Low Flight of Angels in the Benelux

  Some of the havens were clearly industrial and they found a few places where houseboats moored. Yet it seemed the majority was crowded with private pleasure boats; easily half were various kinds of sailing craft. After taking the highway partway across the Maas simply to see it all from elevated position, they turned and headed back down into the old part of city just south of there. Along a very old canal, they stopped for lunch at one of the sidewalk cafes.

  The pedestrian traffic was quite heavy, plus dozens of bicycles, a great many parked alongside buildings. Almost all of the bikes were the standard commuter models; their mountain bikes stood out. They decided to chain them to a heavy steel barrier protecting one of the few trees that stood in one of the rare parking areas, taking a small table nearby.

  After finishing their meals, they decided to vacate their table for some other customers and picked their way across the busy street to the railing along the old canal. Seeing a stairway leading down close to the water, they descended to the ancient stone dock seldom used these days. At the bottom of the steps they passed a man sitting on the last step, smoking a pipe. Were it not for the fine aromatic smell, they might not have paid him any attention. He was very dark-skinned with Asian features; Preston guessed he was Sri Lanken.

  They stepped away to the middle of the dock and were chatting about what they could see. It was readily apparent there wouldn’t have been too many options for moving a bunch of kids through any of the normal havens and they wondered how it would have been done. They began lining up camera angles.

  This was the time of year one might overhear any number of different languages spoken among tourists on the streets. Apparently the pipe-smoker overheard their conversation and understood it. He approached, and Preston noticed the pipe aroma barely hid a strong body odor. This was not uncommon in Europe in the first place and frankly more so among those from Asian countries. Preston thought the man might actually be living on the streets, because he wore more clothing than even most Asians might for a northern climate, since it was nearly the heat of summer. So while a part of him dreaded the possibility of enduring panhandling, the man addressed their conversation itself.

  “You know, up the Roer from the Maas are several places where a skiff could easily be pulled up to a paved boat ramp, right next to major streets. If the freight can be moved easily enough, it would be nothing to smuggle just about anything into these parts, especially under the cover of darkness.” His accent was surprisingly faint, but carried a hint of the Central Asian sound Preston expected.

  Angie was too surprised to speak, simply pulling her red locks away from her face where the wind had blown them. Preston decided to humor the man. “You make it sound like you’ve seen it done a few times,” he suggested with a grin.

  “Done it,” the man said proudly. “But not recently, and I never trafficked in humans. The damned Euro ruined the smuggling business for me.”

  Preston countered, “I’m a little surprised you would be so open about it.”

  The man grinned. “Police here don’t use American informants, especially real professional photographers like yourselves. You might be private investigators or reporters, but not police.” It was obvious the man was quite observant and had seen a lot.

  Preston decided to play along. “Okay, so we were curious about reports of human trafficking in the area. Want to say anything about it?”

  “They ain’t coming off the river these days. Business has been pretty slow these days because Nijmegen has been pretty busy checking everything, not just for children. When cops start looking for something, they’ll be glad to arrest you for just about anything else they can find on general principle of not coming away empty-handed.” The old man’s pipe burned out and he began cleaning it with some small tool he took from a pocket. “That’s about the last of good cheap tobacco I was getting.”

  Preston had seen the prices of the highly taxed tobacco in the Netherlands. Most of it was better quality than Americans usually got, but it wasn’t subsidized like coffee. Dutch coffee was the best in the world, and had always been less expensive than the American stuff. Starbucks offered expensive mud compared to what Preston had sampled here in almost every ordinary cafe or snack bar.

  Preston had a sudden idea. “In your experience, what would be the best way to transport something so the police would ignore it?”

  “Get some other cops to move it for you. They don’t mess with each other.” The old man grinned, then turned slowly and walked away.

  Chapter 28

  On the ride back to their campsite, Angie and Preston discussed this idea.

  Angie insisted, “Corrupt officials are one thing. Local politicians are seldom clean any more than they might be anywhere else in the world. But the Dutch police seldom get too wrapped up in corruption. Gemeentes, maybe. K-Mar – I find it hard to imagine.”

  Preston came back quickly. “Boy, you sure couldn’t say that about American federal law enforcement. They’re some of the biggest criminal operations in the whole country.”

  He paused a bit. “It doesn’t seem the Gemeente police would be running back and forth across the border in their official vehicles that much. So that leaves the German Polizei. That’s pretty complicated. We know for certain they have been used a lot in espionage, or at least someone masquerading as them. I know the CIA has lots of friends in the Polizei. We’ve already discovered the espionage angle to this child trafficking; that’s how we got involved in the first place. But I can’t imagine the Polizei would be running across the border too freely, either. So about the only way I can see it is with them doing transfers along the many small routes in the woods.” He shook his head slowly. “Somehow, that seems entirely too risky and complicated.”

  “But it seems for now that’s the most plausible,” Angie countered.

  Over dinner outside their tent that evening, they scanned the maps of the border area, both paper and online maps. It became obvious that for quite some distance in both directions, the German side of the border was heavily forested. The Dutch side considerably less so, but there was that one area where Preston and his fellow troops used the firing range owned by the Dutch federal police. The next nearest border woodland on the Dutch side was a bit north of where they were camped, just on the south side of Swalmen.

  They decided to divide the border region between north and south of the A52, which was the N280 on the Dutch side of the border. This was the major highway route east and west connecting Roermond with Düsseldorf.

  The next day saw them angling from their quiet country hiding place down along the back roads to where the highway crossed the border. There was a farm lane connected to a small pedestrian bridge crossing over the autobahn. They turned left off the lightweight bridge onto a narrow bike path. From there they had less than a half-kilometer to the border marked by an almost unbroken tree line on the German side. It was a very pleasant ride and they were hardly the only cyclists on the trails.

  On the one hand, the border was shot through with crossings, most of them south of the Javelin Barracks area. On the other hand, Preston could imagine determined traffickers could get a small van down there, but trucks or buses would be nigh impossible. By mid-morning, they decided to head back through the Dutch villages a kilometer or so off the border. There was still the large forested area and they cut it in half by taking the fairly solid lane running past the golf course. By the time they got to Asenray they were ready for a snack. Stopping at the only cafe, they grabbed a vacant table out front and reassessed the task in front of them.

  Preston wasn’t exactly tired, just feeling a little frustrated. “Somehow I get the feeling trying to watch this border area day and night would be way too much. Catching them red-handed seems almost futile. I just don’t get that positive feeling about this. It’s as if our angels aren’t in on that idea.”

  Angie agreed. “I think it’s a dead end, too. It seems too inefficient.”

  Heading east out of the village, they
followed a zigzagging route back to where the little bridge crossed the autobahn. As they rode up over the top, Preston suddenly stopped. He watched a vehicle approach from the east, pass under and cruise off toward the northern end of Roermond. Angie followed his eyes.

  It was a UK Military Police car, an Opel station wagon.

  Preston looked back at Angie. While his features were nearly blank, he had a very intense look, as if his mind worked furiously. He looked again where the vehicle had gone, then back across the bridge, staring off into space. Angie waited expectantly, but all he said was, “Military Police vans.”

  The ride back to the manor and their tent was silent.

  Chapter 29

  Preston insisted on climbing into the tent to lie down. Angie knew he wasn’t so very tired because they hadn’t ridden that far, and certainly not very hard. Lying on his back, he stared up at the interior surface of the tent.

  “When I was in the Army, the Military Police in Europe always had access to VW vans with the police markings and emergency lights mounted on top, just like the older K-Mar vehicles before they started getting the fancy paint jobs they have now. The US version was dark green with large white patches and big black letters. On the inside, they had a heavy wire cage wall separating the front seats from the passenger area. The sliding side door always had the inside handle removed. It was basically a prisoner transport vehicle with room for six passengers.”

  Angie finally understood. She lay down next to him. “So, we do some night watching,” she suggested.

  “Yep.”

  Preston couldn’t sleep. He tethered the laptop to his cellphone and began researching, looking for images to indicate whether the US MPs still used such vans. Apparently there were still some in service here and there across Europe. Social sites offered photos aplenty. Then he scanned the satellite images of the area.

  “Without knowing for sure, I’m just guessing the car we saw was headed right over here to that new Albert Heijn shopping center. It’s probably the closest thing of that sort to Javelin. The next nearest thing is an Aldi out in Brüggen, tiny by comparison and not any closer. There’s also the Rheindahlen Complex” Preston seemed almost thinking aloud, but Angie understood he was explaining where his mind was going. “Without knowing where they might be going or bringing the next load of kids, all we need to do is establish a baseline of routine coming and going by any Military Police vehicles at night across the border.”

  It seemed to take forever, but finally the sun went down. In the dead of summer, that meant nearly 9PM. They road slowly back to the small bridge passing over the autobahn. Parking their bikes out of sight at the bottom, they didn’t climb all the way up. Instead, they sat part way up where they could just see over the side for westbound traffic coming from Germany.

  While they waited and watched, Preston and Angie chattered about almost anything simply to occupy their minds and stay wide awake. “If I were planning to run small batches of kids into this area, I’d want to make sure I had the same vehicles come and go routinely so the local and national police never gave it a thought. I’d make sure they came across the border at least once nightly.”

  He also told stories of apparent corruption he observed or had heard about in the US Army. He became just a bit passionate about it to the point of distraction. It was Angie who recognized the aging VW van with white patches and emergency light bar on top heading toward the bridge where they sat. Preston turned quickly, raised the camera from his lap and immediately began snapping still images. He then stood and made sure to catch the rear license plates.

  The camera told him it was pressing midnight. He decided nonetheless to send a text message to his boss, explaining his notion and promising to post a picture of the rear of the MP van with the plates visible into the dropbox.

  The next morning Preston’s cellphone twittered a reply while he was getting dressed. He snatched it up while still half-naked to see what it said.

  Plausible. Plates ambiguous – Rheindahlen or Javelin. See drop.

  In Preston’s mind, the idea of using a small skiff to transfer from barge to van would explain a lot. Düsseldorf had a great many private havens and several kilometers of beach areas with small roads nearby. Even if an MP van would be conspicuous, other types of cargo vehicles would not. At some point between Düsseldorf and the border was any number of transfer points to switch vehicles. But it would mean someone in the MPs with the means to control and corrupt several others to keep it all quiet. That would hardly be new in the US Army.

  Checking the dropbox account, Preston and Angie saw this message:

  You’ll need to stay around and catch where they take the cargo. No precise location known for the breaking house. Another unintended vacation.

  Gary’s wry sense of humor kept this job sane.

  Chapter 30

  Of course, it meant a lot of swing-shift work, as Preston called it.

  For the next week, at least ten kilometers in all directions, they rode every road, lane and trail they could find. They took pictures of everything conceivably interesting, uploading them every day to the dropbox. Every unusual sight and oddball character they saw was added to the collection. They had memorized the topography in detail. They even went so far as poking around the fence line of Javelin Barracks. While there were some good telephoto shots, nothing offered a clue they could use.

  After dark, they were hardly the only people about, even in the countryside. Each night they observed one or two runs by the MP vans. They counted three different plate numbers. So far, they always ran the same pattern: Running the autobahn to the Roermond-Oost exit, and then turning around under the autobahn just a short ways north. They always dropped into the Burger King on the same property as the Albert Heijn, then back out and back to Germany.

  Early in that week, though, Preston struck an acquaintance with a K-Mar sergeant he saw coming out of the firing range area. He waved the van to stop. The driver at first seemed only to be humoring him until Preston spoke in his clearly American English. His first comment was to ask if who was responsible for digging the spent bullets out of the sand backstop on the range. The sergeant was riding shotgun and laughed heartily. After Preston explained his previous use of the range, the sergeant seemed quite interested in a conversation. Preston explained he and his wife were professional photographers on a working vacation. They chatted about the old days when Preston was still in uniform.

  Eventually the K-Mar had to go, but Preston got his business card with a cellphone number. Later that evening, he tested things by sending a brief text message. He asked if the sergeant would have time for a dinner invitation, and could he suggest a good restaurant for it. The sergeant demurred, but thanked him. Thus began a conversation mostly by text messages about various military news items.

  At one point they crossed paths again on one of the main routes when the van pulled past them, and then stopped as they rode up alongside. During the conversation Preston mentioned seeing American MP vans in the area and the sergeant acted as if it was routine burger chasing, a taste of home.

  Preston and Angie had begun to despair of seeing anything different. Perching somewhere different every night, they watched with decreasing enthusiasm. On their eighth night, the van turned off the N280 heading south on the A73 ring road. They lost it of course, but decided to keep heading along the parallel road. It was just a hunch, but they rode up onto the highest overpass overlooking the area where Preston and his associates used to turn into the woods to get to the firing range.

  Just at that moment, another MP van passed under and ran down the newest highway laid through the area. His eyes followed the lights far down in the quiet night, while Angie trained the camera on it. She strained to track the vehicle, but the tall trees standing alongside the road hid them after a few moments. They rode as quickly as possible along the same route and somewhat beyond where they had last seen the taillights. They were now on the north edge of Herkenbosch following the N570. To t
heir surprise, yet another MP van roared past them, turning off on a country lane. The taillights remained visible against the tree line across the fields for quite some distance.

  Again they strove to chase it as far as they could. Some distance down this small lane running east, they eventually spotted headlights coming at them. Sure enough, it was one of the vans running in the opposite direction. They knew they had to be very close to the turn-around point where the vans had gone. From previous exploration they knew this wooded area stood just north of a sprawling camping park filled with little trailer houses. These were all pretty much identical, owned by the park management and rented to visitors. In the woods were some carved trees of various mythical figures from Dutch and German fairy tales.

  Just ahead, another vehicle came out of the woods on the left. They ducked down a side path and waited, carefully noting where the van had emerged from the woods. Once it was past, they rode hastily to the spot and just past it. Dragging their bikes into the woods, they laid them in the underbrush and began creeping through the gloom toward a lighted area. It was fenced and screened by thick hedges. They were just tall enough to prevent Preston seeing anything but the roof and eaves of a long, low building. There was the noise of some activity and quiet voices.

  Preston quietly grabbed Angie, stood her back to him and lifted her on his shoulders. She understood immediately and sat upright just enough and took a short video of what she saw. She tapped him on top of the head and they fled as if their lives depended on it. They continued up the same road to avoid being seen by the last MP van leaving. Just a few hundred meters took them to a bike route running the border back to the highway they had been watching all this time.

  It was no surprise they spotted one of the vans heading back into Germany as they rode alongside the autobahn to their small overpass.

  Chapter 31

  It was an all-nighter.

  They processed the videos and still images of the vans they had managed to capture that night. The prize was the footage Angie shot over the hedge. The images offered a clear visual of the MP driving the van and someone standing next to the vehicle. The building was an ancient horse barn with multiple outer doors. It was quite extensive. There was a small human sized door in the middle, and it was next to this that the van stood idling as the MP got back into it and drove off. The other person walked back into this personnel door and closed it behind himself.