The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  Also transferring were two ship-search experts from the U.S. Coast Guard, two dog handlers from customs, two communications men from Command HQ and, waiting on their helicopter pad over the stern of the mother ship, the two pilots from the Navy. They sat inside their Little Bird, something the SEALs had rarely seen and never used before.

  If they were ever deployed in helicopters, it would be in the new Boeing Knight Hawk. But the little spotter was the only helo whose rotors would descend into the hold of the Chesapeake when its hatch covers were open.

  Also in the transferring equipment were the usual German-made Heckler & Koch MP5a submachine guns, the SEALs’ weapon of choice for anything close-quarter; diving gear, the standard Dräger units; rifles for the four snipers and a mass of ammunition.

  As the light faded, the EP-3 above told them the sea was still clear. The Little Bird lifted off, circled like an angry bee and settled on the Chesapeake. As both rotors stopped, the onboard derrick lifted the small helicopter and lowered her into the hold. The deck covers, moving smoothly on their rails, closed over the holds, and the coatings sealed them against rain and spray.

  The two ships parted company, and the mother ship edged away into the gloom. On her bridge, some jokester flashed a message in code from an Aldis lamp, the technology of a hundred years ago. On the bridge of the Chesapeake, it was the Navy captain who worked it out. It said “G-O-D-S-P-E-E-D.”

  During the night, the Chesapeake slipped through the islands into her patrol areas; the Caribbean Basin and the Gulf of Mexico. Any inquirer on the Internet would have been told she was a perfectly lawful grain ship taking wheat from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the hungry mouths of South America.

  Belowdecks, the SEALs were cleaning and checking weapons yet again; the engineers were bringing the outboards and the helicopter to combat readiness; the cooks were rustling up some dinner, as they stocked their lockers and fridges; and the comms men were setting up their gear for a twenty-four-hour listening watch on a covert and encrypted channel coming out of a shabby warehouse in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

  The call they had been told to wait for might come in ten weeks, ten days or ten minutes. When it came, they intended to be combat ready.

  THE HOTEL SANTA CLARA is a luxury lodging in the heart of the historic center of Cartagena, a conversion from a nunnery hundreds of years old. Its complete details had been forwarded to Cal Dexter by the SOCA agent who lived undercover as a teacher at the naval cadet school. Dexter had studied the plans and insisted on one certain suite.

  He checked in as “Mr. Smith” just after noon on the appointed Sunday. Perfectly aware that five muscled hoodlums were rather visibly sitting without drinks in the inner courtyard or studying notices pinned to the walls of the lobby, he took a light lunch in an atrium under the trees. As he ate, a toucan fluttered out of the leaves, settled on the chair opposite and stared at him.

  “Pal, I suspect you are a damn lot safer in this place than I am,” murmured Mr. Smith. When he was done, he signed the check to his room and took the elevator to the top floor. He had let it be seen that he was there and alone.

  Devereaux, in a rare display of even a flicker of concern, had suggested he take “backup” in the form of his by-now-adopted Green Berets from Fort Clark. He declined.

  “Good though they are,” he said, “they are not invisible. If Cárdenas sees a thing, he will not show. He will assume they’re there for his own assassination or snatch.”

  As he stepped out of the lift at the fifth, top floor and headed down the open-sided walkway to his suite, he knew he had complied with the advice of Sun-tzu. Always let them underestimate you.

  There was a man with a mop and bucket farther down the open passage as he reached his room. Not very subtle. In Cartagena, women do the swabbing. He let himself in. He knew what he would find. He had seen pictures of it: a large, airy room cooled by air-conditioning; a tiled floor, dark oak furniture and wide patio doors that gave onto the terrace. It was half past three.

  He killed the air-conditioning, drew the curtains back, opened the glass doors and stepped onto the balcony. Above was the clear blue of a Colombian summer day. Behind his head and just three feet up, the gutter and the ocher tiled roof. Ahead and five floors down, the swimming pool glittered below him. A swallow dive might almost have dropped him in the shallow end, but more likely have left a mess on the flagstones. That was not what he had in mind anyway.

  He walked back into the room, pulled a wing chair to a position where the open patio doors were to his side, and he had a clear view of the door. Finally, he crossed the room, opened the door, which, like all hotel room doors, was spring loaded and self-locking, wedged it a quarter inch open and returned to his seat. He waited, staring at the door. At four o’clock, it was pushed open. Roberto Cárdenas, career gangster and many times killer, stood framed against the blue sky outside.

  “Señor Cárdenas. Please, enter, take a seat.”

  The father of the young woman in a detention center in New York took a pace forward. The door swung closed and the bronze locking bar clicked. It would need the right plastic card or a battering ram to open it from outside.

  Cárdenas reminded Dexter of a main battle tank on legs. He was burly, solid, seeming immovable if he did not want to move. He might have been fifty, but he was muscle packed, with the face of an Aztec blood god.

  Cárdenas had been told that the man who had intercepted his Madrid messenger and sent him a personal letter would be alone and unarmed, but of course he did not believe it. His own men had been vetting the hotel and its surrounds since dawn. He had a Glock 9mm in his waistband at the back and a razor-edged knife against the calf inside his right trouser leg. His eyes flickered around the room for a hidden trap, the waiting squad of Americans.

  Dexter had left the bathroom door open, but Cárdenas still had a quick look inside. It was empty. He glared at Dexter, as a bull in a Spanish ring who can see his enemy is small and weak but cannot quite understand why he is there without protection. Dexter gestured to the other wing chair. He spoke in Spanish.

  “As we both know, there are times when violence works. This is not one of those times. Let us talk. Please, sit.”

  Without taking his eyes off the American, Cárdenas lowered himself into the padded chair. The gun in the small of his back caused him to sit forward slightly. Dexter did not fail to notice.

  “You have my daughter.” He was not a great man for small talk.

  “The New York law authorities have your daughter.”

  “It would be better for you if she is well.”

  A Julio Luz almost urinating with fear had told him what Boseman Barrow had said about some of the upstate women’s penitentiaries.

  “She is well, señor. Distressed, of course, but not maltreated. She is retained in Brooklyn, where conditions are comfortable. In fact, she is on suicide watch . . .”

  He held up his hand as Cárdenas threatened to come roaring out of his chair.

  “But only as a ruse. It means she has her own room in the hospital annex. She does not need to mix with other prisoners, the riffraff, so to speak.”

  The man who had risen from the gutters of the barrio to key member of the Brotherhood, the controlling cartel of the world’s cocaine industry, stared at Dexter, still unable to make him out.

  “You are a fool, gringo. This is my city. I could take you here. With ease. A few hours with me, and you would be begging to make the call. My daughter for you.”

  “Very true. You could, and I would. The trouble is, the people at the other end would not agree. They have their orders. You of all people understand the rules of absolute obedience. I am too small a pawn. There would be no swap. All that would happen is that Letizia would go north.”

  The black-eyed, hate-filled stare did not flicker, but the message went home.

  The idea that the slim, gray-haired American was not a pawn but a main player, he discounted. He himself would never have gone into enemy territor
y alone and unarmed, so why should the Yanqui? A snatch would not work—either way. He would not be snatched, and there was no point in taking the American.

  Cárdenas thought back to the report from Luz on the advice of Barrow. Twenty years, an exemplary sentence. No viable defense, an open-and-shut case, no Domingo de Vega to say it was all his idea.

  While Cárdenas was thinking, Cal Dexter reached with his right hand to scratch his chest. For a second, his fingers went behind his jacket lapel. Cárdenas came forward, ready to draw his hidden Glock. Mr. Smith smiled apologetically.

  “Mosquitoes,” he said. “They will not leave me alone.”

  Cárdenas was not interested. He relaxed as the right hand came out. He would have been less relaxed had he known the fingertips had touched a sensitive Go button on a wafer-thin transmitter clipped to the inside pocket.

  “What do you want, gringo?”

  “Well,” said Dexter, impervious to the rudeness of the address.

  “Unless there is an intervention, the people behind me cannot stop the justice machine. Not in New York. It cannot be bought and it cannot be diverted. Soon, even the mercy of keeping Letizia out of harm’s way in Brooklyn will have to be terminated.”

  “She is innocent. You know that, I know that. You want money? I will make you rich for life. Get her out of there. I want her back.”

  “Of course. But, as I say, I am but a pawn. Perhaps there is a way.”

  “Tell me.”

  “If the UDYCO in Madrid were to discover a corrupt baggage handler and he were to give a full and witnessed confession that he chose a suitcase at random after the usual security checks and inserted the cocaine to be retrieved by a colleague in New York, then your lawyer could ask for an emergency hearing. It would be hard for a New York judge not to drop the case. To go on would be to refuse to believe our Spanish friends across the Atlantic. I honestly believe that is the only way.”

  There was a low rumble, as if storm clouds were gathering out of a blue sky.

  “This . . . baggage handler. He could be discovered and forced to confess?”

  “He might. It depends on you, Señor Cárdenas.”

  The rumble grew louder. It separated into a rhythmic whump-whump. Cárdenas repeated his demand.

  “What do you want, gringo?”

  “I think we both know that. You want a swap? That is it. What you have in return for Letizia.”

  He rose, tossed a small pasteboard card to the carpet, walked through the patio doors and turned left. The snaking steel-cord ladder came around the corner of the hotel roof, flailing in the downdraft.

  He jumped to the balustrade, thought, I’m too goddamn old for this, and leapt at the rungs. He could sense above the roar of the rotors that Cárdenas was coming out onto the terrace behind him. He waited for the bullet in the back, but it never came. At any rate, not in time. If Cárdenas fired, Dexter would not have heard it. He felt the rungs bite into his palms, and the man above leaned back hard and the Black Hawk went up like a rocket.

  Seconds later, he was lowered to the sandy beach just beyond the walls of the Santa Clara. The Black Hawk settled as two or three dog walkers gawped; he ducked into the crew door, and the helicopter rose again. Twenty minutes later, he was back inside the base.

  DON DIEGO ESTEBAN prided himself on running the Hermandad , the supreme cocaine cartel, like one of the most successful corporations on the planet. He even indulged in the conceit that the governing authority was the board of directors rather than himself alone, even though that was palpably not true. Despite the huge inconvenience to his colleagues of spending two days dodging the tailing agents of Colonel Dos Santos, he insisted on quarterly meetings.

  It was his custom to name, by personal emissary only, the hacienda, one of fifteen he owned, where the conclave would take place, and he expected his colleagues to arrive un-followed. The days of Pablo Escobar, when half the police were in the cartel’spocket, were long gone. Colonel Dos Santos was an unbribable attack dog, and the Don both respected and loathed him for it.

  His summer meeting he always held at the end of June. He convened his six colleagues, omitting only the Enforcer, Paco Valdez, El Animal, who was summoned only when there were matters of internal discipline to be attended to. That time, there were none.

  The Don listened with approval to reports on increased production from the peasants but without any rise in price. The production chief, Emilio Sánchez, assured him enough pasta base could be grown and bought in to meet any needs from other branches of the cartel.

  Rodrigo Pérez was able to assure him that internal thievery of the product prior to export was down to a reduced percentage, thanks to several hideous examples that had been made of those who thought they could cheat the cartel. The private army, mainly recruited from the jungle-living former terrorist groups known as FARC, was in good order.

  Don Diego, playing the benign host, personally refilled Pérez’s wineglass, a signal honor.

  Julio Luz, the lawyer/banker who had been completely unable to make eye contact with Roberto Cárdenas, reported that the ten banks around the world who helped him launder billions of euros and dollars were content to continue and had not been penetrated or even suspected by the forces of banking regulation.

  José-María Largo had even better news on the merchandising front. Appetite in the two target zones, the USA and Europe, was now climbing to unprecedented levels. The forty gangs and sub-mafias who were the clients of the cartel had placed even larger orders.

  Two big gangs, in Spain and Britain, had been rounded up en masse, tried, sentenced and were out of the field. They had been smoothly replaced by eager newcomers. Demand would be at record levels for the coming year. Heads leaned forward as he produced his figures. He would need a minimum of three hundred tons of pure delivered intact to the handover points on each continent.

  That put the focus on the two men whose job it was to guarantee those arrivals. It was probably a mistake to snub Roberto Cárdenas, whose international network of on-the-payroll officials in airports, docks and customs sheds across both continents was crucial. The Don simply did not like the man. He gave the star role to Alfredo Suárez, the maestro of transportation from Colombian source to northern buyer. Suárez preened like a peacock, and made his servility to the Don plain.

  “Given what we have all heard, I have no doubt that the six-hundred-ton delivery figure can be met. If our friend Emilio can produce eight hundred tons, we have a twenty-five percent margin for loss by interception, confiscation, theft or loss at sea. I have never lost anything like that percentage.

  “We have over one hundred ships served by more than a thousand small boats. Some of our dedicated ships are big freighters, taking on our cargoes at sea and being relieved of them before arrival. Others take the cargo from dockside to dockside, assisted at both ends by officials on the payroll of our friend here, Roberto.

  “Some of these carry sea containers, now used worldwide for freight of every kind and description, including ours. Others in the same group use secret compartments created by the clever little welder of Cartagena who died a few months ago. His name escapes me.”

  “Cortez,” growled Cárdenas, who came from that city. “His name was Cortez.”

  “Precisely. Well, whatever. Then there are the smaller craft, tramp steamers, fishing boats, private yachts. Between them, they carry and land almost a hundred tons a year. And finally we have our fifty-plus freelance pilots who fly and land or fly and drop.

  “Some fly into Mexico to hand over to our Mexican friends, who bring the cargoes over the U.S. border in the north. Others go direct to one of the million creeks and bays along the southern coast of the U.S. The third category flies across to West Africa.”

  “Are there any innovations since last year?” asked Don Diego. “We were not amused by the fate of our fleet of submarines. A massive expenditure, all lost.”

  Suárez swallowed. He recalled what had happened to his predecessor who had back
ed a policy of submersibles and an army of one-journey mules. The Colombian Navy had traced and destroyed the subs; the new X-ray machines being deployed across both target continents were reducing successful in-stomach shipments to under fifty percent.

  “Don Diego, those tactics are virtually extinct. As you know, one submersible that was at sea at the time of the naval strike was later intercepted, forced to surface and arrested in the Pacific off Guatemala. We lost twelve tons. For the rest, I am downgrading the use of mules with a single kilo each.

  “I am concentrating on one hundred shipments per target continent at an average of three tons per cargo. I guarantee, my Don, I can deliver safely three hundred tons per continent after notional losses of ten percent to interception and confiscation and five percent to loss at sea. That is nothing like the twenty-five percent margin that Emilio suggests between his eight hundred tons of product and six hundred tons of safe delivery.”

  “You can guarantee that?” asked the Don.

  “Yes, Don Diego. I believe I can . . .”

  “Then let us hold you to that,” murmured the Don. The room chilled. Through his own bombast, the cringing Alfredo Suárez was on life support. The Don did not tolerate failure. He rose and beamed.

  “Please, my friends, lunch awaits us.”

  THE TINY padded envelope did not look like much. It arrived by recorded delivery at the one-use safe house on the card Cal Dexter had dropped on the hotel-room floor. It contained a memory stick. He took it to Jeremy Bishop.

  “What’s on it?” asked the computer wizard.

  “I wouldn’t have brought it to you if I knew.”

  Bishop’s brow furrowed.

  “You mean you can’t insert it into your own laptop?”

  Dexter was slightly embarrassed. He could do many things that would leave Bishop in intensive care, but his grasp of cybertechnology was lower than basic. He watched as Bishop performed, for him, a kindergarten task.