The road curved, revealing the silhouette of the truck—a hulking shadow moving slow and steady, too heavy to be legal, too intentional to be innocent.
There it was.
The blackout transport.
Not a standard freight hauler. Taller. Reinforced. The kind of truck used to move something that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“Alphabet,” I murmured, “scan for escort vehicles.”
“Two cars behind it—unmarked.” He was already ahead of me. “One pickup ahead of you. None of them have plates. All three are maintaining a perfect triangle around the truck.”
“So a convoy,” Lunchbox said. “Love that.”
“No,” I corrected. “We’ve got a cage.”
Legend cursed under his breath. “They’re guarding it. Hard.”
“And we’re behind their cage of three vehicles,” Voodoo said. “Means if we get closer, they’ll box us out.”
“And if we stay back too far?” Lunchbox asked.
“They’ll know we’re tailing,” I said.
So we kept that perfect two-hundred-foot distance. Close enough to see everything, far enough not to spook the whole parade.
The truck’s brake lights flashed once—too sharp, too quick.
“That was a signal.” Voodoo blew out a breath.
“Yeah,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Calling a check.”
The vehicles in the cage tightened half a lane inward.
Alphabet hissed. “Shit. They’re checking for tails. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Define stupid,” Voodoo muttered, but he kept us steady and we didn’t try to close the distance or shift lanes.
The transport rumbled past a row of idle cranes, then made a wide, sweeping turn deeper into the heart of the port—toward the restricted loading zones.
Alphabet’s voice returned. “You’re heading toward the decommissioned section of Pier C. You’ll lose public coverage soon. All cameras past this point feed to internal servers.”
“Already handled that?” Voodoo asked.
Alphabet snorted. “Please. They won’t be watching anything but black screens for the next hour.”
Good.
The convoy approached a steel checkpoint gate—one that should’ve been guarded.
It wasn’t.
Instead, one man in a reflective vest stepped out, waved the truck through with zero ID check, and never once looked at the trailing vehicles.
Inside job. Completely.
The transport rolled into the restricted pier.
Voodoo slowed at the gate, just enough to look like we weren’t following them. The gate guard glanced at us, hand drifting toward his radio.
