The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  That this ruthless hidalgo, this postimperial, Spanish-descended aristocrat, had remained untouchable for so long derived from many factors.

  One was the absolute refusal of anyone to testify against him. Another was the convenient disappearance of anyone who opposed him. But even that would not have been enough without enormous political clout. He had influence in high places, and a lot of it.

  He was a relentless donor to good causes, all publicized. He endowed schools, hospitals, bursaries, scholarships; and always for the poor of the barrios.

  He donated, but much more quietly, not to one political party but to all of them, including that of President Álvaro Uribe, who had sworn to crush the cocaine industry. In each case, he allowed these gifts to become known to those who mattered. He even paid for the raising of the orphans of murdered police and customs officers, even though their colleagues suspected who had ordered the killing.

  And above all he ingratiated himself with the Catholic Church. Not a monastery or priest’s house fell on hard times but he would not donate toward the restoration. This he made highly visible, as also his regular worship right among the peasant and estate workers in the parish church adjoining his country mansion, meaning his official rural residence, not the many and varied farms owned in false names where he met other members of the Brotherhood he had created to manufacture and market up to eight hundred tons of cocaine each year.

  “He is,” mused Devereaux admiringly, “a maestro.” He hoped the Don had not also read the Ping-fa, the Art of War.

  The Cobra knew that the litany of missing cargoes, arrested agents and ruined buyer networks would not be written off as coincidence for much longer. There are just so many coincidences that a clever man will accept, and the higher the level of paranoia, the fewer the number. The first cover, of nonexistence, would soon be disbelieved, and the Don would realize he had a new and much more dangerous enemy who did not play by the rules.

  After that would come cover number two: invisibility. Sun-tzu had declared that a man cannot defeat an invisible enemy. The wise old Chinese man had lived long before the ultra-high technology of the Cobra’s world. But there were new weapons that could keep the Cobra invisible long after the Don had realized that there was a new enemy out there.

  A primary factor in the exposure of his existence was going to be the Rat List. To blow away 117 corrupt officials in a series of strikes across two continents in a single campaign would be too much. He would feed the Rats into the FLO mincer very slowly until the peso dropped somewhere in Colombia. And, anyway, sooner or later, there would be a leak.

  But that week in August, he sent Cal Dexter to break the sad news to three governmental authorities under conditions, he hoped, of massive discretion.

  In a hard week of traveling and conferring, Cal Dexter apprised the USA there was a bad one in the docks of San Francisco; the Italians learned they had a corrupt senior customs official in Ostia; and the Spanish should start to tail a dock master at Santander.

  In each case, he begged for the arrangement of an accidental stumbling-upon of a cocaine consignment that could lead to the necessary arrest. He received his pledges.

  The Cobra did not give a fig about the American and European street gangs. These scum were not his problem. But every time one of the cartel’s little helpers left the stage, the interception rate would rise exponentially. And before handover at the dock gates, the loss would be taken by the cartel. And the orders would have to be replaced. And refilled. And that would not be possible.

  ÁLVARO FUENTES was certainly not going to cross the Atlantic to Africa in a smelly fishing boat like the Belleza del Mar. As first deputy to Alfredo Suárez, he went on a 6,000-ton general freighter, the Arco Soledad.

  She was big enough to have a master’s cabin, not large but private, and this was taken over by Fuentes. The unhappy captain had to bunk with the first mate, but he knew his place and made no demur.

  As demanded by the Don, the Arco Soledad had been redirected from Monrovia, Liberia, to Guinea-Bissau, where the problem seemed to lie. But she still carried a full five tons of pure cocaine.

  She was one of those merchant ships on which Juan Cortez had worked his skills. Below the waterline, she carried two stabilizers welded to her hull. But they had a dual purpose. Apart from stabilizing the vessel to make her more sea-friendly and give her crew a gentler ride in wild water, they were hollow, and each contained two and half tons of carefully packed bales.

  The main problem with underwater panniers was that they could be loaded and emptied only if the boat was brought out of the water. This meant either the great complexity of a dry dock, with all its chances of witnesses, or beaching until the tide went out, which meant hours of waiting.

  Cortez had fitted virtually invisible snap-release catches with which a scuba diver could quickly remove large panels in each stabilizer. With these gone, the bales, thoroughly waterproofed and roped together, could be drawn out until they floated to the surface for collection by the offshore “greeter” vessel.

  And finally the Arco Soledad had a perfectly legitimate cargo of coffee in her holds and paperwork to prove it was paid for and expected by a trading company in Bissau city. That was where the good news ran out.

  The bad news was that the Arco Soledad had long been spotted with Juan Cortez’s description and photographed from above. As she crossed the 35th longitude, the cruising Global Hawk Sam picked up her image, made the comparison, clinched the identification and informed AFB Creech, Nevada.

  Nevada told Washington, and the shabby warehouse in Anacostia told the MV Balmoral, which moved to intercept. Before Major Pickering and his divers even got onto the water, they would know exactly what they were looking for, where it was and how to operate the hidden catches.

  For the first three days at sea, Álvaro Fuentes abided strictly by his instructions. Every three hours, night and day, he sent dutiful e-mails to his waiting “wife” in Barranquilla. They were so banal and so common at sea, that normally the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, would not have bothered with them. But, forewarned, each one was plucked out of cyberspace and patched through to Anacostia.

  When Sam, circling at 40,000 feet, could see the Arco Soledad and the Balmoral forty miles apart, she put on her jammers over the freighter, and Fuentes went into a blank zone. When he saw the helicopter fluttering above the horizon and then turning toward him, he made an emergency, out-of-sequence report. It went nowhere.

  There was no point in the Arco Soledad attempting to resist the black-clad commandos when they came over the rail. The captain, with a fine show of indignation, brandished his ship’s papers, cargo manifest and copies of the coffee order from Bissau. The men in black took no notice.

  Still yelling “Piracy,” the captain, crew and Álvaro Fuentes were shackled, hooded and herded to the stern. As soon as they could see nothing, the jamming ceased, and Major Pickering summoned the Balmoral. While she steamed toward the stationary freighter, the two divers went to work. It took just under an hour. The spaniels were not needed; they stayed on the mother ship.

  Before the Balmoral was alongside, there were two skeins of roped bales floating in the water. They were so heavy, it took the derrick of the Arco Soledad to bring them on board. From the deck of the tramp, the Balmoral hoisted them into her guardianship.

  Fuentes, the captain and five crew had gone very quiet. Even under their masks they could hear the derrick grinding and heavy thumps as a long series of objects sloshing water came aboard. They knew what they must be. Complaints of piracy ended.

  The Colombians followed their cargo onto the Balmoral. They realized they were on a much bigger ship but could never name or describe it. From the deck, they were led to the forward brig and, with hoods removed, moved into quarters formerly occupied by the crew of the Belleza del Mar.

  The SBS men came last, the divers streaming water. Ordinarily the sub-aqua men meeting the Arco Soledad would have replaced the removed panels underwater, but,
bearing in mind where they were all going, they were allowed to take on water.

  The explosives man was last off. When there was half a mile between the ships, he pressed his detonator.

  “Smell the coffee,” he joked as the Arco Soledad shuddered, flooded and foundered. And indeed there really was a slight odor of roasted coffee on the sea breeze as the PETN for one nanosecond reached 5,000 degrees centigrade. Then she was gone.

  One RIB, still in the water, returned to the spot and gathered in the few floating pieces of detritus that a sharp observer might have spotted. These were netted, weighted and sent to the bottom. The ocean, blue and calm in early September, was as she had always been—empty.

  Far away across the Atlantic, Alfredo Suárez could not believe the news reaching him or work out a way of telling Don Diego and staying alive. His bright young assistant had ceased transmitting twelve hours earlier. This was disobedience, i.e., madness, or it was disaster.

  He had a message from his clients, the Cubans, who controlled most of the cocaine trade in South Florida, that the Orion Lady had not docked in Fort Lauderdale. She was also expected by the harbormaster, who was holding a precious-as-rubies berth for her. Discreet inquiries revealed he had also tried to raise her and failed. She was three days overdue and not answering.

  There had been some successful deliveries of cocaine, but the sequence of failed arrivals by sea and air and a big customs coup in Hamburg had reduced his “safe arrival” percentage set against tonnage dispatched to fifty. He had promised the Don a minimum safe arrival percentage of seventy-five. For the first time, he began to fear that his policy of large cargoes but fewer of them, the opposite of the scattergun approach of his departed predecessor, might not be working. Though not a praying man, he prayed there was not worse to come, proof positive that prayer does not always work. There was much worse to come.

  Far away in the genteel historic township of Alexandria, by the banks of the Potomac, the man who intended to create that “worse” was considering his campaign to date.

  He had created three lines of thrust. One was to use the knowledge of all the merchantmen worked on by Juan Cortez to empower the regular forces of law and order—navies, customs, coast guards—to intercept the giants at sea, “accidentally” discover the secret hiding places and thus both confiscate the cocaine and impound the vessel.

  This was because most of the Lloyd’s-listed carriers were too big to sink unnoticed without causing a furor in the shipping world, leading to powerful interventions at governmental level. Insurers and owners would dispense with corrupt crews, and pay fines, while declaring complete innocence at board level, but losing the entire ship was a loss too far.

  Intercepting at sea at a very official level also frustrated the common tactic of taking the cocaine on board at sea from one fishing vessel and off-loading it before docking in another offshore transfer. This could not last forever, or even for very long. Even though Juan Cortez was seemingly an incinerated corpse in a grave in Cartagena, it must soon become plain that someone knew far too much about all the invisible hiding holes he had created. Any subtlety in seeming to find these places by accident every time would one day run out.

  In any case, these triumphs by the official authorities were never hidden. They quickly became public and leaked back to the cartel.

  His second thrust was a series of irregular and apparently patternless accidents in various harbors and airports around two continents in which a terrible mischance revealed an incoming cocaine shipment and even led to the arrest of the bribed official who acted as “enabler.” These also could not remain accidents forever.

  As a lifelong counter-spy, he doffed his hat, a rare phenomenon, to Cal Dexter for acquiring the Rat List. He never asked who the mole inside the cartel could be, though clearly the saga of the Colombian girl framed in New York was linked.

  But he hoped that mole could dig a very deep hole indeed, because he could not keep the cocaine enablers unarrested for long. As the number of crippled operations in U.S. and European ports increased, it would become clear someone had leaked names and functions.

  The good news, for one who knew a bit about interrogations and who had broken Aldrich Ames, was that these officials, though greedy and venal, were not “hard men” accustomed to the laws of the criminal underworld. The German exposed so far was confessing like a mountain spring. So would most of the others. These tearful spillages would trigger a chain reaction of arrests and close-downs. And future interceptions would, without official help, sky-rocket. That was part of his planning.

  But his ace was the third thrust on which he had spent so much time and trouble and so much of his budget over the permitted preparation period.

  He called it the “bewilderment factor,” and he had used it for years in that espionage world that James Jesus Angleton, his predecessor at the CIA, once referred to as “smoke and mirrors.” It was the explanationless disappearance, one after the other, of cargo after cargo.

  Meanwhile, he would quietly release the names and details of four more of the Rats. In the middle week of September, Cal Dexter traveled to Athens, Lisbon, Paris and Amsterdam. In each case, his revelations caused shock and horror, but in each case he received assurances that each arrest would be preceded by a carefully arranged accident involving an incoming cargo of cocaine. He described the Hamburg sting and proposed it as a role model.

  What he was able to tell the Europeans was that there was a corrupt customs officer in Piraeus, the port of Athens; the Portuguese had a bribe taker in the quite small but busy Algarve Harbor of Faro; France was sheltering a rather large rodent in Marseilles; and the Dutch had a problem in the largest cargo destination in Europe, Euro port Rotterdam.

  FRANCISCO PONS was retiring and he was damnably glad of it. He had made his peace with his plump and homely wife, Victoria, and even found a buyer for his Beech King Air. He had explained matters to the man for whom he flew the Atlantic, a certain Señor Suárez, who had accepted his explanation of age and stiffness, and it had been agreed that this September would be his last trip for the cartel. It was not so bad, he reasoned with Señor Suárez; his eager young copilot was aching to become a full captain and earn a captain’s fee. As for a newer and better plane, that was now necessary anyway. So he lined up on the runway at Fortaleza and took off. Far above, the tiny moving dot was registered by the wide-aspect radar scanner of Global Hawk Sam and logged in the database.

  The memory bank did the rest. It identified the moving dot as a King Air, that it was coming out of Rancho Boa Vista, that a Beech King Air cannot cross the Atlantic without large extra in-built fuel tanks and that it was heading northeast toward the 35th longitude. Beyond that, there was only Africa. Someone in Nevada instructed Major João Mendoza and his ground crew to prepare to fly.

  The oncoming Beech was two hours into its flight, almost on the last of its main wing tanks, and the copilot had the controls. Far below and somewhere ahead, the Buccaneer felt the hammer blow of the RATO rockets, plunged down the runway and roared away over the dark sea. It was a moonless night.

  Sixty minutes later, the Brazilian was at his intercept station, circling at a lazy three hundred knots. Somewhere to his southwest, invisible in the blackness, the King Air plodded along, now running on reserve tanks, with the two pumpers working away behind the flight deck.

  “Climb to twelve thousand, continue in rate one turn,” said the warm voice from Nevada. Like the Lorelei, it was a pretty voice to lure men to die. The reason for the instruction was that Sam had reported the King Air had climbed to ride over a cloud bank.

  Even without a moon, the stars over Africa are fiercely bright, and a cloudscape is like a white bedsheet, reflecting light, showing up shadows against the pale surface. The Buccaneer was vectored to a position five miles behind the King Air and a thousand feet above. Mendoza scanned the pale plateau ahead of him. It was not entirely flat; there were knobs of altocumulus jutting out of it. He eased back his speed for fear of ove
rtaking too quickly.

  Then he saw it. Just a shadow between two hills of cumulus disfiguring the line of the stratus. Then it was gone, then back again.

  “I have it,” he said. “No mistake?”

  “Negative,” said the voice in his ears. “There is nothing else in the sky.”

  “Roger that. Contact.”

  “Contact acknowledged. Stop, clear, engage.”

  He eased on some throttle, the distance closed. Safety catch off. Target swimming into the gunsight, range closing. Four hundred meters.

  The two streams of cannon shells streamed out and coalesced at the tail of the Beech. The tail fragmented, but the shells went on into the fuselage, racing up the line through the extra fuel tanks and into the flight deck. Both pumpers died in a tenth of a second, blown apart; the two pilots would have followed, but the exploding fuel did it faster. As with the Transall, the Beech imploded, fragmented and fell blazing through the cloud sheet.

  “Target down,” said Mendoza. Another ton of cocaine was not going to reach Europe.

  “Turn for home,” said the voice. “Your course is . . .”

  ALFREDO SUÁREZ had no choice about telling the Don the litany of bad news because he was sent for. The master of the cartel had not survived so long in one of the most vicious milieus on earth without a sixth sense for danger.

  Item by item, he forced the director of dispatch to tell him all. The two ships and now two airplanes lost before reaching Guinea-Bissau; the two go-fasts in the Caribbean that never made their rendezvous and had not been seen since, including eight crewmen; the playboy who disappeared with a ton of puro destined for the valuable Cuban clients in South Florida. And the disaster in Hamburg.

  He had expected Don Diego to explode in rage. The reverse happened. The Don had been taught as a boy that gentility required that even if one is irritable over small things, big disasters require a gentlemanly calm. He bade Suárez remain at the table. He lit one of his slim black cheroots and went for a stroll in his garden.