Where to smuggle kidnapped humans?

If above average intelligence and physical fitness are requirements, then something simple like putting an advert in a newspaper asking for people with those qualities to volunteer for something might bring them to you. A medical experiment, a gameshow, a fitness and intelligence survey -- anything you like. As long as payment is involved, and possibly the chance of fame, you should get lots of people turning up. Verify their qualifications, and then lock them up.

You'll have to work out things like what you tell the press when the project you advertised is "cancelled", and where the volunteers may have gone that will put off enquiries from their families for a couple of days or more.

You could have a cult situation as the cover. Or you could look into ways that people in the real world often disappear: they are offered marvelous-sounding opportunities in another country, a way of escaping the terrible conditions they live in, and so they leave their families and head off to an airport or train station where they meet up with their contact, and when they arrive at their destination, are forced into prostitution rings with no one knowing where they are, and possibly with fake information being sent back about them.

I don't think that Charlie is going to be concerned about whether she is too young to drive, if being a hijacker isn't a problem for her.

Shipping containers have long been used to smuggle people. They're big metal boxes that can go on trains, boats, and trucks. I like ElaraSophia's idea of luring these people there with an ad in the paper. You could have the shipping containers dressed up to look like a room and then have the "participants" wait in the room, close the doors, and drive away. Heh. That sounds like fun... I might hijack that idea myself. ;-)

How many do you need? A number of years ago, we had a few hundred outstanding warrants on people, mostly for non-violent crimes. We sent them phony letters telling them they were contest winners and they had won a new TV. They were supposed to come to a promotion site where they could pick it up. When they got there, we picked them up. It worked so well we had to set up a justice assembly line.

I know this has been done on TV since then so it's not new, but it works.

ETA: As I read this I know you're asking, if we can mail them a letter, why don't we just go there and pick them up. Duh, they see us coming and disappear.

If someone has cash, they can probably buy anything they want. They might go to a shipping company. You might find some at scrapyards or recylce/ reuse centers. Again, cash talks. If nothing else, they might be able to get a shill (someone who's older) to buy them the cotainer(s) under the pretense of using it to store stuff from their house or move or something because mom's sick or a similar ruse.

Or maybe they order a container from PODS (or a made up version of the comapny) drop the container off at the location.

BlueLucario said:

They can't be senior citizens.

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Since it was so successful in the last election, now everybody plays the age card. Perhaps your writer's block is really early onset of Oldtimer's Disease, ha ha ha.

Anyway, "senior citizen" is no longer in. Restaurants now offer discounts to "honored citizens," the current euphemism for "too old to cut the mustard."

I'd say more about physical fitness, but the Russian tanker is due in Portland, and if I'm late all the best mail-order house maids are gone.

Kids making cyborgs, huh? This would be very easy. Print up fliers and post at universities offering pay for a reasearch project. Have them apply in person at the location where they need to go.

What if you use one solution to solve both problems? Have the kidnappers hijack a bus full of student athletes, preferably from a prestigious college. (There can be some amusing exchanges when a few of them prove not to be as intelligent as required, despite the college's supposedly high admission standards.) The kidnappers can simply shoot the coach, and force the driver to take them wherever needed.

You will have to address the issue of how two 10-year-olds hold off a bus full of college baseball players, but presumably they have really good weapons.

Please tell us, assuming this is a fantasy novel, what type of world this is. Could be, perhaps, with food containers/barrels/craters

Follow up on the news for illegal aliens. They generally have ways of transporting people. Some ideas for holding the 'candidates', though, are: the already mentioned storage/packing containers, foreclosed houses (particularly in remote areas), summer/winter homes (the kind that are used only seasonally, again particularly in remote areas), abandoned industrial areas, stuff like that.

This kinda reminds me of a movie from the 70's, early 80's, where a bunch of aliens (E.T.'s) made a grand entrance, offered a chance to go to a paradise, made their selections, then brought their candidates to an abandoned industrial area before heading off into space. We only were shown the selection/departure process, not what happened on the other side, though. I thought that would be interesting.

Freight/cargo containers used for shipping can be set up with bunk beds, chemical toilets, food and water. These can be carried by tractor trailer, by ship, by rail, or by cargo plane.

hammerklavier said:

Kids making cyborgs, huh? This would be very easy. Print up fliers and post at universities offering pay for a reasearch project. Have them apply in person at the location where they need to go.

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Excatly what I was thinking. Make sure the pay is something astronomical, like $250 for three months of sweltering work and the opportunity to test 45 experimental, non-FDA approved drugs on them. They'll line up in droves.

RJK said:

ETA: As I read this I know you're asking, if we can mail them a letter, why don't we just go there and pick them up. Duh, they see us coming and disappear.

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Why not do it in the middle of the night?

I saw on the History Channel about the practice that came to be called "Shanghai-ing." There was a new and lucrative merchant sea trade that rapidly emerged between California and China back in the 1800's. And many shipping companies desperately wanted to get in on the action of those new shipping routes. But they were very hard-pressed to come up with men willing to be sailors onboard those ships. So they resorted to kidnapping men and forcing them to be sailors.

Here's how it worked.

The primary shiping ports were Shanghai and San Francisco. So they would kidnap men from Seattle. They drugged them, took away all their documents and also made sure to take away their shoes so they couldn't escape. They these men would wake up on board a ship bound for Shanghai. They HAD to get to work right away as soon as they woke up, and they had no choice: either start working or walk the plank.

The men they targetted were always tall and strong. Seattle was a major trading city and was full of many loud and bawdy bars. Someof these bars had a dark and evil deal with these kidnappers: the barkeep built a trap door under the floor of the bar. When a man entered the bar who looked like a good candidate, they would offer to buy him a free drink if he'd join them at one particular table over at that end of the very loud and crowded barroom. He would agree, he'd sit down, take a drink, and then when they could see that the drugs in the drink were finally putting him to sleep, they'd open up the trap door and he'd fall down onto a matress in the basement below. (The matress was to prevent him from getting injured --broken bones are useless at sea.) The barroom was so loud and full of such commotion that no one would ever see this happening.

The kidnapped men were held in secret prison cells in the basements of Seattle. Then when the next ship arrived in Seattle from San Francisco, the men would be drugged again and taken aboard these ships and then wake up already far out on the Pacific.

Cybernaught - that would be harrassing their families, waking them up to ask silly questions like is your select one (son, father, mother, sister, brother, daughter, significant other) home? - must play nice