The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  Ortega grunted his assent. Like any detective, he had carried through stakeout operations that had lasted months before the final pounce. Patience was essential but hugely frustrating.

  Dexter was lying. He knew of no other laundering operations like the Luz-Guzman linkage. But he could not divulge the whirl-wind that Project Cobra was going to unleash when the cold-eyed man in Washington was ready.

  And now he wanted to get home. He had read the letter in his room. It was long, tender, concerned for the young woman’s safety and well-being and signed simply “Papá.”

  He doubted Julio Luz would now be parted from the reply letter all day or night. Perhaps when he was in the first-class cabin back to Bogotá, he might fall asleep, but to do a “lift” of the attaché case above his head with the cabin crew looking on was out of the question.

  What Dexter wanted to discover before any pounce was made was simply this: who was Letizia Arenal and who was Papá?

  WINTER was loosening its grip on Washington when Cal Dexter returned at the beginning of March. The forests cloaking those parts of Virginia and Maryland next to the capital were about to clothe themselves in a haze of green.

  From the Kapoor yard south of Goa, a message had come from McGregor, who was still sweating it out among the stench of toxic chemicals and malarial heat. The two grain ships were close to their transformation. They would be ready for handover in their new role in May, he said.

  He presumed their new role would be what he had been told. This was that a mega-wealthy American consortium wished to enter the treasure-hunting world with two ships equipped for deep-sea diving and wreck recovery. The accommodation would be for the divers and surface crew, the workshops for the servicing of their rigs and the large hold for a small spotter helicopter. It was all very plausible; it was just not true.

  The final completion of the transformation from grain merchant to Q-ship would take place at sea. That was when heavily armed marine commandos would fill the berths, and the workshop/ armories would contain some seriously dangerous kit. He was told he was doing a great job, and the two merchant marine crews would fly in at handover.

  The paperwork was long since in place, should anyone search. The former ships had disappeared, and the two about to sail were the reconditioned MV Chesapeake and the MV Balmoral. They were owned by a company based in a law office in Aruba, flew the (convenience) flag of that tiny island and would be chartered to carry grain from the wheat-rich north to the hungry south. Their real ownership and purpose were invisible.

  The laboratories of the FBI had produced a perfect DNA profile of the young woman in Madrid who had handled the coffee cup in the Villa Real. Cal Dexter had no doubt that she was Colombian, already confirmed by Inspector Ortega. But there were hundreds of Colombian youngsters studying in Madrid. What Dexter craved was a matcher to that DNA.

  In theory, at least fifty percent of the DNA should have derived from the father, and he was convinced “Papá” was in Colombia. And who was he who could ask a major player in the cocaine world, albeit a “technical,” to play postman for him? And why could he not use the mails? It was a long shot, but he put the request to Colonel Dos Santos, intelligence chief of the anti-drug division of the Policía Judicial. While waiting for a response, he made two quick journeys.

  Off the northeast shore of the coast of Brazil is an obscure archipelago of twenty-one small islands of which the main one gives its name to the group: Fernando de Noronha. It is only ten kilometers by three and a half, its total area twenty-six square kilometers. The only town is Vila dos Remédios.

  It was once a prison island like France’s Devil’s Island, and the thick native forests were cut down to prevent the prisoners building rafts to escape. Shrub and scrub replaced the trees. Some wealthy Brazilians had away-from-it-all holiday villas there, but it was the airfield that interested Dexter. Built in 1942 by the U.S. Army Air Force Transport Command, it would make a perfect site for a USAF unit operating Predator or Global Hawk drones, with their amazing capacity to loiter for hours aloft, looking down with cameras, radars and heat sensors. He flew in as a Canadian tourist resort developer, had a look, confirmed his suspicion and flew back out again. His second visit was to Colombia.

  By 2009, President Uribe had effectively crushed the FARC terrorist movement which really specialized in kidnap and ransom demands. But his anti-cocaine efforts had been mainly offset by Don Diego Esteban and the mightily efficient cartel he had created.

  In that year, he had offended his hard-left neighbors in both Venezuela and Bolivia by inviting American forces into Colombia to lend their superlative technology to help him. Facilities were offered at seven Colombian military bases. One of these was at Malambo, right on the northern coast by Barranquilla. Dexter went in as a serious defense writer with Pentagon approval.

  Being in the country, he saw the chance to fly up to Bogotá and meet the formidable Colonel Dos Santos. The U.S. Army ran him up to Barranquilla Airport, and he caught the shuttle up to the capital. Between the still-warm tropical coast to the city in the mountains, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.

  Neither the chief of the American DEA operation nor the leader of the British SOCA team in Bogotá knew who Dexter was or what the Cobra was preparing, but both had been advised, from their HQs on Army Navy Drive and the Albert Embankment, to cooperate. They all spoke fluent Spanish, and Dos Santos had perfect English. He was surprised when it was the stranger who mentioned a DNA sample that had been submitted a fortnight earlier.

  “Strange that you should call at this moment,” said the youthful and dynamic Colombian detective. “I got a match this morning.”

  His explanation of how the match was made was stranger than Dexter’s arrival, which Dos Santos viewed as a mere coincidence. DNA technology had come late to Colombia due to the parsimony of governments prior to the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. He had increased the budgets.

  But Dos Santos read feverishly every publication dealing with modern forensic technology. He had realized earlier than his colleagues that one day DNA would be an awesome weapon in identifying bodies, living and dead (and there were a lot of the latter). Even before his department’s laboratories could cope, he had begun to collect samples as and when he could.

  Five years earlier, a member of the Drug Squad’s rogues’ gallery had been in a car crash. The man had never been charged, never convicted, never imprisoned. Any New York civil rights lawyer would have had Dos Santos’s badge for what he did.

  He and his colleagues, long before the Don created the cartel, were convinced this man was a major career gangster. He had not been seen for years, and certainly had not even been heard of for two. If he was as big as they suspected he was, he would live constantly on the move, shifting from one disguise and safe house to another. He would communicate only by use-once-and-throw cell phones, of which he probably had fifty, constantly renewed after use.

  What Dos Santos did was go to the hospital and steal the swabs that had been used on the crash victim’s broken nose. When the technology caught up, the DNA was identified and filed. Fifty percent was in the sample sent from Washington with a request for help. He delved into a file and laid a photo on the desk.

  The face was brutish, scarred, cruel. A broken nose, pebble eyes, buzz-cut gray hair. It had been taken over ten years earlier but “aged” to show how the man ought to look today.

  “We are now convinced he is part of the Don’s inner circle, the one whose agents pay off the corrupt officials abroad who help the cartel bring its product through the ports and airports of America and Europe. The ones you call the ‘Rats.’”

  “Can we find him?” asked the man from SOCA.

  “No, or I would have already. He comes from Cartagena, and he is an old dog now. Old dogs do not like to move far from their comfort zone. But he lives under deep cover, invisible.”

  He turned to Dexter, the source of the mysterious DNA sample of a very close relative.

  “You will never
find him, señor. And if you did, he would probably kill you. And even if you took him, he would never break. He is hard as flint and twice as sharp. He never travels; he sends agents to do his work. And we understand the Don trusts him totally. I fear your sample is interesting but takes us nowhere.”

  Cal Dexter looked down at the impenetrable face of Roberto Cárdenas, the man who controlled the Rat List. The loving papá of the girl in Madrid.

  IN THE extreme northeast of Brazil is a vast land of hills and valleys, a few high mountains and much jungle. But also there are enormous ranches of up to half a million acres, grassland well watered by the myriad streams running down from the sierras. Because of their size and remoteness, their estate houses are realistically reached only by air. As a result, they each have one airstrip and sometimes several.

  As Cal Dexter took the commercial flight back from Bogotá to Miami and Washington, an airplane was being refueled on one such strip. It was a Beech King Air, carrying two pilots, two pumpers and a metric ton of cocaine.

  As the fuel-bowser team filled the main and supplementary tanks to the brim, the crew dozed in the shade of a palm-thatched lean-to. They had a long night ahead. An attaché case containing brick after brick of hundred-dollar bills had already been handed over to cover the fuel and the fee for the stopover.

  If the Brazilian authorities had their suspicions about Rancho Boa Vista, two hundred miles inland from the port city of Fortaleza, there was precious little they could do. The sheer remoteness of the estate meant the slightest hint of a stranger would be noticed. To stake out the complex of main buildings would be futile; using the GPS system, a drug plane could rendezvous with the fuel bowser miles away and never be seen.

  For the owners, the fees paid for the fueling stops were rewards far beyond the returns from ranching. For the cartel, the stopovers were vital on the route to Africa.

  The Beech C-12, more commonly the King Air, was originally designed and made by Beechcraft as a nineteen-seat, twin turboprop, general-purpose communications mini-airliner. It sold widely across the world. Later versions saw the seats ripped out for conversion to freight carrier and general-purpose hauler. But the version waiting in the afternoon sun at Boa Vista was even more special.

  It was never designed to cross the Atlantic. With its all-up fuel load of 2,500 liters the two Pratt and Whitney Canada engines would take it 708 nautical miles. That was in still air, fully loaded, on long-range cruise setting with allowance for starting, taxi, climb and descent. To attempt to leave the coast of Brazil for Africa like that was a recipe for death in the center of the ocean.

  In secret workshops belonging to the cartel, hidden beside jungle airstrips in Colombia, the “coke” planes had been modified. Clever artificers had installed extra fuel tanks not under the wings but inside the fuselage. There were usually two, one on each side of the freight hold, with a narrow passage giving access to the flight deck up front.

  Technology is expensive, manpower cheap. Rather than have transfer of the extra fuel from the inboard tanks to the main tanks by electric power tapped off the engines, two “peons” were brought along. As the main tanks emptied far out in the dark sky, they began to pump manually.

  The route was simple. The first leg was from a hidden airstrip in the Colombian jungle, constantly changed to evade the attentions of Colonel Dos Santos. The pilots would cover the 1,500 miles right across Brazil to Boa Vista on the first night. Flying at 5,000 feet in darkness above the canopy of the Mato Grosso rain forests, they were just about invisible.

  At dawn the crew would tuck into a hearty breakfast and sleep through the heat. At dusk the King Air would be again tanked to the brim to face the 1,300 miles from the New World to the Old at its narrowest point.

  That evening, as the last light bled from the sky over Rancho Boa Vista, the pilot of the King Air turned into the light breeze, did his final checks and began to roll. His all-up weight was the manufacturer’s maximum of 15,000 pounds. He would need 1,200 meters to get airborne, but he had over 1,500 of rolled-flat grassland. The evening star was twinkling when he lifted out of Boa Vista, and the tropical darkness descended like a theater curtain.

  There is a saying that there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. Francisco Pons was fifty and had spent years flying in and out of airstrips that would never feature in any official manual. And he had survived because he was careful.

  His route was carefully plotted, no detail overlooked. He would refuse to fly in crazy weather, but that night the forecast was for a nice twenty-knot tailwind all the way. He knew there would be no modern airport at the other end but yet another strip hacked out of the bush and lit by the lights from six off-roads parked in a line.

  He had memorized the dot-dot-dash signal that would be flashed at him as he approached, to confirm there were no ambushes waiting down there in the warm velvet of the African night. He would fly as usual between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, depending on the cloud layer, well below any need for oxygen. Of course he could fly through clouds all the way, if need be, but it was more agreeable to skim above the layer in moonlight.

  With six hours airborne, even flying toward the east and the rising sun, even adding three hours of time change and two for another refuel from a bowser parked in the bush, he would be up and heading back over the African coast, one ton lighter with no cargo, before the African sunrise was more than a pink glow.

  And there was the pay. The two pumpers in the back would be paid $5,000 each for three days and nights, for them a fortune. “Captain Pons,” as he liked to be called, would collect ten times that and would soon retire a very wealthy man. But then, he was carrying a cargo with a street value in the great cities of Europe of up to a hundred million dollars. He did not think of himself as a bad man. He was just doing his job.

  He saw the lights of Fortaleza under his right wing, then the blackness of the ocean replaced the dark of the jungle. An hour later, Fernando de Noronha slipped under the left wing, and he checked time and track. At 250 knots, his best cruise speed, he was on time and true heading. Then the clouds came. He climbed to 10,000 feet and flew on. The two peons started pumping.

  He was heading for Cufar airstrip, in Guinea-Bissau, hacked out of the bush during the independence war fought by Amilcar Cabral against the Portuguese many years before. His watch said eleven p.m., Brazil time. One hour to go. The stars were brilliant above, the cloud layer thinning below. Perfect. The peons kept pumping.

  He checked his position again. Thank the Lord for Global Positioning, the four-satellite navigator’s aid, presented to the world by the Americans and free to use. It made finding a dark bush airstrip as easy as finding Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. He was still flying his course of 040°, as all the way from the Brazilian coast. Now he altered a few points starboard, dropped to 3,000 feet and caught the glitter of the moon on the river Mansôa.

  To port he saw a few dim lights in the otherwise blacked-out country. The airport; they must be expecting the Lisbon flight or they would not waste the generator. He slowed to 150 knots and looked ahead for Cufar. In the darkness, fellow Colombians would be waiting, listening for the drone of the Pratt and Whitneys, a sound you could hear for miles over the croak of the frogs and the whining mosquitoes.

  Up ahead, a single white bar of light flashed upward, a vertical pillar from a million-candlepower Maglite. Captain Pons was too close. He flashed his landing lights and turned away, then back in a sweeping curve. He knew the airstrip lay on a compass heading east to west. With no wind he could land either way, but by agreement the Jeeps would be at the western end. He needed to sweep in over their heads.

  Wheels down, landing flaps, speed dropping, he turned onto final approach. Ahead of him, all the lights blazed alive. It was like noonday down there. He roared over the off-roads at 10 feet and a hundred knots. The King Air settled at her usual eighty-four knots. Before he could close engines and shut off the systems, there were Wranglers racing either side
of him. In the back, the two peons were soaked in sweat and limp with tiredness. They had been pumping for over three hours, and the last fifty gallons sloshed in the inboard tanks.

  Francisco Pons forbade any smoking on board his flights. Others permitted it, turning their craft, with the danger of petrol fumes, into flying fireballs in the event of a single spark. Safely on the ground, all four men lit up.

  There were four Colombians, headed by the boss, Ignacio Romero, chief of all cartel operations in Guinea-Bissau. It was a big cargo, it merited his presence. Local natives hauled off the twenty bales that made up the ton of cocaine. They went into a pickup with tractor tires, and one of the Colombians took them away.

  Also piled onto the bales were six Guineans, who were actually soldiers assigned by General Jalo Diallo. He was running the country in the absence of even a titular President. It was a job no one seemed to want. Tenancy tended to be short. The trick was, if possible, to steal a fast fortune and retire to the Portuguese Algarve coast with several young ladies. The “if possible” was the problem.

  The bowser driver connected his pipes and began to pump. Romero offered Pons a cup of coffee from his personal flask. Pons sniffed it. Colombian, the best. He nodded his thanks. At ten to four, local time, they were done. Pedro and Pablo, smelling richly of sweat and black tobacco, climbed into the back. They had three more hours to rest as the main fuel tanks were used up. Then more pumping back to Brazil. Pons and his youthful copilot, who was still learning the ropes, bade Romero good-bye and went up to the flight deck.

  The Wranglers had repositioned themselves so that when the searchlights came on, Captain Pons had only to turn around and take off toward the west. At five to four, he lifted off, a ton lighter now, and cleared the coast still in darkness.