The Zero Hour

If you were a drug smuggler seeking to get, say, a few thousand kilos of cocaine into the United States, you would probably resort to one of the time-honored methods devised by the drug cartels. You might conceal the goods in hollowed-out bars of aluminum stacked high in the cargo of a Venezuelan ship entering the Port of Newark. Or you might move the cocaine by truck across the Mexican border, buried in a shipment of roofing material.

If you were careful, and your shipping documents were in order, the odds would be in your favor.

But if instead you were smuggling in relatively small quantities of contraband, whether drugs or explosives or weapons-grade plutonium, there is another, far safer way.

You would simply use an international express package delivery service such as DHL or Federal Express or Airborne. Millions of packages enter the United States every day, roughly a hundred thousand sent by overnight express, and they are hardly ever subject to inspection.

“Express consignment operators,” as the U.S. government formally designates international express courier services, are strictly controlled by the lengthy list of rules set out in Volume 19 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Part 128. They must demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. Customs Service that their shipping facilities are secure, and that everyone who works for them has been subjected to a thorough background security check.

John F. Kennedy International Airport in Idlewild, New York, is the single customs entry point, the funnel through which all express packages from Europe must pass. In order to speed up the customs procedures, most of the express consignment shippers transmit a manifest in advance, by computer, to enable U.S. Customs to clear the planeload of packages in advance. After all, the U.S. Customs Service cannot possibly inspect even one of every thousand packages that pass through JFK.

Etienne Charreyron, the bomb-disposal expert in Lièges, Belgium, whom Baumann had hired to construct the fusing systems, sent two parcels on two separate days through DHL in Brussels. Each package contained a custom-designed fusing system, concealed in the hollow body of a Sony CFD-30 CD/radio/cassette player.

Charreyron knew the basic route of packages sent by DHL. He knew that Brussels was DHL’s European hub. He knew that a package sent from the DHL office in Brussels was sent via one of DHL’s private 727 jets, in which it was stuffed into one of six or seven large containers, or “cans,” as they’re called in shipping terminology. Each can might contain one to two thousand packages.

He knew that the packages containing the fusing mechanisms would arrive at one or two o’clock in the morning at JFK Airport, go through customs, and be loaded on a DHL jet to Cincinnati, DHL’s U.S. hub, by nine in the morning. By the next day they would be in the hands of the man who had ordered them. In all, the transit time would be two business days.

Charreyron had done his homework, and he had chosen a good, low-risk way to send the detonators. But he had not figured on Senior Inspector Edna Mae Johnson.

Johnson had worked for the U. S. Customs Service for thirty-six years. A stout black woman of ferocious intelligence and unwavering attention, she was known by friends and admirers as Eagle Eye, and by many who got in her way by less admiring nicknames, most of them unprintable. Her husband of forty-odd years had learned the hard way not to bother trying to pull one over on Edna Mae.

So had the licensed customs brokers who dealt with her each night when the express consignments came in. They all knew that when Inspector Johnson was on duty, nothing would ever be allowed to slide by. Everything would go strictly according to Hoyle. With a fine-tooth comb-no, with a goddam microscope!-she went through the manifests, the airbills, and the commercial invoices (the official U.S. Customs form, actually called a Customs Entry, which listed a package’s contents, value, and use), looking for any discrepancies.

A few of the customs brokers swore that finding a discrepancy gave Edna Mae an orgasm. If she found one, you could bank on the fact that she would make things right, even if it meant holding an entire planeload.

Two words everyone in the courier business most feared were “break bulk”: this meant to make the shipping company open a container and spend three hours or so sorting through the two thousand packages for that one miserable little letter envelope whose paperwork was fouled up. Inspector Johnson certainly did not hesitate to break bulk. There were those who suspected she rather enjoyed it. When a customs broker groaned, she’d snap, “Well, I sure as hell didn’t make the mistake. And you call yourself a business!”