The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  Because of the changes made, it had been decided Major Mendoza would fly back to the mid-Atlantic by a different route. In the Portuguese islands of the Azores is the U.S. Air Force base of Lajes, home of the 64th Wing, and the Pentagon, operating to unseen strings, had agreed to refuel the “museum piece” ostensibly heading back to South Africa. At 1,395 nautical miles, it was no problem.

  Nevertheless, he overnighted in the officers’ club at Lajes in order to leave at dawn for Fogo. He had no wish to make his first landing at his new home in the dark. He took off at dawn for the second leg, 1,439 miles to Fogo, well under his 2,200-mile limit.

  The skies over the Cape Verde Islands were clear. As he dropped down from his cruise altitude of 35,000 feet, he could see them all with total clarity. At 10,000 feet, the wakes of a few speedboats out at sea were like little white feathers against the blue water. At the south end of the group, west of Santiago, he could make out the jutting caldera of Fogo’s extinct volcano and, tucked into the southwestern flank of the rock, the sliver of airport runway.

  He dropped farther in a long, curving sweep over the Atlantic, keeping the volcano just off port wing. He knew that he had a designated call sign and frequency, and that the language would not be Portuguese but English. He would be “Pilgrim,” and Fogo Central was “Progress.” He pressed the Transmit button and called.

  “Pilgrim, Pilgrim . . . Progress Tower, do you read me?”

  The voice that came back he recognized. One of the six from Scampton who would be his technical and support team. An English voice, North Country accent. His friend was sitting in the Fogo Airport control tower beside the Verdean traffic controller of commercial flights.

  “Read you fine, Pilgrim.”

  The Scampton enthusiast, another retiree recruited by Cal Dexter with Cobra money, stared out of the plate-glass window of the stumpy little control box and could clearly see the Bucc curving over the sea. He delivered landing instructions: direction of runway, wind strength and direction.

  At 1,000 feet, João Mendoza lowered undercarriage and flaps to landing setting, watched the airspeed and altitude drop. In such brilliant visibility, there was not much need for technology; this was flying as it used to be. Two miles out, he lined up. The froth of foaming surf swept under him, the wheels thumped the tarmac at the very threshold marker, and he was braking gently down a runway half the length of the Scampton strip. He was fuel light and un-weaponed. It was not a problem.

  As he came to a halt with two hundred yards to spare, a small pickup swerved in front, and a figure in the back beckoned him to follow. He taxied away from the terminal to the flight-school complex and finally shut down.

  The five who had preceded him from Scampton surrounded him. There were cheery greetings as he climbed down. The sixth was approaching from the tower on his rented scooter. All six had arrived by a British C-130 Hercules two days earlier. With them came rockets for RATO departures, every tool needed to maintain the Bucc in her new role and the all-important Aden cannon ammunition. Among the six, all now assured of much more comfortable pensions than they had faced six months earlier, were rigger, fitter, armorer (the “plumber”), avionics expert, air comms (radio) technician and the air traffic controller who had just talked him down.

  Most missions yet to come would be in darkness, both takeoff and landing, which would be trickier, but they had another fortnight to practice. For the moment, they took him off to his quarters, where his kit was already laid out. Then he went to the main mess hall to meet his fellow Brazilian instructors and the Portuguese-speaking cadets. The new CO and his personal museum piece had arrived. The youngsters were eagerly looking forward, after four weeks of classwork and aircraft familiarization, to their first dual-controls flights in the morning.

  Compared to their basic simple little Tucano trainers, the former Navy ship killer looked formidable. But it was soon towed to the steel-doored hangar and out of sight. That afternoon, she was refueled, her rockets fitted and her canno packs armed. Night familiarization was two evenings away. A few passengers trooping off the Santiago shuttle into the civilian terminal saw nothing.

  That evening, speaking out of Washington, Cal Dexter had a short conversation with Major Mendoza, and, in answer to the obvious question, told him to be patient. He would not have long to wait.

  JULIO LUZ was trying to act normally. He had been sworn to secrecy by Roberto Cárdenas, and yet the thought of deceiving the Don, even by nondisclosure, terrified him. They both terrified him.

  He resumed his fortnightly visits to Madrid as if nothing had happened. On this particular trip, his first since his visit to New York and yet another utterly miserable hour reporting to Cárdenas, he was again invisibly followed. He was quite unaware, as was the excellent management of the Villa Real Hotel, that his habitual room had been bugged by a team of two from the FBI, directed by Cal Dexter. Every sound he made was listened to by another hotel client, who had taken a room two floors abovehim.

  The man sat patiently with “cans” over his ears and blessed the wiry ex-Tunnel Rat who had installed him in a comfortable room instead of his usual billet on stakeouts: a cramped van in a parking lot with rotten coffee and “no facilities.” When the target was out at the bank, dining or taking breakfast, he could relax with the TV or the funnies of the International Herald Tribune from the lobby newsstand. But on this particular morning, the day of the target’s departure back to the airport, he was listening hard with his cell in his left hand.

  The lawyer’s personal physician would have been completely understanding of the middle-aged patient’s abiding problem. The constant cross-Atlantic journeys played havoc with his constipation. He carried his own supply of syrup of figs at all times. This had been discovered during a raid on his room while he was at the bank.

  After ordering a pot of Earl Grey tea in bed, he retired to the marble bathroom and thence to the lavatory cubicle as always. There he patiently waited for nature to take its course, a sojourn that took up to ten minutes. During that time, with the door closed, he could not hear his own bedroom. That was when the eavesdropper made his call.

  On the morning in question, the room was silently entered. The key code was different with every visit, of course, indeed changed for every occupant of the room, but it posed no barrier to the lockpicker Cal Dexter had brought with him again. The deep pile of the carpet reduced footfalls to utter silence. Dexter crossed the room to the chest where the attaché case rested. He hoped the roller sequence had not been altered, and he was right. It was still the Bar Association membership number. He had the lid up, the job done and the lid replaced in seconds. He rolled the numbers back to where they had been before. Then he left. Behind the bathroom door, Señor Julio Luz sat and strained.

  He might have made it to the first-class departure lounge at Barajas without opening his briefcase, if only he had had his airline ticket in his breast pocket. But he had put it in his travel wallet in the interior lid of the case. So as his hotel checkout record was being printed, he opened his case to get it.

  If the shock call from the Colombian Foreign Ministry ten days earlier had been bad, this was calamitous. He felt so weak, he thought he might be having a heart attack. Disregarding the proffered printout, he retired to sit on a lobby chair, case on lap, staring haggard at the floor. A bellhop had to tell him three times that his limo was at the door. Finally, he staggered down the steps and into the car. As it drew away, he glanced behind. Was he being followed? Would he be intercepted, dragged away to a cell for the third degree?

  In fact, he could not have been safer. Invisibly tailed on arrival and during his stay, he was now being invisibly escorted to the airport. As the limo left the suburbs behind, he checked again, just in case of an optical illusion. No illusion. It was there, right on top. A cream manila envelope. It was addressed simply to “Papá.”

  THE BRITISH-CREWED MV Balmoral was fifty miles off Ascension when she met her Royal Fleet Auxiliary. As with most of the older RFAs,
she was named after one of the Knights of the Round Table, in this case Sir Gawain. She was at the tail end of a long career at her specialty, resupply at sea, known as RAS, or “razzing.” Or “coopering.”

  Out of sight of any prying eyes, the two ships made the transfer, and the SBS men came aboard.

  The Special Boat Service, based very discreetly on the coast of Dorset, England, is far smaller than the U.S. Navy SEAL unit. There are seldom more than two hundred “badged” personnel. Though ninety percent drawn from the Royal Marines, they operate like their American cousins on land, sea or in the air. They operate in mountains, deserts, jungles, rivers and the open ocean. And there were just sixteen of them.

  The CO was Major Ben Pickering, a veteran of over twenty years. He had been one of the small team who witnessed the massacre of Talib prisoners by the Northern Alliance at the fort of Qala-i-Jangi, northern Afghanistan, in the winter of 1991. He was still a teenager back then. They lay on top of the wall of the fortress looking down on the bloodbath as the Uzbeks of General Dostum slaughtered their prisoners following the Taliban revolt.

  One of two CIA special operatives also present, Johnny “Mike” Spann, had already been killed by the Taliban prisoners, and his colleague Dave Tyson had been snatched. Ben Pickering and two others went down into the hellhole, “slotted” the three Taliban holding the American and dragged Tyson out of there.

  Major Pickering had done time in Iraq, Afghanistan (again) and Sierra Leone. He also had extensive experience in interception of illegal cargoes at sea, but he had never before commanded a detachment on board a covert Q-ship, because since the Second World War it had never been done.

  When Cal Dexter, ostensibly a servant of the Pentagon, had explained the mission at the SBS base, Major Pickering had gone into a huddle with his CO and the armorers to work out what they needed.

  For at-sea interceptions, he had chosen two 8.5-meter rigid inflatables, called RIBs, and had picked the “arctic” version. It would take eight men sitting upright in pairs behind the CO and the coxswain, who would actually drive it. But he could also take on board a captured cocaine smuggler, two experts from the “rummage crews” of HM customs and two sniffer dogs. They would follow the attack RIB at a more sedate pace so as not to upset the dogs.

  The rummage men were the experts in finding secret compartments, slithering through the lowest holds, detecting cunning deceptions aimed at hiding illegal cargoes. The dogs were cocker spaniels, trained not only to detect the odor of cocaine hydrochloride through several layers of covering but to detect changes in air odor. A bilge that has been opened recently smells different from one not opened for months.

  Major Pickering stood beside the captain on the open wing of the bridge of the Balmoral and saw his RIBs swung gently onto the deck of the freighter. Thence, the Balmoral’s own derrick took over the cradles and lowered the inflatables into their hold.

  Of the SBS’s four Sabre Squadrons, the major had a unit from M Squadron, specializing in Marine Counter-Terrorism, or MCT. These were the men who swung aboard after the RIBs, and after them their “kit.”

  It was voluminous, involving assault carbines, sniper versions, handguns, diving equipment, weather- and sea-proof clothing, grapnel hooks, scaling ladders and a ton of ammunition. Plus two American communications men to liaise with Washington.

  Support personnel consisted of armorers and technicians, to maintain the RIBs in perfect working order, and two helicopter pilots from the Army Air Corps, plus their own maintenance engineers. Their concern was the small “chopper” that came aboard last. It was an American Little Bird.

  The Royal Navy might have preferred a Sea King or even a Lynx, but the problem was the size of the hold. With rotors spread, the larger helicopters would not fit through the hatch cover to emerge from its belowdecks hangar into the open air. But the Boeing Little Bird could. With a main rotor span of just under twenty-seven feet, it would pass through the main hatch, which was forty feet wide.

  The helo was the one piece that could not be winched across the gap of choppy sea separating the two vessels. Freed of its swathes of protective canvas under which it had ridden down to Ascension Island, it took off from the foredeck of the Sir Gawain, circled twice and settled on the closed foreward hatch of the Balmoral. When the two rotors, main and tail, ceased to turn, the nimble little helicopter was hefted by the on-deck derrick and lowered carefully into the enlarged hold, where she was cleated to the deck beneath her.

  When there was finally nothing left to transfer and the Balmoral’s fuel tanks were full again, the vessels parted. The RFA would go back north to Europe, the now very dangerous Q-ship would head for her first patrol station, north of the Cape Verdes, in the mid-Atlantic between Brazil and the curve of failed states running along the West African seaboard.

  The Cobra had divided the Atlantic into two, with a line running north-northeast from Tobago, easternmost of the Antilles, to Iceland. West of that line he designated, in terms of cocaine destination, “Target Zone USA.” East of the line was “Target Zone Europe.” The Balmoral would take the Atlantic. The Chesapeake, about to meet her supply ship off Puerto Rico, would take the Caribbean.

  ROBERTO CÁRDENAS stared at the letter long and hard. He had read it a dozen times. In the corner, Julio Luz was trembling.

  “It is from the rogue, Vega?” he queried nervously. He was seriously wondering whether he was going to get out of the room alive.

  “It has nothing to do with Vega.”

  At least the letter explained, without saying so, what had happened to his daughter. There would be no revenge on Vega. There was no Vega. Never had been. There was no freelance baggage handler at Barajas Airport who had picked the wrong suitcase in which to plant his cocaine. There never had been. The only reality was twenty years in an American jail for his Letizia. The message in the replica envelope to the ones in which he used to send his own was simple. It said:

  “I think we should talk about your daughter Letizia. Next Sunday, at 4 p.m., I will be in my suite under the name of Smith at the Santa Clara Hotel, Cartagena. I shall be alone and unarmed. I shall wait one hour. Please come.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE U.S. NAVY SEALS BOARDED THEIR Q-SHIP ONE hundred miles north of Puerto Rico, where the supply vessel had herself been loaded at Roosevelt Roads, the U.S. base on that island.

  The SEALs are at least four times larger than the British SBS. Their parent group, the Naval Special Welfare Command, contains twenty-five hundred personnel, of which just under a thousand are “badged” operatives and the rest support units.

  The ones who wear the coveted trident emblem of a SEAL are divided into eight teams, each with three forty-man troops. It was a platoon of half that number that had been assigned to live on the MV Chesapeake, and they came from SEAL Team 2 based on the East Coast at Little Creek, Virginia Beach.

  Their CO was Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon, and, like his British opposite number out in the Atlantic, he, too, was a veteran. As a young ensign, he had taken part in Operation Anaconda. While the SBS man was in northern Afghanistan watching the slaughter at Qala-i-Jangi, Ensign Dixon had been Al Qaeda hunting in the Tora Bora White Range when things went badly wrong.

  Dixon had been one of a troop coming into land on a flat area high in the mountains when his Chinook was raked by machine-gun fire from a hidden nest in the rocks. The huge helicopter was mortally hit and lurched wildly as the pilot fought for control. One of the helicopter crew skidded on the hydraulic fluid washing around on the floor and went over the tail ramp into the freezing darkness outside. He was saved from falling by his tether.

  But a SEAL near the falling man, Boatswain’s Mate Neil Roberts, tried to catch him and also slipped out. He had no tether and fell to the rocks a few feet below. Casey Dixon reached wildly for Roberts’s webbing, missed by inches and watched him fall.

  The pilot recovered, not enough to save the ship but enough to limp three miles and dump the Chinook out of machine-gun range. But Robe
rts was left alone in the rocks surrounded by twenty Al Qaeda killers. It is the pride of the SEALs that they have never left a mate behind, alive or dead. Transferring to another Chinook, Dixon and the rest went back for him, picking up a squad of Green Berets and a British SAS team on the way. What followed is hallowed in SEAL legend.

  Neil Roberts activated his beacon to let his mates know he was alive. He also realized the machine-gun nest was still active and ready to blast any rescue effort out of the sky. With his hand grenades, he wiped out the machine-gun crew but gave away his position. The Al Qaeda came for him. He sold himself very dear, fighting and killing down to the last bullet and dying with his combat knife in his hand.

  When the rescuers came back, they were too late for Roberts, but the Al Qaeda were still there. There was an eight-hour, close-quarter firefight among the rocks, as hundreds more jihadis poured in to join the sixty who had ambushed the Chinook. Six Americans died, two SEALs were badly injured. But in the morning light, they counted three hundred Al Qaeda corpses. The U.S. dead were all brought home, including the body of Neil Roberts.

  Casey Dixon carried the body to the evacuation chopper, and, because he had taken a flesh wound to the thigh, was also flown to the States, and attended the memorial service a week later at the base chapel at Little Creek. After that, whenever he glanced at the jagged scar on his right thigh, he remembered the wild night among the rocks of Tora Bora.

  But nine years later, he stood in the warm evening east of the Turks and Caicos and watched his men and their kit transfer from the mother ship to their new home, the former grain carrier, now the Chesapeake. High above, a patrolling EP-3 out of Roosevelt Roads told them the sea was empty. There were no watchers.

  For attack off the sea, he had brought one large, eleven-meter Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat, or RHIB. This could take his entire platoon and pound along over calm water at forty knots. He also had two of the smaller Zodiacs, known as Combat Rubber Raiding Craft, or CRRC. Each was only fifteen feet long, just as fast and would take four armed men comfortably.