A Shipment with Deadly Cargo

Tanjung Priok Port exhaled under the weight of Jakarta’s midnight heat, its docks slick with rain and sweat. Cranes loomed like skeletal giants, their floodlights carving pools of glare into the haze. Containers stamped with innocuous logos—Sunrise Textiles, Golden Harvest Fisheries—clanged onto the pier, their hollow thuds echoing like a slow-beating heart. Inside, nestled between layers of lead-lined foam, were machines that hummed with a predatory stillness: server arrays sleek as obsidian, drones folded like dormant wasps, and racks of neural-key decryption chips. Tools not for surveillance, but possession.

Feng Bao watched from the cab of an idling cargo truck, his scarred knuckles tapping a restless rhythm against the door. The jagged line running from his temple to jaw—a souvenir from a Triad cleaver—twitched as he barked into his radio. “Faster. The tide turns in an hour.” His men, faces masked by balaclavas, moved with the efficiency of ants swarming a carcass. The Nine Dragons had paid triple to bypass customs, triple again to silence the dockmaster. A pittance, Feng knew, compared to what this cargo would reap. Once operational, the tech would hijack parliamentary comms, bleed stock exchanges dry, and turn rival syndicates into puppets dancing on the Dragons’ strings. Dominion, Wei Long had called it. Feng preferred simpler terms: winning.

Bintang crouched behind a corroded fuel drum, the stench of diesel and brine clawing at his throat. His monocular lens—stolen from a dead mercenary in Surabaya—zoomed in on Feng’s profile. Sweat trickled down Bintang’s spine, but he didn’t blink. Patience, he told himself. Patience and precision.

The monocular’s thermal overlay painted the dockworkers in ghostly blues and reds. Bintang tracked their patterns: three men at the crane controls, four unloading Container 7A, two snipers on the rooftop. His earpiece crackled with their encrypted chatter, intercepted by the hack-dongle jammed into the port’s security hub an hour earlier. He’d memorized every frequency, every blind spot. Like raiding your own house, he thought bitterly. Once, he’d helped the Dragons build these systems. Now, he’d burn them down.

A flicker on the thermal scan—a guard straying too close. Bintang flattened himself against the drum, his hand drifting to the shock-pulse baton at his belt. The weapon was Phi-Trust’s “gift,” its voltage tuned to scramble nervous systems, not kill. “We’re not butchers,” their agent had said. Bintang hadn’t argued. Mercy was a luxury; survival wasn’t.

—

Bintang’s gaze snapped back to Container 7A. The lock was biometric, keyed to Feng’s palm. Idiots. He’d warned Wei Long a year ago about single-point failures. Now, he’d exploit it. From his pack, he withdrew a foil-wrapped device no larger than a cigarette case—a harmonic resonator, reverse-engineered from the Dragons’ blueprints. It would mimic Feng’s pulse, body heat, even the ridge patterns of his scarred hand.

A voice hissed in his earpiece. Feng’s voice. “Move the alpha unit to the warehouse. Now.”

Bintang’s jaw tightened. The “alpha unit” was the core of the shipment: a quantum-core server capable of cracking military-grade encryption in seconds. Letting it reach the warehouse meant game over.

He synced the resonator to his watch. 3:17 a.m. The snipers changed shifts in four minutes.

Four minutes to become a ghost.

Feng lit a clove cigarette, the ember flaring like a warning beacon. His men wheeled the alpha unit—a matte-black cube on a reinforced trolley—toward Warehouse 13. The sight should’ve eased him. Instead, his spine prickled. The dock felt…wrong. Too quiet, save for the creak of ropes and the sea’s low growl.

He thumbed his radio. “Sweep the perimeter again.”

Bintang was already moving.

He flitted between shadows, the resonator clutched like a prayer. The alpha unit’s trolley left a faint trail of heat on his monocle. Twenty meters. A guard pivoted, flashlight slicing the dark. Bintang froze, his blackened face and clothes dissolving into the gloom. The beam swept past.

Ten meters.

The resonator hummed to life. Bintang slapped it against the biometric lock. A green blink. Access granted.

He slipped inside the container, the alpha unit’s servers glowing with dormant LEDs. From his pack, he pulled a vial of nano-acid and pressed it to the quantum core. The liquid hissed, eating through the casing, corrupting the circuits within. A slow death, untraceable until sunrise.

Footsteps outside. Feng’s voice, sharp. “Why is this open?”

Bintang’s pulse spiked. He ducked behind the server stack as Feng’s silhouette filled the container door.

“Check it,” Feng ordered a subordinate.

The guard stepped inside.

Bintang’s fingers closed around the shock baton.

Above, the cranes groaned. Somewhere, a fish leaped in the oily water.

The Nine Dragons’ dominion would end tonight.

But first, Bintang had to survive the next sixty seconds.

The Black Sorrow Strikes

The night clung to Tanjung Priok like a fever, the air thick enough to taste salt, oil, and the metallic tang of impending chaos. Bintang crouched behind a stack of rusted cargo containers, his gloved fingers tracing the edges of a shaped charge. The dockyard sprawled before him, a maze of shadows and sodium-lit pools where Nine Dragons guards patrolled, their flashlight beams slicing the darkness like careless scythes. Somewhere beyond the labyrinth, the sea hissed against the pylons, a restless audience to the night’s performance.

The Black Sorrow moved like smoke.

There were seven in total, ghosts trained in the art of absence. Bintang had handpicked each one: hackers who’d burned their old lives, ex-syndicate enforcers with debts to settle, engineers who’d turned their blueprints into weapons. Tonight, they wore matte-black gear, faces obscured by scarves soaked in charcoal to dampen their breath. Their tools were simple, brutal—PETN explosives molded into adhesive strips, timers synced to a single frequency, and the cold precision of vengeance.

“Alpha team, west dock secured,” a voice murmured in Bintang’s earpiece. Rani, her tone steady as a sniper’s exhale. She’d rigged the gantry cranes, their colossal frames critical to unloading the Dragons’ cargo.

“Beta, moving to fuel depot,” replied Darmawan, once a Nine Dragons demolitions expert. His payload would turn the port’s diesel tanks into a chain reaction of fire.

Bintang’s target was the heart—Container 7A, where the alpha unit’s quantum core now sat rotting from his nano-acid sabotage. But to ensure the Dragons couldn’t salvage even a microchip, the dock itself had to collapse. He slipped toward a support pillar, its steel bones already weakened by salt and neglect. Kneeling, he peeled the adhesive backing from a charge and pressed it to the beam. The explosive clung like a leech, its timer blinking a silent countdown.

A shout echoed through the yard.

Bintang froze. Thirty meters away, a guard paused, cocking his head toward the containers. Had Darmawan’s footfall been too loud? Bintang’s hand drifted to the shock baton at his hip, its voltage dial set to fatal. He’d vowed to avoid kills—Phi-Trust’s rules—but survival sometimes demanded ugly choices.

The guard took a step closer.

Then, a feral yowl split the air. A skeletal cat darted from the shadows, chasing a rat. The guard snorted, muttered a curse, and turned away.

Bintang exhaled. Close.

“All teams, report,” he whispered.

“West dock rigged.”

“Fuel depot set.”

“East pylons—done.”

One by one, the voices chimed in. Bintang glanced at his wrist display: a schematic of the port, every red blinking light a promise of ruin. The Dragons’ shipment wasn’t just in Container 7A; it was in the veins of the dock itself—the cranes that lifted it, the fuel that fed its transport, the pylons that held the pier above the hungry sea.

He moved to the final pillar, the charge in his grip. This close to the water, the air stung with brine, and the pillar’s surface wept with condensation. As he planted the last explosive, a memory flickered—unwelcome, vivid. Wei Long’s voice, years ago: “Loyalty is structural. Weakness in one beam brings down the whole.”

Bintang’s jaw tightened. Funny, boss. Let’s test that.

“Final charge placed,” he said.

A pause. Then Rani’s voice: “We’re ready.”

No fanfare. No grand speeches. The Black Sorrow wasn’t a movement; it was a scalpel. Bintang raised the detonator, its weight familiar as a pistol grip. For a heartbeat, he wondered if Feng Bao was watching, if he’d feel the ground shake and know, deep in his scarred bones, that his reign was crumbling.

He pressed the trigger.

The world erupted in light and thunder. The charges fired in sequence—first the cranes, their girders twisting like paperclips in a fire, containers raining into the sea. Then the fuel depot, a mushroom cloud of flame clawing at the sky, painting the docks in hellish orange. Finally, the support pillars groaned, their steel intestines shredded, and the dock folded inward like a dying beast.

Chaos swallowed the night. Guards ran, screaming, as concrete split and waves lunged upward to claim the wreckage. Somewhere in the inferno, the alpha unit’s servers melted into slag, its poisoned core dissolving into the harbor’s black heart.

Bintang was already moving, his team vanishing into pre-mapped escape routes. As he scaled the port’s outer fence, he glanced back. Against the blaze, a figure stood silhouetted—Feng Bao, staring at the ruin, phone pressed to his ear. Reporting failure, Bintang guessed.

He dropped into the waiting speedboat, its engine growling. Rani steered them into the open water, the fire reflected in her narrowed eyes. “They’ll hunt us harder now.”

Bintang peeled off his gloves, watching the dock collapse into the sea. “Let them. We just showed them how brittle their bones are.”

Somewhere, in a penthouse high above Hong Kong, Wei Long would be receiving the news. Bintang hoped he felt it—the first crack in the dragon’s spine.