22

Jalal leaned back in his chair, exhausted from his trip and not wanting to hear the words his friend was saying. “What do you mean, you can’t get this into the shipment? You’re on the inside. You’re the man who has access to the containers. It’s just a tube.”

Badis said, “You don’t understand how hard it is. The ship is being loaded tonight, which means all of the containers that will be boarded are in a secure holding area.”

“Can’t you get into it?”

“I could, but it wouldn’t matter. Each container has a cable seal with a bar code.”

“You don’t have additional seals?”

“I do, but the United States requires the manifest for anything headed to their country to be sent twenty-four hours in advance of the ship even being loaded. They have all the seal numbers. Even if we made it in, broke into that container, and then replaced the seal, it wouldn’t be allowed to board because the new seal number wouldn’t match the manifest. It would only draw attention to that container. They’d break it down and search every article. They’d find the explosives.”

“And the explosives are already inside the container?”

“Yes. I had to load it when I had the chance. Before the seals went on. Jalal, forget about the tube. Just let the explosives go off. It will be the same thing.”

“No, it won’t. How much of a charge did you place inside?”

“It’ll blow half the container open. If the container ends up in the middle or bottom of the stack, it’ll cause the entire stack to fall into the sea. Spectacular.”

“So we get a visible display, but it won’t do anything to the port.”

“It will once they realize that a bomb was smuggled in. Right now, they search a fraction of the containers. With this attack, and the tanker one before it, they’ll be forced to search every container. It will destroy their shipping industry. They can’t possibly do it without disrupting the shipping chain globally.”

“I agree, which means they won’t do it. They’ll scream and yell, and show flash and pomp, but they won’t let the trade stop. Only we can do that, by damaging the port.”

Badis rubbed his hands together, like an old woman afraid of confrontation. He said, “You don’t understand, there is no way to get that tube into my container. Just no way. We can’t penetrate a secure area, find the right CONEX, then open the doors, breaking the seal, and dig around to find my explosive package. It looks like every other package in the CONEX, and the place is under constant surveillance. This isn’t like Tangier, where we planned the attack. They don’t care what comes into port. America does.”

Jalal squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then said, “Can you get me in?”

“Yes. I have a temporary badge. The one they issue while the real one is being made.”

He held out his own badge, a thick piece of plastic with Badis’s face emblazoned on it. “This is what you would end up with, and it’s embedded with biometric information. In this case, a retinal scan. I wave this at the reader, then lean in to look into a machine that reads my eyes. It takes a while to get them made, so in the interim, new hires are given a temporary badge. But you have to be with me to enter. Or with someone who owns a real badge.”

“When are they loading the ship?”

“Tonight, starting at ten P.M. They’ll run until one A.M., and we’ll have a shift change, which is when I work. We’ll continue for six hours straight, loading forty containers an hour, until it’s done. The ship is due to leave tomorrow at eight in the morning.”

“Besides the seal mix-up, what would prevent a container from being loaded?”

“What do you mean?”

“What would cause the contents of one of those metal containers to be transloaded to another container?”

“Nothing. They’re already packed.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, if the container was shown at the final inspection to have some structural flaw, maybe. If the dockmaster thought that the container posed a threat to the stability of the stack. I mean, they stack those things up like buildings. If something like that happened, they might halt the loading.”

Jalal stared at the wall, lost in thought. Badis said, “What are you thinking?”

Jalal said, “You load the containers, correct?”

“Well, yes, in a way. I take the containers out of the holding area using a top-pick and transport them to a shuttle carrier, which then takes them to the cranes for loading on the boat.”

“So this top-pick is like a forklift?”

“Yes. A giant one, but it lifts from the top. It can transport an entire forty-foot steel CONEX.”

Jalal lapsed into silence again. Badis said, “What?”

“Could you get me in during the loading?”

“Yes, with my visitor badge, but what would you do? You don’t know anything about being a stevedore. Someone will ask what you’re doing there.”

“You’ll take care of that.”

“How?”

“You’re going to lose your job.”

—

Six hours later, Badis drove his small pickup truck through the gate of the port of Algeciras, the sixth-busiest port in Europe. At the tip of the Iberian Peninsula in the Strait of Gibraltar, it was the closest operating port to the Maghreb, a mere ten miles to the African coast, and as such, a major transit point from Africa into Europe. Moroccans of all stripes made the daily one-hour ferry commute from Tangier to Algeciras to work in Spain, and this was one of the reasons Jalal had chosen it for infiltration. It had taken two years of work to embed Badis deep within the trust of the port authority, and yet Jalal had never been inside.

Badis slowed at the primary entrance, but the woman inside the gatehouse barely looked at him. He continued on, driving past the ferry terminal, and Jalal said, “That wasn’t much security.”

“That’s just to enter the public side. Everyone taking a ferry travels through that gate, so it’s really nothing more than show. The real security is deeper.”

They hit a traffic circle, and Jalal saw the cranes in the distance, giant booms hanging out over the water. Badis took a road leading to a chain-link fence and another gate, this one with a drop bar, but unmanned. Beyond the fencing were rows of cars. Badis ran his badge over a card reader, and the bar lifted. He pulled in and parked, saying, “This is as close as they let private vehicles get.”

“How do we get in?”

“We walk. Make sure that tube doesn’t slip down your pants.”

Jalal ran his hand down his calf, testing the tape holding it in place. “I’m good.”

He followed Badis across the lot, hitting another gate, this one only wide enough for pedestrians, manned with a guy in uniform holding a radio.

Badis nodded at him, waved his badge in front of another card reader, then placed his eyes into what looked like an outsize set of binoculars attached to the wall. A light buzzed green, and the pedestrian gate opened.

Badis said, “Show him your temporary badge.” Jalal did, and the guard wrote down the number on a clipboard. Badis said, “Orientation night for him.”

The guard smiled and said, “Good luck with that. Going to be a rough one.”

Jalal said, “So I’ve heard,” and they were through the gate, into a holding area towering with row after row of twenty-foot and forty-foot SeaLand containers.

Badis said, “The security here is a separate company from the loaders, so they won’t question your being inside. I’m a top-pick driver, so let me deal with the foreman. I’ll tell him you’re just going to right-seat ride for the night.”

“Okay.”

Badis pointed to a small office in the ocean of steel and said, “I need to clock in. Obviously, you can’t do that. Stay out here.”

Thirty minutes later, Jalal was in a vortex of what looked to him like controlled chaos, top-picks driving back and forth hauling CONEX boxes to shuttle mules, which then took them to the gantry cranes, the cranes never ceasing movement loading the ship.

Jalal said, “There are four top-pick drivers. How will you guarantee we get the right container?”

“The way we divided up the lot. Trust me, it looks confusing, but it’ll be our top-pick. You just be ready to help with the reload.”

Three routes back and forth later, and Badis lifted the steel harness of the top-pick to the rack of containers, pulled one out, then leaned toward the windshield. He said, “This is the one.”

Jalal rubbed his leg, feeling the tube. He said, “Do it.”

Badis manipulated the controls, lowering the twenty-foot container until it almost blocked his vision. He began driving toward the shuttle carriers, building up speed, then jerked the vehicle to the left, causing the left side of the container he was carrying to clip the stack in a rending of metal. He immediately backed up, as if shocked, then lowered the container.

Before the dust had even settled, the dock foreman was outside, screaming his head off. Jalal and Badis exited, seeing the container had a small split along the seams of the corner, the rivets popping out. The foreman began berating Badis, demanding to know if he’d allowed Jalal to work the lift as an apprentice. Badis said no, it was completely his fault.

The precision timetable of the container loading ground to a halt, and it was a schedule that had to be maintained. The cranes could mount forty containers an hour—and needed to do so to keep the port in operation. Now they had a problem, because it wasn’t a misstep of paperwork on the part of the freight forwarders or an error of the company that contracted the port for shipping—it was the port operation itself, and they would pay a hefty penalty for this load not making the ship.

Something Badis knew all about.

In short order, an empty container was brought out, and as the ship was being loaded with all the other containers, men simultaneously manhandled the freight from the damaged container to a new one. Including Badis and Jalal.

Passing across boxes of linens and crates of plastic donkeys from China, Badis finally hit the crate he wanted: one that looked like all the others but was decidedly different in composition. He said, “Jalal, help me with this one.”

Jalal felt the sweat break out on his neck, looking at the four guards watching the transfer. He nodded, picking up one side of a wooden-crated box four feet square. They walked past the guards and entered the container, moving to the rear. They sat it on top of a similar crate, and Jalal hissed, “Block their view.”

Badis turned around, the harsh lights of the port leaving him in stark silhouette. On his knees, Jalal stuck his hand under the leg of his jeans and ripped the tube free, stifling a scream as it took his hair with it. In between the wood slats, he jabbed a hole in the paper wrapping and shoved the tube through.

He had no idea if it was close enough to the explosives to do the damage he wanted, and he feared it would simply be launched intact into space. But it was all he could do.

He stood up and nodded at Badis, and they continued loading. Forty minutes later, they watched the security team seal the new container, a cable band placed on the locking mechanism and the number recorded.

Twenty minutes after that, it was transferred to the ship. One container out of millions that traversed the high seas, the last one loaded on a ship crossing the ocean toward the port at Los Angeles. The event would be logged, as were all anomalies, but the ship would sail. After all, there were schedules to keep.

When the loading was complete, the dock foreman said, “Badis, you’ve been a hard worker, but I can’t protect you from this. Too much potential monetary loss. The container you were lifting was destroyed and we almost missed the departure of the ship.”

Badis said, “I understand, and I don’t blame you. It was my mistake.”

The foreman said, “I’ll vouch for you. I don’t want to lose you.” He jerked a thumb to Jalal and said, “This guy, on the other hand, can head on back to where he came from. He knows shit about port operations. We hire him, and it will be a disaster every night.”

Jalal said, “Not every night, I promise.”