enough?”
“I’d bet my life on it.”
“Whew. That takes a load off. I’ll make a note in my records. Thanks for taking care of that.”
Fung shrugged. “It’s my job.”
Watson leaned back in her chair. “You really are always one step ahead, aren’t you?”
Fung smiled. “I try, boss. I try.”
22
SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
The port of Saint Petersburg was a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, the busiest commercial terminal on the Gulf of Finland, feeding into the Baltic Sea.
At some sixty million tons of cargo a year, Saint Petersburg was also one of Russia’s busiest ports, but with a variety of Western embargoes in place, that wasn’t saying much these days. Rotterdam—Europe’s busiest port—serviced nearly seven times as much. Saint Petersburg hosted all kinds of shipping traffic, including big cruise liners, tankers, and RoRo ships. But container ships and their standardized intermodal containers made up the bulk of operations.
The big steel boxes had revolutionized commercial shipping traffic, expediting loading and unloading from ships to trucks by many orders of magnitude. That was the reason more than twenty million containers were in service around the globe.
Thousands of them were neatly stacked and organized according to ship destination in the first cargo area of the Saint Petersburg harbor. But tonight there was only one intermodal container that Officer Sergei Burutin was worried about.
The one right in front of him.
Burutin was perched on top of a rolling ladder. The container in question was the second of three in a stack eight meters high in one of the four orderly rows demarcated by a numbered yellow line. The thousands of multicolored stacks of steel containers all across the first cargo area were similarly organized and all precisely arranged like a giant English garden maze. Each intermodal container bore an ISO code—the international standardized letter and numbering system identifying country of origin, container type, owner/operator, serial number, and check digit.
The still night air was chill and damp, the stars hidden behind a bank of low clouds bathed in the yellow glow of the port’s blazing sodium lamps. Men shouted over the din of rumbling cranes, clanging steel containers, and revving diesel engines at the busy facility.
The anti-smuggling inspector checked his handheld RFID reader again and cast yet another glance back up at the overhead security camera—out of order for more than forty days now, according to the maintenance report he checked earlier.
Strange.
The camera covered operations for a thousand square meters of the staging area, an absolute necessity for his department, always seriously understaffed by the pencil pushers back in Moscow. He was new to this side of the port—in fact, this was his very first day of duty as a newly commissioned inspector—but he had a hard time believing they were any less concerned about the illegal transportation of chemicals, weapons, or persons in Saint Petersburg as they were back at the training academy.
“Is there a problem, tovarich?” a man asked from down below.
Burutin turned around. A large, bearded man in beige maritime coveralls and a light winter coat smiled broadly at him as he approached. A slightly built Asian man, ten years younger and half a head shorter, followed right behind him, similarly dressed.
Burutin climbed down the ladder and shook the older man’s extended hand, lowering the pistol-gripped RFID reader by his side.
“Name’s Voroshilov.” The bearded Russian threw a thumb over his shoulder, pointing at a rusty blue-and-white freighter docked a hundred meters behind him. It rode high in the water, its first container not yet loaded. “I’m the captain of the Baltic Princess.” He nodded to the Asian. “And this is my chief mate, Mr. Wu.”
Wu nodded with a forced smile.
The smooth-faced young inspector’s small hand was crushed in Voroshilov’s iron grip. He returned the same as best he could. “Sergei Burutin, at your service.”
“We haven’t met before,” the captain said.
“It’s my first day on the job.”
“In Saint Petersburg?”
Burutin squared his shoulders, trying to hide his insecurity. “Anywhere.”
“Congratulations. It’s an important job.”
“Thank you.”
“Where is Oleg? He’s supposed to be on duty tonight.”
“Officer Konev called in sick earlier. I’m his substitute.”
“Oleg is a good man. Keeps things moving around here.”
“I’ve never met him.” Konev was out with a hangover, according to one of his comrades back at the office. Not an unusual thing.
The burly Russian captain wagged his head, thinking. Finally, he pointed up at a red steel container. “It looked as if you were having a problem with that container.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
Burutin climbed back up the ladder. The lockbox on the double doors was padlocked, but the