15
MY SPARK OF INSPIRATION CAME from a complaint Ollie had made about some missing imported whisky. Because there are thousands of containers holding crates of fine whiskies shipped from Ireland and Scotland, and nearly nine billion metric tons of all sorts of cargo shipped on the seas every year. These goods are mostly carried in two hundred million containers—twenty-foot- or forty-foot-long steel coffins you can fill with whisky or shoes or computers or frozen meat or whatever. Even me.
Many cargo ships carry six thousand containers or more. Almost none of these containers are inspected for contraband. A busy port may see thirty thousand containers a day enter and then be loaded onto rail and trucks. As the ships arrive to deliver their cargo—whether in New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Houston—they are met by a fleet of trucks. Stop the containers to conduct detailed inspections, which involves offloading a container onto a truck, hauling it to a scanner, having bureaucrats complete paperwork and watch the inspection, unpack and then repack if any anomalies are found, and then reload and return to a truck, and you get a logistical and financial nightmare. Any inspected container creates a delay, strains a link in the surprisingly delicate economic chain. Trucks bring cargo or empty containers to the port and they take away cargo from the port. Stop for inspections, and the trucks and the trains moving the raw goods and finished products stop. The stores don’t have necessities on their shelves. The shoppers complain, the stores lose profits, the shareholders scream bloody murder, the politicians listen.
This is the big, gaping hole in our armor.
The security people brag that six percent of containers get inspected. That math means ninety-four percent don’t. But that number lies. Six percent at a major port would be nearly two thousand containers a day. It simply doesn’t happen.
I could get to Europe if I could get inside a container. The odds of being caught in an inspection were very low. Hide in the steel box for seven to ten days, get spit out in London or more likely Rotterdam, the biggest European port. Then hitch a boat into London. Start looking for Lucy and my son.
All I had to do was smuggle myself.