by Rod Collins
***
Hands cold from holding binoculars, Butler watched the security gate to the four hundred plus acres of the Terminal 6 compound, the huge Port of Portland container dock on the Columbia River. He was back in the deserted warehouse only fifty yards or so from the gate, but floodlights backlit the guard shack, making it almost impossible to identify the man inside.
Butler needed to know who was on duty. If it was Dantonio Jones, it meant easy access to the containers. Two years earlier, Butler formed a mutually beneficial relationship with Dantonio, a numbskull who had an arrangement with certain members of the crews on the container ships which periodically tied up to the dock.
In exchange for the services of freelance hookers, a car to drive, and some money for marijuana or booze, Dantonio was the front man for a smuggling business. When Al-Alwani sent Butler to find a corruptible dock worker, two nights of surveillance and video of a money-for-drugs exchange turned Dantonio from small-time hood into a full-time snitch with keys to the gate. Butler paid Dantonio well.
Butler pulled his cell phone from a zippered pocket and hit a saved number. He watched the shadowy figure in the guard shack put a cell phone to his ear and thought, That’s Dantonio.
Dantonio said, “Yes?”
Butler laughed and said, “I’m watching you.”
“Where you at?”
“Across the road. I’m coming in.” He kept his head down because of the security cameras, and walked to the man-gate where Dantonio waited to let him in.
“What you want, man?”
Butler pointed and said, “Let’s get inside.”
Dantonio made a show of checking a list on his clipboard, opened the gate for Butler, and then pushed through the door to the guard shack with Butler right behind. Butler worked the screen on his iPhone and pulled up a picture of Al-Alwani. “I want to know if he’s been here recently.”
Dantonio nodded. “Last night. He was in a big fuss about something. He asks if I seen you lately. I tell him no, I ain’t seen you. He said to call him if I do. Then he drove to the container in his van. That’s all.”
“Which container did he go to?”
“The blue one at the far end of the docks … downriver. Sits by itself.”
“Here’s what I need you to do…”
Chapter 45
Trust
HIS CELL PHONE BUZZED and vibrated on the bedside table a half-dozen times and then went to voice mail. A few seconds later it started up again.
Groggy, Brandt glanced at his bedside clock and wondered who in the hell was calling him at 11 p.m. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and punched the on button. “This better be good,” he growled.
The sound of Winslow Butler’s voice brought Brandt fully awake. “Oh, it is, Special Agent Brandt. It is.”
“What the hell do you want, Butler? I figured you would be out of the country by now.”
“Remember when I told you I was going to make your careers, you and Wilcox? Well, get your pen ready.”
Brandt swung his legs and sat up on the bed. He turned his lamp on and fumbled a pen and a note pad from the little drawer in the bedside table. “I still think you should come in.”
“Nah. I’m having too much fun. I don’t think you can have any fun in jail. In fact, I’m sure you can’t.” And then Butler laughed. “I’m the masked crusader now, protecting the weak, righting the wrongs and dealing out justice. Never had this much fun before.” Or liked myself as much, he thought.
“Enough. What have you got for us?”
“Take a SWAT team. Go visit Terminal 6, the container dock on the Columbia. Arrest Dantonio Jones for criminal conspiracy. Right now, he’s on duty at the guard shack. He has orders to let you in without any fuss or bother, but not before midnight. The swing shift shuts down at midnight. You need to let the terminal clear out and the big yards lights go dim.
“Look for a blue freight container sitting all by itself at the far end of the wharf. I’m sending you a picture of the container. You can figure it out from there. After all, you are the FBI.” And then he cackled and laughed like a crazy man.
Brandt asked, “Is that where the women are being held?” All he heard was Butler hanging up.
Brandt shook his head. “Judas priest. He’s crazy as a loon.” He punched at his phone and waited for Wilcox to answer.
Fifteen minutes later, a black SUV pulled up to the curb in front of Brandt’s apartment building. Brandt slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
While he read the address for Terminal 6 aloud, Wilcox fed it into the GPS mounted in the dash. “Okay,” Wilcox said, “Let’s go see if Butler really knows something … or if the crazy bastard is just playing with us.”
“Do we want backup? Maybe let dispatch know?”
“No backup,” Wilcox decided, “but we should let dispatch know we’re on a call and where to.” Traffic was light, so Wilcox pushed the big SUV at a steady eighty-five miles per hour up I-5.
Brandt used the radio to let their dispatcher know they were on a call to the Pier 6 terminal, and then checked his watch. “Butler said a guard named Dantonio Jones would let us through the gate after the swing shift left at midnight. He was very specific about the time. Not before midnight.”
“Why?”
“He said the place cleared out at midnight. Maybe he didn’t want to tip off the bad guys.”
Wilcox drove into the big parking lot outside the terminal, reversed and backed into an open parking spot with a clear view of the gate. He killed the lights and turned off the wipers. “And now we wait?”
“I think so. Butler always leaves me guessing … like it’s some kind of game.”
***
At midnight, the huge gantries unloading containers from the open decks of three container ships shut down, and the rhythm of the work simply stopped.
Five minutes later, Wilcox and Brandt saw a dirty white shuttle bus make its way from the docks to the gate and drop off a busload of longshoremen. A guard stepped out of the shack to unlock the man-gate and to compare each man’s TWIC (Transportation Worker Identification Credentials) against a checklist. The last man through the gate was the bus driver who maneuvered the shuttle bus into a parking spot alongside the guard shack, and killed the engine. He waved and said, “Have a good night, Dantonio. Don’t let any buggers get you.”
Dantonio waved back, checked the driver’s name off on his list and thought, They already have.
In a cost-cutting measure, the Port of Portland ordered the floodlights shut off as soon as the longshoremen on the swing shift filed through the small man-gate to their vehicles. A string of weak, solar powered lamps lined the fence, but the storage areas were almost totally dark.
Chapter 46
Busted
SPECIAL AGENTS WILCOX AND BRANDT slid down in their seats, trying to make the FBI vehicle look unoccupied. They saw a line of weary longshoremen in battered hard hats, some carrying lunch pails, trudge across the parking lot and climb into cars and pickups or onto motorcycles.
The sound of engines filled the night, and the traffic started lining up at the stop sign on Marine Drive. The line of tail lights marked their progress towards I-5, where some headed south and others north across the Columbia for home on the Washington side of the river.
“Well, Leroy,” Brandt said. “How do you want to play this? Butler said to arrest the guard for criminal conspiracy.”
Wilcox started the engine and drove slowly toward the gate. “Let’s just leave him in place, and use him … for now.”
Sweat started beading Dantonio’s forehead when the headlights on the SUV in the parking lot came to life. He didn’t start shaking until the vehicle pulled up to the gate. As instructed, he punched the remote and watched the gate roll back on its track, parallel to the fence.
When the SUV was inside, he keyed the remote and watched the gate close again. As instructed by Butler, he stepped out of the guard shack with his hands empty and his arms o
ut, wide of his body. “I’m Dantonio Sims. Butler, told me to help you guys. Says he works for the FBI.”
Hand on his pistol, Brandt said, “I need to search you for weapons. Please turn around and place your hands behind your back.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Dantonio said, “except let a van in to go visit a container down at the end of the docks.”
Wilcox pulled his pistol and said, “Turn around, just like my partner told you.”
“All right. All right. I’m doin’ it. I’m doin’ it.” Dantonio turned his back to the agents and put his hands behind his back, knowing full well he was about to be handcuffed and arrested.
“I don’t have no weapons other than my pistol,” he said.
Brandt snapped the cuffs shut, pulled a 9mm handgun from Dantonio’s holster, and dug a wallet from a rear pocket. He flipped it open and read aloud, “This Port of Portland security card identifies this man as Dantonio Jones.”
He finished his pat down and asked, “Then what’s this?” Brandt pulled a knife from Dantonio’s left rear pocket.
“That just what my grandpa would call a whittling knife.”
Brandt dropped the knife into the right pocket of his windbreaker and said, “Turn around.”
Wilcox lit Dantonio’s face with his Maglite and said, “What’s the security set-up here?”
Sweat dripped off Dantonio’s nose. He nodded and said, “Oh, man. Let me think. Ah … we have motion-activated lights along the fence, security cameras on the dock, a Coast Guard marine patrol on the river, and a roving patrol with two security people in a Jeep … like mine over there. And in the main building, we have a couple of people who monitor the cams during work hours.”
“Can you trust the security patrol?” Brandt asked.
“Honest as the day is long,” Dantonio answered.
“Hold still,” Brandt said and produced a key to unlock the cuffs. “Now go call them. Tell them the FBI wants to talk to them. Tell them the truth.”
“You ain’t gonna arrest me?”
Wilcox snapped off the flashlight and snorted. “Not yet. For now, you belong to us. Whatever we ask, you do. Mind your manners and we’ll think about letting you skate. So, you be good. But just for the record, what would we arrest you for?”
The first smidgen of hope blossomed in Dantonio’s mind. “Nothing, nothing at all.”
“That’s what I thought,” Wilcox grumbled. “Now do as my partner told you.”
Three minutes later the SUV was lit by the headlights of a white Jeep Cherokee with a light rack on the roof. Two women got out, and walked cautiously toward the SUV, hands close to their weapons.
Brandt held his badge in the headlights and said, “We’re Portland FBI. Got a tip we need to check out. I suggest we use the guard shack. We can see each other that way. Okay?”
A woman’s voice answered. “You first.”
In the brightly lit interior of the guard shack, a roomy fifteen by twenty-foot concrete building, Wilcox and Brandt produced their credentials and badges. The taller of the two women, a husky thirty-something redhead with a marine security badge pinned to her blue shirt and a name tag that read ‘Sue Allison,’ said, “We get shippers in here at all times of the day and night, so nighttime activity isn’t all that unusual. To gain access, a person needs a TWIC number. Dantonio, or whoever is on shift, checks the number against a list of people authorized to be in the terminal. If he gets a match, he lets people in.”
Wilcox frowned. “You don’t keep track of why they want in?”
The smaller woman whose name tag said ‘Donna Martin,’ a slim brunette with a stunning figure, at least in the eyes of Wilcox, shook her head. “Not our business.”
Brandt looked skeptical. “You trying to tell me you don’t ever get curious about what the shippers have in the containers?”
Officer Donna Martin said, “We help DEA when they bring sniffer dogs to look for drugs. And TSA has some dogs who are trained to smell explosives. Other than that, we don’t do much inspecting.”
Wilcox looked at Brandt and shook his head. He didn’t say, “Idiots” aloud, but Brandt heard him anyway. “Well, on that happy note, let’s go look for a blue container with these numbers on it.” He held his phone out for the marine security guards. “This is the one.”
Officer Martin said, “Just a minute.” She turned to the PC on the desk and typed in the numbers from the container. “Yes. We know where that one is.” She started for the door. “Follow us.”
Brandt said, “Mister Sims, you stay here. We might need you to let the cavalry in. If you see an ambulance and police vehicles, you let them in and give them directions to the container. Got it?”
Dantonio gave a shaky nod and a weak, “Yessir.”
Outside, Officer Allison asked, “Do you know something about Dantonio we should know? I’m the night supervisor, and I like to know what my people are into.”
Wilcox shook his head and gave a non-committal “No.”
Brandt stifled a grin and said, “Shall we go?”
“It would be easier to help if we knew what you two are looking for.”
Brandt gave into his urge to grin and said, “We’re about to find out ourselves.”
***
The marine security guards led the way in their Jeep, down the rain-slick asphalt. Nearly a half-mile later they stopped in front of a blue container sitting in isolation near the end of the wharf. Brandt guessed it to be maybe fifty feet long and at least eight feet wide. Big sucker, he thought.
Officer Allison lit the doors to the container with spotlights from the Jeep’s overhead rack, and both women stepped into the light drizzle, flashlights in hand. A big steel padlock and a metal ribbon sealed the door.
Wilcox inspected the lock and pulled on the handle … just because that’s what one does to locked handles when one works for the FBI. Or maybe it was just a ‘guy thing.’ When the lock held, he slapped the door with his big hand and yelled, “FBI! This the FBI! Anyone in there?”
A startled yell penetrated the steel walls of the container, followed by women’s voices crying for help. One voice, stronger than the rest carried over the top of the screaming and crying. “Get us the hell out of here!”
“Bingo!” Brandt yelled. He turned to the guards and said, “You know how to break into one of these things?”
Officer Martin said, “Well, sometimes we have to change the locks. I have a master key in back.” Grinning she opened the back hatch of the Jeep and dropped a toolbox to the ground. She unsnapped the latch on the toolbox, flipped the lid open, and produced a cordless drill with a carbide cutting wheel. “We use this.”
A few seconds later, streams of sparks from the carbide wheel lit the night as Officer Martin cut the lock and the metal seal. When the lock hit the ground, Wilcox unlatched the doors and pulled them open.
Chapter 47
Rescued
A TALL, ATHLETIC-LOOKING WOMAN in black sweat pants and a dark, hooded sweatshirt, blonde hair looking like it hadn’t seen a comb in a month, pushed hard against the door and knocked Wilcox back.
She stood blinking in the headlights, tears masked by the rain. In a choked voice, she asked, “FBI?”
