24 Declassified: Storm Force 2d-7

by David S. Jacobs

  At the far end, an archway opened on the bleak emptiness of early morning light.

  The archway was filled by a figure stepping into view. The figure advanced, moving along the arcade toward the camera.

  The scene was imaged not in real time but compressed, with one frame every few seconds, giving it a flickering, herky-jerky quality, like a sequence from an old-time silent movie.

  The figure neared, resolving into a female figure. Outrageously female. Pete cracked, "I can't place the face, but the body is familiar."

  The woman wore sunglasses and a light-colored scarf wrapped around her head, covering her hair. Her sharp-pointed face was worried, intent. She wore a sleeveless, one-piece dark dress whose hem reached to mid-thigh; her feet were shod in low-heeled sandals. She carried a handbag whose strap was slung across one shoulder.

  She passed beyond the camera and out of range. End of sequence.

  That was all.

  Jack said, "Run it again, only this time freeze it on the face."

  This was done. Jack said, "Vikki Valence."

  Pete said, "In the flesh."

  "We know one thing, at least: she was alive at seven o'clock."

  "I know that arcade, too," Pete said. "That Shelton Street neighborhood's like a maze, filled with back alleys and passageways. You couldn't ask for a better place to get lost in — or to lose anybody that's looking for you. She knew what she was doing when she ducked in there.

  "But it cuts both ways. Because of the layout, it's a natural for criminal activities, namely drug dealing, prostitution, muggings, public urination. So it's covered by a lot of cameras. Too bad most of them don't work. Not since Katrina."

  Jack said, "It's something, anyway."

  Center said, "We're checking on other cameras in the area and beyond to see if we can pick her up. But we're hampered by the technology gap. The NOPD surveillance system is spotty, glitchy. Whatever they've got, it takes time for them to call it up and send it to us. They're understaffed, too, more than usual, since a lot of personnel took off from work in order to evacuate ahead of Everette. We'll get what they've got — eventually."

  Jack said, "Any police patrol cars operating in that or adjacent areas that might have spotted her before the alert was given?"

  "If they did, they haven't reported it to us yet," Center said.

  Pete said, "Try the streetcar conductors in that zone at around that time; maybe Vikki boarded one."

  Center said, "We're checking on that that, and on the taxicab companies too. No luck so far."

  Center signed off. Jack said, "Vikki's not the type who can fade back into the woodwork so easily. So how does she slip the dragnet and drop out of sight?"

  Pete said, "She knows the turf and how to work it. She could've gotten clear of the area before it was cordoned off. Or she could still be hiding in it, somewhere. At that hour, there weren't a lot of public places open for her to duck into, like cafes and whatnot. But there's plenty of private places she might know about, illegal gambling dens, brothels, bottle clubs, after-hours clubs — hell, crack houses and heroin shooting galleries, if it comes to that. She knows the spots; she's a player and a party girl."

  Center came back on the line. Pete was so pent with frustration that he answered by saying, "What?"

  But this time Center came back with something solid. "Our LAGO source reported in. Raoul Garros is at the Mega Mart building."

  Pete said, "Susan Keehan's place."

  Jack said, "Let's go."

  They went.

  * * *

  Where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, it was inevitable that a mighty port would come into being. The locale was strategically and commercially valuable, the advantages irresistible. Such was the seed of New Orleans, now one of the great port cities of the world, ranking with such other maritime giants as London, San Francisco, Macao, and Hong Kong.

  Its waterfront is extensive, encompassing mile after mile of docks, piers, quays, wharves, shipyards, and warehouses. A city within a city, it's part of New Orleans but apart from it, a kind of private floating world.

  Dockside facilities are generally self-contained. Like other places of business, such as factories and truck terminals, they're off-limits to the casual visitor. An industrial zone, not a public playground.

  Crime is rampant on the docks. Smuggling, of such contraband as drugs, weapons, exotic animals, and people. Labor racketeering. Cargo theft.

  Law enforcement is no less involved, with officialdom represented by the Coast Guard, Harbor Patrol, tax collectors, safety inspectors, maritime regulating agencies, and occupational and environmental groups.

  The sheer size and sprawl of the waterfront is a great guarantor of anonymity, offering innumerable cracks and crannies to hide in, lending itself to covert activities. The riverside booms with places that are alive with activity; colorful, dynamic wealth generators.

  Pelican Pier was not one of them.

  It sat on the right bank of the river, the New Orleans side, in a relatively isolated and run-down area several miles upstream from the Mississippi River Bridge that connects the city with the left bank.

  A two-lane roadway ran parallel to the shoreline. The road carried plenty of truck traffic day and night, making deliveries to and from the docks.

  Between the road and the water stood Pelican Pier, a long wharf jutting out from the shoreline at right angles. There was seemingly nothing about it to make it stand out from its similarly drab neighboring facilities.

  The shoreward side of the pier was walled in and fenced off, restricting access and screening the site from public view. Above the top of the wall could be seen the roof of a warehouse and, at the far end of the wharf, an old, rusted derrick crane for loading and unloading cargo.

  * * *

  The absence of a thing can be as significant as its presence. Sherlock Holmes once famously solved a case based on the clue of what a dog didn't do at night.

  In an ecosystem, the sudden disappearance of a species is a red flag pointing to a serious imbalance in the environment.

  A similar warning was to be found in the lack of something in the vicinity of Pelican Pier. What was missing were the human derelicts with which the rest of the waterfront abounded.

  These were the folks who'd fallen into society's abyss, homeless outcasts who haunted the docks and made them their homes. Among them were hopeless alcoholics, drug addicts, the mentally ill, those broken in spirit or body or both.

  On dry land, they would have gravitated to the local equivalent of skid row, that sinkhole where the defeated follow their downward path to the null point where they come to rest.

  In a port city such as New Orleans, though, legions of the lost wind up on the waterfront, to grub for such minimal necessities as a crust of bread, a bottle of cheap wine, a rock of crack cocaine, and a hole to hide in.

  Previously Pelican Pier had been such a resting place, a closed site turned den for these living ghosts of the waterfront.

  Then, no more than a month ago, the pier had been reopened and reclaimed, occupied by a new crew of tough, hard-eyed strangers. They were on a mission, and the pier site clanged with their cryptic activities.

  And a not so fanny thing began happening: the living ghosts that were the derelicts haunting Pelican Pier began disappearing. Vanishing without a trace, except for an occasional shriek in the night or a pattern of blood spatters left drying on a wall.

  Word went out along the grapevine that these living ghosts weren't living anymore, that they'd been done in and dumped in the river, which carried their bodies away.

  Those who'd managed to avoid the initial purge spread the news that Pelican Pier was a place to be avoided like, well, death.

  So the creatures of the night, the winos, crackheads, bums, and crazies, all absented themselves from the area, finding new places to dwell.

  The cops were ignorant of the incident. They had better things to do than go in search of a bunch of missing bums
, even if they'd known they were missing. They'd just as soon have said good riddance to them, had they been aware of the great disappearance.

  Whatever purpose Pelican Pier was being used for continued to advance without interference or even outside observation toward fruition.

  * * *

  Now, today, that purpose was about to be made manifest. Saturday, an hour or so away from noon, when seen from the outside, Pelican Pier resembled nothing more than another dockside facility, indistinguishable from its neighbors.

  The shoreward side of the pier was fenced and gated, with masses of green tarps strung behind the fence to 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 deliver
y 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 devices, all of which had to be tripped before the master switch could be thrown.

  The arming device was connected by a bolted-on housing to the control board of the barge. The arrangement would allow the barge pilot to arm the floating bomb as it made its final run.

  Huygens stood on one knee on the floor, screwdriver in hand, tightening the connections from the pluglike end of the firing cable trunk to a socket set in the base of the arming device.

  Ahmed and Rashid stood nearby, watching with interest. Ahmed, forty, was medium-sized, with close-cropped dark hair and a short black beard. Rashid, in his mid-twenties, was long and rangy, with warm, sympathetic brown eyes and a wispy mustache and beard. Ahmed spoke English and was the leader of the duo; Rashid, his backup and assistant, knew only a few words of the language and relied on him for translation.

  Huygens continued to labor over the assembly, fresh sweat pouring from him with every breath. From time to time, he wiped his brow on the sleeve of his shortsleeved shirt, to keep the sweat from trickling into and stinging his eyes. He sweated not from fear but from the heat, even though the slightest fumbling of crossed wires at this point risked blowing them all sky-high. Bombs were his business and he didn't make those kind of mistakes.