The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  Internally, he was in a homicidal rage. There would be blood, he vowed. There would be screams. There would be death. But first, analysis.

  Against Roberto Cárdenas, there could be nothing proved. One exposure of one of his on-the-payroll agents in Hamburg was probably bad luck. A coincidence. But not the rest. Not five vessels at sea and two planes in the air. Not the forces of law and order—they would have held press conferences, flaunted confiscated bales. He was used to that. Let them gloat over fragments. The entire cocaine industry was worth $300 billion a year. More than the national budget of most of the nations outside the G30 of the richest.

  The profits were so vast that no amount of arrests could stop the army of volunteers screaming to take the places of the dead and imprisoned; profits big enough to make Gates and Buffett look like street vendors. The equal of their entire wealth was generated each year by cocaine.

  But nonarrival, that was dangerous. The purchasing monster had to be fed. If the cartel was violent and vengeful, so also were the Mexicans, Italians, Cubans, Turks, Albanians, Spaniards and the rest whose organized gangs would slaughter over an ill-advised word.

  So if not coincidence, and that was now no longer to be entertained as a reason, who was stealing his product, killing his crews, causing his shipments to vanish into thin air?

  For the Don, this was treachery or theft, which was another form of treachery. And treachery had only one response. Identify and punish with insensate violence. Whoever they were, they had to learn. Nothing personal, but you cannot treat the Don like that.

  He went back to his trembling guest.

  “Send the Enforcer to me,” he said.

  CHAPTER 12

  PACO VALDEZ, THE ENFORCER, AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS flew into Guinea-Bissau. The Don was not prepared to risk any more high-seas disappearances. Nor was he going to indulge the American DEA by having his creatures travel by scheduled commercial airline.

  By the end of the first decade of the third millennium, the surveillance and control of all intercontinental airline passengers had become so total that it was unlikely that Valdez, with his unusual appearance, would not be spotted and followed. So they flew in the Don’s private Grumman G4.

  Don Diego was absolutely right . . . up to a point. But the twin-jet executive luxury aircraft still needed to fly a virtually straight line from Bogotá to Guinea-Bissau, and this brought her under the wide patrol circle of Global Hawk Sam. So the Grumman was spotted, identified and logged. When he heard the news, the Cobra smiled with satisfaction.

  The Enforcer was met at Bissau Airport by the head of operations for the cartel in Guinea-Bissau, Ignacio Romero. Despite his seniority, Romero was very deferential. For one thing, Valdez was the Don’s personal emissary; for another, his reputation was fear inspiring throughout the cocaine trade; and, for a third, Romero had been forced to report the nonarrival of four major cargoes, two by sea and two by air.

  That cargoes should be lost was part of the permanent risk factor involved in the trade. In many parts of that trade, especially the direct routes into North America and Europe, those losses might hover around fifteen percent, which could be absorbed by the Don so long as the explanations were logical and convincing. But losses on the West Africa run had for Romero’s entire tenure in Guinea been close to zero, which was why the Europe-bound percentage using the African dogleg had risen over five years from twenty to seventy percent of the total.

  Romero was very proud of his safe-arrival figures. He had a flotilla of Bijagós canoes and several fast pseudo-fishing boats at his disposal, all equipped with GPS locators to ensure pinpoint rendezvous at sea for cocaine transfers.

  Added to this, he had the military establishment in his pocket. General Diallo’s soldiers actually did the heavy-lifting work during unloading; the general took his ample cut in the form of cocaine and ran his own shipments north to Europe in cahoots with the Nigerians. Paid off via West Africa’s army of Lebanese money brokers, the general was already a rich man in world terms, and, in local terms, an African Croesus.

  And then this. Not simply four lost cargoes but total disappearances without a clue of explanation. His cooperation with the Don’s emissary was a given; he was relieved that the one called the Animal was genial and good-humored toward him. He should have known.

  As always when a Colombian passport appeared at the airport, formalities vanished. The crew of three was ordered to live on the G4, use the facilities of the VIP suite, such as it was, and never to leave the jet without at least one onboard. Then Romero drove his guests in his luxury SUV through the war-gutted city and on to his mansion by the beach ten miles out of town.

  Valdez had brought two assistants with him. One was short but immensely broad and beefy, the other tall, skinny and pockmarked. They each carried a grip that went uninspected. All experts need their tools.

  The Enforcer appeared an easy guest. He demanded a vehicle of his own and a suggestion for a good lunch restaurant out of town. Romero proposed the Mar Azul, out on the banks of the Mansôa behind Quinhámel, for its fresh lobster. He offered to drive his guests there personally, but Valdez waved away the proposal, took a map and left, with the beefy one at the wheel. They were away most of the day.

  Romero was bemused. They did not seem interested in his foolproof procedures for cargo-reception and onward-transmission routes to North Africa and Europe.

  On the second day, Valdez declared that as lunch by the river had been so splendid, they should all four repeat the outing. He mounted the SUV beside the beefy one, who replaced Romero’s regular driver. Romero and Skinny took the rear seats.

  The newcomers seemed to know the route well. They hardly referred to the map and drove unerringly through Quinhámel, the unofficial capital of the Papel tribe. The Papels had been bereft of influence since President Vieira, who was one of them, had been chopped to bits with machetes by the Army a year earlier. Since then, General Diallo, a Balanta, had been the dictator.

  After the town, the signposted road to the restaurant left the main highway and went down a sandy track for another six miles. Halfway down, Valdez nodded to the side, and the beefy one swerved into an even smaller track toward an abandoned cashew farm. At this point, Romero began to plead.

  “Be quiet, señor,” said the Enforcer quietly. When he would not stop protesting his innocence, the skinny one drew a slim boning knife and held it under his jaw. He began to weep.

  The farmhouse was little more than a shack, but it had a chair of sorts. Romero was too distressed to notice that someone had screwed its legs to the floor to stop it from rocking.

  The zone chief ’s interrogators were quite matter-of-fact and businesslike. Valdez did nothing but stare from his cherubic little face at the surrounding cashew trees, overgrown and unharvested. His assistants hauled Romero out of the SUV, into the farmhouse, stripped him to the waist and tied him to the chair. What followed took an hour.

  The Animal started, because he enjoyed it, until the questioned one lost consciousness, then he handed over. His acolytes used smelling salts to restore consciousness, and after that Valdez simply asked the question. There was only one. What had Romero done with the stolen cargoes?

  An hour later, it was almost over. The man in the chair had ceased to scream. His pulped lips uttered only a low moan in the form of a “No-o-o-o-o-o” when, after a brief pause, the two tormentors started again. The beefy one did the hitting, the skinny one the cutting. It was what they were best at.

  Toward the end, Romero was unrecognizable. He had no ears, eyes or nose. All the knuckles were crushed and the nails removed. The chair sat in a pool of blood.

  Valdez noticed something at his feet, stooped and threw it out through the open door into the eye-searing sunlight outside. In seconds, a mangy dog approached it. There was a dribble of white saliva around its jaws. It was rabid.

  The Enforcer pulled an automatic, cocked it, drew a bead and fired once. The slug went through both hips. The foxlike creature utt
ered a shrill yelp and collapsed, its forepaws scratching for traction, the two rear legs useless. Valdez turned, holstering the gun.

  “Finish him,” he said mildly. “He did not do it.” What was left of Romero died with a thrust from the boning knife through the heart.

  The three men from Bogotá did not try to hide what they had done. That task could be left to Romero’s deputy, Carlos Sonora, who could now take over. The experience of clearing up would be salutary and a guarantee of future loyalty.

  The three took off their splashed plastic raincoats and rolled them up. All were soaked in sweat. As they left, they were careful to step clear of the foaming muzzle of the dying dog. It lay snapping at thin air, still a yard short of the tidbit that had brought it from its lair. It was a human nose.

  Escorted by Sonora, Paco Valdez paid a courtesy call on General Jalo Diallo, who received them in his office at Army HQ. Explaining that this was the custom of his people, Valdez brought a personal gift from Don Diego Esteban to his esteemed African colleague. It was an elaborate flower vase of finely turned native pottery and delicately hand-painted.

  “For flowers,” said Valdez, “so that when you look at them you can think of our profitable and comradely relationship.”

  Sonora translated into Portuguese. The skinny one fetched water from the en suite bathroom. The beefy one had brought a bunch of flowers. They made an attractive display. The general beamed. No one noticed that the vase accommodated remarkably little water, and the stalks of the flowers were rather short. Valdez noted the number of the desk telephone, one of the few in town that actually worked.

  The next day was Sunday. The party from Bogotá was about to leave. Sonora would drive them to the airport. Half a mile past Army HQ, Valdez ordered a halt. On his cell phone, operated by MTN, the one local service provider, used only by the elite, the whites and the Chinese, he called the desk phone in General Diallo’s office.

  It took a few minutes for the general to walk through from his adjacent residential suite to his office. When he answered, he was a yard from the vase. Valdez pressed the detonator in his hand.

  The explosion brought down most of the building and reduced the office to brick rubble. Of the dictator, a few fragments were found and later taken back to Balanta territory for tribal burial among the spirits of the ancestors.

  “You will need a new business partner,” Valdez told Sonora on the road to the airport. “An honest one. The Don does not like thieves. See to it.”

  The Grumman was ready for takeoff, fully fueled. It passed north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, where Sam noticed and reported it. The coup in West Africa made the BBC World Service TV news, but it was a reported item without video so it did not last long.

  A FEW DAYS EARLIER, there was another newscast that raised no eyebrows, but it was on CNN out of New York. Ordinarily the deportation from Kennedy of a young Colombian student back to her studies in Madrid after the dropping of charges against her in Brooklyn might not have rated coverage. But someone pulled strings somewhere, and a crew was sent.

  There was a two-minute report on the evening news. By nine p.m. it had been discontinued on editorial grounds. But while it lasted, it showed the ICE car drawing up at international departures, and two marshals escorting a very pretty young woman with a subdued manner across the concourse until they disappeared through the security barrier, where the group was not stopped.

  The soundtrack narrated simply that Ms. Arenal had been the victim of an attempt by a criminal baggage handler in Madrid to use her suitcase on a trip to New York as a vehicle for a kilogram of cocaine that had been discovered in a spot check at Kennedy several weeks earlier. The arrest and confession in Spain had exonerated the Colombian student, who had been freed to return to her fine arts course in Madrid.

  It made no waves, but it was spotted and recorded in Colombia. After that, Roberto Cárdenas replayed the segment frequently. It enabled him to see the daughter he had not set eyes on in years, and it reminded him of her mother, Conchita, who had been truly beautiful.

  Unlike many of the top echelon of the cocaine trade, Cárdenas had never developed the taste for ostentation and luxury. He had come from the gutters and fought his way up through the old cartels. He was one of the first to spot the rising star of Don Diego and realize the benefits of centralization and concentration. This is why the Don, convinced of his loyalty, had taken him into the newly formed Hermandad at an early stage.

  Cárdenas had the animal instincts of shy game; he knew his forest, he could sense danger, he never failed to settle a score. He had only one weak point, and a lawyer whose too-regular visits to Madrid had been spotted by a computer surfer far away in Washington had exposed it. When Conchita, who had raised Letizia alone after they parted, died of cancer, Cárdenas had got his daughter out of the nest of pit vipers, which was the world in which he was condemned to live because he knew no other.

  He should have made a run for safety after the destruction of Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg. He knew it; his antennae did not let him down. He just refused. He hated a place called “abroad,” and could run his division of bribed foreign officials only through a team of youngsters who moved like fish among the foreign coral. He could not do that and he knew it.

  Like a jungle creature, he moved constantly from refuge to refuge, even in his own forest. He had fifty bolt-holes, mainly within the zone around Cartagena, and he bought use-and-throw prepaid cell phones like candies, never making more than one call before heaving the communicator into a river. He was so elusive that sometimes the cartel took a day or so to find him. And that was something the highly effective Colonel Dos Santos, head of intelligence in the anti-drug division of the Policía Judicial, could not do.

  His bolt-holes tended to be working cottages, obscure, plainly furnished, even spartan. But there was one indulgence he cherished; he loved his TV. He had the best and newest model of plasma screen, the sharpest aerial dish, and they traveled with him.

  He liked to sit with a six-pack of beer flicking through the satellite channels or screening movies on the DVD player below the screen. He loved the cartoons because Wile E. Coyote made him laugh, and he was not by nature a laughing man. He liked the cop dramas because he could deride the incompetence of the criminals, who were always caught, and the uselessness of the detectives, who would never have caught Roberto Cárdenas.

  And he loved one taped newscast that he played over and over again. It showed a lovely but haggard young woman on a pavement at Kennedy Airport. Sometimes he would freeze-frame and stare at it for half an hour. After what he had done to enable that clip of film, he knew that sooner or later someone would make a mistake.

  THE MISTAKE, when it came, was in Rotterdam, of all places. This very ancient Dutch city would hardly be recognized by any merchant who had lived there a hundred years ago or even a British Tommy who had marched through it in a welter of flowers and kisses in early 1945. Only the small Old Town still retained the elegant mansions of the eighteenth century, while the gigantic Euro port was modern, a second city of steel, glass, concrete, chrome, water and ships.

  While most of the unloading of enormous quantities of oil to keep Europe functioning is accomplished at sea islands of pipes and pumps far out of reach of the city, Rotterdam’s second specialty is its container port; not quite as large as Hamburg but just as modern and mechanized.

  Dutch customs, working with the police and, in the time-honored phrase “acting upon information received,” had exposed and arrested a senior customs officer by the name of Peter Hoogstraten.

  He was clever, devious and intended to beat the charge. He knew what he had done and where he had banked the payoff money, or, more precisely, where the cartel had banked it for him. He intended to retire, and he intended to enjoy every penny of it. He had not the slightest intention of confessing or admitting a single thing. He intended to play his “civil rights” and his “human rights” down to the last card on the table. The only thing tha
t worried him was how the authorities knew so much. Someone, somewhere, had blown him away; of that, he was certain.

  Ultra-liberal though the Netherlands prides itself on being, it plays host to an enormous criminal underworld, and, perhaps because of the extreme permissiveness, a very large part of that underworld is in the hands of European foreigners and non-Europeans.

  Hoogstraten worked primarily for one such gang, and they were Turks. He knew the rules of the cocaine trade. The product belonged to the cartel until it rolled out of the sea-container port onto the highways of the European Union. Then it belonged to the Turkish mafia, who had paid fifty percent up front, with fifty percent on delivery. A consignment intercepted by Dutch customs was going to hurt both parties.

  The Turks would have to re-place their order, while refusing to pay any further money. But the Turks had customers who had also placed orders and demanded delivery. Hoogstraten’s skill at clearing sea containers and other cargoes was invaluable and paid extremely well. He was only one asset in a procedure that, between Colombian jungle and Dutch dinner party, could easily have twenty layers of different participants, all needing to be paid a cut, but he was a crucial one.

  The mistake occurred because of Chief Inspector Van der Merwe’s private problem. He had been in the Royal Dutch Customs all his working life. He had joined the criminal investigation division within three years of entering the profession and had intercepted a mountain of contraband over the years. But the years had taken their toll. He had an enlarged prostate and drank far too much coffee, which exacerbated his weak bladder. It was the source of smothered grins among his younger colleagues, but, as a sufferer, he could not see the joke. Halfway through the sixth interrogation of Peter Hoogstraten, he simply had to go.

  It should not have been a problem. He nodded to the colleague beside him that they would all take a break. The colleague intoned, “Interview suspended at . . . ,” and switched off the digital recording machine. Hoogstraten insisted he wanted a cigarette and that meant he had to go to the “Smoking Permitted” area.