THIS WAS exactly the conclusion Cal Dexter was coming to as he sat in Vienna with the Canadian narco-hunter Walter Kemp of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The figures on UNODC tallied very closely with those of Tim Manhire down in Lisbon.
Starting only a few years earlier as the recipient of twenty percent of Colombian cocaine heading for Europe, West Africa was now taking over fifty. What neither man sharing a café table in the Prater Park sun could know was that Alfredo Suárez had increased that percentage to seventy.
There were seven coastal republics in West Africa that qualified for the police description “of interest”: Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry (ex-French), Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana.
After being flown or sailed across the Atlantic to West Africa, the cocaine filtered north by a hundred different routes and ruses. Some came by fishing boat, up the coast to Morocco, and then followed the old cannabis run. Other cargoes were flown across the Sahara to the North African coast and thence by small craft to the Spanish mafia across the Pillars of Hercules or to the Calabrian Ndrangheta waiting at the port of Gioia.
Some shipments went by exhausting land train right across the Sahara from south to north. Of extreme interest was the Libyan airline Afriqiyah, which links twelve major West African cities to Tripoli, just across the water from Europe.
“When it comes to freighting northward to Europe,” said Kemp, “they are all in it together. But when it comes to receiving from across the Atlantic, Guinea-Bissau is premier league.”
“Perhaps I should go and have a look,” mused Dexter.
“If you do go,” said the Canadian, “be careful. Have a good cover story. And it might be wise to take some muscle. Of course, the best camouflage is to be black. Can you provide that?”
“No, not this side of the pond.”
Kemp scribbled a name and number on a paper napkin.
“Try him in London. A friend of mine. He’s with SOCA. And good luck. You’ll need it.”
Cal Dexter had not heard of the British Serious and Organised Crime Agency, but he was about to. He was back at the Montcalm Hotel by sundown.
BECAUSE OF the former colonial connection, the Portuguese airline TAP is the only convenient carrier. Duly visaed, vaccinated and injected against everything the School of Tropical Medicine could think of and attested to by letter from BirdLife International as a foremost ornithologist specializing in the study of wading birds that winter in West Africa, “Dr.” Calvin Dexter was a week later flying out of Lisbon on the TAP night flight to Guinea-Bissau.
Sitting behind him were two corporals of the British Parachute Regiment. SOCA, he had learned, grouped just about every agency concerned with big crime and antiterrorism under one banner. Within the network of contacts available to a friend of Walter Kemp’s was a senior soldier who had spent most of his career with the regiment’s Third Battalion, Three Para. It was he who had found Jerry and Bill based at the Colchester HQ. They had volunteered.
They were not Jerry and Bill anymore. They were Kwamé and Kofi. Their passports said they were firmly Ghanaian, and further paperwork swore they worked with BirdLife International in Accra. In fact, they were as British as Windsor Castle, but both had parents who hailed from Grenada. So long as no one interrogated them in fluent ga or ewe or Ashanti, they would do fine. They also spoke no Creole or Portuguese, but they were definitely African to look at.
It was after midnight and pitch-black when the TAP airliner touched down at Bissau Airport. Most passengers were going on to São Tomé and only a tiny trickle veered away from the transit lounge for passport control. Dexter led the way.
The passport officer scanned every page in the new Canadian passport, noted the Guinea visa, palmed the twenty-euro note and nodded him through. He gestured at his two companions.
“Avec moi,” he said, adding, “Con migo.”
French is not Portuguese, and neither is Spanish, but the meaning was clear. And he beamed good humor all around. Beaming usually works. A senior officer stepped forward.
“Qu’est-que vous faites en Guinée?” he asked.
Dexter feigned delight. He delved in his shoulder bag for a fistful of brochures featuring herons, spoonbills and others of the seven hundred thousand waterbirds that overwinter in Guinea-Bissau’s vast swamps and wetlands. The officer’s eyes glazed over with boredom. He waved them all through.
Outside there were no taxis. But there was a truck and a driver, and a fifty-euro note goes a long way down there.
“Hotel Malaika?” said Dexter hopefully. The driver nodded.
As they approached the city, Dexter noticed it was almost entirely black. Only a few points of light showed. Army curfew? No; there is no electricity. Only buildings with private generators have light after dark or power at any time. Happily, the Malaika Hotel was one. The three checked in and retired for what was left of the night. Just before dawn, someone shot the President.
IT WAS Project Cobra’s computer expert Jeremy Bishop who first spotted the name. Just as those obsessed by general-knowledge quizzes will prowl through dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases vacuuming up facts they will never be asked, Bishop, who had no social life, spent his spare time prowling through cyberspace. Not surfing the Internet—that was far too simple. He had the habit of hacking effortlessly and invisibly into other people’s databases to see what was there.
On a late Saturday evening when most of Washington was out enjoying the start of the festive season, he sat in front of a console and penetrated the arrivals and departures lists logged at Bogotá Airport. There was a name that cropped up repeatedly. Whoever he was, he flew from Bogotá to Madrid regularly, every fortnight.
His returns were less than three days later, giving him no more than fifty hours in the Spanish capital. Not enough for a vacation, too much for a stopover toward a further destination.
Bishop ran his name against the compendium of those known to be involved in any possible aspect of cocaine as supplied by the Colombian police to the DEA and copied to Cobra HQ. It was not there.
He broke into the database of Iberia Airlines, which the man used every time he traveled. The name came up under “frequent flier,” with special privileges like priority status on overbooked flights. He always traveled first class and his return flight reservations were prebooked automatically unless canceled by him.
Bishop used his overriding clearance to contact the DEA people in Bogotá and even the British SOCA team in the same city. Neither knew him, but the DEA helpfully added that, from local reference books, he was a lawyer with an upscale practice that never did criminal-court work. Having run into the wall, but still curious, Bishop told Devereaux.
The Cobra absorbed the information, but did not think it merited the expenditure of much further effort. As a long shot, it was a mite too long. Still, a simple inquiry in Madrid would do no harm. Acting via the DEA team in Spain, Devereaux placed a request that on the man’s next visit he be discreetly tailed. He, the Cobra, would appreciate knowing where he stayed, where he went, what he did and whom he met. With much rolling of eyeballs, the Americans in Madrid agreed to call in a favor from their Spanish colleagues.
The anti-drug unit in Madrid is the Unidad de Droga y Crimen Organizado, or UDYCO. The request was dumped on the desk of Inspector Francisco “Paco” Ortega.
Like all police, Ortega reckoned he was overworked, under-equipped and definitely underpaid. Still, if the Yanquis wanted a Colombian tailed, he could hardly refuse. If the UK was the biggest single user of cocaine in Europe, Spain was the biggest arrival point and was equipped with a huge and vicious underworld. With their enormous resources, the Americans sometimes intercepted a piece of pure gold and shared it with UDYCO. A note was made that when, in ten days, the Colombian arrived again, he would be quietly tailed.
Neither Bishop, Devereaux nor Ortega could know that Julio Luz was the single member of the Hermandad who had never come to the attention of the Colombian police. Colone
l Dos Santos knew exactly who all the others were, but not the lawyer and money launderer.
BY MIDDAY, after the arrival of Cal Dexter and his team in Bissau city, the affair of the dead President had been cleared up and the panic subsided. It was not another coup d’état after all.
The shooter had been the lover of the old tyrant’s much younger wife. By midmorning both had disappeared into the bush far upcountry, never to be seen again. Tribal solidarity would protect them as if they had never existed.
The President had been of the Papel tribe; his trophy wife was Balanta and so was her boyfriend. The Army was also mainly Balanta and had no intention of hunting down one of its own. The President had not been very popular. Another would eventually be chosen. It was the Army commander and chief of staff who held the real power.
Dexter rented a white SUV from Mavegro Trading, whose helpful Dutch proprietor put him in touch with a man with a small cabin cruiser to rent. It came with outboard engine and trailer. It would certainly be capable of cruising the creeks and inlets of the offshore Bijagós Archipelago looking for wading birds.
Finally, Dexter managed to rent a detached bungalow opposite the sports stadium recently erected by China, which was quietly recolonizing great tracts of Africa. He and his two helpers moved out of the Malaika and into their cottage.
On the drive from one to the other, they were caught up by a Jeep Wrangler which swerved across their path at an intersection. In just two days, Dexter had learned there were no traffic police and the lights rarely functioned.
As the SUV and the Jeep swerved within inches of each other, the front passenger in the Wrangler stared at Dexter from a few inches away but behind wraparound black shades. Like the driver, he was not African nor European. Swarthy, black-haired, with a pigtail and chains of gold “bling” around the neck. Colombian.
The Jeep had a chrome frame above the cab on which was mounted a rack of four powerful searchlights. Dexter knew the explanation. Many cocaine carriers came in by sea, never reaching the shabby little port of Bissau itself but transferring the bales out in the creeks among the mangrove islands.
Other carriers came by air, either to be dropped into the sea close to a waiting fishing boat or flown on into the hinterland. Guinea-Bissau’s twenty-year guerrilla fight for independence from Portugal and fifteen-year civil war had bequeathed up to fifty airstrips cut out of the bush. Sometimes the coke planes landed there before flying back to the airport, empty and “clean,” to refuel.
A night landing was safer, but as none of the bush strips had any laid-on power, they had no lights. But a receiving party of four or five pickups could use their roof-rack lighting to provide a brilliantly illuminated landing path for the few minutes needed. That was what Dexter could explain to his two paratroop escorts.
AT THE pestilential Kapoor shipyard south of Goa, the work on the two grain ships was in full flow. The man in charge was a Canadian-Scot named Duncan McGregor who had spent a lifetime in the shipyards of the tropics and had a skin like terminal jaundice with eyes to match. One day, if the swamp fever did not get him, the whisky would.
The Cobra liked retired experts as hirelings. They tended to have forty years on the job, no family ties and needed the money. McGregor knew what was wanted but not why. With the fee he was getting, he had no intention of speculating, and certainly not of asking.
His welders and cutters were local, his outfitter imported Singaporeans, whom he knew well. For their accommodation, he had leased and brought down a row of motor homes; they would certainly not tolerate the hovels of the local Goans.
The exteriors of both grain ships were to remain, he had been instructed. Only the interiors of the five enormous holds were to be converted. The farthest forward was to be a brig for prisoners, though he did not know that. It would have bunks, latrines, a galley for cooking, showers, and a wardroom with air-conditioning and even TV.
Next was another living area with the same but better. One day, either British Special Boat Service commandos or American Navy SEALs would live here.
The third hold needed to be smaller so that its neighbor could be large. The steel bulkhead between holds 3 and 4 had to be cut out and moved. This was being fitted out as an all-purpose workshop. The second-to-last hold, up against the sterncastle, was left bare. It would contain very fast inflatable RIB raiding craft powered by huge motors. This hold would have the only derrick above it.
The largest hold was taking the most work. On its floor, a steel plate was being made, which would be hoisted vertically by four hydraulic winches, one at each corner, until it was level with the deck above. Whatever would be strapped to that rising floor would then be out in the fresh air. In fact, it would be the unit’s attack helicopter.
All through the winter under the still-blazing Karnatakan sun, the torches hissed, drills bored, metal clanged, hammers smashed and two harmless grain ships were turned into floating death traps. And far away, the names were changed as ownership passed to an invisible company managed by Thame of Singapore. Just before completion, those names would go on each stern, the crews would be flown back to take them over and they would steam away to whatever work awaited them on the other side of the world.
CAL DEXTER spent a week acclimatizing before he took the boat into the heart of the Bijagós. He plastered the SUV with decals he had brought with him, advertising BirdLife International and the American Audubon Society. Lying prominently on the backseat for any passing observer to see were copies of the latest reports from the Ghana Wildlife Society and the can’t-do-without Birds of Western Africa by Borrow and Demey.
In fact, after the brush with the Wrangler at the intersection, two swarthy men were indeed sent to the bungalow to snoop. They returned to tell their masters the bird-watchers were harmless idiots. In the heart of enemy territory, “idiot” is the best cover there is.
Dexter’s first chore was to find a place for his boat. He took his team west of Bissau city deep into the bush toward Quinhámel, the capital of the Papel tribe. Beyond Quinhámel, he found the Mansôa River leading down to the sea, and, on its bank, the hotel and restaurant Mar Azul. Here he slipped the cabin cruiser into the river and billeted Jerry in the hotel to look after it. Before he and Bill left, they had a sumptuous lobster lunch with Portuguese wine.
“Beats Colchester in winter,” agreed the two paras. The spying on the offshore islands began the next day.
There are fourteen main Bijagós, but the entire archipelago comprises eighty-eight small blobs of land between twenty and thirty miles off the Guinea-Bissau coast. Anti-cocaine agencies had photographed them from space, but no one had ever penetrated them in a small boat.
Dexter discovered they were all swampy, hot, mangrove filled and feverish, but four or five, facing farthest out to sea, had been graced with luxurious snow-white villas on gleaming beaches, each with large dish aerials, state-of-the-art technology and radio masts to pick up signals from the faraway MTN service provider for mobile phones. Each villa had a dock and a speedboat. These were the exile residences of the Colombians.
For the rest, he counted twenty-three hamlets of fishermen, pigs and goats, leading a subsistence existence. But there were also fishing camps where foreigners came to rape the country’s teeming fish reserves. There were twenty-meter canoes from Guinea-Conakry, Sierra Leone and Senegal with ice, food and fuel for fifteen days away from base.
These served South Korean and Chinese mother ships whose refrigerators could freeze the catch all the way back to the East. He watched up to forty canoes serving a single mother ship. But the cargo he really wanted to watch came on the sixth night.
He had berthed the cruiser up a narrow creek, crossed an island on foot and hidden himself in the mangroves by the shore. The American and the two British paras lay covered in camouflage scrim with powerful binoculars as the sun went down ahead of them in the west. Out of the last red rays came a freighter that was most definitely not a fishing mother ship. She slipped between two islands,
and the chain clattered as her anchor went down. Then the canoes appeared.
They were local, not foreign, and not rigged for fishing. Five of them, each with a crew of four natives, and an Hispanic in the stern of two of them.
On the side rail of the freighter, men appeared lugging bales bound with stout cord. The bales were heavy enough that it needed four men to lift just one over the side and lower it to a waiting canoe, which rocked and sagged as it took the weight.
There was no need for secrecy. The crew laughed and shouted in the high piping tones of the East. One of the Hispanics clambered aboard to converse with the captain. A suitcase of money changed hands, the fee for the Atlantic crossing, but a mere fraction of the eventual yield in Europe.
Guessing the weight of the bales and counting the number, Cal Dexter calculated two tons of Colombian pure had been unloaded as he watched through his binoculars. The darkness deepened. The freighter put on some of her lights. Lanterns appeared on the canoes. Finally, the transaction done, the canoes gunned up their outboards and chugged away. The freighter hauled up her anchor and swung on the ebb tide before turning for sea.
Dexter caught sight of the red/blue flag of South Korea and her name. The Hae Shin. He gave them all an hour to get clear, then motored back upriver to the Mar Azul.
“Ever seen a hundred million sterling, guys?”
“No, boss,” said Bill, using the paratroop vernacular of a corporal to an officer.
“Well, you have now. That was the value of two tons of coke.” They looked glum.
“Lobster supper. Our last night.”
That cheered them up. Twenty-four hours later, they had returned the cottage, boat and SUV and flown out, via Lisbon for London. The night they left, men in black balaclavas raided their villa, ransacked and then torched it. One of the Bijagós natives had seen a white man among the mangroves.
The Cobra Page 8