The rest of the day was spent greasing palms and hustling dock workers and officials along to make things happen. A pilot was hired at ten times the going rate, and he warped the container ship along a pier, where it was moored down, and a gangway rolled up to it for boarding. It was a long day of soothing egos, making payoffs, and shouting from Boats, who spoke Arabic like a native, peppered with the deepest profanity in English.
Dwayne observed Boats at work and parceled out the cash when it was called for. He wondered at the lethargic pace of it all. Despite the snail’s pace, he was exhausted. He was also drenched in sweat from the furnace-like heat.
The only real bright spot of the day was discovering the name given Boats by his parents. Randall Francis Crumb. He might be the only SEAL who ever got an upgrade on names.
They left the pier area for a taxi they’d paid for with a pair of hundreds torn in half. This gave them full use for the day. A jabbering man in a tropical suit and bow tie met them at the gate to the parking area. He was some kind of middle management in the cargo area and was waving a sheaf of paperwork at them and glaring through sweat-smeared sunglasses. He had forty containers ready for loading and needed them removed from his lot today.
Dwayne explained through Boats that they had to hold off on loading those containers as their holds needed to be arranged in a very particular order and they were awaiting delivery on a half dozen priority containers that needed to be loaded first. The jabbering man could not be calmed until Dwayne pressed a sweat-sodden envelope stuffed with twenties into his hand. The man was all smiles then and trotted away, waving assurances to them.
“Wonder what he would have wanted if he knew one of the boxes we’re waiting on had a nuclear reactor inside?” Boats said as they walked to the taxi idling in the lot.
The reactor arrived the following week without Parviz and Quebat. The two Iranians, who maintained the generation four mini-reactor, were a no-show. Some cryptic emails phrased to escape NSA monitoring explained that they would join the excursion en route. No one was sure what that meant. And no one knew where on the planet the pair had been, since the night they departed from the compound in Nevada with the reactor strapped down inside the trailer of a semi. When you’re a former Iranian nuke engineer on the terror watch list as well as carrying a fatwa from Tehran for being gay, you learn how to lay low or you die.
With the reactor’s arrival, they could begin loading the Raj. Most of the crew recruited by Boats had shown up and were living in quarters on board. They worked by day preparing the Raj for launch by cleaning and oiling and doing repairs on the plumbing and electrics. They were Ethiopians primarily and, according to Boats, all first and second cousins. He’d captained many of them before on various vessels much like the Raj. They were “good Muslims,” he assured Dwayne and Jimbo. No drinkers or fighters. All Sufis.
And thus, the whole vessel thrummed with the hard-driving beat of their brand of pop music pounding through the ship’s PA system as the crew scraped and painted and lubricated.
The containers had to be loaded in a particular order worked up into a graphic by the Taubers. There was a lot of shouting, cursing, and pleading in Arabic, Amharic, and American obscenities from Boats directed at the crane operators and his crew to get the big Conex boxes arranged properly according to the schematic.
The reactor was loaded forward athwart three containers filled with sacks of Saharan sand. More containers of sand sacks were loaded around and atop it to provide further shielding for the nuke. The reactor was plenty shielded as it was, but there was no sense tempting fate. Then came a dozen containers that held the components for the new Tauber Tube and related equipment like transformers, miles of cable and an IBM T-Rex mainframe computer. These were laid on the floor of the hold in a certain order. Lightly packed containers were loaded atop them to a height that exceeded the level of the main deck and then were covered over with tarps dogged down taut.
There were modifications that would be required to the Raj, but those would be performed when they were at sea in international waters and away from curious eyes.
Dwayne, Jimbo, and the Taubers moved into their quarters on board. The cabins were spacious enough and newly covered with a bright coat of white paint. Fresh linens were laid on. The galley was stocked with food for its pantries and refrigerators. The tanks were filled with diesel and the reservoirs with filtered water. All was set for departure except for the delivery of a half-dozen crates containing equipment that Morris Tauber had fabricated in Germany. Waiting for that to arrive delayed them another week.
The week was spent by the Taubers working on computer models for the modified Tauber Tube. They started at a makeshift work-station set up in the chart room of the Raj. The air conditioning went out, and the interior of the superstructure became an oven. The brother and sister moved to the open deck under a tarp awning set up by the crew. The siblings’ arguments over the construction of the new Tube were interrupted by long, icy silences, to the amusement of the crew, who could not understand one word.
To Dwayne, who had never seen the pair in the process of their research, it was a revelation. He leaned on the rail of the weather deck watching Caroline storm aft with Morris chasing after her. Both were shouting loud enough to be heard even over the pulse of Sufi percussion blasting from the speakers all over the Raj.
“Having
