Act of War 01 - Act of War by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061738470
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-01-24T19:13:34+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Porto do Santos, State of São Paulo, Brazil

Later that evening

Jorge Ruiz was a farm boy, but Manuel Pereira was a wharf rat. Born and raised in the bustling port city of Santos, on the South Atlantic coast southeast of São Paulo, Pereira loved the sea and loved the hardworking, hard-playing, no-nonsense life on the docks. The rules were simple: you worked, you supported your family, and you gave thanks to Jesus at the end of the week…the rest was up to you. Drinking, smoking, whoring, fighting, whatever—as long as you took care of the first three first, just about everything else was boa vida—the good life.

Although he joined the army and loved being a ground soldier, he would always be drawn to life on the docks. He loved the smell of the mountains of burlap bags of coffee or boxes of bananas on the wharf awaiting loading onto the rows and rows of ships from all over the world, the scent even overpowering the big diesel and oil engines; he loved the power and brutish efficiency of the cranes, tenders, tugs, and barges, all fighting for position and attention like bees in a hive; and he especially loved the grimy, gritty resolve of the men and women who worked the docks. Loading hundreds of tons of produce aboard a ship in just a couple hours might seem impossible for most men, but the workers did it day in and day out, in any kind of weather, for laughably low wages. They griped, groused, swore, fought, threatened, and complained every minute, but they got the job done because it was their way of life and they loved it.

Sometimes Pereira wished he could go back to the hard but fulfilling life of his boyhood. The people of the docks taught him how to be a man. It was not an easy tutelage, nothing he would ever want to experience again, but something he could look back on and be proud of how he got through it, proud of how well he learned and adapted, and anxious to pass along his knowledge and experience to his children.

“Manuel?” Pereira turned. His wife of two years, Lidia, stepped into the room, breastfeeding his son, Francisco. “Should you be sitting in the window like that?”

“You’re right,” he said, and moved his chair back into the shadows. They lived in a little two-room fourth-floor tin and wood shanty over the Onassis Line Southeast Pier, one of the busiest and oldest sections of the Porto do Santos. Almost five thousand families lived in this roughly one-square-kilometer shantytown, the homemade wood and tin cottages stacked and jumbled atop one another like thousands of cockroaches in a box. He knew he should be more careful—it would be ridiculously easy for the Policia Militar do Estado to scan hundreds of windows in just a few seconds from the harbor, an aircraft, or a nearby wharf.

But Pereira felt very safe here among the other shanties and thousands of people all around him.

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