times, until she was satisfied with her sampling.
“Okay, put it back. Terminada.”
The stevedore and the driver took a while repacking the shipping container. Pulling cargo free had been easy; now they had to restore the precise packing to get everything to fit.
As they completed the job by hand, she leaned against the forklift and checked her phone.
Manzanillo’s seaport was now the busiest along North America’s Pacific coast, floods having wiped out LA’s use of railways. The Mexican port authority had invested heavily since to capitalize on this new prominence, including its cybersecurity, now considered top notch. It was so good that Mang had needed six weeks to worm into the seaport’s logistics software and throw a little digital sand into the authority’s gears.
The message on her phone read, “44.25 degrees North, 116.60 degrees West.”
Typical Mang, giving her instructions on the next assignment before she had even completed this one.
Prepare the package, she wrote back in Chinese.
“Hola,” came a deep voice. “Qué estás hacienda acqui?”
She looked up to see a yard supervisor, white hard hat denoting rank, walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, his face dominated by a luxurious mustache. A good build, not like these two fat clowns she had bribed.
The stevedore and the driver looked over their shoulders, guilt written on their faces.
“Psst,” she hissed, jerking her chin in the direction of the intruder.
The stevedore offered a weak smile. “Nada, señor. Solo comprobando el inventario.”
She zapped Mang a one-word message: Send.
“Y quién demonios es ella?” the supervisor demanded.
Nadia catwalked his way, palm open. “Hi there! I’m with US customs. Nadia Zhang. We’re doing some routine checks.”
The supervisor didn’t shake her hand. “You can’t be here.” He had broad shoulders and a flat belly, and Nadia flirted with the idea of doing him, maybe right here on the seats of the forklift. But that appetite would have to wait.
“Well, see, I can.” She pulled a thin badge from her back pocket. It was a faked Customs and Border Authority ID, passable so long as he didn’t take a good look. “Special liaison, looking for contraband. I guess we got a bad tip.”
“Let me see.” She handed the badge over. He didn’t look convinced, reached for his walkie-talkie.
“It’s like this…” she said, “I think your computer systems are malfunctioning. It told me this container was in from Buenaventura and that this identifier meant we’d find something belonging to the Calí cartel.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our computers.”
“Maybe you could ask Control.”
The robot ocean sounds ceased. The gantry cranes had come to a surprising halt, bathing the yard in an eerie hush. The men looked up in amazement.
“See?” she said. But no one could see anything right now: Mang’s malware had knocked out a square kilometer’s worth of cameras and sensors.
The supervisor spoke into his walkie-talkie, asked what was going on. She heard a crackled response and the man’s face twitched in alarm. He demanded, “You knew about this? What’s your name again?”
“It’s right there…” she said.
He let her come close. She grabbed his wrist with both hands and threw him off balance into her thrusting knee. He rolled to a stop on the macadam. His radio squawked José! José?
The stevedore and the forklift driver stared open-mouthed.
“Put him inside.” They didn’t move. “Ponlo adentro! Ahora!”
They had to first remove some of the white boxes with the forklift, upending their mathematical arrangement. She raised José’s walkie-talkie to her ear and heard sounds of alarm from Control. Control had a computer attack to suddenly grapple with. One lone supervisor walking the port yard would be far from anyone’s thoughts.
The stevedore and forklift driver dug out a big hole inside the container box, but the men stood above José, unwilling to move him.
“Señorita, él todavía está vivo.”
“Still alive, hunh? All right. I’ll pay you double. Doble, hear me?” She gestured toward the unconscious man. “Unless you want to join him.”
The men picked up the supervisor, his face bloody but his chest still moving.
“That’s it,” she said as they folded him in the recess of the box. There was no time now to be precise. The men loaded the forklift as high as it would allow, and the driver dumped the load of boxes on top of José.
She watched the supervisor disappear beneath a wall of white boxes with no more than a professional interest, her thoughts already turning to one of her comfortable bolt holes and soaking in a very long bath.
The computer’s manifest regarding 6155-TPPDSK now registered plastic toys, action figures from this summer’s superhero movie, arriving from Tanjung Priok, Indonesia, to be loaded onto three trucks bound for Laredo, Texas via Guadalajara.
The gantry cranes rumbled back to life and the cameras opened their eyes, but not before the truck’s doors were sealed with José inside. The seaport settled back into its gargantuan routines.
Riding the forklift back to Control, she considered messaging Mang to tell him the job was done, that his plan to save them was on track. She had a feeling he already knew. 44.25N, 116.60W. His restless mind was already pushing her toward some new kind of hell.
(Next chapter.)