The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  THE CEREMONY took place, in deference to the wishes of the donating nation, in the U.S. Embassy in Abílio Macedo Street, Praia, Santiago Island, Republic of Cape Verde. Presiding with her usual charm was Ambassador Marianne Myles. Also present was the Verdean Natural Resources Minister and the Defence Minister.

  To add gravitas, a full U.S. admiral had flown in to sign the agreement on behalf of the Pentagon. He, at least, had not the faintest idea what he was doing there, but the two gleaming white tropical uniforms of he and his ensign ADC were impressive, as they were supposed to be.

  Ambassador Myles offered refreshments, and the necessary documents were spread on the conference table. The embassy’s defense attaché was present and a civilian from the State Department whose identification was perfect and in the name of Calvin Dexter.

  The Verdean ministers signed first, then the admiral and finally the ambassador. The seals of the Republic of Cape Verde and the United States were affixed to each copy, and the aid agreement was in place. Work could proceed on its implementation.

  Duty done, flutes of sparking wine were decanted for the usual toasts, and the senior Verdean minister made in Portuguese the, for him, obligatory speech. To the weary admiral, it seemed to go on and on, and he understood not a word of it. So he just smiled his Navy smile and wondered why he had been hauled off a golf course outside Naples, Italy, and sent to a group of impoverished islands stuck three hundred miles into the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa.

  The reason, his ADC had sought to explain to him on the flight down, was that the U.S., out of its habitual generosity to the Third World, was going to help the Republic of Cape Verde. The islands have absolutely no natural resources save one: the seas around them are teeming with fish. The republic has a one-cutter Navy but no Air Force worth the name.

  With the worldwide growth of fishing piracy and the East’s insatiable appetite for fresh fish, the Verdean seas, well inside the two-hundred-mile limit that was rightfully hers, were being gutted by poachers.

  The U.S. was going to take over the airport on the remote island of Fogo, whose runway had just been extended by a donation from the European Union. There the U.S. Navy was going to build a pilot training facility, as a donation.

  When it was done, a team of Brazilian (because of the Portuguese common language) Air Force instructors would move in with a dozen Tucano aircraft and create a Fisheries Air Guard, who were by training suitably selected, up-to-standard Verdean cadet pilots. With long-range-version Tucanos, they could then patrol the oceans, spot the malefactors and guide the Coast Guard cutter on to them.

  So far, so marvelous, agreed the admiral, though it defeated him why he’d had to be dragged away from his golf just when he was getting on top of his putting problem.

  Leaving the embassy in a flurry of handshakes, the admiral offered the man from State a lift back to the airport in the embassy limo.

  “Can I offer you a ride back to Naples, Mr. Dexter?” he asked.

  “Very kind, Admiral, but I am shipping back to Lisbon, London and Washington.”

  They parted at Santiago Airport. The admiral’s Navy jet took off for Italy. Cal Dexter waited for the TAP schedule for Lisbon.

  A month later, the first huge fleet auxiliary brought the U.S. Navy engineers to the conical extinct volcano that is ninety percent of the island of Fogo, so called because that is the Portuguese for “fire.” The auxiliary moored offshore where she would stay as a floating base for the engineers, a small piece of the U.S. with all the comforts of home.

  The Navy Seabees pride themselves that they can build anything anywhere, but it is unwise to part them from their marbled Kansas steaks, potato fries and gallon jars of ketchup. Everything works better on the right fuel.

  It would take them six months, but the existing airport could handle C-130 Hercules transports, so resupply and furlough was not a problem. That apart, smaller supply ships would bring girders, beams, cement and anything needed for the buildings, plus food, juices, sodas and even water.

  The few Creole who lived on Fogo gathered, much impressed, to watch the ant army swarm ashore and take over their small airport. Once a day, the shuttle from Santiago came and went when the runway was clear of building kit.

  When it was finished, the flight training facility would have, quite separate from the small cluster of civil-passenger sheds, an expanse of prefabricated dormitories for the cadets, cottages for the instructors, repair and maintenance workshops, aviation gas tanks for the turboprop Tucanos and a communications shack.

  If anyone among the engineers noticed something odd, no mention was made of it. Also constructed to the approval of a civilian from the Pentagon named Dexter, who came and went by civil airliner, were a few other items. Gouged out of the rock face of the volcano was a cavernous extra hangar with steel doors. Plus a large reserve tank for JP-5 fuel, which Tucanos do not use, and an armory.

  “Anyone would think,” murmured Chief Petty Officer O’Connor after testing the steel doors of the secret hangar in the rock, “that someone was going to war.”

  CHAPTER 4

  IN THE PLAZA DE BOLÍVAR, NAMED AFTER THE GREAT Liberator, stand some of the oldest buildings not only in Bogotá but in all South America. It is the center of Old Town.

  The conquistadors were here, bringing with them, in their raging lust for God and gold, the first Catholic missionaries. Some of these, Jesuits all, founded in 1604 in one corner the school of San Bartolomé, and not far away the Church of St. Ignatius, in honor of their founder, Loyola. In another corner stood the original national Provincialate of the Society of Jesus.

  It had been some years since the Provincialate officially moved to a modern building in the newer part of the city. But in the blazing heat, despite the favors of new air-conditioning technology, the Father Provincial, Carlos Ruiz, still preferred the cool stones and paving flags of the old buildings.

  It was here, on a humid December morning that year, that he had chosen to meet the American visitor. As he sat at his oak desk, brought many years ago from Spain and almost black with age, Fr. Carlos toyed again with the letter of introduction requesting this meeting. It came from his Brother in Christ, the dean of Boston College; it was impossible to refuse, but curiosity is not a sin. What could the man want?

  Paul Devereaux was shown in by a young novice. The provincial rose and crossed the room to greet him. The visitor was close to his own age, the biblical three score and ten: lean, fastidious in silk shirt, club tie and cream tropical suit. No jeans, or hair at the throat. Fr. Ruiz thought he had never met a Yankee spy before, but the Boston letter had been very frank.

  “Father, I hesitate to ask at the outset but I must. May we regard everything said in this room as coming under the seal of the confessional?”

  Fr. Ruiz inclined his head and gestured his guest to a Castilian chair, seated and backed in rawhide. He resumed his place behind his desk.

  “How can I help you, my son?”

  “I have been asked by my President, no less, to try to destroy the cocaine industry that is causing grievous damage to my country.”

  There was no further need to explain why he was in Colombia. The word “cocaine” explained it all.

  “That has been tried many times before,” said Fr. Ruiz. “Many times. But the appetite in your country is enormous. If there were not such a grievous appetite for the white powder, there would be no production.”

  “True,” admitted the American, “a demand will always produce a supply. But the reverse is also true. A supply will always create a demand. Eventually. If the supply dies, the appetite will wither away.”

  “It did not work with Prohibition.”

  Devereaux was accustomed to the feint. Prohibition had been a disaster. It had simply created a huge underworld, which, after repeal, had moved into every other possible criminal activity. Over the years, the cost to the U.S. could be measured in trillions.

  “We believe the comparison fails, Father. There are a th
ousand sources of a glass of wine or a dram of whisky.”

  He meant, But cocaine comes only from here. There was no need to say it.

  “My son, we in the Society of Jesus try to be a force for good. But we have found by terrible experience that involvement in politics or matters of state is usually disastrous.”

  Devereaux had spent his life in the trade of espionage. He had long ago come to the view that the greatest intelligence-gathering agency in the world was the Roman Catholic Church. Through its omnipresence, it saw everything; through the confessional, it heard everything. And the idea that over a millennium and a half it had never supported or opposed emperors and princes was simply amusing.

  “But where you see evil, you seek to fight it,” he said.

  The provincial was far too wily to fall for that one.

  “What do you seek of the Society, my son?”

  “In Colombia, you are everywhere, Father. Your pastoral work takes your young priests into every corner of every town and city . . .”

  “And you wish them to become informers? For you? Far away in Washington. They, too, practice the seal of the confessional. What is told to them in that small place can never be revealed.”

  “And if a ship is sailing with a cargo of poison to destroy many young lives and leave a trail of misery in its wake, that knowledge, too, is sacred?”

  “We both know the confessional is sacrosanct.”

  “But a ship cannot confess, Father. I give you my word no seaman will ever die. Interception and confiscation is absolutely the limit I have in mind.”

  He knew that he, too, would now have to confess to the sin of lying. But to another priest faraway. Not here. Not now.

  “What you ask could be extremely risky; the men behind this trade, foul as it is, are utterly vicious and very violent.”

  For an answer, the American produced an item from his pocket. It was a small and very compact cell phone.

  “Father, we were both raised long before these were invented. Now all the young have them, and most who are no longer young. To send a short message, there is no need to speak . . .”

  “I know about texting, my son.”

  “Then you will know about encryption. These are encrypted far beyond the powers of the cartel ever to intercept. All I ask is the name of the ship with the poison onboard, heading for my homeland to destroy its young people. For profit. For money.”

  The Father Provincial permitted himself a thin smile.

  “You are a good advocate, my son.”

  The Cobra had one last card to play.

  “In the city of Cartagena is a statue to Saint Peter Claver of the Society of Jesus.”

  “Of course. We revere him.”

  “Hundreds of years ago, he fought against the evil of slavery. And the slave traders martyred him. Father, I beseech you. This trade in drugs is as evil as that in slaves. Both merchandise human misery. That which enslaves need not always be a man; it can be a narcotic. The slavers took the bodies of young people and abused them. Narcotics take the soul.”

  The Father Provincial stared for several minutes out of the window across the square of Simon Bolívar, a man who set people free.

  “I wish to pray, my son. Can you return in two hours?”

  Devereaux took a light lunch under the awning of a café in a street running off the square. When he returned, the leader of all Colombia’s Jesuits had made his decision.

  “I cannot order what you ask. But I can explain to my parish priests what you ask. So long as the seal of confession is never broken, they may decide for themselves. You may distribute your little machines.”

  OF ALL his colleagues in the cartel, the one Alfredo Suárez had to work with most closely was José-María Largo, in charge of merchandising. It was a question of keeping track of every cargo, down to the last kilogram. Suárez could dispatch them, consignment by consignment, but it was vital to know how much arrived at the point of handover to the purchasing mafia and how much was intercepted by the forces of law and order.

  Fortunately, every major intercept was immediately blazoned across the media by the FLO. They wanted the credit, kudos from their governments, always angling for larger budgets. Largo’s rules were simple and ironclad. Big customers were allowed to pay fifty percent of the price of the cargo (and that was the cartel’s price) on placement of an order. The balance would be owed after handover, which marked change of ownership. Smaller players had to provide one hundred percent as a single nonnegotiable deposit.

  If the national gangs and mafias could charge astronomical fees at street level, that was their business. If they were careless or penetrated by police informants and lost their purchase, that, too, was their business. But confiscation of the cargo after delivery did not absolve them of the need to settle up.

  It was when a foreign gang still owed the fifty percent balance, had lost their purchase to the police and refused to pay up, that enforcement was necessary. The Don was adamant about the value of terrible examples being set. And the cartel was truly paranoid about two things: theft of assets and informant betrayal. Neither was forgivable or forgettable, no matter what the cost of retribution. It had to be inflicted. That was the law of the Don . . . and it worked.

  Only by conferring with his colleague Largo could Suárez know to the last kilo how much of what he shipped was intercepted before the point of handover.

  Only this would show him what shipment methods had the highest chances of getting through and which the least.

  Toward the end of 2010, he calculated that interception was running much as ever; between ten and fifteen percent. Given the telephone-number profits, this was quite acceptable. But he always lusted to bring the interception level down to single figures. If cocaine was intercepted while still in the possession of the cartel, the loss was wholly theirs. The Don did not like that.

  Suárez’s predecessor, now dismembered and decomposing under a new apartment block, had thrown his entire judgment, after the turn of the century a decade earlier, behind submarines. This ingenious idea involved the construction up hidden rivers of submersible hulls that, powered by a diesel engine, could take a crew of four, a cargo of up to ten tons, along with food and fuel, and then sink to periscope depth.

  Even the best of them never went deep. They did not need to. All that showed above the water was a Perspex blister dome, with the captain’s head peering out so that he could steer, and a tube to suck in fresh air for the engine and crew.

  The idea was for these invisible submersibles to creep slowly but safely up the Pacific Coast from Colombia to northern Mexico and deliver huge quantities to the Mexican mafias, leaving them to smuggle it the rest of the way across the border into the USA. And they had worked . . . for a while. Then came the disaster.

  The guiding genius behind their design and construction was Enrique Portocarrero, who masqueraded as a harmless shrimp fisherman out of Buenaventura down in the south on the Pacific Coast. Then Colonel Dos Santos had got him.

  Whether he squealed under “pressure” or whether a search of his premises revealed traces, the main base of the submarine construction yards was discovered, and the Navy moved in. By the time Captain German Borrero had finished, sixty hulls in various stages of construction were smoking ruins. The loss to the cartel had been enormous.

  The second mistake of Suárez’s predecessor had been to send extremely high percentages of cargo to the U.S. and Europe by single mules, carrying one or two kilos each. It meant using thousands to carry just a couple of tons.

  As Islamist fundamentalism caused the tightening of security in the Western world, more and more passenger suitcases were X-rayed and their illegal contents discovered. This led to a switch to belly cargoes. Idiots prepared to take the risk would numb their gullets with novocaine and then swallow up to a hundred pellets containing about ten grams each.

  Some sustained an internal burst and ended their lives frothing on the airport concourse floor. Others were reported by shar
p-eyed stewardesses as being unable to take food or drink on a long-haul flight. They were taken aside, given syrup of figs and given a lavatory with a filter screen at the bottom. American and European jails were filled to bursting with them. Still, over eighty percent got through by sheer volume of numbers and the West’s obsession with civil rights. Then the predecessor to Suárez had his second stroke of bad luck.

  It was pioneered in Manchester, England, and it worked. It was a new “virtual strip search” X-ray machine that would not only reveal the passenger as if naked but also reveal implants, insertions into the anus and the contents of the entrails. The machine was so silent that it could be installed below the guichet occupied by the passport control officer so that the presenter of the passport could be observed from thorax to calves by another officer in another room. As more and more Western airports and sea terminals installed them, the rate of intercept of the mules shot upward.

  Finally, the Don had had enough. He ordered a change of chief executive of that division—permanently. Suárez had taken over.

  He was a dedicated big-cargo man, and his figures showed clearly which were the best routes. For the U.S. it was by surface craft or aircraft up through the Caribbean to deliver to northern Mexico or the southern littoral of the U.S., with the cargoes carried mainly by merchant marine freighters for most of the way, and a final, at-sea transfer to private craft of the sort that teem along both coasts, from fishermen to speedboats to private yachts to leisure boats.

  For Europe, he hugely favored the new routes; not direct from the Caribbean to Western and Northern Europe, where interceptions topped twenty percent, but due east to the ring of failed states that comprised the West African coast. With the cargoes changing hands there and the cartel paid off, it was up to the buyers to break the consignments down and filter them north over the deserts to the Mediterranean shore and then over to Southern Europe. And the destination he favored most was the small, ex-Portuguese, civil-war-ravaged failed state and narco-hellhole of Guinea-Bissau.