The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  It was on the second day that the two crews of the go-fasts experienced the same bewilderment as the captain of the Belleza del Mar. A helicopter appeared out of nowhere and was ahead of them, hovering above an empty blue sea. There was not a warship in sight. This was simply not possible.

  The booming challenge from the loudspeaker to cut engines and heave to was simply ignored. Both racers, long, slim aluminum tubes packing four Yamaha 200 hps at the stern, thought they might outrun the Little Bird. Their speed increased to sixty knots, noses up, only the engines immersed in water, a huge white wake behind each of them. As the Brits had secured Rogue One, these two became Rogues Two and Three.

  The Colombians were mistaken about outrunning a helicopter. As they swept under the Little Bird, she tilted her rotors into a violent turn and came after them. At 120 knots, double their speed.

  Sitting beside the Navy pilot, clutching his M14 sniper rifle, was Petty Officer Sorenson, the platoon’s ace sharpshooter. With a steady platform and a range of a hundred yards, he was confident he was not going to miss very much.

  The pilot used his loudspeaker system again, and he spoke in Spanish.

  “Close down your engines and heave to or we fire.”

  The go-fasts kept racing toward the north, unaware that there were three inflatables packed with sixteen SEALs powering toward them. Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon had put his big RHIB and both his smaller Zodiacs into the water, but, fast though they were, the aluminum darts of the smugglers were even faster. It was the Little Bird’s job to slow them down.

  PO Sorenson had been raised on a farm in Wisconsin, about as far away from the sea as you can get. This may have been why he joined the Navy—to see the sea. The talent he brought from the boondocks was a lifelong expertise with a hunting rifle.

  The Colombians knew the drill. They had not been intercepted by helicopters before, but they had been instructed what to do and that was primarily to protect their engines. Without these roaring monsters behind them, they would become helpless.

  As they saw the M14 surmounted by its scope sight staring at their engines, two of the crew hurled themselves over the housings to prevent them being hit by rifle fire. The forces of law and order would never fire straight through a man’s torso.

  Mistake. Those were the old rules. Back on the farm, PO Sorenson had slotted rabbits at two hundred paces. This target was bigger and closer, and his rules of engagement were clear. His first shot went straight through the brave smuggler, penetrated the cowling and shattered the Yamaha’s engine block.

  The other smuggler, with a yelp of alarm, threw himself backward just in time. The second armor-piercing round shattered the next engine. The go-fast continued on two. But slower. She was very heavily laden.

  One of the remaining three men below produced a Kalashnikov AK-47, and the Little Bird pilot veered away. From his 100 feet up, he could see the black dots of the inflatables closing the gap, creating a closing speed of a hundred knots.

  The undamaged go-fast saw them, too. The helmsman could no longer bother with the enigma of where they had come from. They were there, and he was trying to save his cargo and his freedom. He decided to streak right through them and use his superior speed to get away.

  He nearly succeeded. The damaged go-fast closed down its other two engines and surrendered. The lead boat continued at sixty knots. The SEAL formation split and spread, swerved into shuddering turns and gave chase. Without the helicopter, the smuggler might have been able to race to freedom.

  The Little Bird skimmed the flat sea ahead of the go-fast, turned at ninety degrees and spewed out a hundred yards of invisible blue nylon cord. A small cotton drogue at the end dragged the flex out into the air, and it fell to the ocean where it floated. The go-fast swerved and almost made it. The last twenty yards of the floating cord slid under the hull and wrapped itself around all four propellers. The four Yamahas coughed, choked and stopped.

  After that, resistance was useless. Facing a firing squad of MP5 submachine guns, they allowed themselves to be transferred to the big RHIB, were shackled and hooded. That was the last daylight they saw until they stepped onto Eagle Island, Chagos Archipelago, as guests of Her Majesty.

  An hour later, the Chesapeake was alongside. She took the seven prisoners. The brave dead man was given a blessing and a length of chain to help him sink. Also transferred were two tons of two-stroke fuel (which could be used), various weapons and cell phones (for analysis of previous calls made) and two tons of baled Colombian puro.

  Then the two go-fasts were riddled with holes, and the heavy Yamahas took them down. It was a pity to lose six good and powerful engines, but the instructions of the Cobra, invisible and unknown to the SEALs, were precise: nothing traceable to be left. Only the men and the cocaine are to be taken, and then only for temporary storage. Everything else disappears forever.

  The Little Bird settled on the forward hatch, closed down and was lowered into her out-of-sight home. The three inflatables went up, over the side and into their own hold to be washed down and serviced. The men went below to shower and change. The Chesapeake turned away. The sea was empty again.

  Far ahead, the freight ship Stella Maris IV waited and waited. Finally, she had to resume her voyage to Euro port Rotterdam, but without any extra cargo. Her first officer could only send a bewildered text message to his “girlfriend” in Cartagena. Something about not being able to make their date because his automobile had not been delivered.

  Even that was intercepted by the National Security Agency at their enormous Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was decrypted and passed to the Cobra. He gave a thin smile of gratitude. The message had betrayed the go-fasts’ destination, the Stella Maris IV. She was on the list. Next time.

  IT WAS a week after the Cobra declared open season that Major Mendoza received his first call to fly. Global Hawk Sam spotted a small twin-engined transport lifting off from the Boa Vista Ranch, clearing the coast over Fortaleza and heading out across the wide Atlantic on a heading of 045° which would take her to any landfall between Liberia and the Gambia.

  Computer imaging identified her as a Transall, a onetime Franco-German collaboration that had been bought by South Africa and, at the end of her active service as a military transport, sold secondhand to the civilian market in South America.

  She was not large, but a reliable workhouse. She also had a range that would in no way take her across the Atlantic, even at the shortest point. So she had been “doctored” with extra internal fuel tanks. For three hours, she plodded northeast through the near darkness of a tropical night, flying at 8,000 feet above a flat plain of cloud.

  Major Mendoza pointed the nose of the Buccaneer straight down the runway and completed final checks. In his ears he did not hear the control tower speaking in Portuguese, for it was long closed down. He heard the warm tones of an American woman. The two American communications personnel on Fogo with him had taken her message an hour earlier and alerted the Brazilian to get ready to fly. Now she was patched through to his earphones. He did not know she was a U.S. Air Force captain sitting behind a screen in Creech, Nevada. He did not know she was watching a blip that represented a Transall freighter, and that soon he, too, would be a blip on that screen, and that she would bring the two blips together.

  He glanced out at the ground crew that stood in the darkness of the Fogo airfield and saw the “Go” signal flashed at him. This was his “control tower,” but it worked. He raised his right thumb in assent.

  The two Speys increased their howl, and the Bucc shuddered against the brakes, wanting to be free. Mendoza flicked the RATO switch and freed the brakes. The Bucc flung herself forward, he emerged from the shadow of the volcanic mountain and saw the sea gleaming in the moonlight.

  The rocket thrust took him in the small of the back. Speed shot up and through takeoff velocity, the wheel rumble ceased and she was up.

  “Climb to fifteen thousand feet on heading one-nine-zero,” said the warm molasses voi
ce. He checked the compass, steadied the craft on 190° and climbed to height as instructed.

  In an hour, he was three hundred miles south of the Cape Verdes, turning in a slow rate 1 circle, waiting. He saw the target at one o’clock low. Above the plateau of cloud, the gibbous moon had appeared and clothed the scene in a pale white light. Then he saw a flitting shadow below him and to his right. It was heading northeast; he was still halfway around a sweeping turn. He completed the turn and came up behind the prey.

  “Your target is five miles ahead of you, six thousand feet below.”

  “Roger, I have it,” he said. “Contact.”

  “Contact acknowledged. Clear engage.”

  He dropped until the outline of the Transall in the moonlight was quite clear. He had been given an album of likely planes used by cocaine fliers, and there was no doubt this was a Transall. There could simply be no innocent plane like that in the sky.

  He flicked off the safety catch of his Aden cannon, placed his thumb over the Fire button and gazed ahead through the gunsight modified at Scampton. He knew his two gun packs were centered to concentrate their united firepower at four hundred meters.

  For a moment, he hesitated. There were men in that machine. Then he thought of another man, a boy on a marble slab in the São Paolo mortuary. His kid brother. He fired.

  There was a mixture of fragmentation, incendiary and tracer in his ammunition packs. The bright tracer would show him his line of fire. The other two would destroy what they hit.

  He watched the two lines of red fire race away from him and unite at four hundred meters. Both impacted into the hull of the Transall just to the left of the rear loading doors. For half a second, the freighter seemed to shudder in midair. Then it imploded.

  He did not even see it break up, disintegrate and fall. Its crew had evidently only just begun to draw on the inboard reserves, so those tanks inside the hull were brimful. They took the white-hot incendiary rounds, and the whole airplane turned molten. A shower of blazing fragments fell through the cloud layer beneath, and that was it. Gone. One plane, four men, two tons of cocaine.

  Major Mendoza had never killed anyone before. He stared for several seconds at the hole in the sky where the Transall had been. He had wondered for days what he would feel. Now he knew. He just felt empty. Neither exultant nor remorseful. He had told himself many times; just think of Manolo on his marble slab, sixteen years old, never to have a life to lead. When he spoke, his voice was quite steady.

  “Target down,” he said.

  “I know,” said the voice out of Nevada. She had seen the two blips become one. “Maintain altitude. Steer three-five-five for base.”

  Seventy minutes later, he watched the runway lights of Fogo turn on for him and shut down when he was taxiing toward the rock hangar. Rogue Four had ceased to be.

  Three hundred miles away in Africa, a group of men waited by a jungle airstrip. And waited and waited. At dawn they climbed into their SUVs and drove away. One of them would send a coded e-mail to Bogotá.

  ALFREDO SUÁREZ, in charge of all shipments from Colombia to clients, was in fear for his life. Barely four had been lost. He had guaranteed the Don to deliver three hundred tons to each target continent and had been promised a margin of up to two hundred tons as acceptable losses in transit. But that was not the point.

  The Hermandad, as the Don was now putting it to him very personally and with frightening calm, had two problems. One was that four separate cargoes in three separate transport methods had apparently been either captured or destroyed; much more perplexing, and the Don hated to be perplexed, was that there was not a trace of a clue as to what had gone wrong.

  The captain of the Belleza del Mar should have reported he was in trouble of some kind. He did not. The two go-fasts should have used their cell phones if anything went wrong. They did not. The Transall had also taken off, fully fueled and in good order, and without a Mayday call had vanished off the earth.

  “Mysterious, would you not say, my very dear Alfredo?” When the Don spoke in terms of endearment, he was at his most frightening.

  “Yes, my Don.”

  “And what explanation could you possibly imagine?”

  “I do not know. All carriers have ample means of communication. Computers, cell phones, ships’ radios. And short coded messages to say what is wrong. They have tested their equipment, memorized the messages.”

  “And yet they are silent,” mused Don Diego.

  He had listened to the Enforcer’s report and concluded that it was extremely unlikely the captain of the Belleza del Mar was the culprit in his own disappearance.

  The captain was known to be a dedicated family man, he would have known what would happen if he betrayed the cartel and he had concluded six successful voyages to West Africa before.

  There was only one common denominator for two of the three mysteries. Both the fishing boat and the Transall had been heading for Guinea-Bissau. Even though the two go-fasts out of the Gulf of Urabá were an enigma, the finger was still pointing at something going badly wrong in Guinea.

  “Do you have another consignment for West Africa soon, Alfredo?”

  “Yes, Don Diego. Next week. Five tons going by sea to Liberia.”

  “Change it to Guinea-Bissau. And you have a very bright young deputy?”

  “Álvaro, Álvaro Fuentes. His father was very big in the old Cali cartel. He was born to this work. Very loyal.”

  “Then he should accompany this cargo. And be in touch every three hours, night and day, all the way. Prerecorded messages on both laptop and cell phone. Nothing to do but press a button. And I want a listening watch at this end. Permanently, on shifts. Do I make myself plain?”

  “Perfectly, Don Diego. It will be done.”

  FR. EUSEBIO had never seen anything like it. His parish was large and rural, spread over many villages, but all humble, hardworking and poor. Not for him the bright lights and luxury marinas of Barranquilla and Cartagena. What had moored just off the mouth of the creek that led out of the mangroves to the sea did not belong there.

  The whole village went to the frail timber jetty to stare. She was over fifty meters long, gleaming white, with luxury cabins on three decks and brightwork that the crew had polished until it gleamed. No one knew who owned it, and none of its crew had come ashore. Why should they? For one village with a single dirt street, where chickens pecked, and a single bodega?

  What the good Father and Jesuit could not know was that the craft moored out of sight of the ocean around two curves in the creek was a very luxurious oceangoing yacht called a “Fead ship.” It had six sumptuous staterooms, for the owner and guests, and a crew of ten. It had been built in a Dutch yard three years earlier to the personal order of its owner and would not have appeared in Edmiston’s catalog for sale (which it was not) for less than $20 million.

  It is an oddity that most people are born at night and many also die at night. Fr. Eusebio was wakened at three in the morning by a tapping on his door. It was a little girl from a family he knew to say that Grandpa was spitting blood, and Mama feared he might not see the morning.

  Fr. Eusebio knew the man. He was sixty, looked ninety and had smoked the foulest tobacco for fifty years. The last two, he had been coughing up mucus and blood. The parish priest slipped on a cassock, gathered his shawl and rosary and hurried after the girl.

  The family lived near the water, one of the last houses in the village that overlooked the creek. And indeed the old man was truly dying. Fr. Eusebio gave the last rites and sat with him until he drifted away into a sleep from which he would probably not wake. Before he slipped away, he asked for a cigarette. The parish priest shrugged, and the daughter gave him one. There was nothing more the priest could do. In a few days, he would bury his parishioner. For the moment, he needed to complete his night’s rest.

  As he left, he glanced toward the sea. On the water between the jetty and the moored cruiser was a large open boat chugging out to sea. There were three
men on board and a small amount of bales in the thwarts. The luxury yacht was showing lights at her stern, where several crewmen waited to receive cargo. Fr. Eusebio watched and spat in the dust. He thought of the family he had buried ten days earlier.

  Back in his room, he prepared to resume his interrupted sleep. But he paused, went to the drawer and pulled out the gizmo. He did not know about texting and did not own a cell phone. He never had. But he had a small piece of paper on which he had written the list of buttons he had to press if he wanted to use the little machine. He pressed them one by one. The gizmo spoke. A woman’s voice said “¿Oiga?” He addressed the cell phone.

  “Se habla español?” he asked.

  “Claro, Padre,” said the woman. “¿Qué quiere?”

  He did not know quite how to phrase it.

  “In my village is moored a very large boat. I think it takes on board a great quantity of the white powder.”

  “Does it have a name, Father?”

  “Yes, I have seen it on the back. In gold letters. It is called the Orion Lady.”

  Then he lost his nerve and put the phone down so nobody could trace him. The computerized database took five seconds to identify the cell phone, the user and his exact location. In another ten, it had identified the Orion Lady.

  She was owned by Nelson Bianco of Nicaragua, a multimillionaire playboy, polo player and party giver. She was not listed as one worked on by Juan Cortez, the welder. But her deck plan was obtained from her builders and fed into the memory of Global Hawk Michelle, who found the boat before dawn as she slipped out of the creek and headed for the open sea.

  Further investigations during the morning, including consultation with the social diaries, revealed Señor Bianco was due in Fort Lauderdale for a polo tournament.

  As the Orion Lady cruised north northwest to round Cuba by the Yucatán Channel, the Q-ship Chesapeake moved to cut her off.