The rain didn’t stop. It thickened. What had started as a steady curtain of water was now a pounding wall, each drop cold enough to sting when it hit skin. By the time the SUVs rolled past the rusted gates of the port, every surface seemed slick and alive, reflecting the harsh glare of distant floodlights in fractured shards. The air smelled heavy salt from the sea, oil from the engines, and something faintly metallic that lingered in the back of the throat, like old blood that had been left too long to rot.
Steel containers rose on either side of the narrow lanes like silent giants, stacked high and tight, turning the docks into a maze of metal corridors. Each one cast deep shadows, the kind that could hide a man… or a dozen. Somewhere, the wind groaned through gaps in the stacks, low an
