The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  The following day was free time because the vital night flying would commence the night after. And then finally RATO and gunnery practice, for which the targets would be brightly painted barrels floating in the sea, dropped at agreed locations by one of their group who had a fishing boat. She had no doubt her pupil would pass with flying colors. She had quickly noted that he was a natural flier and had taken to the old Bucc as a grebe to water.

  “Have you ever flown with rocket-assisted takeoff?” she asked him a week later in the crew hut.

  “No, Brazil is very large,” he joked. “We always had enough land to build long runways.”

  “Your S2 Bucc never had RATO because our aircraft carriers were long enough,” she told him. “But sometimes in the tropics the air is too hot. One loses power. And this plane was in South Africa. It needs help. So we have no choice but to fit RATO. It will take your breath away.”

  And it did. Pretending the huge Scampton runway was really too short for unassisted takeoff, the riggers had fitted the small rockets behind the tail skid. Colleen Keck briefed him carefully on the takeoff sequence.

  Park right at the end of the tarmac. Hand brakes on hard. Run up the Spey engines against the brakes. At the moment they can hold no more, release brakes, power to maximum, flick the rocket switch. João Mendoza thought a train had hit him in the back. The Buccaneer almost reared and threw herself down the tarmac line. There was a blur of runway, and she was airborne.

  Unbeknownst to Cdr. Keck, Major Mendoza had spent his evenings studying a pack of photos sent to him at the inn by Cal Dexter. They showed him the Fogo runway, the approach lights pattern, the touchdown threshold coming in from the sea. The Brazilian had no doubts left. It would be, as his English friends liked to call it, a piece of cake.

  CAL DEXTER had examined the three pilotless drones, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAVs, manufactured by the USA with enormous care. Their role was going to be vital in the Cobra’s coming war. He finally discarded the Reaper and the Predator and chose the “unweaponized” Global Hawk. Its job was surveillance and only surveillance.

  Using Paul Devereaux’s presidential authority, he had lengthy negotiations with Northrop Grumman, the manufacturers of the RQ-4. He already knew that a version dedicated to “broad area maritime surveillance” had been developed in 2006 and that the U.S. Navy had placed a very large order.

  He wanted two extra capabilities, and he was told there need not be a problem. The technology existed.

  One was for the onboard memory bank to memorize the images brought back by the TR-1 spy planes of almost two score ships as seen directly from above. The pictures would be broken down into pixels that would represent a distance no more than two inches on the deck of the real ship. It would then have to compare what it was looking down at with what was in its data bank and inform its handlers, miles away at their base, when it found a match.

  Second, he needed communications-jamming technology, enabling the Hawk to surround the vessel beneath it with a ten-mile-diameter circle in which no communication of any electronic kind would work.

  Though it packed no rocket, the RQ-4 Hawk had all the details Dexter needed. It could fly at 65,000 feet, far out of sight or sound of what it was watching. Through sun, rain, cloud or night, it could survey forty thousand square miles a day and, sipping its fuel, could stay up there for thirty-five hours. Unlike the other two, it could cruise at 340 knots, far faster than its targets.

  By the end of May, two of these marvels had been installed and were dedicated to Project Cobra. One was set up to operate out of the Colombian coastal base of Malambo, northeast of Cartagena.

  The other was on the island of Fernando de Noronha, off the northeastern coast of Brazil. Each unit was lodged in a facility set away from all prying eyes on the other side of the air base. On the Cobra’s instruction, they began to prowl as soon as installed.

  Although operated on the air bases, the actual scanning was accomplished many miles away in the Nevada desert at U.S. Air Force Base Creech. Here, men sat at consoles staring at the screens. Each had a control column like that of a pilot in his cockpit.

  What each operator saw on his screen was exactly what the Hawk could see staring down from the stratosphere. Some of the men and women in that quiet, air-conditioned control room at Creech had Predators hunting over Afghanistan and the border mountains leading to Pakistan. Others had Reapers over the Persian Gulf.

  Each had earphones and a throat mike to receive instructions and inform higher authority if a target hove into view. The concentration was total and therefore the shifts short. The Creech control room was the face of wars to come.

  With his dark humor, Cal Dexter gave each patrolling Hawk a nickname to tell them apart. The eastern one he called “Michelle,” after the First Lady; the other one was “Sam,” after the wife of the British Prime Minister.

  And each had a separate task. Michelle was to gaze down, identify and track all merchant marine vessels identified by Juan Cortez and found and photographed by the TR-1. Sam was to find and report on everything flying or sailing out of the Brazilian coast between Natal and Belém, or heading eastward across the Atlantic passing longitude 40°, direction Africa.

  Both the control decks at Creech in charge of the two Cobra Hawks were in direct touch with the dowdy warehouse in the Washington suburb, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  LETIZIA ARENAL knew what she was doing was wrong, against the strict instructions of her papá, but she could not help herself. He had told her never to leave Spain, but she was in love, and love trumped even his instructions.

  Domingo de Vega had proposed to her and she had accepted. She wore his ring on her hand. But he had to return to his post in New York or lose it, and his birthday was in the last week of May. He had sent her an open ticket with Iberia to Kennedy and begged her to come and join him.

  The formalities at the American Embassy had been accomplished as if on oiled wheels; she had her visa waiver and was cleared by Homeland Security.

  Her ticket was in business class, and she checked in at Terminal 4 with hardly any wait. Her single valise was tagged for “New York Kennedy” and slid away down the conveyor belt to baggage handling. She took no notice of the man behind her hefting a large grip as his personal and only carry-on luggage.

  She could not know it was full of newspapers or that he would turn away as soon as she disappeared toward security and passport control. She had never seen Inspector Paco Ortega before and she never would again. But he had memorized every detail of her single valise and of the clothes she was wearing. Her photo had been taken from long distance as she stepped from her cab at the curb. All would be in New York before she even set off.

  But just to be on the safe side, he stood at an observation window, looking out at the airfield, and watched as, far away, the Iberia jet turned into the breeze, paused, then roared toward the still-snowcapped peaks of the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Atlantic. Then he called New York and had a few words with Cal Dexter.

  The airliner was on time. There was a man in ground-staff uniform in the jetway as the passengers streamed off. He murmured two words into a cell phone, but no one took any notice. People do that all the time.

  Letizia Arenal passed through passport control with no more than the usual formality of pressing one thumb after another onto a small glass panel and staring into a camera lens for iris recognition.

  As she went through, the immigration official turned and nodded silently at a man who stood in the corridor the passengers were now taking toward the customs hall. The man nodded back and wandered after the young woman.

  It was a heavy day for traffic, and the luggage was delayed by an extra twenty minutes. Eventually, the carousel gurgled, thumped into life, and suitcases began to spew onto the moving band. Her own case was neither first nor last but somewhere in the middle. She saw it tumble from the open mouth of the tunnel and recognized the bright yellow tag that she had affixed to help her pick it out.


  It was a hard frame with wheels, so she slung her tote bag over her left shoulder and towed the valise toward the green channel. She was halfway through when one of the customs officers, as if standing idly by, beckoned to her. A spot check. Nothing to worry about. Domingo would be waiting for her in the concourse beyond the doors. He would have to wait a few minutes longer.

  She pulled her case toward the table the officer indicated and lifted it. The latches were facing toward her.

  “Would you please open your case, ma’am?” Scrupulously polite. They were always scrupulously polite, and they never smiled or joked. She unflicked the two catches. The officer turned the case around toward himself and lifted the lid. He saw the clothes ranged on top, and, with gloved hands, lifted off the top layer. Then he stopped. She realized he was staring at her over the top of the lid. She presumed he would now close it and nod that she could leave.

  He closed it, and said very coldly, “Would you come with me, if you please, ma’am.”

  It was not a question. She became aware that a big man and a burly woman, also in the same uniforms, were standing close behind her. It was embarrassing; other passengers were staring sideways as they scuttled through.

  The first officer snapped the catches closed, hefted the case and went ahead. The others, without a word spoken, came up behind. The first officer led them through a door in the corner. It was quite a bare room, with a table at the center, a few plain chairs against the walls. No pictures, two cameras in different corners. The valise went flat on the table.

  “Would you please open your valise again, ma’am?”

  It was the first inkling Letizia Arenal had that something might be wrong, but she had not a clue what it might be. She opened her case, saw her own neatly folded clothes.

  “Would you take them out, please, ma’am?”

  It was underneath the linen jacket, the two cotton skirts and the several folded blouses. Not large, about the size of a one-kilo bag of grocery-store sugar. Filled with what looked like talc. Then it hit her; like a wave of fainting nausea, a punch in the solar plexus, a silent voice in the head screaming:

  No, it is not me, I did not do this, it is not mine, someone must have placed it there . . .

  It was the burly woman who sustained her, but not out of any spirit of sympathy. For the cameras. So obsessional are the New York courts with the rights of the accused, and so keen are defense attorneys to pounce upon the tiniest infraction of the rules of procedure to procure a dismissal of a charge, that, from officialdom’s point of view, not even the smallest formality may be ignored.

  After the opening of the suitcase and the discovery of what at that point was simply unidentified white powder, Letizia Arenal went, in the official phrase, “into the system.” Later it all seemed a single nightmarish blur.

  She was taken to another, better-appointed room in the terminal complex. There was a bank of digital recorders. Other men came. She did not know, but they were from the DEA and the ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With U.S. customs, that made three authorities detaining her under different jurisdictions.

  Although her English was good, a Spanish-speaking interpreter arrived. She was read her rights, the Miranda rights, of which she had never heard. At every sentence, she was asked, “Do you understand, ma’am?” Always the polite “ma’am,” although their expressions told her they despised her.

  Somewhere, her passport was being minutely examined. Elsewhere, her suitcase and shoulder bag received the same attention. The bag of white powder was sent for analysis, which would happen outside the building at another facility, a chemical lab. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be pure cocaine.

  The fact that it was pure was important. A small quantity of “cut” powder might be explained as “personal use.” Not a kilo of pure.

  In the presence of two women, she was required to remove every stitch of clothing, which was taken away. She was given a sort of paper coverall to wear. A qualified doctor, female, carried out an invasive body search into orifices, ears included. By now, she was sobbing uncontrollably. But the “system” would have its way. And all on camera, for the record. No smart-ass lawyer was going to get the bitch off this one.

  Finally, a senior DEA officer informed her she had the right to ask for a lawyer. She had not been formally interrogated, not yet. Her Miranda rights had not been infringed. She said she knew no New York lawyer. She was told a defense attorney would be appointed, but by the court, not by him.

  She repeatedly said her fiancé would be waiting for her outside. This was not ignored, not at all. Whoever was waiting for her might be her accomplice in crime. The crowds in the concourse beyond the doors of the customs hall were thoroughly vetted. No Domingo de Vega was found. Either he was a fiction or, if her accomplice, he had fled the scene. In the morning they would check for a Puerto Rican diplomat of that name at the UN.

  She insisted on explaining all, waiving her right to an attorney being present. She told them everything she knew, which was nothing. They did not believe her. Then she had an idea.

  “I am a Colombian. I want to see someone from the Colombian Embassy.”

  “It will be the consulate, ma’am. It is now ten at night. We will try to raise someone in the morning.”

  This was from the FBI man, though she did not know it. Drug smuggling into the USA is a federal, not state, offense. The Feds had taken over.

  JFK Airport comes under the East District of New York, the EDNY, and is in the borough of Brooklyn. Finally, close to midnight, Letizia Arenal was lodged in that borough’s federal correctional institution, pending a magistrate’s hearing in the morning.

  And of course a file was opened, which rapidly became thicker and thicker. The system needs a lot of paperwork. In her single, stiffling cell, odorous of sweat and fear, Letizia Arenal cried the night away.

  In the morning, the Feds contacted someone at the Colombian Consulate, who agreed to come. If the prisoner expected some sympathy there, she was to be disappointed. The consular assistant could hardly have been more hatchet-faced. This was exactly the sort of thing the diplomats loathed.

  The assistant was a woman in a severe black business suit. She listened without a flicker of expression to the explanation and believed not a word of it. But she had no choice but to agree to contact Bogotá and ask the Foreign Ministry there to trace a private lawyer called Julio Luz. It was the only name Ms. Arenal could think of to turn to for help.

  There was a first hearing at the magistrate’s court, but only to arrange a further remand. Learning that the defendant had no representation, the magistrate ordered that a public defender be found. A young man barely out of law school was traced, and they had a few moments together in a holding cell before returning to the courtroom.

  The defender made a hopeless plea for bail. It was hopeless because the accused was foreign, without funds or family, the alleged crime was immensely serious and the prosecutor made plain that further investigations were afoot into the suspicion that a much larger chain of cocaine smugglers could be involved with the defendant.

  The defender tried to plead that there was a fiancé in the form of a diplomat at the United Nations. One of the Feds slipped a note to the prosecutor, who rose again, this time to reveal there was no Domingo de Vega in the Puerto Rican mission at the UN nor ever had been.

  “Save it for your memoirs, Mr. Jenkins,” drawled the magistrate. “Defendant is remanded. Next.”

  The gavel came down. Letizia Arenal was led away in a flood of fresh tears. Her so-called fiancé, the man she had loved, had cynically betrayed her.

  Before she was taken back to the correctional institute she had a last meeting with her lawyer, Mr. Jenkins. He offered her his card.

  “You may call me anytime, señorita. You have that right. There is no charge. The public defender is free for those with no funds.”

  “You do not understand, Mr. Jenkins. Soon will come from Bogotá Señor Luz. He will rescue
me.”

  As he returned by public transport to his shabby law office, Jenkins thought there has to be one born every minute. No Domingo de Vega, and probably no Julio Luz.

  He was wrong on the second point. That morning, Señor Luz had taken a call from the Colombian Foreign Ministry that almost caused him to have a cardiac arrest.

  CHAPTER 8

  JULIO LUZ, THE ADVOCATE FROM THE CITY OF BOGOTÁ, flew into New York clothed in outward calm, but internally a thoroughly frightened man. Since the arrest of Letizia Arenal at Kennedy three days earlier, he had had two long and terrifying interviews with one of the most violent men he had ever met.

  Though he had sat with Roberto Cárdenas in the meetings of the cartel, that had always been under the chairmanship of Don Diego, whose word was law and who demanded a level of dignity to match his own.

  In a room in a farmhouse miles off the beaten track, Cárdenas had no such limitations. He had raged and threatened. Like Luz, he had no doubt his daughter’s luggage had been interfered with and had convinced himself the insertion of cocaine had been accomplished by some opportunist lowlife in the baggage hall at Barajas Airport, Madrid.

  He described what he would do to this baggage handler when he caught up with him, until Julio Luz felt nauseated. Finally, they concocted the story they would present to the New York authorities. Neither man had ever heard of any Domingo de Vega and could not surmise why she had been flying there.

  Prisoners’ mail out of U.S. correctional institutions is censored, and Letizia had not written any such letter. All Julio Luz knew was what he had been told by the Foreign Ministry.

  The lawyer’s story would be that the young woman was an orphan, and he was her guardian. Papers were concocted to that effect. Money traceable back to Cárdenas was impossible to use. Luz would draw monies from his own practice, and Cárdenas would reimburse him later. Luz, arriving in New York, would be in funds, entitled to see his ward in jail and seeking to engage the best criminal attorney money could buy.