Cabrillo shook it, and the pilot pocketed the pair of hundred-dollar bills as smoothly as he handled the ship. There was no inherent need to bribe the pilot, since this is the last time the Ibis would ever dock in Iraq, or any other port in the world, but the Chairman liked to keep up appearances.

On the dock down below sat an eighteen-wheeler, with a container on its flatbed trailer, and two Toyota minivans that looked as though their odometers passed a hundred thousand about ten years ago. A sedan parked near them didn’t look much younger. Towering over everything was a skeletal crane with a boom that could stretch fifty feet over the water. Lights rigged from it bathed the dock in an artificial twilight. This was an older section of the harbor. The cranes for unloading containers from the massive panamax freighters were farther up the roads. The tankers, which made up the largest portion of traffic coming into and out of Umm Qasr, were loaded out at sea using pipelines.

Juan had his own handheld radio, and he called down to the men near the gangway to lower the crane. It rattled through its chain fall and came to rest on the concrete pier. “If you will excuse me . . .”

“Of course.” The pilot stepped aside to wait for the captain to conclude his business on the dock. He would then guide the ship back out into the open waters of the Gulf beyond the al-Başrah Oil Terminal.

Cabrillo took a second to square his uniform shirt into his black trousers and make sure his shoulder boards were even. Eddie Seng met them at the head of the gangway. He acted as first officer on the Ibis, while Hali Kasim played that role on the other two incarnations of the Oregon in this grand ruse.

The two men strode down the gangplank together. A customs official, this one truly corrupt, stood by as men piled out of the minivans. There were no visible weapons, but Cabrillo knew all of them were armed.

That was the other tricky aspect to this whole deal. Three different criminal syndicates collectively owned The Container along with their unknown American partner or partners. No one trusted one another, so there was tension on the dock even without the presence of a container full of cash. No one spoke as a few minutes elapsed. Then three more vehicles approached. They were all Mercedes SUVs, black with dark-tinted windows. Each would be as well protected as a bank’s armored car.