Matt Rogers
Warrior
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
1
Abdullahi stepped out of the inspection shed’s shadow, offering himself to the relentless heat of the Somali sunshine. He had been a dock worker for eight years now. The constant exposure to the elements had hardened his skin to the point where little affected him — hours under the cloudless sky were routine, as was the exertion and strain that came with handling the heavy equipment littering the port. All of it acted as a complicated grid, a puzzle that no single man could decipher. Thousands of shipping containers flowed in and out of the port every day, loaded off small bulk transport ships and larger intercontinental vessels.
By this point, Abdullahi’s work had become a blur.
As had the payments.
He sauntered along a disused path squashed between two terminals, the trail littered with gravel and the ground on either side overflowing with weeds and rubbish. He checked his cracked wristwatch covered in fingerprint stains — two minutes until the cargo was scheduled to be off-loaded. Abdullahi had been around the port long enough to know that just as the sun rose each morning, the containers were off-loaded at the precise minute they were expected to be.
Like clockwork.
In an industry as enormous as modern shipping, nothing could be late.
That left all kind of room for Abdullahi and hundreds of thousands of others to take advantage of the lax security measures. Especially in a land like this.
The trail opened out into a vast concrete dock facing the Indian Ocean. Abdullahi cast his gaze across a sea of shipping containers, thousands upon thousands arranged in a neat grid.
TEUs, to be specific.
The Twenty-foot Equivalent Units were — as the name suggested — twenty feet long, eight feet tall, and eight feet wide. Handling them had become as common in Abdullahi’s life as breathing and sleeping and eating.
Today, he was concerned with one unit in particular.
The instructions had been passed along to him in the same manner they always were — through an anonymous phone call informing him of a tracking number. When he first dipped a finger in the gargantuan pie of global smuggling, it had scared him senseless. He’d often answer the phone expecting a death sentence for his troubles.
Then he realised that everyone — all the way from the heads of multinational corporations to the low-level street vendor — was involved.
And it had settled his heart rate years ago.
Now, all fear and tension had dissipated entirely. The contents of the TEUs were never anything sinister, or significant — just ordinary goods necessary for maintaining the country’s infrastructure that weren’t declared accurately. It wouldn’t have bothered Abdullahi if it were narcotics or firearms, but at least it put his mind at ease.
He couldn’t care less either way.
He went through the practiced motions of diverting a specific container, relaying instructions to the nearest crane driver via a dusty two-way radio at his hip. He saw a helmet nod understandingly inside the cabin a hundred feet in the air, and the giant contraption plucked a single grey TEU effortlessly off the top of the nearest stack.
As if on cue, three Mercedes trucks rumbled into the dock from a connecting passageway. They pulled to a halt, one by one, forming a tight semi-circle in a manoeuvre that had been carried out a thousand times over by each driver. They were never early nor late, as usual.
Always right on time.
It paid to be accurate.
The driver of the middle truck stepped down first, crossing the hot stretch of concrete to greet Abdullahi underneath the shadow of the crane. Abdullahi wasn’t sure if he recognised the man — by this point, the drivers blurred into an amalgamation of sweaty thin Somali men. Sometimes he got Europeans — they stood out. Men and women bold and brazen enough to venture into a foreign land in search of more money than they knew what to do with.
Profit had no distinct colour, after all.
The driver nodded once, and wordlessly handed over thirty-five thousand USD, held together by a thick band. Abdullahi took the wad of notes and slipped them into his back pocket. A moment later, the container touched down on the ground in front of the trucks, barely audible due to the crane driver’s experience handling the TEUs. Abdullahi gestured invitingly to the unit, and the driver smiled, exposing cracked yellow teeth.
Abdullahi knew that smile.
He knew it well.
It meant cash.
A long, flowing pipeline of cash, more cash than any of them could grow used to. Anyone who found themselves involved in the extra-legal channels of global trade found it hard to leave. It was never clear exactly what laws were being broken, especially when the business involved a country such as the one Abdullahi had been raised in.
Somalia.
A hell-hole, or a garden of riches.
Depending on who you asked.
The three drivers, along with a horde of dock workers who scurried to assist with the transaction, set about unloading the contents of the TEU into the massive Mercedes trucks. Abdullahi turned his back on the proceedings, setting off for the head office with a delivery of dirty profits in his khaki trousers. He didn’t care what was in the container. More often than not it was a mixture of cigarettes, tools, timber, counterfeit sneakers — any everyday item that could avoid being taxed.
Abdullahi shook his head as he walked, imagining what people in first-world countries thought of the illegal pipeline. He had seen snippets in the media of the light his business was cast in. Wrought with images of hardened criminals and muscle-clad thugs trading cocaine and heroin and automatic weapons back and forth.
The truth was far more mundane.
But that didn’t make for good television.
Still striding with measured paces, he reached back and slid a hand into his rear pocket. Carrying out movements he’d practiced countless times, he separated fifty bills from the chunky wad, each of them one hundred USD.
With two fingers acting as pincers, he siphoned five thousand out of the main band and let the bills spill loose into the depths of the pocket.
Simple as that.
He strolled into a rundown one-storey building with flimsy plaster walls and a rusting screen door hanging ajar. The man with the pockmarked face scarred by serious acne seemingly hadn’t moved since last week. Abdullahi visited him seven days a week, at the same time, without fail.
There was too much money in this business to bother taking a day off.
‘Issues?’ the man said.
Abdullahi shook his head. He only spoke when absolutely necessary. This was not one of those times. Acting as if he hadn’t altered the stash in any way, he reached back again and slid out the thirty thousand dollars the driver had given him.
There was no mention of the other five, because this man in front of him had no idea it existed.
He passed the wad across, making sure to pin the thick band into place on the underside of the notes with his thumb, ensuring that the dock’s owner didn’t spot the missing portion.
The man expected thirty thousand every day, and that was what Abdullahi provided.
What the guy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
With another curt nod signifying the culmination of the exchange, Abdullahi turned on his heel and left the building as quickly as he’d entered it.
Eight hours complete at the port. As the sun dipped toward the opposite horizon, casting a golden glow across the towers of TEUs, he made for the employee car park — a section of the port consisting of a flat gravel expanse and a maze of overflowing dumpsters. The fifty unaccounted bills rustled back and forth in his pocket as he strode, reminding him of the risk he accepted every single day.