Chapter 12

Later that same morning
Ready Enterprises Manufacturing
Near Harborton, Washington

Yakov was chilled to the bone even though the inside of the industrial machine shop was warm in the late summer sunshine. His chill wasn’t from the temperature though- he was frightened, terrified even. He hadn’t felt like this since he was nine years old running from a gang in the streets of St.Petersburg, Russia. He knew what would happen if he didn’t get this latest job handled properly. He couldn’t let his men see it though. Raw strength or the appearance of it, was all that kept his crew together. And he needed them to get through the handover so that he and his sons could escape.

“Sergei, get all this shit cleaned up, they are due here any minute,” said Yakov as he surveyed the insides of the warehouse strewn with tools. Empty drums and pallets were scattered everywhere alongside the semi-trailer they had just finished refurbishing.

“Yes boss, working on it now,” replied his top man, Sergei, as he started yelling at his men to get a move on. They were all dull-eyed and barely looked able to stand, but that was just too fucking bad.

The trailer had been nearly new when they picked it up from the wholesale yard 3 weeks ago. A load of fine-grained metallic pellets in lead foil-sealed barrels had arrived a few days later from their affiliate Bratva gang in California. Also included were pallets of putty-like off-white bricks. Yakov had little experience with the military either in his birth country or here, but the thick clay looked like mil-grade plastic explosives to him. He didn’t much care, since there were no timers or detonators for them to deal with, nothing that went boom- just several pages of very detailed instructions on how they were supposed to fabricate a sort of shell around the inside of the semi-trailer. Yakov didn’t know if they were making a bomb or a 6th-grade science project and it didn’t matter to him since he wasn’t going to be anywhere near here as soon as the trailer left his machine shop.

The fabrication instructions were very odd. His men had to painstakingly mix the hundreds of pounds of pellets into epoxy resin molds that were then hardened into sheets and layered against the frame of the trailer. His crew then sandwiched an inches-thick layer of the sticky clay-type substance over the sheets and replaced the thin gauge steel that made up the interior of the trailer.

Thankfully his chop shop men had the tools and the skills needed to do this much. He would not have wanted to disappoint his new boss. From what he’d heard, that could be a gruesomely fatal mistake.

To make matters worse, it had been touch and go since nearly all of his men had come down with the flu and were barely functional. Then they had all picked up a strange rash and mouth sores. Yakov was furious at them for getting it from the low-class hookers they commonly used- but his men had sworn that they were too tired for that sort of entertainment. No matter, they were nearly done now and soon he’d be able to get out of this backwater and safely back to his motherland

The strange instructions weren’t even the oddest part of the whole transaction. The drivers dropping off the shipment had included sheaves of paperwork. The paperwork had obviously been fudged and in no way indicated what the actual shipment was but they did list an origination point from a Mexican port and an import/export company with a vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding name. Even though the data was mostly fake this was a thread that a dogged investigator could pull on to unravel their whole operation. Yakov was not a sophisticated man in many ways, but he had been involved in smuggling for his entire adult life and this puzzled him. Why would his new boss allow this sort of documentation to follow the shipment?

And then there was the discrepancy in the amounts. The paperwork said there were 2 barrels and 1 pallet but they had received 8 barrels and 12 pallets of Semtex or C-4 or whatever it was. This sloppiness was not what he had come to expect of the new boss lady, but he wasn’t about to ask for clarification. Yakov didn’t know anything about explosives but he knew what a shit ton looked like and this was way more than that.

Yakov shrugged. Not his circus, not his monkeys. At least his worthless cow of a wife had somehow managed to escape from the warehouse and spare him the trouble of killing her. Of course, the boy who had let her get away had to be punished. He had been one of the only non-Russians of the Bratva affiliate and would never have been made a full member but still Yakov regretted killing him- he had been an excellent worker and one of his only Spanish speakers, a trait that often came in handy when dealing with street gangs in LA.

On the other hand, he was not the least bit concerned about his wife or who she might tell tales to. The Sheriff was paid very well to deal with such annoyances and in a few hours Yakov and his sons would be gone for good and he’d never have to see the vapid slut again. He’d been thinking about upgrading to a newer model anyway.

“Is that idiot geek almost done?” asked Yakov as he paced back and forth along the large roll-up doors at the front of the shop.

He could hear a muffled conversation from within the depths of the trailer.