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Quickly all six were aboard, and they made their way together in a tight stack to a hatch. Looking through a thick window, Hash saw that the passageway beyond was clear, so he opened the hatch and entered.
Travers and the others followed silently behind, and Hash let them into an empty changing locker room just a few feet on.
Travers signaled his men to drop to a crouch here by the long row of lockers, and he did the same. His eyes still on the lighted passageway through the hatch, he tapped a button on the radio attached to his magazine carrier on his chest and spoke in a whisper. “Victor Actual for Overwatch.”
Jim Pace’s voice came into the earpieces of all six men. “Go for Overwatch.”
Travers said, “We’re internal. Condition nominal.”
“I expected to hear from you fifteen mikes ago.”
“Currents were worse than anticipated.”
“Roger. No activity on the water from my vantage point. Security in the container yard appears unchanged.”
“Roger. Proceeding to fourth deck and number two hold.”
Travers rose, the men followed suit, and soon they were back in the passageway, then on a ladder heading down.
•••
Jim Pace’s staff back at Langley had managed to find out the location of the targeted shipment on board the massive vessel from internal company records at ETC, as the placement of goods was crucial to efficient ocean shipping logistics. Travers knew where he was heading, and he knew the layout of the Panamax ship. He even knew where security cameras were placed on board, a standard practice for ETC vessels of this size.
He just didn’t know where the crew was.
The men descended quietly past third deck, bypassed a long catwalk with a single man walking on it in the opposite direction, and another passageway monitored by a security camera, and then they went down to fourth deck. Here they found a hatch that led to the number two hold, which they knew would be filled with six hundred of the nearly four thousand containers on board the Estelle.
Just before they opened the door, however, the unmistakable sound of a watertight hatch being opened in the distance filled their noise-enhancing ear protection. They were exposed here in the passageway, so Travers gave the order to double-time it into the hold before whoever had opened the door got any closer.
They made it inside the darkened space, gently shut and secured the watertight hatch, and then all the men knelt down below the hatch portal.
A pair of figures passed twenty seconds later; the men in the hold knew the count only because the light from the window was blacked out twice in quick succession as the unknown subjects ambled by.
Travers then took the time to look around.
The hold was four stories high, lit only with a few glowing bulbs on the walls spaced twenty meters apart, and the containers were stacked all the way up to the two gargantuan closed hatch doors on the ceiling above.
The containers were also stacked tightly together, which meant if the one they were looking for hadn’t been on the end of a row, they would have had no way of accessing it until it was off-loaded, but Pace’s team at Langley had reported they were looking for a gray forty-foot container on the second level in the port-side aft corner of the hold.
Takahashi led the way along the wall of multi-colored containers; twice the team had to leave the hold itself and return to a parallel passageway because the way ahead was obstructed with piping, winching equipment, container lashing equipment, and other items they hadn’t anticipated.
It took ten more minutes, but eventually they found themselves in the port-side aft corner of the number two hold, and they looked up to see the gray container.
The ground-floor containers were wedged tight against railings built into the floor, but the containers higher up were all kept in place with lashing rods, diagonal metal poles that affixed one container to another.
Travers used a small red-lensed flashlight to check the seven numbers and four letters on the container, confirmed it with data on a palm-sized computer he pulled from a pocket, and then he and Takahashi both climbed up on the railing, then made their way up farther with help from the diagonal lashing rods.
Victors Three and Six followed them up; they all found they could sit on a horizontal metal railing right in front of the container doors, and quickly Jamie, Victor Six, pulled out a blowtorch, lowered a set of goggles over his eyes, and went to work on the lower joint of the first lashing rod, intending to cut it in a location that would be hard to detect once he resoldered it after inspection.
FORTY-SEVEN
It took over ten minutes to cut through both lashing rods blocking the door to the target container, and it took all four men up there more time to carefully move the heavy poles out of the way without making any noise by striking the sides of the big corrugated steel boxes.
As soon as the door was free from the lashing equipment, Chris Travers looked to his watch. They’d been on board for forty-four minutes already, and they hadn’t even breached the seal of the container. Just as he was stressing about this, he heard Jim Pace’s voice in his ear.
“Overwatch for Victor Actual.”
“Go, Overwatch.”
