WATCHING THE WATERFRONT.(Global Terminal, Bayonne, New Jersey)

Global Terminal, in Bayonne, New Jersey, has one clear advantage over most of its competitors for container-ship business in New York Harbor: it's a straight shot from the Narrows, the harbor's entrance. From Global's wharf to Ambrose Seabuoy, out in the Atlantic, where arriving ships meet their pilots, the distance is only fourteen miles. Maurice Byan, the president of Global, told me that ships can save four hours by docking at his pier, which looks across at lower Manhattan, rather than turning west and going through the Kill Van Kull and up into Newark Bay, where the biggest container terminals are, in Port Newark and Elizabeth, or to Howland Hook, on the western shore of Staten Island. Also, ships that dock at Global don't need to pass under the Bayonne Bridge, which is becoming a problem as container ships grow ever larger. Last year, a freighter had to remove its radio towers to make it.

Global, at a hundred acres, is a relatively small terminal, but it's busy. Byan took me on a tour of the pier in his pickup truck, navigating between walls of containers and dodging big, fast-moving equipment--forklifts, bladed stackers, top loaders, and huge rubber-tired gantries, six stories high. "Empty field!" Byan yelled, pointing at some tall piles of multicolored containers, each one eight feet wide by eight feet high and forty feet long, with "CHINA SHIPPING" and "HANJIN" and "P & O NEDLLOYD" painted on the sides. Empty containers are the Port of New York and New Jersey's biggest export, followed by wastepaper and scrap metal. The wastepaper mainly goes to China, and comes back later as paper goods. No empty containers arrive.

Byan, an unassuming sixty-year-old, comes from Baltimore, where his father and grandfather were longshoremen, and where he got his first job, driving a forklift on the piers. "The ships I started on looked like lifeboats compared to these things," he said. He indicated a massive container ship that was being furiously unloaded. He had two new Super Post-Panamax quay cranes coming from China, where they were built. "Panamax" refers to the largest ship that can squeeze through the Panama Canal. Ships that are larger must sail through the Suez Canal on their way from China to New York, a trip that is several thousand miles longer. "We've done a hundred million dollars in upgrades," Byan said. "Twenty-five million more to go. Wait till you see those new cranes."

Many of the ships that dock at the terminal belong to Orient Overseas Container Line, a Chinese corporation, whose parent company owns Global, as well as the Howland Hook terminal. (Most big international port operators have fleets; indeed, one problem with recent calls to end foreign ownership of U.S. ports is that there is no American operator with this capacity.) Orient Overseas is a family-owned firm with close ties to the Chinese government leadership. Its former head, C. H. Tung, left the company to become chief executive of Hong Kong when Beijing took control of the territory. His brother, C. C. Tung, now runs the company.

"Reefers!" Byan said, pointing at a line of boxes. Reefers are refrigerated containers--"produce, wine, shrimp." Longshoremen in bright-orange safety vests went about their jobs. "Average age out here used to be fifty-seven, fifty-eight," Byan said. "We're getting younger people now, though. Longshoremen used to be all big, brawny guys. Now they're more educated, computer-savvy. Fact, these young guys make good crane operators. They grew up on video games."

We drove by a radiation portal, a gateway equipped with a scanner through which all containers leaving the terminal must pass--part of the new federal port-security regime. The portal is overseen by officers of the Customs and Border Protection Agency. Byan said, "Customs bring the VACIS screening vehicle"--Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System, a gamma-ray imaging system--"down here a few days a week and do sonograms on the containers we've been told to isolate."

The trashed, teemingly industrialized landscape around the major container terminals in Elizabeth and Port Newark is perhaps the most critical couple of miles in the entire American transportation system. It includes the New Jersey Turnpike, Newark airport, and so many gas and oil and chemical storage tanks that it is known as the Chemical Coast, all within easy striking distance of the piers. And then, of course, there's Manhattan. National-security analysts estimate that if a terrorist attack closed New York Harbor in winter New England and upstate New York would run out of heating fuel within ten days. Even temporarily hampering the port's operations would have immeasurable cascading effects.