Authors: Alan Zendell
I considered calling William when I got to work Thursday morning, but rejected the idea. If I’d reached him on Wednesday night, calling this morning would be superfluous and hard to explain. And if I hadn’t reached him last night? What would I tell him? Ilene had already implied he’d be calling later to let me know
Al Khalifa
was landing at a berth on Staten Island. He didn’t need me to warn him of possible trouble.
As for Jim, if my Wednesday turned out the way Ilene described, would he be wondering where I’d been all day or would it be like last week, when he seemed to have forgotten I existed? I decided to preempt the issue when he came in.
“Sorry I couldn’t check in yesterday. Remember I told you I was on quick call-up with my reserve unit?”
“Yeah, you mentioned it last week,” he said, apparently unconcerned.
I was about to tell him I’d been called in Wednesday morning, but I might not be gone on Wednesday if William changed his tactics after talking to me last night, and called off today’s operation. If he had I wouldn’t be injured and I’d awaken next to Ilene Wednesday morning and go to work normally. Was that even possible? I felt like I was going in circles. Maybe hearing about Wednesday from someone else’s point of view would help. I went to see Wilson.
“Hey, Dylan, how’s it goin’?” he said, innocuously enough.
“Nothing special. You guys doing all right?”
“Right on schedule. Gayle’s been on top of things from home.”
That wasn’t very helpful. “Where the hell have you been?” would have told me a lot more.
I realized that trying to figure this out was a non-starter, so instead of obsessing over Wednesday, as I had last week, I stuck to the agenda I’d worked out on Tuesday and waited to see what would develop. I loaded my favorite financial webpage and looked at the list of Wednesday’s biggest stock gainers. I knew I was supposed to research stocks before buying them, but with the element of chance all but removed, it was like fishing in a trout pond.
Even so, I treaded cautiously. I doubted that anyone monitored my transactions but there were all kinds of scenarios in which they might later. Anything I did today would be available to audit or subpoena for years.
I picked four stocks to buy Wednesday morning. One had gained eighty-three percent, another sixty-nine, while one has risen modestly and the fourth had actually lost a little. That wouldn’t fool anyone intent on proving I knew the stock movements in advance, but my need to seek balance in all things hadn’t yet adapted to the new rules.
After puttering ineffectually for a while, I loaded the Maritime Association website to see if a berthing assignment had been made for
Al Khalifa
. It took only a few seconds to find it, berth 24.1 at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island, north of the Goethals Bridge. She was due to dock at 9:40 this morning, which fit with what Ilene had said.
Did that mean the impound order hadn’t been issued? I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder that before William called. “Ready to move, Dylan?”
“On your count, William.”
“There’ll be a car outside your building in fifteen minutes.”
“We going to Howland Hook?”
Any surprise William may have felt was masked by annoyance. “That’s out of order, Dylan, and you know it.”
He was right. Even with a scrambler, you never gave unnecessary information over a phone line. What the hell was I doing, showing off?
“Will I be riding with you?” If he said yes I still had an opportunity to warn him that something bad was going to happen, but all I heard was an exasperated “Jesus!” followed by a sharp click.
For all William’s concern with security, I wondered why he hadn’t rejected the trite, black SUV that pulled up fourteen minutes later. We might as well have been flying cavalry flags. Inside were William, Samir, and two grunts that William generally referred to as gorillas. William whirled on me before the door had closed.
“What the fuck is with you, Dylan? You forget everything I ever taught you?”
“Sorry, William. I wasn’t thinking.”
He grumbled something, and that was that. “Couple more guys’ll meet up with us at the terminal. I had to wake up some people this morning to get Homeland Security’s attention. The least the fuckers could have done was contact the Port Authority and keep that damn ship on hold while they scratched their asses makin’ us wait.”
William shook his head, obviously disgusted. Putting domestic security under a single umbrella was supposed to improve communication among agencies. “We’ll just have to make the best of it. Customs should be on the dock with an impound order by now. Blows the shit out of our cover, but it can’t be helped.”
William wanted us on board the ship the instant we arrived. Samir and I would head for the suspect container with one of the gorillas alongside. It turned out the latter was a wiz with small explosives, which would be our last resort for getting the container open. I didn’t like that – one slip and we might set off our own dirty bomb. William logged my objection and we moved on to the rest of his plan, which isn’t worth repeating, since we never got to put it in play.
We had a few minutes of quiet which I used to wrack my brain, but the best I could come up with was, “I have a bad feeling about this, William.” We were already on the Bayonne Bridge. We’d be there in three minutes.
To my relief, he didn’t bite my head off. “I know. What’re you thinkin’?”
“This has been dragging too long. There’s a good chance they’re onto us. Wouldn’t surprise me if they knew all along there was an impound order in the works. They’ve had plenty of time to set something up.” Not bad, Dylan, you got his attention.
“We’ll be careful. That’s what the extra personnel are for. First sign of anything unexpected we break off and call in reinforcements.” At my raised eyebrows, he said, “A couple of patrol boats and a helicopter are on standby. Best I could do.”
We came to a much too conspicuous halt near the end of the rail head serving the terminal. Looking up at the “Howland Hook” sign as we walked past it, William said, “By the way Dylan, that was a nice catch. Just try to be a little more discreet, will ya?”
Al Khalifa
rode low in the water, her cargo still mostly on board, but a number of containers had been moved up to be unloaded and several had already been hoisted onto waiting rail cars. From five hundred yards away, we couldn’t see details, but it was clear that armed customs officers were evacuating the crew and herding them onto the pier. A uniformed man, presumably the captain was gesticulating angrily at the officers, but we couldn’t hear anything except the sounds of cranes and hoists at that distance.
Samir was irate. “So much for getting in and out quickly. They’ve already started unloading. We’re going to be as obvious as a camel fart.” He liked to joke that way even though we all knew he’d probably never been within a mile of a camel. He seemed to think we expected it of him.
“It’s after one,” I said. “The ship was berthed before ten.”
“Fucking Homeland Security!” William muttered. “It’s a wonder New York’s still standing.” The gorillas didn’t say anything.
We waited a couple of minutes for the second SUV to arrive. This one had “U. S. Government” stenciled along its side. Six men got out, including two who I recognized from previous operations years earlier.
William saw me turn to greet them. “Social hour’s not till three. Let’s move.”
We may not have been subtle, but I thought we looked pretty intimidating, eleven men, nine big and burly and two, Samir and me, average-sized; black, white, Asian, Muslim – I thought inanely that we looked like a professional football team advancing on the pier, eager to hit someone, all of us armed, four carrying shotguns in addition to their sidearms – more effective for crowd control when the crowd was likely to be hostile. At the moment, the growing group of displaced crew didn’t seem very aggressive, but their restless milling about made me uneasy. This was supposed to be a covert operation. We all kept sharp nervous eyes, me especially, but there was no obvious sign of trouble.
As we came abeam of the ship, Samir pulled me aside. “Anything look strange to you Dylan?”
Why was he asking me? I’d never even been this close to an offloading freighter before. “What do you see?” I asked.
“You said the ship’s been here over three hours, but there’s a tug boat still attached. It’s almost hugging the hull.”
“Maybe it’s there to help stabilize the ship. Looks like some hefty wind waves out there.”
Samir frowned at me. “Next time I’ll ask someone who knows the difference between a rowboat and a battleship. That’s what those taut lines are for.” He called out to William next. “I need to get on board and find that container. Can you have a couple of men check out that tug? It shouldn’t be there, and from here, there doesn’t appear to be anyone on board.”
Two of the gorillas began closing on the tug, which was maybe a hundred fifty feet from where we stood. The assembled crew had been watching every move we made, and as our guys approached the tug, two of them, one wearing a Yankees cap and the other, a UCLA sweat shirt, broke from the group and began running away from the pier.
The guards ordered them to halt and fired a couple of warning shots in the air, but the men kept running. William sent a couple of our guys after them, but NYPD had set up a perimeter at Western Avenue; there was nowhere for them to go. I’d turned to watch the pursuit when I felt searing heat on the right side of my face, followed a millisecond later by a booming explosion. The impact threw me against a truck parked on the pier. A Chinese gong went off inside my head and everything got misty.
Slumped against the truck, I saw the tug erupt in flames. The explosion ripped a hole in
Al Khalifa’s
side, back toward the stern, mostly below the water line. I couldn’t see the extent of the damage, but air from the freight decks, below, was boiling to the surface like an erupting volcano. As brackish water rapidly filled the hold, the ship began listing toward the massive rent in its hull.
I struggled to my feet, but waves of nausea made me cling to the side of the truck. The two men William had sent to look at the tug had taken the full force of the blast and were lying on the pier, their clothes afire. Two others were rushing to extinguish the flames. Samir was down on his knees looking dazed, and as I watched, he crumbled to the pier and lay still. William was on his feet screaming orders. It was then that I realized I couldn’t hear anything.
I felt like I was floating outside my body. The pain in my head was almost unendurable, yet I seemed to drift in surreal calm. Within minutes,
Al Khalifa
touched bottom, her bays completely flooded. Inexplicably, a voice in my head reminded me of what I’d seen on the maritime website. The water at the berth was only forty feet deep. The ship had sunk as far as it was going to, and most of it remained above water.
The last thing I remember was the impact of the freighter banging against the pier after hitting bottom. I lost my purchase on the side of the truck and everything went black. I remember all that now, but when I woke up in the E.R. hours later, everything that had happened since William’s call was a blank.
Truth be told, “woke up” is an exaggeration. I was aware of where I was the way someone lost in fog knows he’s in a city because he can make out vague, building-like shapes. The place had the unmistakable smell of a hospital, and people in lab coats and blue scrubs were in constant motion. In my semi-aware state I imagined a disaster with hundreds of casualties flooding emergency rooms, but that might have been a distant memory of some television show.
Someone shined a light in my eyes and tried talking to me but all I heard was a background buzz like dead air on an untuned radio. She seemed to be speaking emphatically to someone dressed in white and shaking her head. Then she turned to another patient and I felt myself being wheeled down a corridor. I can’t say where because I was out within seconds like a baby being rocked in his carriage.
When I again surfaced through the murk I was floating in it was dark. Light filtered into the room, but I could see that it was night outside the window where the blinds hadn’t closed completely. I registered details like that, but I still had no memory of what had landed me there, and when I tried to put random facts together into a coherent thought a wave of dizziness hit me. It was a good thing I was already on my back.
I lay there with no sense of time passing, a vague uneasiness gnawing at me. Something I ought to be concerned about seemed just beyond my grasp. A nurse came in and asked me something, her voice sounding like she was whispering from fifty feet away. Concentrating hurt too much so I just shook my head, which turned out to be a serious error. The pain almost made me faint.
That didn’t seem to surprise the nurse. She calmly checked my pulse and blood pressure and stuck a thermometer clamp on my finger, looking satisfied as she recorded the results. She tried communicating with me again, this time speaking more deliberately. “Are you in pain?”
I blinked my eyes once in the age-old code that meant, “Yes.”
“Your head?” I blinked again. “What about the burns on your face?” I couldn’t feel my face at all, so I tried mouthing, “numb.” She nodded so I’d know she’d heard me. She was turning to leave when I reached out and plucked her sleeve, feeling a driving need to know what time it was.