Page 110 of Strays
She pauses, scanning the room. “Fentanyl’s already lethal in micrograms. This compound’s structure suggests it could be significantly stronger. But we don’t have an exact potency yet, still waiting on confirmation from Quantico and CDC tox.”
She clicks again, and photos of gel pills appear, each tagged with a timestamp and location. One of them is cracked open, leaking faint blue. “It’s cold-chain stabilized, inert when frozen. Activates at room temperature, but degrades fast. That’s why it needs to be kept cold. It metabolizes fast too, which explains why the tox screens came back clean.”
Lowell steps in. “The truck the aegis unit spotted in front of the building where we recovered the drug belongs to TGH USA. They’re a licensed cold-chain distributor based in New Jersey. The main facility operates out of Port Newark.”
Scouse clicks again, and now there’s paperwork on the screen: port logs and a manifest. “That truck left Port Newark in the middle of the night carrying a container from Athena Foods,” she says. “It arrived in Bridgeport and stopped outside that building yesterday at six a.m.” She flips open her legal pad. “Athena Foods is a large-scale meat exporter based in Rosario, Argentina. They’ve been exporting to TGH for the last six months.”
She glances up again. “TGH is scheduled to pull another container this morning. The manifest lists frozen beef, standard inspection; pre-cleared. But after yesterday’s takedown, the odds of a TGH truck carrying anything illegal just dropped to zero. I don’t think whoever’s behind this is stupid enough to keep using the trucks.”
“But the ship’s already docked, and it left Argentina eighteen days ago. If there’s criminal cargo onboard, it’s still on that vessel,” she adds. “The New York team is already at the port. Truck rolls first, and if it’s clean, they’ll move ontothe ship directly.”
She clicks the remote again, and a photo Jay took appears on the screen: the dented sedan.
“The car parked next to the truck yesterday,” she says. “We ran the plate, and it came back registered to a vehicle in Union City. Problem is, it’s not the car the aegis unit logged. Same plate, but different make and model. They cloned it. We checked VINs from nearby street cams and ran traffic footage three blocks in both directions, but got no hits.”
Lowell leans forward, arms folded. “It’s a ghost car. Whoever was driving knew exactly how to stay invisible.”
By noon, we get confirmation from the New York office. The TGH truck rolled out of Port Newark just before 10 a.m., pulling a standard reefer container loaded with frozen beef. The paperwork matched the manifest exactly; the weight was consistent; the driver had no priors and no visible nerves. He drove slowly, stuck to the route, stopped for fuel once, then kept going.
But the ship — the Santa Teresa — was still in port. At 10:35, the New York field team boarded the vessel. Initial sweeps by CBP and port security dogs turned up nothing. Agents walked the decks, checked containers, read serials off clipboards, and everything appeared standard. Meat was cold, seals unbroken, no signs of tampering.
But when the aegis unit got in, they picked something off. A scent leaking from a corridor near the reefer hold. They followed it to a sealed panel tucked behind a run of control piping. The blueprints didn’t show anything there, but the seam was real.
Behind it, they found a concealed space fiberglass-lined, and there was a woman inside.
Latin American, early twenties. Alert but silent. Her clothes were damp, stuck to her skin. She had no shoes. Next to her, just a bucket in the corner, two empty water bottles and a plastic bag crowded with foil food containers, some empty, some still holding scraps gone sour.
She didn’t resist when they pulled her out. Didn’t speak. She’d been in that box for eighteen days. The medics stabilized her on the dock and moved her to Mt. Sinai under federal protection.
Late afternoon, we get a new update. The NY team located a second compartment on the ship, this one inside the main refrigerated bay. A false wall had been built behind a rack of legitimate cargo, and inside were neatly stacked gel pills, fully sealed and ready for distribution. Preliminary tests confirmed the same compound: Acetyl-nitazene-Δ9F, still frozen and intact.
By Tuesday morning, seizure orders went out to every major U.S. port receiving cargo from Athena Foods. Customs flagged the containers, DEA teams mobilized nationwide, and Homeland Security looped in Coast Guard patrols. And just like that, the network cracked open.
In Houston, agents intercepted a refrigerated freighter owned by Athena Foods before it finished unloading. They found eight women below deck in a compartment hidden within the cold storage infrastructure, camouflaged behind thermal shielding. The space was barely large enough to sit upright. The women were wrapped in plastic blankets, barely conscious.
The team also seized over three hundred pounds of Acetyl-nitazene-Δ9F gel pills, hidden behind false panels in the ship's main reefer bay.
In Los Angeles, two women were recovered from a hidden compartment above the engine room. No drugs were found.
Charleston’s case was worse. No women were recovered, and no drugs were found, but agents discovered a concealed compartment above the engine room, insulated, padded, and empty. Hours later, the body of a Latin woman washed up near the port. No ID. Investigators believe the crew, knowing the ship would be searched, threw her overboard to eliminate evidence.
At each port where women or drugs were found, key crew members were detained immediately. Captains, cargo officers, and engineers were questioned by DHS and CBP, and in several cases, arrested. In Houston and Los Angeles, formal charges were filed within hours. In Charleston, two crew members vanished during offloading. They are now listed as fugitives under federal warrants.
The task force moved fast with coordinated raids across four cities, warrants served before phones could be wiped or hard drives could disappear.
Of all the people arrested, none talked. Not a single manager, dispatcher, or driver broke. The message is clear: this operation is too protected, too organized, and too dangerous to betray.
Late Wednesday, Detroit’s DEA office picked up a low-level dealer tied to cold-chain drop points. He was too scared to say a word about his suppliers, but he gave them the name of the drug on the streets: Frostbite.
We now know that the pills are meant to be swallowed. The dealer said the proper use was to let it sit at room temperature for five minutes before swallowing; this would partially degrade the compound and lower the risk. But that’s not what users wanted.
“Colder’s stronger,” he told them. “You pop it straight from the fridge, it hits harder. But sometimes it hits too hard and people go down.”
With the operation exposed, the traffickers pulled back. Shipments from Athena halted. Containers already en route vanished from U.S. manifests. At least two vessels turned back mid-ocean; one diverted to West Africa. Another disappeared from tracking before reaching the Gulf.
But now we already had the product, the packaging, the routes, and the entire smuggling method documented.
The case shifted gears. If we were working crazy hours before, now every day feels like a marathon. We’re pulling twelve-hour stretches at the DEA, andgarrison training days are suddenly longer with briefings stacked on top of workouts, drills, and evaluations.
