The Hobart Docks Agreement

The meeting took place at the Hobart docks on an early morning when the wharves were still quiet enough for two men to speak without being overheard. Jarod James had arrived first, waiting near the container depot in a spot Mick Davies had nominated the previous day. The location was chosen for its distance from the security office and its position between two rows of stacked containers that blocked sightlines from the main access road.

Jarod needed shipping containers. The settlement he was supplying — which he did not name, and which Mick did not ask about — required them urgently and would continue requiring them for weeks. The containers needed to leave the docks without generating the kind of attention that missing inventory creates. Jarod could provide cash. He could not provide an explanation.

Mick Davies had worked the Hobart docks long enough to know how cargo moved through the port and, more usefully, how it could move without appearing to move at all. He was a logistics operator with two decades of experience in container handling, the kind of man who understood schedules, manifests, and the gaps between them. His value to Jarod was not physical labour but institutional knowledge — he knew which containers sat unclaimed for weeks, which areas of the yard were surveilled and which were not, which shifts ran skeleton crews, and which paperwork could be fabricated without triggering an audit.

Mick's proposal was straightforward. He would mark the containers as leased to a fictitious business entity, generating documentation that would satisfy a surface-level inquiry if anyone noticed the containers had been moved. The paperwork would show a legitimate short-term lease, standard for temporary storage clients who cycled through the docks regularly. The containers themselves would be drawn from stock that had sat idle long enough to be overlooked — units in serviceable condition that nobody was actively tracking.

He recommended a driver. Tom Walters was a truck operator with a flatbed trailer and a hydraulic lift system capable of loading twenty-foot containers without a crane. Mick described him as reliable, discreet, and uninterested in asking questions that weren't his business. Tom would expect to be paid in cash, same as Mick. He could be available that night.

Jarod agreed to the terms without negotiation. The price was modest against the scale of what the containers would enable, and Jarod had dealt with enough grey-market operators to recognise one who was quoting fairly rather than testing how much a desperate buyer would pay. He counted out the cash on the bonnet of his car — payment for Mick's arrangement and an advance for Tom's first night's work.

The agreement covered more than one delivery. Mick confirmed he could repeat the process at intervals — one night's run every few days, drawing from different sections of the yard each time, rotating the fictitious lessee names on the paperwork to avoid a pattern forming. The operation could run for as long as Jarod needed it to, provided the cash kept arriving and the containers kept disappearing at a pace the port's administrative systems could absorb without flagging.

Both men left the docks separately. Mick returned to his shift. Jarod drove away carrying the confirmation that three containers would be ready for collection that night and a mobile number for Tom Walters.