He went back to scanning the lanes and the rows of boxes piled out in the yard.
“The colonel, he’s in the import business,” he said. “He’s moving illegals.”
Now, that was a surprise. The notion that Trask had been moving Mexican field workers across the American border wasn’t much in keeping with his rant about how the country was going to hell. Then I remembered the sudden swarm of foreigners out of that one container.
“You talking wetbacks in seagoing containers?”
“Oh, hell, no,” he said. “They don’t put the colonel’s meat in cans. Those big-ass ships bring ’em in like passengers. And, according to the colonel, these aren’t tomato pickers. These are journeymen who can do complicated shit. People who can run a lathe, do CAD-CAM, X-ray techs, or guys who can operate a big Caterpillar tractor.”
“They come up in the ships from down south?”
“Right. The crews are all in on it-they’re getting paid off, too. The ships feed ’em and maybe even work ’em. They go in a can just before the ship lands.”
“And then?”
“Then those cans go out there, into the stacks. The ones with people in ’em go on the bottom of a stack, every time, real convenient-like. Then the colonel, he comes in with the boat, uses some of us to help him move them out.”
“Help how?”
He shrugged. “I take a crew of those derelicts in, stir up some shit. You saw those people. They get desperate for their next bottle, their next rock, I offer cash. I send them in under the wire. They go pretend to bust a box, along come the cops, there’s a big deal, lights and sirens, all the while the colonel’s moving his goods in a different part of the yard.”
“Where does he take them?”
“Away,” Beard said.
“Who’s paying for all this?” Pardee asked.
“The companies who’re gonna use ’em here in the States,” he said. “Like the colonel keeps saying: This is a seaport. Skilled people are just another commodity.”
“Where does he take them?” I asked again.
Beard looked over at me with a disappointed expression, as in, He doesn’t tell us and we don’t ask. “You really want to go in there, or did you find out what you came to find out?”
I looked over at Pardee. Busted.
“That’s what I thought,” Beard said. “Can we go back now? Lieutenant?”
I’d begun to wonder why he’d been so forthcoming about what was going on down here. The bearded guy was grinning at us now. Then he fingered a slim government ID card from a slit in his belt. His name was J. B. Houston.
“ICE,” he said. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And you would be the retired sheriff’s office lieutenant with the two German shepherds that the local Feebs are so fond of.”
Pardee was shaking his head disgustedly. Houston looked around to make sure none of the tramps had followed us and then indicated the fence. “Let’s go up there, and I’ll show you something.”
I’d been trying to think of something intelligent to say but had failed entirely, so we followed him up the hill, slipped under a loose skirt of chain-link, and walked out into the stack yard. We were at the most remote end of the yard and a good half mile away from the active pier and the unloading activity. I kept looking for video cameras on the light standards but didn’t see any. Houston took us into the space between two rows of stacked containers and then knelt down on the concrete at the base of a stack.
“See this?” he said, pointing to what looked like the top of a soup can buried in the concrete. “See how all these cans are stacked exactly the same way? This is a reader. Each can has a transmitter tag, which identifies the container by number, source, and destination. Every stack has a reader, and every reader is networked to a control room at the head of the yard.”
He stood up and pointed to the lowest container’s double doors, where there was a lead seal and what looked like a padlock on each of the three operating rods. Upon closer examination, I could see that the locks, too, were actually electronic devices of some kind.
“Break the seal and open any door out here, that smart-tag there tells on you and sets off a strobe light on the top of the nearest light pole. Unless of course, someone in the control room disables that reader at a specified time.”
“Can someone open the box from the inside?”
“Actually, yes. After they had a couple of incidents of illegals suffocating in containers, they modified all the cans so that if you get locked in, you can pull the latch plates off from the inside and bust the doors. Still be an alarm, though.”
“Seems pretty damned secure.”
“It is.”
“So all that stuff about you and Trask moving illegals out of here? That was all bullshit?”
“Nope,” he said. Then he waited for us to get the picture.
“You’re saying that’s all being done under government supervision?” Pardee asked.
“Yep,” Houston said.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Well, here’s the theory, as it was explained to us snuffies who work the port: Homeland Security decided that it would be better to know who was moving through this port in the way of aliens, especially skilled people, than to play cops and robbers and never know what or who they might have missed.”
“That’s a lot like saying the government is selling cocaine so that they’ll have good statistics on the drug market.”
“Well,” Houston countered, “you seeing any big progress on the control of illegal immigration into this country? You seeing bills getting through Congress?”
We all knew the answer to that.
“You’re not seeing that,” he continued, “because the major corporations who own the politicians don’t want effective immigration control. Same deal for national ID cards. Why in the hell are we stuck with a Social Security card for identification that ties in with every aspect of our personal finances? Stupid-or intentional?”
“I hear you,” I said, not wanting to get into it with yet another politically frustrated citizen.
“I can’t prove all that, of course, but there would have to be some pretty high-priced top cover for this kind of program, don’t you think?”
I thought back to what Ari had said about foreigners at the power plant, and wondered if that was just another manifestation of what was going on there. This was the second eye-opener I’d collided with here in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The first had been a military-operated civilian detention center. Houston must have read my mind.
“There’s a war on, Lieutenant,” he said. “J. Q. Public seems to forget that. And there are two fronts: one overseas, where regular soldiers are learning about street fighting from the jihadis. Then a second one here on our so-called borders, where the umpteenth guy in one of these shipments through here or any of the other ports might be a legitimate CAD-CAM wizard. Or he might be the final member of a cell that’s been building for five years, the one guy who can actually wire up the satchel nuke. By becoming part of the pipeline, we get a look.”
“And they only have to get lucky once,” I said. “We have to be lucky every damned time.”
He nodded.
“So what happened the other night, when that container erupted with stowaways?”
“Somebody fucked up,” he said promptly. “It’s a government program, remember?”
I smiled. “Why are you telling us this?” I asked.
“Two reasons,” he said, again looking around. “One, word’s out among the working cops here on the waterfront that you won’t take go-away for an answer. I figured you might as well know what you’re poking your nose into.”
“And two?”
“Two: I want something. What’s happened to Trask? Jungle drums are saying nobody can raise him.”
“Your boss checked with the Bureau?” Pardee asked, giving me a warning look over Houston’s head.
“Bureau doesn’t share for shit. They’re not part of Homeland Security, as I’m sure you guys remember.”