Dear Jessica (Night's Black Agents)

Some of the information in this post comes from LexisNexis.

The Lexis database lists the Jessica (aka HMYJ5, Grand Union, Lian Shun 9), as a prohibited General Cargo vessel from North Korea, banned from entering US waters under the Countering America's Enemies Act and North Korea Sanctions Act. Lexis doesn't go into specifics as to why Jessica made the list, but there could be all sorts of reasons. Over 59 vessels have been sanctioned by the US Treasury, usually because they're smuggling cargo into, or out of, the dictatorial regime of North Korea.

It's not difficult to change the appearance of a ship. Smugglers have been doing that since the age of sail, and it's just as easy now as it was then. A new paint job, a new name on the stern, change out the flag and some of the fittings, and you're done.

As the CNN article points out, modern means of tracking are easy to falsify - or, in the case of transponders, turn off as soon as you leave port. File your company in Hong Kong, so you have a neutral(ish) port of call and flag to fly. That company owns the ship, and if you have trouble, just transfer the ship to another company. And another. And another. None of this is any more sophisticated than it has to be. The people who run these operations know nobody's looking too hard at them, and when someone does, they can just vanish, to be replaced by another faceless entity.

When a ship's well and truly burnt, its shadowy owners cut ties, just as happens to spies now and again - something your agents know all about. With ships, it's a little different.

You may recall me mentioning Rats, Glorious Rats, and Derelicts before. Also the Seaman Guard Ohio incident, and the nasty cargo found aboard the Hai Sin, when it was broken up at Guangdong port.

When you no longer want a ship, the best course of action is to dump it. The CNN article above references the Hao Fan 6 and says that, in its final stages, the ship's transponder had it going in circles for weeks and weeks. The author suggests this is a tactic to throw off investigators; with no legit port to go to, it just stays at sea. It could also mean that the crew disembarked weeks ago, kept the engines running, and tied off the wheel. Whereas the Hai Sin was sold to a scrapyard, but that was back in the 1990s, when transponders were less common, and the West's media didn't pay anything like as much attention to things that happened in Chinese ports. [Not that it pays a great deal of attention now, mind.]

There are plenty of graveyards all over the world. The UK has a few, France has a few, but if you want to dump your unwanted illegal cargo ship somewhere unremarkable, Africa and Asia are still your best shots - though I note that the largest of them all, Nouadhibou, is being cleared up, with China's help.

If you don't want to ditch it, for whatever reason, and you can't afford to send it to a scrapyard, your next best bet is to scuttle it. Sounds easy, doesn't it? People have been sinking ships for centuries, usually unintentionally. However scuttling your vessel can prove difficult. Ships are built to float, and sometimes stubbornly remain afloat despite the best efforts of those aboard. That's how ghost ships like the Lyubov Orlova with its cannibal rats get their start.

So, to gamify:

Jessica's Cargo

The agents are hired, either by shadowy go-betweens or by an agency like Edom, and sent to Bangladesh to take possession of the Jessica, a ship on the prohibited list for various smuggling offenses. The Jessica is believed ultimately to belong to North Korea, but is legally owned by a Hong Kong holding company. The Hong Kong holding company and the American authorities, possibly with CIA backing, are battling for control of the Jessica, so the agents must expect competition. The Bangladesh authorities are proving less than helpful, so the agents will have uncooperative bureaucracy to deal with too.

The Jessica turned up in Bangladesh in the old-fashioned way: it beached itself during a storm. It was swiftly claimed by a local scrapyard, for salvage, and a claim was put in with the ship's owners. Unfortunately for the salvage yard, its claim is on hold, and likely to remain so, as the shipyard owner's eldest son has been kidnapped by local gangsters. Though the shipyard owner is very reluctant to say so, one of the conditions on his son's release is that he drop all claim on the Jessica or its cargo. He won't want to cooperate with anyone, whether it's the agents or one of their rivals.

Why all this fuss? Is it because:

• The Jessica wasn't supposed to beach, whether in Bangladesh or anywhere else. It was supposed to be delivering a very illegal cargo for North Korea's regime. North Korea wants to know why the Jessica ended up in Bangladesh - and the Conspiracy, which hitched a ride through contacts in North Korea, wants to cover up its involvement in the affair. What was that cargo? What Conspiracy asset was aboard the Jessica, and where is it now?  
• The Jessica's carrying cargo meant for delivery in Bangladesh, but for whatever reason the crew went missing and now the cargo's God knows where. Did someone steal it, or did it walk away? Is this an elaborate attempt by a Conspiracy asset to defect?
• The Jessica's part of a NSA operation designed to draw out Chinese assets working with North Korea. The NSA's been tracking the Jessica for months, and there was an op in place to recruit the ship's captain. Then the captain began relaying some very peculiar data, just before the Jessica went silent - two weeks before it ended up on Bangladesh's shoreline. The NSA wants to know what went wrong, and if the American vampire's in play, he may be assigned to find out.

Enjoy!

Sand and Conflict Antiquities (Night's Black Agents)

So how does the Conspiracy get its money, anyway? It takes vast sums of cold hard cash to keep those combat choppers and armies of mooks on the payroll. Not every vampire is like that ultimate trustafarian, Dracula, with stacks of gold bullion stashed away in the dusty caverns under daddy's castle. Some of them have to work for a living; but what do they do, and what kind of payout can they expect?

I'm going to discuss two possibilities here, both ripped from the headlines: sand smuggling, and conflict antiquities.

Conflict antiquities is a topic that's been in the news frequently of late, due to its links with Isis, and the conflict in Syria. Briefly, in conflict zones organized bands of looters strip antiquities sites of anything valuable and portable, sending it to the antique shops of Europe for a quick buck. The process is helped by the traditional, mercenary attitude of collectors and dealers, a characteristic that has provided fiction with many memorable antiheroes. Most dealers don't inquire too closely into the antecedents of the items they sell, and the collectors care even less than the dealers. At the moment, profits from the trade are funding terrorist groups, but in the past it's kept many a crime lord and would-be dictator for life in clover.

Incidentally, in case you were about to argue that at least the antiques are saved for posterity, rather than destroyed, it's worth bearing in mind that the profits from each 'saved' antique go to fund the activities of the same people determined to destroy those same antiquity sites.

Religious fanaticism won't be denied, but even the fanatics are willing to bend a point to keep the movement in funds. The money's too good to resist; items flow from the conflict zone to nearby intermediary markets in, say, Turkey, before making its way to the West. It's organized looting on a massive scale. "Every day we are getting calls about Syrian gold, Syrian mosaics, Syrian statues," says one antiquities dealer. "Damascus is being sold right here in Amman, piece by piece."

Arguably the Conspiracy has a slight advantage over the ordinary looter, in that some of its members may be old enough to remember where all the best antiquities sites are. In any case, wherever the Vampires fit in the chain, it's a cinch that they're making a mint. The interesting thing about a chronicle of this type is that you can set the scene nearly anywhere, from a Middle Eastern marketplace to an oh-so-exclusive antiquities dealer in, say, Rome, or Bonn, or London. You're probably talking about several Nodes worth of the Conspyramid, from the original looters out on the sharp end, to the people organizing transport, to the vendors, and possibly also one or two of the more highly-placed collectors.

Now we've talked about that, let's talk about sand.

It's big business. Everybody needs it, and there isn't enough of it. Construction, manufacturing, technological development; it all comes, ultimately, from sand dredged up from river beds and beaches. Fresh water sand is best; you don't want to be fighting salt corrosion from sand impregnated with the stuff. Desert sand's no good, as you need it to have those rough edges, allowing it to bind together.

Ecologically this is frequently a nightmare scenario.Wisconsin's sand rush is not without its cost. "Your clothes are full of it, you can’t roll your car windows down," says one Wisconsin native, living near the Oakdale sand mines. "The breathing part of it isn’t good. You can just feel it in your throat, feel it in your nose." But that's in the United States, where you can, occasionally, oppose an industrial development on environmental grounds. Places like India, on the other hand, where there are few rules and little will to enforce them, are another question entirely. There are over a dozen nations heavily involved in illicit sand mining, and again, there are indications that profits from these scams flow back to, among others, terrorist groups.

From a Conspiracy perspective, sand lacks the sexiness of antiquities smuggling, but it's a lethal trade, worth a fortune, and might appeal to technologically-proficient vampires looking for raw materials to build their sinister devices. Or who just want to build a city in the middle of nowhere. Construction materials aren't cheap, after all.

As with antiquities, the most useful element of sand smuggling is that you can set the story pretty much anywhere. Once again there's the blasted, gang-run danger zone, where life is cheap and bribes frequent. Even if there is an actual authority, you can bet that the cops and government types will not be on the characters' side. Then there's the transport arm, and finally the delivery site, where the product is then divided up and shipped off to wherever it's needed. That could be Washington DC, or it could be Dubai. Or anywhere else in between, really; the choice is yours.

That's it from me. Enjoy!