Chapter 4 / Page 3

The casks were hoisted from the elevator platform to the deck of the Iraqi boat. A crane moved—a phantasm steel arm drifting through the night. Attached to the crane was a heavy hook and cables manipulated by a pulley system. The casks were fitted with a leather harness and chrome carbuncle. The strap enabled swift ship-to-ship transfer. It had been tested several times. Of course tests performed in calm harbors and research labs never take into account the vagaries of the ocean.

The crane’s hook seemed to move faster than the last time. The sea swells may have moved the ships closer together, or the alignment of the decks tilted at the wrong time. Instead of an orderly movement, the hook slammed into the back of one of his men. Cast iron and weighing over one hundred kilos, it smashed him in the back. The audio microphones from the platform recorded a sickening slap. The splintering of bones and the snapping of a spinal column kept pace with the image of a human being suddenly turned into kindling. His man catapulted over the cask. He hit, slid, and disappeared over the side. The sea swallowed him whole and dutifully washed the blood from the deck.

The hook did not end its night’s work with the death of one sailor. It turned after its first murder and rammed like a missile into the side of the next cask. Double hulled, stainless steel was no match for the simple physics of mass times velocity. The barrel designed to transport a deadly toxin looked like a crunched pop can. Impaled on a hardened chunk of metal, the breached barrel rose up, smashing the sailor opposite the first casualty. He caught several hundred pounds of metal under the chin. He flipped backward into the sea. They were the first to die. They were the lucky ones.

Another planning disaster—no one was supposed to be hit by container hooks. Men were not supposed to die on a black deck under a moonless sky. The double-hulled casks were supposed to resist small arms fire. No one considered the transfer mechanism to be capable of such mayhem.

A green jet spewed from the ruptured cask. It spun like a child’s pinwheel, painting the deck, the men, and the sea. A macabre death dance began with the twirling cask—a deadly pirouette. The green spray slashed a sailor across the middle. In seconds, the yellow biohazard suit parted, exposing bare skin to whatever concoction they had been ordered to deliver. It continued to eat right through the third sailor.The planners never checked the biohazard suit’s durability. Or perhaps they had, and this stuff behaved exactly as advertised. The biohazard suits seemed to smoke. Most likely, the chemical agent was fundamentally an airborne acid capable of defeating most safety systems. Wong’s men were beyond the safety systems.