Marcus pulled ahead when the light turned green. Hilde tried to phone Tonia as they passed the bar, but only got the Secret Service agent's voicemail message. She said for Tonia to call her when she got the message.
“We'll get hold of her later,” she said.
The car turned left at A Street and Marcus continued after it. The Audi traveled at the posted speed limit as they crossed the Ship Creek Bridge heading toward the Port of Anchorage shipping terminal. The road was empty except for their vehicle and Farrah’s. Marcus slowed the truck. They were nearly a hundred yards behind the Audi when it continued past the last turnoff before the port. Farrah was locked in with only one road out. Marcus turned right at the Loop Road exit as the Audi 's taillights disappeared behind the hill that obscured the port’s guard post. Once out of sight, he pulled to the side of the road.
“Lonnie, take the wheel. Park over there somewhere.” He pointed to a row of rail yard warehouses about two hundred yards away.
“Mike and I will go in on foot and see if we can ID your man, and maybe figure out what he's up to.” Marcus reached into the pocket in the door and grabbed a set of compact Steiner Predator® binoculars, then realized he was getting ahead of himself. “Uh, assuming that's okay with you, Mike.”
Under the spell of the adrenaline-laced slow-motion pursuit, no one had spoken as they followed the Audi.
“You don’t even need to ask, bro,” Mike said. “I haven't had a good rush in a long time.”
A blue minivan taxi passed the truck and continued up and around to the Government Hill neighborhood. Once it was out of sight, the two men jumped out of the truck and jogged across the empty highway toward the port's entrance. The women moved to the front seat of the truck and Lonnie drove around the exit ramp, and then pulled into the rail yard. She moved the truck through the rows of long, dark warehouses until they faced A Street again, with a view of the only avenue from which any vehicles could come out of the port.
Chapter 7
The Audi had long since passed through the guard post that protected the entrance from the highway. While the contracted security at the gate was armed, they were not likely to be a formidable deterrent to professionals. Regardless, the two men took the long way around rather than risk surprising a half-awake rent-a-cop with a gun.
Marcus led the way along a wooded escarpment that traced the contour of the port access road below them. The twenty-foot-high ridge had been created by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake when the area presently inhabited by the city port dropped that many feet from its previous height. Nature’s wrath of decades earlier had been rather generous, as it turned out. The destructive forces ended up providing the retired Marines with good concealment for their current movement.
From the top of the escarpment, the view of the port grounds stretched all the way to the cluster of cargo ships docked in shallow water just beyond the land's edge. Laid out in rows like a military formation, bundles of pipe and sheet metal bound in clear plastic wrap reflected beams of angular sunlight like randomly scattered laser flashes. An eight-foot-high fence topped with a triple-layer straight run of barbed wire bounded the port property. Marcus lifted the binoculars to his eyes and scanned. The special design of the Steiner lenses gave him a focused field of view from twenty yards away to infinity, negating the need to refocus for near and far objects. Within a few seconds, the tail of the Audi came into view, mostly concealed within a cluster of massive white tanks marked as aviation fuel.
Two security cameras stared down from atop the structures. One slowly rotated ninety degrees, stopping before they were in its line of sight, then turned the other direction. The other started to rotate but stopped, jittered in place for a second, then turned back to its starting position.
Marcus pointed the broken camera out to Mike. “Gotta love it when folks rely on technology.”
A few yards from where they stood, the perimeter fence twisted very close to a part of the cliff where a tall spruce tree had collapsed, smashing the barbed wire and bending the fence to half its full height. Using the spruce as a bridge, they crossed into the shipyard, carefully avoiding the sharp edges of the broken branches that jutted randomly around them like jagged claws. To trip and fall on one of those spikes could leave a nasty wound, or worse. Careless loggers or hikers alike have been seriously injured, even killed by such rough appendages when they slipped while using a fallen tree as a bridge. An unlucky father and son had recently lost their lives when the top of a similar tree fell on their campsite as they slept during a windy night. The search and rescue that found them several days later had a very difficult time untangling the bodies from the numerous puncturing branches. Licensed wilderness guides like Marcus had been required to undergo additional annual training to make sure they were aware of the dangers.
Once over the fence, they jumped the five feet to the ground, landing with a whump in the hard-packed dirt. Mike let out a soft grunt.
“That was a lot easier when I was twenty-five,” he whispered, his face tight with a grimace of pain as the shock shot through his knees.
Outside the range of the cameras, they jogged toward the Audi. As they drew near, they saw that it was parked in front of a squat, corrugated-metal building stuffed between the fuel tanks. Its engine ticked softly as it cooled. The building, about twelve by twelve feet, was not big enough to hide many people. A solitary window about a single square foot in size next to a solid door broke up the monotony of horizontal lines in the wall facing the vehicle. Marcus stole forward, Mike right behind him, watching his back. Marcus cautiously peered through the window. The interior space was comprised of bare white walls, a gray concrete floor, and a white acoustic tile ceiling. Opposite the entrance was an opening that led to a staircase which descended into a subterranean level that presumably stretched beneath a portion of the ground for a considerable distance.
A voice echoed up from the stairwell in the tiny room. Marcus caught a brief glimpse of the top of a man’s head as he climbed the steps, stopped, and shouted back down the tunnel.
“It’s in the boot of the car.”
Mike looked at Marcus with a quizzical expression. While Marcus had understood what the man said, it took a moment for his mind to register that the words the man had spoken were not English. In the Marines, Marcus had been trained as a linguist, as well as a sniper. He was fluent in four languages before enlisting, and the Corps decided during the Yugoslav conflict of the nineties that he needed one more. That language was the one he heard now, Albanian.
The Albanian speaker continued up the stairs toward the door. The two men quietly hustled around the side of the building as the door swung open.
Feet crunched on the gravel out of sight behind the building. Mike tapped Mojo on the shoulder and hissed. “Someone’s coming around the other side,”
They took several quick steps and moved between two of the large white fuel tanks as the guard came around the building. Farrah walked out the door and toward the car. As he opened the trunk, one of the port security guards rounded the building and called out.
“Mr. Farrah, how’s it going down there?”
“Coming along, George, coming along.”
“You guys gonna be long tonight?”
“Leka and Kreshnik will be a few hours,” Farrah reached in the trunk and picked up a box. “I’m leaving soon, though. Why?”
“Just checking so I can let the next shift know.”
“Yes, the cousins will be here most of the night. Lots of upgrades to do,” Farrah shut the trunk and moved back toward the building.