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The Company
Time: Thursday, August 12, 2010 (predawn).
Place: Vancouver, Canada.
Last Event: Getting the Gaia Defender ready.
While most of the team loads the Gaia Defender with equipment, Vinnie gets ready to head into town to steal guns from the seedy "sporting goods" shop he cased back on August 10. His crew consists of Wen, to examine the firearms, and Lev and Zhang, who visited the place after dark and familiarized themselves with the layout and security measures. All four have gloves and balaclavas, as well as large hockey bags: five for plundered guns and ammo, and one for Vinnie's burglar's tools. The thieves head out by car, with Vinnie at the wheel.
On arriving in front of the shop, all seems quiet. The neighborhood is a bad one, but by this hour most of its denizens have either gone home or passed out. Nobody is obviously watching the place or hanging around inside. Peering more closely through the front window, though, Wen sees a dim light spilling under the door to the back room, occasionally blocked by a moving shadow. There's definitely somebody in there!
The Agents weigh their options and decide to proceed with the burglary. Everybody dons a balaclava and gloves, and sets smart phones to vibrate. Lev stays with the car, slouching out of sight with his phone at the ready, just in case. The other three grab the hockey bags and burglary tools, and then sneak down the alleyway that leads behind the gun shop. Since Vinnie is the professional thief and this is his show, he takes point.
As Vinnie approaches the alcove containing the shop's back door, he smells ganja. He takes a quick peek and sees three tough-looking guys, all wearing do-rags and with pistols not-so-subtly stuffed under their hoodies, handing around a blunt. He drops back and warns Wen and Zhang. After a quick discussion, Wen says she'll take off her balaclava, mess up her clothes, and stagger out there as a distraction, playing the part of a junky. As she's very skinny, she might be able to pull it off – and as she's a diminutive woman, she's unlikely to put the men on alert.
Once everybody is ready, Wen lurches out into plain sight. She approaches the thugs, asking whether they can hook her up with some black tar. They react threateningly, one warning her to leave as the other two discuss "doing" her. Once all three have crowded up on her, Vinnie and Zhang steal up behind them brandishing tonfas. Two whacks to the skull later, only one of the toughs is left standing. When he half turns and goes for his pistol, Wen launches a swift, hopping kick to the crotch that puts him on the ground as well.
Vinnie's guess is that the three gangstas were lookouts covering whatever criminal business is going on inside the shop. He figures that with three sentries, it's unlikely that the people inside would bother to watch via the peephole . . . but that it's possible that somebody might have heard the noise. Therefore, he dashes over to the door and starts working on the lock as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Wen pulls on her gloves and balaclava again, and then helps Zhang zip-cuff the downed thugs, take their pistols, and pull them out of sight.
Neither the alarm nor the lock on the back door is of good quality or in decent repair; Vinnie disables both in under a minute. Then he grabs the handle, nods to Zhang and Wen, and steps back, yanking open the door. Zhang immediately charges inside, where he sees a middle-aged man with a holstered pistol talking with a fourth gangsta type. He brings his tonfa down on the skull of the man with the pistol, sending him to the floor. The younger guy fumbles for the gun under his shirt, but he's too slow; Zhang takes him down, too.
As soon as Zhang has cleared the room, the others come in behind him and shut the door. On examining the scene, it seems evident that the man with the holstered pistol – quite likely the shop's owner – was in the process of selling four old Uzis (Wen estimates that they're 1980s vintage) to the thugs. After taking the Uzis and the cash, all the bling that the buyer was wearing, and the fancy .454 revolver that the seller had on his belt, the Agents head into the front of the shop.
Wen and Zhang unroll the hockey bags on the shop floor and unzip them, while Vinnie gets started on locks, alarms, bars, and trigger chains. As Vinnie unlocks things, Wen and Zhang stuff guns and ammo into the bags. Vinnie soon joins them, and in mere minutes, they have as much hardware as they can carry. Wen calls Lev, who cruises down the alleyway and picks them up. Then Vinnie takes the wheel and drives back to the docks via a carefully planned route. On the way, Wen calls 911 from her secure Company phone to make sure that the people back at the shop get the necessary medical and police attention.
At the dock, the thieves lug their booty aboard the Gaia Defender while Qoqa wipes down the car they used. Anabel distracts the hired mechanics with money, paying them generously for their work and then tossing in the roll of cash taken from the men at the gun shop as a bonus. This not only keeps eyes off the guns – it buys a promise from the workers that they would happily do future business with the group (or at least with Anabel!). As soon as the laborers have left, the Agents get ready to head out to sea.
Vinnie takes care of getting the Gaia Defender cleared out of the harbor, using some cock-and-bull story about taking a ship famously used by ecoterrorists down to Hollywood to use it in an action movie with an ecoterrorism angle. It isn't obvious whether this or the false papers lead to a green light from the harbormaster, but the Agents are soon headed for the Pacific. If anybody decides to look into Vinnie's story later, a Hollywood film budget would certainly help explain the $3.5 million in fees paid to get the vessel out of impound!
The next six days go quickly, with everybody assigned to specific tasks:
• JB and Vinnie look after navigation and shiphandling. Based on what they know of the target vessel's time and place of departure – and estimating its likely speed from the ship type and cargo weight given in the information found at the Tokyo warehouse – they plot a rough intercept course. While this could in principle be off by hundreds or perhaps thousands of kilometers, the Agents have an ace in the hole . . .
• Jili uses her souped-up radio gear to scan for emissions from the target vessel. As the information taken from the Tokyo warehouse included call signs and frequencies, this task is trivial for an operator of her caliber. She feeds bearings to JB and Vinnie, who constantly adjust their intercept plot. By August 17, she has a hard fix via radiolocation.
• Hamid assembles the parts he acquired into a makeshift radar jammer. He has a knack for such work, and gets the thing working after just a few days at sea. The only outward evidence of the jammer is a strange-looking extra antenna.
• Klas, Lev, and Wen spend the whole time disassembling, cleaning, tuning up, and reassembling firearms. With three skilled armorers working for six days, that's about 12 man-hours of work on the loadout of each Agent. The guns are all in good shape in short order, and everybody has time to get familiar with their new hardware by squeezing off a few rounds on the high seas.
• Qoqa serves as ship's medic, changing the dressings of those wounded in the Tokyo warehouse battle and making sure that everybody gets proper food and rest (and vodka). Under her watchful eye, everybody heals well. Barring a sudden nautical disaster, the team should be going into the boarding operation in full health.
• Anabel, Ben, Paul, and Zhang serve as general crew and watch-standers. Ben pays special attention to the engines, just in case, but the mechanics did a good job and his oversight proves unnecessary.
By the evening of Wednesday, August 18, the Gaia Defender is less than 24 hours from its intercept, based on Jili's radio fix and JB and Vinnie's navigational calculations. The whole group meets to make sure that everybody is clear on his or her role. The plan is to cross ahead of the other ship at some distance – lights out and jammer on – and pop three Zodiacs full of boarders directly into its path. When the target closes with the boats, the Agents aboard will tie on quietly and (hopefully) board undetected.
After that discussion, the Agents work out a broad TO&E for the operation:
• Gaia Defender: JB will helm the ship alone. Paul will stay with him, mainly to watch his back in case anything goes wrong.
• Zodiac Alpha: Vinnie, armed with a pump shotgun, will be the coxswain of the lead boat. His crew will consist of Lev, Wen, and Zhang, all armed with Uzis. His boat will carry the majority of the climbing gear.
• Zodiac Bravo: Anabel, armed with a powerful hunting rifle, will be the coxswain of the middle boat. Her crew will consist of Qoqa, also armed with a rifle, and Klas, with the last of the Uzis. Their job will be to cover Vinnie's squad as they board.
• Zodiac Charlie: Hamid, armed with a pump shotgun, will be the coxswain of the rear boat. His crew will consist of Ben and Jili, also armed with pump shotguns. His boat will carry the majority of the electronics.
In addition to their main weapons and mission-critical gear, everybody will carry a handgun (Ben, Vinnie, and Qoqa select heavy revolvers, while everybody else prefers automatics), a rescue beacon, a flashlight, and other basics. Once the meeting adjourns, the Agents start packing their kit and getting the boats ready.