Brute Force by Marc Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

stacks of multicolored metal containers that took up the bulk of the ship. They were known as TEUs—or Twenty Foot Equivalent Units—and the CCC Loadstar carried over 13,000 of these ubiquitous metal shipping boxes.
    Dickey Ng only cared about one of them. He’d followed PVMU 526604-1 from the time it had been loaded with palletized tractor parts in Guangzhou. A little money in the right hands made certain he was the one charged with “stuffing” the container, to ensure that the contents could not shift during the movement of the ship while in transit—and thus the last person to see it before it was sealed. He didn’t know what was in the wooden crate marked with the red peony flower that he’d strapped to a wooden pallet of parts for small garden tractors, but he was fairly certain it was some sort of weapon. Weapons and art were his two most common assignments. There was no law against smugglers profiling their clients, and considering all the inshal-lahs and alaikums going on between the men who’d set up the transportation arrangements, he had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t moving a piece of art. He was being paid two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars to see that the crate was delivered safely to the United States. His four rules made sure that would happen.
    Making his way forward the length of two football fields without drawing the attention of the bridge watch took time. Ng moved slowly, staying low and out of sight in the narrow walkways between the towering stacks of metal boxes. He told himself the smoke was nothing. Perhaps it was only one of the sailors hiding out to smoke a cigar, or even some vent in one of the ship’s systems that he was unaware of. He was, after all, a smuggler, not a sailor, and the only paying customer on the CCC Loadstar.
    Flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, the mega ship operated with a crew of twenty-six but kept four cabins open for world travelers and adventure seekers. Ng had signed on in Guangzhou, staying out of the way during the frenetic first few days of the journey as the ship stopped to load more TEUs in several more Chinese ports, then Hong Kong, and finally Kogo-shima in southern Japan before heading out to open sea. For the last ten days, life on the ship had settled into a comfortable routine of watches and chores for the crew—made up of primarily Malaysian sailors—and cigarettes and boredom for Ng.
    Raised in the teeming streets of Singapore, Dickey Ng found it difficult to breathe with all the fresh air of the open sea. While it wasn’t exactly quiet, the sounds were far too one-dimensional for him. He missed the frantic honk of traffic and the constant buzz of people milling in the back streets. Singapore was a nanny state, but it was his nanny state. Even in a place where nearly everything was against the law, there were so many people stacked on top of each other that a person could blend in, get lost in the crowd.
    This was the same sentiment—and the reasoning—he used to complete every job he accepted.
    There were plenty of people who could fill a shipping container with plastic dolls that were stuffed with Korean Ecstasy or teddy bears packed with Baggies of uncut heroin. Flat crates of Russian AK-47s fit perfectly in the hollow walls of refrigerated containers.
    But customs officials knew all that as well as any smuggler. They tore apart a large cross section of Chinese-made dolls and ripped the stuffing out of the bears. The first place inspectors looked for hidden weapons were the hollow walls of reefer units. Every up-and-coming customs inspector he’d ever seen was looking, not so much for contraband, as to make a name for him or herself—to find that big haul of illicit goods that would garner them a fat promotion. If those goods had something to do with terrorism, their hero status would be set in stone. In the East, customs officials looked for bribes. In North America, they wanted to make the news.
    So, Dickey Ng followed