screen what lay beyond from the prying eyes of outsiders.
The front gate, wide enough when open to permit the passage of a delivery truck, was now closed, barred from the inside.
Inside the fence, to one side of the gate, stood a guardhouse, a simple one-room structure. Fence and guardhouse were relatively new, as were the floodlights mounted atop the gateposts.
The guardhouse was manned by a lone sentry, who wore a gray uniform and commander's cap, an outfit standard for private security guards. With this exception: there were no badges, emblems, or insignia to indicate to which firm the guard belonged.
No nameplate to identify him, either.
He was about forty, big, and tough-looking. He wore a big-bore belt gun, a heavy-caliber man stopper. Inside the guard shack, standing against the wall within easy access, was a machine gun.
Sharp, hard-edged, he seemed a breed apart from the usual run of rent-a-cops. There was something martial, soldierly, in his bearing, his watchful gaze, and the way he carried himself. His attitude was that of a sentry on guard duty.
Other guards were posted around the site. They, too, projected that same aura of deadly competence.
A warehouse sat atop the pier, its long axis parallel to it. The structure was a shoe box-shaped, high-walled shed with a peaked roof. Narrow horizontal bands of windows were set high atop the long walls. It was a dilapidated, barnlike shed, its walls faced with sheets of corrugated tin. The tin was corroded, rusted through, giving it a ruddy color, like the planet Mars.
At the far end of the pier, out over the water, stood a heavy-duty lifting crane.
Its boxy cab sat atop a steel framework derrick tower several stories tall. The rig was old, rusted, and hadn't worked for many years. But the control cabin served as an excellent watchtower, affording views of the river and the shore.
It was manned by a couple of sentries equipped with binoculars, cell phones, and assault rifles. One kept watch over the land, and the other over the river.
It had been years, almost a decade, since the pier had last housed a going concern. The warehouse was decrepit, a potential safety hazard. The crane had broken long ago, and now the machinery was beyond repair.
That was before the arrival of the New People.
In the last month or so since then, the site had enjoyed a kind of rebirth. It was back in business. The recent spurt of activity was for a limited time only, and was about to reach its end.
The pier was raised up on a framework of massive wooden pilings reinforced with X-shaped cross braces, raising it twenty feet above the river. On the downriver side of the pier, a ramp zigzagged downward to a massive floating dock, a raftlike platform now bobbing on the surface of the water.
Moored alongside it was a barge. A gangway with side rails slanted upward from the floating dock to the bridge.
The vessel was an old hulk of a freight-hauling scow, crude and massive.
Rectangular-shaped, its upper works wider than its base, with slanted sides, bow, and stern. It was equipped with a bridge amidships and portside deckhouse. A distinctive touch: its starboard side sported davits designed for offloading a whaler-style motorboat that was secured to them.
The barge was marked with a series of identifying numbers matching those inscribed on the ship's papers in a cabinet in the wheelhouse. The numbers and the documents were fakes, although they were good enough to pass a superficial inspection by the authorities.
No Coast Guard or Harbor Patrol boat or any other minions of maritime officialdom had yet arrived to inquire about the barge or the site, and it was unlikely that any would, in the relatively brief time remaining before it began its final, fatal voyage downriver.
Why should they? The New Orleans waterfront was huge, sprawling, teeming with hundreds of ships of all sizes and thousands of men. There was nothing in this near-derelict hulk and faceless facility to attract the interest of officialdom.
The barge displayed numbers but no name. Whatever original name it had once borne had been painted over and blacked out.
Arm-thick hawser lines secured it to sturdy wooden bollards on the floating dock.
The vessel rode bobbing on turbid waters. The river was long, wide, snakelike, coiling with heavy, powerful currents and churns. Thick and murky as black coffee, complete with the grounds.
Above the water, the sky seethed with masses of gray clouds streaming northward. Gusts of wind began picking up little, spiky whitecaps on the river's surface.
The nameless scow was as seaworthy as it could be made in the limited time allowed before its mission. Besides, it wasn't supposed to look too good. That would break cover and make it stand out from the ordinary run of similar bargelike vessels, scores of which were seen ceaselessly plying their courses up and down the river.
Major Marc Vollard didn't have to be there while the final rigging and arming was done. His role now was strictly as an observer. Huygens was an expert and didn't need a commanding officer looking over his shoulder to ensure that he performed up to his usual standard of excellence.
By all rights, Vollard shouldn't have been there at all. It was a contravention of sound military doctrine for the team leader to risk his own neck on the threshhold of a mission, because if something did go wrong and catastrophe resulted, the mission would be without its commanding officer.
The mission was two-pronged; the explosives-laden barge was only one-half of it; and even without it, the other half promised to supply the necessary quota of destruction contracted for by his clients.
Vollard had no doubt that his second-in-command, Rex de Groot, would carry on and complete that portion of the mission in the unlikely event that Huygens got his wires crossed and blew the boat, its occupants, and the pier sky-high. De Groot and the main body of the mercenary storm force were off-site now, at a secluded compound outside city limits, waiting for nightfall to make their rendezvous at Pelican Pier, the staging area from which the raid would be launched. No pier, no problem; de Groot would merely lead the force from the compound to the target area.
No, Vollard didn't have to be there. That's why he was present. In the business of soldiering, one led from the front and by example. Mystique was part of leadership. Vollard delighted in sharing the risks taken by the least of his troops. Private troops, mercenary force.
He liked the action, the thrill of being poised on the swordblade's razor edge.
The wheelhouse was a square-shaped cabin that stood amidships on the port side, containing the controls for the barge. Vollard stood in the doorway, looking in.
Inside the cabin were three men: Piet Huygens, the demolitionist who was completing the rigging of the arming device; and Ahmed and Rashid, a pair of Yemeni sea captains and would-be martyrs who would pilot the boat on its final run.
Vollard was Belgian, Huygens was Dutch, but both essentially were men without a country. Hardcore professional mercs, the only banners they fought under were the black flag and the certified check. Freelances in a rogue's regiment of Dogs of War.
Ahmed and Rashid, something different, had been furnished by the mission's Saudi backers. Their part in the operation was a suicide run, a one-way ticket to Paradise. That was a job not for mercs but for True Believers.
Huygens was an innovator and skilled mechanic in the field of destructive delivery systems. He had a thatch of strawcolored hair, a same-colored mustache, and a red face. Arm muscles bulged in his short-sleeved shirt as he connected the end of the wiring's trunk cable to the arming device.
The crates of explosives in the hold were rigged with a network of wires and detonators. The detonators were arranged in spaced clusters to maximize the force and impact of the cumulative explosions. Individual wires stretched back into bundled branches of wires, themselves combining further on into a single, trunk cable which emerged from the hold and into the wheelhouse, where Huygens was finishing the work of connecting it to an arming device which combined a timer and a triggering device.
The arming device was housed in a horn-shaped piece of plastic similar in size and shape to the joystick of a video game console board. It contained a digital electronic clock, a keying switch, and several built-in fail-safe
