The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  And this he did, in that order. Faced with her fellow country-man, even with a Spanish-speaking woman from the DEA sitting in the corner of the room, Letizia Arenal poured out her story to a man she had met only for dinner and breakfast at the Villa Real Hotel.

  Luz was aghast, not just at the story of the devilishly handsome pseudo-diplomat from Puerto Rico, nor at the incredibly stupid decision to disobey her father by flying the Atlantic, but at the prospect of the volcanic rage of that father when he heard, as hear he must.

  The lawyer could add two and two and come up with four. The phony art-fan Vega was clearly part of a Madrid-based smuggling gang using his gigolo talents to recruit unsuspecting young women to act as “mules” by carrying cocaine into the U.S. He had little doubt that soon after his return to Colombia, there would be an army of Spanish and Colombian thugs coming to Madrid and New York to find the missing Vega.

  The fool would be snatched, taken to Colombia, handed over to Cárdenas and then God help him. Letizia told him there had been a photo of her fiancé in her purse and a larger one in her flat in Moncloa. He made a mental note to demand the first back and have the larger one removed from the Madrid apartment. They would help in the search for the rogue behind this disaster. Luz calculated the young smuggler would not be hiding deep because he would not know who was coming for him, only that he had lost one of his cargoes.

  He would, under torture, give up the name of the baggage handler who had inserted the bag of coke at Madrid. A full confession from him, and New York would have to drop the charge. So he reasoned.

  Later, there was total denial of there being any photo of any young man in the purse confiscated at Kennedy, and the one in Madrid had already gone. Paco Ortega had seen to that. But first things first. Luz engaged the services of Mr. Boseman Barrow, of Manson Barrow, considered the finest advocate at the criminal bar of Manhattan. The sum involved for Mr. Barrow to drop everything and cross the river into Brooklyn was deeply impressive.

  But as the two men returned from the federal correctional institution to Manhattan the following day, the New Yorker’s face was grave. Internally, he was not so grave. He saw months and months of work at astronomical fees.

  “Señor Luz, I must be brutally frank. Things are not good. Personally, I have no doubt your ward was lured into a disastrous situation by the cocaine smuggler who called himself Domingo de Vega and that she was unaware of what she was doing. She was duped. It happens all the time.”

  “So that is good,” interjected the Colombian.

  “It is good that I believe it. But if I am to represent her, I must. The problem is, I am neither the jury nor the judge, and I am certainly not the DEA, the FBI or the District Attorney. And a much bigger problem is that this Vega man has not only vanished, but there is not a shred of evidence that he existed.”

  The law firm’s limousine crossed the East River and Luz stared down glumly at the gray water.

  “But Vega was not the baggage handler,” he protested. “There must be another man, the one in Madrid who opened her case and put in the package.”

  “We do not know that,” sighed the Manhattan counselor. “He may have been the baggage handler as well. Or have had access to the baggage hall. He may have passed for an Iberia staffer or customs officer with right of access. He may even have been either of these things. How energetic will the Madrid authorities be to divert their precious resources to the task of trying to liberate one they probably see as a dope smuggler, and a non-Spanish to boot?”

  They turned onto the East River Drive toward Boseman Barrow’s comfort zone, downtown Manhattan.

  “I have funds,” protested Julio Luz. “I can engage private investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. How you say, ‘the sky is the limit.’ ”

  Mr. Barrow beamed down at his companion. He could almost smell the odor of the new wing on his mansion in the Hamptons. This was going to take many months.

  “We have one powerful argument, Señor Luz. It is clear that the security apparatus at Madrid Airport screwed up badly.”

  “Screwed up?”

  “Failed. In these paranoid days, all airline baggage heading to the U.S. should be X-ray screened at the airport of departure. Especially in Europe. There are bilateral compacts. The outline of the bag should have shown up at Madrid. And they have sniffer dogs. Why no sniffer dogs? It all points to an insertion after the usual checks . . .”

  “Then we can ask they drop the charges?”

  “On an administrative foul-up? I’m afraid dropping the charges is out of the question. As for our chances in court, without some blistering new evidence in her favor, not good. A New York jury simply will not believe a screwup in Madrid Airport is possible.

  “They will look at the known evidence, not the protestations of the accused. One passenger from, of all places, Colombia; slipping through the Green Channel; one kilogram of Colombian pure; floods of tears. I am afraid it is very, very common. And the city of New York is getting very, very sick of it.”

  Mr. Barrow forebore to say that his own engagement would not look good either. Olympian quantities of money were associated by low-budget New Yorkers, the sort who end up on juries, with the cocaine trade. A real, innocent mule would be abandoned to the Legal Aid Office. But no need to secure his own departure from the case.

  “What happens now?” asked Luz. His entrails were starting to melt again at the idea of confronting the volcanic temper of Roberto Cárdenas with this.

  “Well, she will soon appear before the Federal District Court for Brooklyn. The judge will not grant bail. That is a given. She will be transferred to an upstate federal jail on remand, pending trial. These are not nice places. She is not street hardened. Convent educated, you said? Oh dear. There are aggressive lesbians in these places. I am deeply sorry to say that. I doubt it is different in Colombia.”

  Luz put his face in his hands.

  “Dios mío,” he murmured. “How long there?”

  “Well, not less than six months, I fear. Time for the Prosecutor’s Office to prepare its case, somewhere in its vast workload. And for us, of course. For your private eyes to see what they can turn up.”

  Julio Luz also declined to be frank. He had no doubt a few private eyes would be Cub Scouts compared to the army of hard men Roberto Cárdenas would unleash to find the destroyer of his daughter. But he was wrong in that. Cárdenas would do no such thing, because Don Diego would find out. The Don did not know about the secret daughter, and the Don insisted on knowing everything. Even Julio Luz had thought she was the gangster’s girlfriend and the envelopes he carried were her allowance. He had one last timid question. The limousine hissed through the slush to a halt outside the luxury office block whose penthouse floor housed the small but gold-plated law firm of Manson Barrow.

  “If she is found guilty, Señor Barrow, what would be the sentence?”

  “Hard to say, of course. Depends on mitigating evidence, if any; my own advocacy; the judge on the day. But I fear in the present mood it might be felt necessary to create an example. A deterrent. In the area of twenty years in a federal penitentiary. Thank heavens her parents are not around to see it.”

  Julio Luz moaned. Barrow took pity.

  “Of course, the picture could be transformed if she became an informant. We call it ‘plea bargaining.’ The DEA does trade deals for insider information to catch the much bigger fish. Now, if . . .”

  “She cannot,” moaned Luz. “She knows nothing. She is truly innocent.”

  “Ah well, then . . . such a pity.”

  Luz was being quite truthful. He alone knew what the jailed young woman’s father did, and he certainly did not dare to tell her.

  MAY SLIPPED into June, and Global Hawk Michelle silently glided and turned over the eastern and southern Caribbean, seeming like a real hawk to ride the thermals on an endless quest for prey. This was not the first time.

  In the spring of 2006, a joint Air Force/DEA program had put a Global Hawk over the Car
ibbean from a base in Florida. It was a Maritime Demonstration Program, and short-term. In its brief time aloft, the Hawk managed to monitor hundreds of sea and air targets. It was enough to convince the Navy that BAMS, or Broad Aspect Maritime Surveillance, was the future, and it placed a huge order.

  But the Navy was thinking Russian fleet, Iranian gunboats, North Korean spy ships. The DEA was thinking cocaine smugglers. The trouble was, in 2006 the Hawk could show what it could show, but no one knew which was which, the innocent and the guilty. Thanks to Juan Cortez the wonder-welder, the authorities now had Lloyd’s-listed cargo ships by name and tonnage. Close to forty of them.

  At AFB Creech, Nevada, shifts of men and women watched Michelle’s screen, and every two or three days her tiny onboard computers would make a match—pitting the “Identi-Kit” deck layout provided by Jeremy Bishop against the deck of something moving far below.

  When Michelle made a match, Creech would call the shabby warehouse in Anacostia to say:

  “Team Cobra. We have the MV Mariposa. She is coming out of the Panama Canal into the Caribbean.”

  Bishop would acknowledge, and punch up details of the Mariposa on her present voyage. Cargo heading for Baltimore. She might have taken on a consignment of cocaine in Guatemala or at sea. Or maybe not yet. She might be taking her cocaine right into Baltimore itself or dropping it to a speedboat by dead of night somewhere in the vast blackness of Chesapeake Bay. Or she might not be carrying at all.

  “Shall we alert Baltimore customs? Or the Maryland Coast Guard?” asked Bishop.

  “Not yet” was the answer.

  It was not Paul Devereaux’s habit to explain to underlings. He kept his logic to himself. If searchers went straight to the secret place, or even made a pretense of finding it with dogs, after two or three successful discoveries the coincidences would be too neat for the cartel to ignore.

  He did not want to make intercepts or hand them gift-wrapped to others once the cargo had landed. He was prepared to leave the American and European importing gangs to the local authorities. His target was the Brotherhood, and they took the “hit” directly only if the intercept was at sea, before handover and change of ownership.

  As was his habit from the old days when the opponent was the KGB and its satellite goons, he studied his enemy with extreme care. He pored over the wisdom of Sun-tzu as expressed in the Ping-fa, the Art of War. He revered the old Chinese sage whose repeated advice was “Study your enemy.”

  Devereaux knew who headed the Brotherhood, and he had studied Don Diego Esteban, landowner, gentleman, Catholic scholar, philanthropist, cocaine lord and killer. He knew he had one advantage that would not last forever. He knew about the Don, but the Don knew nothing of the waiting Cobra.

  On the other side of South America, right out over the Brazilian coast, Global Hawk Sam had also been patrolling the stratosphere. Everything it saw was sent to a screen in Nevada and then patched to the computers at Anacostia. The merchant vessels were much fewer. Trade by big carriers from South America due east to West Africa was slimmer. What there was was photographed, and though the vessels’ names were usually out of sight from 60,000 feet, their images were compared to the files of the MOAC in Lisbon, the UN’s ODC in Vienna and the British SOCA in Accra, Ghana.

  Five matches could be given names that were on the Cortez list. The Cobra stared at Bishop’s screens and promised himself their time would come.

  And there was something else Sam noticed and recorded. Airplanes left the Brazilian coast heading due east or northeast for Africa. The commercials were not many and not a problem. But every profile was sent to Creech and then Anacostia. Jeremy Bishop quickly identified them all by type, and a pattern emerged.

  Many of them had not the range. They would not make the distance. Unless they had been internally modified. Global Hawk Sam was given fresh instructions. Refueled at the air base on Fernando de Noronha, it went back up and concentrated on the smaller aircraft.

  Working backward, as from the rim of a bicycle wheel down the spokes to the hub, Sam established they almost all came from a huge estancia deep inland from the city of Fortaleza. Maps of Brazil from space, the images sent back by Sam and discreet checks within the office of land management at Belém identified the ranch. It was called Boa Vista.

  THE AMERICANS got there first, as they had the longest cruise ahead of them. Twelve of them flew into Goa International Airport masquerading as tourists in mid-June. Had anyone delved deep into their baggage, which no one did, the searcher would have found that, by a remarkable coincidence, all twelve were fully qualified as merchant seamen. In truth, they were the same U.S. Navy crew that had originally brought the grain vessel now converted into the MV Chesapeake. A coach hired by McGregor brought them down the coast to the Kapoor shipyard.

  The Chesapeake was waiting, and as there was no accommodation inside the yard they went straight on board for a long sleep. The next morning they began two days of intensive familiarization.

  The senior officer, the new captain, was a Navy commander, and his first officer one rank down. There were two lieutenants and the other eight ran from chief petty officer down to rating. Each specialist concentrated on his individual kingdom: bridge, engine room, galley, radio shack, deck and hatch covers.

  It was when they penetrated the five huge grain holds that they stopped in amazement. There was a complete Special Forces barracks down there, all without portholes or natural daylight and therefore all invisible from the outside. At sea, they were told, they would have no call to come forward from their own quarters. The SEALs would fix their own chow and generally look after themselves.

  The crew would confine themselves to the ship’s normal crew quarters, which were more spacious and more comfortable than they would have had, for example, on a destroyer.

  There was a double-bunked guest cabin, purpose unknown. If the SEAL officers wished to confer with the bridge, they would walk belowdecks through four watertight doors connecting the holds and then upward into the daylight.

  They were not told, because they did not need to know, or not yet, why the hold nearest the bow was a sort of jail to take prisoners. But they were definitely shown how to remove the hatch covers over two of the five holds to bring their contents up into action. This exercise they would practice repeatedly on their long cruise; partly to while away the hours, partly until they could do it in double time and in their sleep.

  On the third day, the parchment-skinned McGregor saw them off to sea. He stood on the end of the seamost groyne, as the Chesapeake came under way and slid past him, and raised an amber glass. He was prepared to live in conditions of heat, malaria, sweat and stench, but never to be without a bottle or two of the distillation of his native islands, the Hebrides.

  The shorter route to her destination would have been across the Arabian Sea and through the Suez Canal. Because of the long shot of Somali pirates proving troublesome off the Horn of Africa, and because she had the time, it had been decided she would turn southwest for the Cape of Good Hope, then northwest to her sea rendezvous off Puerto Rico.

  Three days later, the British arrived to pick up the MV Balmoral. There were fourteen, all Royal Navy, and under the guidance of McGregor they, too, went through a two-day familiarization process. Because the U.S. Navy is “dry” in alcohol terms, the Americans had brought no duty-free spirits from the airport. The inheritors of Nelson’s navy have no such rigors to endure, and they made their mark with Mr. McGregor by bringing several bottles of single malt brew from Islay, his favorite distillery.

  When she was ready, the Balmoral also put to sea. Her sea rendezvous was closer; around the Cape of Good Hope and northwest to Ascension Island, where she would meet, out of sight and land, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary carrying her complement of Special Boat Service Marines and the equipment they, too, would need.

  When the Balmoral was over the horizon, McGregor packed up what was left. The converter crews and internal outfitters were long gone and their motor homes
taken back by the hire company. The old Scot was living in the last of them on his diet of whisky and quinine. The brothers Kapoor had been paid off from bank accounts no one would ever trace and lost all interest in two grain ships they had converted to dive centers. The yard went back to its habitual regime of dismembering ships full of toxic chemicals and asbestos.

  COLLEEN KECK crouched on the wing of the Buccaneer and puckered her face against the wind. The exposed flat plains of Lincolnshire are not balmy ever in June. She had come to say good-bye to the Brazilian of whom she had become fond.

  Beside her, in the forward cockpit of the fighter bomber, sat Major João Mendoza, making last and final checks. In the rear cockpit, where she had sat to train him, the seat was gone. Instead was yet another extra fuel tank, and a radio set that fed straight into the flier’s headphones. Behind them both, the two Spey engines rumbled at the idling pitch.

  When there was no point in waiting anymore, she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “Safe journey, João,” she shouted. He saw her lips move and realized what she had said. He smiled back and raised his right hand, thumb erect. With the arctic wind, the jets behind him and the voice from the tower in his ears, he could not hear her.

  Cdr. Keck slid off the wing and jumped to the ground. The Perspex canopy rolled forward and closed, locking the pilot into his own world; a world of control column, throttles, instruments, gunsight, fuel gauges and tactical air navigator, the TACAN.

  He asked for and got final clearance, turned onto the runway, paused again, checked brakes, released and rolled. Seconds later, the ground crew in the van by the tarmac, who had come to see him off, watched as 22,000 pounds of thrust from twin Speys powered the Buccaneer into the skies and saw it bank toward the south.