“It gets weirder. Hatcherly just spent a fortune to buy the trans-isthmus railroad from an American company and installed a spur into their port. It’s coupled to an automated unloading and stacking system that can off-load a freight train and move the containers to designated spots until they’re ready to be transferred onto a ship. It’s done with an overhead cableway crane that only requires a few computer operators. They’re currently moving a little cargo by rail but nothing near their reported capacity.”
“That is why my cousin will lose his job. The whole thing is automated.”
“If Hatcherly’s up to something big, they’ll need to do it under cover,” Mercer said. “Do they have warehouses?”
“Several. And they’re huge.”
Mercer turned to Roddy. “Can your cousin get us in?”
“No. They have heavy security, many are former members of Noriega’s brutal Dignity Brigades, the troops responsible for the worst of the Pineapple’s atrocities.” Roddy used the contemptuous nickname of the Panamanian dictator the U.S. military ousted in 1989. The name Pineapple referred to the horrible skin on Manuel Noriega’s face. “The ex-Dingbats”-that name for the Dignity Brigades came from the American soldiers involved in Operation Just Cause-“patrol the perimeter fences, which are electrified and have motion sensors. There are also Chinese guards who regularly sweep the container yard. Somehow Hatcherly got permission to have them all armed with automatic weapons.”
“Bit heavy-handed to protect shipping containers that you can’t steal without a crane and an eighteen- wheeler,” Harry said. “We’ve got to see what they’re up to.”
“My thought exactly,” Mercer agreed. “What about coming in from the water?”
“There are powerful lights on the gantry cranes,” Lauren answered. “When you were in the hospital, Roddy and I went out on his boat. We didn’t get fifty yards from the place before they sent a patrol boat to escort us away.”
“Could we swim in somehow?”
“Maybe, but it would be risky. And we don’t know what kind of security they have on the quay. The whole place really is protected like a fortress.”
“So there’s no easy way in?” The extra security gave Mercer the impression that they were already on the right track.
“There is,” Roddy answered. “Well, not easy. But easier. We can come in the back door, so to speak.”
Mercer raised a questioning eyebrow.
“The railroad. Lauren and I talked about it. We can stow away in a container on a night my cousin is working. They unload the trains with forklifts until their cable crane is fully operational. My cousin Victor can move our container to a secluded spot and let us out. Once we finish looking around, he loads the container back on the train for the return trip to the Atlantic port of Cristobal.”
“How can we get into a container at Cristobal?” Mercer asked, noticing another quirk about Lauren’s eyes for the first time.
When just chatting about nothing of consequence, she turned her head so her warmer blue eye kept her expression candid and laughing. It was as the discussion became substantial that her face shifted so her more intense gray iris dictated her bearing. Her mismatched eyes were the only outward sign of this mental rebalancing. In their own ways, Mercer found both sides of her personality alluring. One was the epitome of Southern grace and deportment, the other a detached coolness that radiated competence. She was like two distinct people somehow reconciled within one.
“I’ve already worked it out.” Lauren leaned forward. “Three months ago an import-exporter I know over in the Colon Free Trade Zone had a son who was getting involved in the drug trade as a courier. He asked me to help set the boy straight. Pretending to be members of the National Police, Ruben and his men broke into his apartment one night. They roughed him up a little, took his passport and said if he tried to get it renewed they’d be back. Needless to say, the kid gave up his dreams of becoming the next Pablo Escobar.” She smiled at the memory. “The old man owes me.”
“And the Chinese guards?”
“Roddy said easier, not easy.”
“We need guns.” Mercer felt his guts slide even as he said it. Once again, he was putting himself in danger for a cause he didn’t yet fully understand. Ever since he’d accompanied a commando team into Iraq to determine Saddam Hussein’s uranium mining capabilities, the threat of violence had dogged him. He never sought it out. It was just there, a circumstance he seemed unable to avoid. But like the other times-Hawaii, Alaska, Eritrea and most recently Greenland-he felt an unnamable obligation to face it.
Lauren thought she recognized the tired look in Mercer’s eyes. Harry had told her some of his past and she knew he did not relish what they may be forced to do. She nodded slowly. “I’ve got that covered too. Roddy, if we’re lucky no one’s going to see us, but if we’re not. . Are you sure you want in on this?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’m fighting for my family, perhaps a better reason than either of you.”
“No,” Mercer snapped. “You’re not coming. You might have a good reason, but you don’t have any combat experience.” He wouldn’t let Roddy orphan his children and widow his wife for this. “Lauren and I know what we’re doing. We’ve been there before.”
Roddy’s face went red with unsuppressed anger. He looked to Lauren for support.
“We can handle this ourselves.” She understood what Mercer was doing. “Your job’s going to be to learn as much as you can about Liu Yousheng. If we don’t find anything at the container terminal, going after him directly might be our only other option.”
Carmen Herrara and the children returned before he could reply. His three kids crowded around him, vying for his attention as they gushed about their day swimming. Miguel went straight to Mercer to show him the money an English tourist had given him for retrieving her sunglasses after they had fallen in the pool.
Reminded of what he was risking, Roddy caught Mercer’s eye. “I’ll do whatever you say.”
Cristobal, Panama
It wasn’t claustrophobia that bothered Mercer as the large shipping container was shunted around the cargo terminal on Panama’s Atlantic coast and loaded onto the flatbed rail-car. The enclosed blackness didn’t affect him at all. If it did he never would have become a miner. What he hated was the disorientation of not knowing what was coming next. A sudden turn by the heavy-duty forklift slapped him and Lauren against the container’s wall and the slam of the box dropping onto the train came with spine-jarring abruptness that left the steel confines echoing.
“What next?” Lauren complained from across the darkness where she’d tumbled.
The diesel locomotive two dozen cars ahead lurched forward to test the couplings. Mercer had just gotten to his feet and had the floor pulled out from under him. He landed on his backside, cursing.
“I should have known.” She turned on a flashlight with a red filter lens. In its glow, her dark hair looked like ink.
“Didn’t Roddy tell the forklift driver to take it easy?”
“I think he was.” Lauren crabbed across the floor to sit next to Mercer as the train jerked again. “I feel like we’ve been stuffed inside an industrial clothes dryer.”
The train’s motion settled to the metronomic clacking of wheels over rails. It was a rhythm Mercer had always enjoyed. For a moment he could forget where he was, what he was about to do, and the Beretta 92 hanging in a nylon shoulder holster.
He and Lauren had ninety minutes before the freight train reached the Hatcherly terminal at Balboa. There, the last three cars would be decoupled while the remainder of the train continued to the larger container terminal farther along the canal. They had gone over their plan for two days straight, knew the layout of Hatcherly’s facility from diagrams drawn by Roddy’s cousin, Victor. Lauren had even taken Mercer to a pistol range to test his assertion that he knew how to handle a weapon. Though she’d beaten him at distance shooting, he had an intuitive aim for pop-up targets that she couldn’t match.
They had nothing to do for the next hour and a half and neither seemed willing, or able, to make idle conversation as the miles stretched out behind them. Mercer’s mind drifted back twenty hours, when he’d been eating off a teppanyaki grill at a Japanese restaurant with Maria Barber.
The meal had been delicious. The company remained as a bad taste in his mouth.
