Karadon (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  “That’s the one,” Alex confirmed. “He’s being paid to change the records when new customs documents are generated. They will have told him, of course, not to keep any record of that anywhere, but he’s evidently a man who likes to keep everything written down. It took our guys just seconds to crack the “secret code” he puts on dockets when he’s been paid to change them. He even keeps a spreadsheet on his personal comp, listing how many dockets he’s altered, keeping track of how much they owe him. That’s how we knew about the crate on your ship, cross referencing the altered docket on the office records with his personal spreadsheet. That, by the way, is cunningly labelled “personal expenditure”, and uses his own codes for different kinds of drugs. It did not take us long to work out that “beer” stands for grey DPC.”

  “Oh.” Tom caught his breath. When Rangi had said that they had a pretty good idea where all the drugs were on ships in port, whether they knew it or not, Tom hadn’t really taken that in. Even when the skipper had said he knew about other ships in port that had drugs aboard, Tom had taken it as read that he was bluffing. Now, though, he saw the enormity of that find, and almost jumped out of his chair. “But that means you’ve got everything!”

  “Well, not everything,” Alex qualified. “That may not be the only route that drugs are being trafficked, and there may be time he’s been off work, with shipments not accounted for. He also seems to delete all his records after keeping them for two financial years, so his spreadsheets only go back that far. It’s a pretty extensive list, though, and bang up to date, with the latest entry made yesterday afternoon.”

  Tom looked at him with an awed expression.

  “So… you know about other ships in port that have got drugs aboard, right now, sir? And others that have left recently?”

  “Indeed. We’ll be sending alerts to all the worlds we know drugs are heading towards,” Alex said. “And we can only hope that, given the names of the ships and the manifest number of the crates concerned, the groundside authorities can get their act together on it. Unfortunately, as you know, that isn’t always the case. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your previous run wasn’t picked up, though we know the information was received.”

  Tom grimaced. It had taken him and Murg a long time to win the trust of the drug traffickers on Karadon. They were known to be ex-Fleet and Tom was known to be a very upright, law-abiding ex-officer. They were only at the station for a week or so every eight or nine weeks, shuttling back and forth between Karadon and Therik, so this was only their fifth visit in a year of undercover ops.

  Murg had succeeded in buying a crate of heavy cindar on their previous visit. They had not opened it so did not even know themselves whether it really was cindar or if it was drugs. They had, however, passed the word to their handler, as they went into port, to alert Customs and the system police’s Drug Squad to track that particular crate.

  “I thought as much, when we never heard anything about it,” he said, wryly, and looked at the skipper. “Drugs, sir?”

  “Toxies,” Alex confirmed. “Sky Candy, if we’ve got Mr Tantrell’s code correctly.”

  Tom relaxed a little. Toxies were usually no more dangerous or addictive than alcohol. The most common reason that they were made illegal was that they were too readily transferable, meaning things like sprays that might affect other people around you, lip gloss that might intoxicate someone you kissed, or something that looked like an innocent product. Sky Candy looked like sweets, with obvious issues there for kids getting their hands on it. It was very expensive, which made it worth exporting. It was a Class One illegal drug, though, not as serious as the Class Three life-destroying stuff.

  “Whether your tip-off was ignored because of incompetence or corruption is a matter of opinion,” Alex observed. “But we’ve been able to correlate Mr Tantrell’s records with known seizures, and I’m confident that what we have, here, is a pretty comprehensive record of drug handling over the last two years. See for yourselves.”

  He activated screens for them with the records he’d been working on earlier, and both Tom and Murg sat forward, shyness forgotten.

  Tom looked at the records. The Fourth, having hacked Karadon’s supposedly impregnable systems, had run a comparative search through all documents handled by Logan Tantrell, looking for even the smallest anomalies. What they’d found was a punctuation error, a doubled full stop amongst the small print on hundreds of manifest dockets. That might have been mere coincidence, but they had correlated those dockets to Logan Tantrell’s “personal expenditure” spreadsheet on his own computer, cross-referenced to the customs seizures there’d been of a handful of those crates.

  A little sound of crowing triumph burst out of Tom before he could stop it. It was indicative of his state of mind that it would be some time before he’d remember the burst of laughter that went up on the command deck and throughout the ship, at that, and connect it with his own reaction to seeing that intel. At the time he tore his eyes from the files to look at the skipper, who grinned again and nodded confirmation.

  “Very well done, dear boy.” Buzz was at the table, too, and added his congratulations, with a warm smile for Murg. “It might have taken us days to find that, without your profile.”

  “It was CPO Atwood’s spot.” Astounded as he was, Tom did not feel it would be fair to take the credit for that when it had been Murg who’d spotted the relationship between the club owner and the admin clerk.

  Everybody looked at Murg, and she turned red, mumbling something incoherent about teamwork. Alex gave her an approving nod for that, while Buzz beamed at her, benignly.

  “But this is just tremendous, sir!” Tom told the skipper. “What a coup!”

  “It is,” Alex agreed. “But only possible because of all the groundwork that was done before us, including yours, and all the support we have from every agency involved. “We’re not done yet, of course – it’s unfortunate that we can’t get the financial records we wanted, but we did just crack Ambit Persane’s personal file cache.

  “As you suggested in your profile of him, he’s into everything and not half as smart as he thinks he is. The encryption on his cache was nothing more than a mixed alphabet substitution cipher based on the keyword “insurance”. He’s put together amateur but interesting files on all the members of the board. The most interesting thing we’ve found so far is a journal entry, “DT knows TS!!!”, which suggests that he believes that Belassa Torres – Director Torres, to him – knows The Shareholder personally. That tallies with other intel indicating that she may be acting directly under the orders of whoever it is actually owns ISiS Corps.”

  Tom nodded. They both knew that even the most determined efforts had not been able to identify the true owner of ISiS Corps, though possibilities had been narrowed down to a handful of people on Flancer.

  “We also, thanks to the LIA, have copies of correspondence Belassa Torres has sent to head office,” Alex went on. “She is as smart as she thinks she is and there’s nothing incriminating or even encrypted. In one of her reports, though, she says that the situation is “as discussed in agenda point 14”. We believe that means she’s uncovered evidence of drug trafficking and knows that Durban Jorgensen is involved. We think she was asking for direction from head office as to what to do about that, ahead of our arrival. Only we’ve arrived sooner than expected.”

  Tom nodded understanding. He and Murg had profiled Belassa Torres as a corporate zombie. In any matter that required strict adherence to established policy and procedures, she would be extremely efficient. If she didn’t have a policy or procedure to follow, however, she would be at a loss.

  “So…” Tom longed to ask the skipper what he intended to do now, but that was not a question an Old School Fleet officer would ask his CO. “How can we be of help?” he asked.

  Alex gave him a look which held some amusement, fully appreciative of Tom’s yearning to be told about his plans.

  “Well, that depends,” he said. “We’
re not going for the throat just yet. It isn’t just about Karadon, of course. My orders are to do everything I can to get evidence linking back to the Landorn cartel.”

  Tom nodded. Clearing out the nest of drug traffickers on Karadon would only be cutting one head off a monster that could grow three more to replace it in a matter of weeks. That monster was on Dortmell, the drugs capital of the League. Its major industry was the manufacture of legitimate pharmaceuticals. They even shipped DPC, legally, to companies on other worlds, as it was used in the manufacture of a number of medical drugs. It was also one of the most corrupt worlds in the League. An official who didn’t expect kick-backs would be remarkable, there. An official who took a public stance against the criminal gangs that dominated the planet would be even more remarkable, though fairly briefly, as they’d have the life expectancy of a mayfly.

  It was wrong to describe the gangs on Dortmell as “underworld”. They did not see any need to hide themselves away. The upper echelons of the gangs were amongst Dortmell’s social elite. Elsten Landorn, for instance, was publicly known as a prominent businessman, the owner of one of Dortmell’s largest pharmaceutical companies. His methods for dealing with anyone who crossed him, as with all the drug lords, ran the full range of intimidation, violence and murder.

  “I intend to put the traffickers on the station under pressure,” Alex explained, “in the hope that one or more of them may crack and turn state’s evidence – all right, it’s a faint hope,” he admitted, as Tom and Murg didn’t look convinced by that, “but worth a try. It is going to take some time, though, and will need the support of the spacer community too.

  “As you see,” he gestured at the screens, “we do know which ships have drugs on board. We are, however, going to offer an amnesty, shortly, in the hope that at least one of them will volunteer for searching and turn state’s evidence. I’m also hoping, frankly, that at least one of them will try to make a run for it.”

  He indicated one of the three ships identified as having crates of drugs aboard. Two of them were perfectly ordinary, respectable freighters. Both had a crate of “powdered almond” on the manifest, from the same container load as the one that Murg had been sold as heavy cindar. The chances were high that they too had bought what they believed to be cindar and were carrying DPC unknowingly.

  That was no excuse in Tom’s opinion. He really was rigidly Old School and very firmly of the view that if people bought cargo they knew was illegally labelled, with the intention of smuggling it past customs, then they were criminally liable if it turned out to be drugs.

  Alex, however, was clearly making a distinction in that between people who’d been duped into carrying drugs and those who had bought them in full knowledge of what they were doing. The third ship on the list, the one he’d indicated, was a strong candidate for that.

  The Demella Enterprise was an old rustbucket with a bad reputation, the kind of freighter other spacers called a coffin ship. The only crew the skipper could get was the ones other ships didn’t want – drinkers, people handy with their fists, unqualified and inexperienced. For spacers, the fact that they had riveted a steel cap over a leaking tank valve on the hull made it entirely obvious that the ship was unsafe. They would almost certainly have a falsified launch safety certificate, and it would be amazing if it turned out that they were not running illegal cargo. They had four crates of “powdered almond” listed on their manifest.

  Tom, however, was focussed on how this would affect him and Murg. It was apparent to him that the Fourth’s seizure of their ship that morning had been in the nature of a demonstration as to what would happen if ships didn’t accept the offer of searching their vessel under amnesty. Where the skipper was going with that, though, was unclear.

  “We will,” Alex told him, “be releasing footage of the seizure of your ship, as part of explaining the terms of the amnesty. I know,” he said, as both Tom and Murg looked at him in horror, “high exposure. Not something intel agents are comfortable with. But important, okay? We need to show people that even good, decent people like you can be duped into buying drugs. We also need to show the operation of the nanoscanner. People aren’t going to allow us to search their ships if that means trashing their cargo, after all, so we need to show that tech in operation. There is a carrot and stick element to this too, of course, holding up what happened to you, or what people think happened to you, as an awful warning, at the same time as holding out the carrot of the amnesty.

  “Where we go from there as far as you are concerned, though, depends on whether the two of you want to stay married.”

  They stared at him. The question just seemed to come at them from so far out in left field that it took a few seconds even for them to make sense of it.

  “Sir?” Tom queried.

  “Sorry.” Alex adjusted his mindset to that of deep cover agents for whom personal feelings or preferences had been set aside for more than a year. They just could not get their heads around the idea that what they wanted, personally, could be of any importance at all. “I have many options, all right? All of them good, all of them strong. Admiral Smith has told me to bring you back into mainstream Intel by the end of our operations, but has left it to my discretion how to go about that. As he said, a year is a long time to be working off the wire as you have, so he wants you back in from the cold, all right?”

  Tom’s eyebrows rose still further. “You’ve met with Admiral Smith, sir?” He couldn’t prevent himself asking that, he was so amazed. Very few people even at the highest levels of the Fleet knew Admiral Smith’s true identity.

  Alex grinned at him, quirking up one eyebrow in a quizzical look. There was two seconds of silence from him, a little chuckle from Buzz, and then, all at once, Tom gave a little choking noise as enlightenment hit him like a juggernaut.

  Alex von Strada had graduated top of his year, not just in his Academy but of all the Academies across the League. That always meant being offered a place on the Fleet’s “tagged and flagged” programme, officially tagged for a rapid promotion scheme and unofficially expected to become a flag rank officer. Both the First and Second Irregulars would naturally take an interest in such high achieving officers, as with Dan Tarrance, who’d been the top cadet of his year and was now serving a tour of duty with the Second. There was nothing on Alex’s record about him having served with Fleet Intelligence, otherwise known as the First Irregulars, but Tom realised now how stupid he had been to take that at face value. Of course Admiral Smith would have recruited him, trained him as a field agent and run him undercover.

  “Sir!” Tom acknowledged, with a new sense of respect for the skipper.

  “I only did one tour of duty,” Alex informed him, with respect in his own manner, too, as he looked at them both. “I don’t have your stamina for that kind of work. I do, however, have some understanding of what you’ve been going through. That being the case, and since I do have good options and have the luxury of being able to offer you a choice, I feel it only fair and right to take your wishes into account. One of the ways we can go with this involves you getting divorced, but I wouldn’t do that if you do have a genuine relationship and would prefer to stay married. So, given the choice, which would you prefer?”

  Tom looked at Murg, feeling that it would be rude for him to say straight out that he would give everything he owned not to have to be married to her any more.

  “I would prefer to be divorced, sir, please,” Murg said, carefully, and Tom nodded agreement.

  “Fine, we’ll go with that, then,” Alex said. “So, are you happy to keep working cover for two or three more months, till we can bring you home?”

  “We’ll do whatever is needed, sir,” said Tom, and meant that, though the surge of relief in his eyes at this indication that they would be brought back to mainstream Fleet Intel was a giveaway of his true feelings.

  “Fine,” Alex said, seeing the same reaction in Murg, as she agreed. “So,” he looked at them, and smiled, “this is the plan.”
>
  Chapter Seven

  Towards the middle of the morning, just as Chok was starting to think that they might be making headway in starting to calm things down, Alex von Strada finally responded to the questions battering at him from the media.

  Well, he responded to some of the questions, anyway, with recorded statements and no opportunity for journalists to question any points arising out of that. He had, indeed, learned a lot from his media relations course and had decided not to talk to journalists directly any more. That never went well.

  The media had not been satisfied with that limited, recorded response, naturally, but they had made the most of it. The statements on the five questions that he’d answered were being played on the station’s channels within minutes.

  Responding to questions about his firing on the media shuttles, earlier, he was unapologetic.

  “Yes, we fired warning shots at them,” he confirmed, as if that needed to be confirmed when it had been filmed. “This is a warship on operations. Any ship that incurses on our security zone will be warned off, warning shots fired, and live fire engaged if they continue to approach. We will make no exception in that for media ships.” His tone conveyed very subtly that actually they would be rather more inclined to fire at media ships than otherwise.

  In response to a storm of questions asking if the Fourth intended to board the station by force to make arrests, he merely stated that he could not disclose operational intentions.

  In answer to questions about suspects on the station, however, he was far more forthcoming.

  “We are looking at Durban Jorgensen, Director of Karadon Freight,” he said. “We do not believe that drugs could be trafficked on this scale without his knowledge or involvement. We are also looking at Leo Arad, a trader well known for his habit of selling goods under false manifest. It was Arad Exports which sold the crate alleged to contain cindar which we seized from the Fancy Free this morning. We are also, obviously, looking at Chokran Dayfield, executive director of the station – whether he is actively involved in the trafficking or wilfully blind to it, he is ultimately responsible for what happens on the station. We are also looking at a number of associates we know to be involved, who I will not name at this stage.”