The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  First his haversack was lowered on a thin steel cable. Down below, the haversack swung in the downdraft until strong hands caught and unhooked it. The cable came back up. The loadmaster nodded to Dexter, who rose and stepped to the door. The two double cleats were hooked to his harness, and he stepped out into space.

  The pilot was holding the Black Hawk rock steady at 50 feet above the deck; the sea was a millpond; the reaching hands grabbed him and brought him down the last few feet. When his boots touched the deck, the cleats came off and the cable was whisked back up. He turned, gave the thumbs-up to the faces staring down and the Black Hawk turned for base.

  There were four to greet him: the captain of the vessel, the U.S. Navy commander pretending to be a merchant seaman; one of the two comms men who kept the Chesapeake in contact at all times with Project Cobra; Lt. Cdr. Bull Chadwick, commanding the Team 3 SEALs; and a burly young SEAL to carry the haversack. It was the first time Dexter had let go of it.

  When they were off the deck, the Chesapeake came under power, and they headed farther out to sea.

  The waiting took twenty-four hours. The two comms men spelled each other in their radio shack until, the following afternoon, AFB Creech in Nevada saw something on the screen that Global Hawk Michelle was transmitting.

  When the Cobra team in Washington had noticed the cartel switching their traffic from Caribbean to Pacific two weeks earlier, Michelle’s patrol pattern had also changed. She was now at 60,000 feet, sipping gasoline, staring down at the coast from Tumaco in the deep south of Colombia up to Costa Rica, and as far as two hundred miles out into the ocean. And she had spotted something.

  Creech passed the image to Anacostia, Washington, D.C., where Jeremy Bishop, who never seemed to sleep and lived on lethal fast food at his computer banks, ran it through the database. The vessel that would have been an invisible speck from 60,000 feet was magnified to fill his screen.

  It was one of the last vessels on which Juan Cortez had worked his magic with the welding torch. It had last been seen, and photographed, at berth in a Venezuelan port months earlier, and its presence in the Pacific confirmed the switch of tactics.

  The vessel was too small to be Lloyd’s listed; a 6,000-ton rust-bucket tramp steamer more accustomed to working along the Caribbean coast or making sorties to the many islands supplied only by such coasters. She had just come of out of Buenaventura, and her name was the Maria Linda. Michelle was ordered to keep tracking her northward, and the waiting Chesapeake moved into position.

  The SEALs were now highly practiced at their routine, with several interceptions already behind them. The Chesapeake positioned herself twenty-five miles farther out to sea than the freighter, and just after dawn of the third day the Little Bird was hoisted to the deck.

  Clear of the derrick, her rotors whirled, and she lifted off. Cdr. Chadwick’s big RHIB and his two lighter CRRC raiders were already in the water, and as the Little Bird rose they raced toward the freighter over the horizon. Sitting in the rear of the RHIB, with the two-man rummage crew, the dog handler and his spaniel, was Cal Dexter, clutching his haversack. The sea was flat, and the deadly little flotilla piled on the power to skim the surface at forty knots.

  Of course the helicopter got there first, swerving past the bridge of the Maria Linda to let her captain see “U.S. Navy” on the boom, then hovering forward of the bridge with a sniper rifle pointing straight at his face while the loudspeaker ordered him to heave to. He obeyed.

  The captain knew his orders. He muttered a short command to his mate, out of sight down the companionway to the cabins, and the mate tried to send out the warning message to the listening cartel operator. Nothing worked. He tried the cell phone, a text on the same machine, the laptop and, in desperation, an old-fashioned radio call. Overhead, out of sight and sound, Michelle just turned and jammed. Then the captain saw the RIBs racing toward him.

  Boarding was not a problem. The SEALs, clad in black, masked, H&K MP5s on each hip, just swarmed over each side, and the crew threw up their hands. The captain protested, of course; Cdr. Chadwick kept it formal and very courteous, of course.

  The crew had time to see the rummage crew and the spaniel come aboard, then the black hoods went on and they were herded to the stern. The captain knew exactly what he was carrying and prayed the raiders would not find it. What awaited, he thought, would be years in a Yanqui jail. He was in international waters; the rules were on the side of the Americans; the nearest coast was Panama, which would cooperate with Washington and extradite them all north of that dreadful border. All servants of the cartel, from the highest to the lowest, have a horror of extradition to the U.S. It means a long sentence and no chance of a quick release in return for a bribe.

  What the captain did not see was the older figure, a bit stiffer in the joints, being helped on board with his haversack. When the hoods went on, not only was sight blotted out but also sound; the hoods were internally padded to muffle external noise.

  Thanks to the confession of Juan Cortez, which he had overseen, Dexter knew exactly what he was looking for and where it was. While the rest of the raiders pretended to scour the Maria Linda from top to bottom and stem to stern, Dexter went quietly to the captain’s cabin.

  The bunk was mounted to the wall with four strong brass screws. The heads were grimed with dirt, showing they had not been unscrewed in years. Dexter wiped away the muck and unscrewed them. The bunk assembly could then be moved away to expose the hull. The crew, about an hour away from handover point, would have done that themselves.

  The steel of the hull looked untouched. Dexter felt down for the unlocking catch, found it and turned. There was a low click, and the steel panel loosened. But it was not the sea that rushed in. The hull was double at that point. As he gently lifted away the steel plate, he saw the bales.

  He knew the cavity extended well to the left and right of the aperture, as well as upward and downward. The bales were all shaped like cinder blocks, no more than eight inches deep, for that was the depth of the space. Piled one on top of the other, they created a wall. Each block contained twenty briquettes, sealed in layers of industrial-strength polyethylene, and the blocks were in jute sacking, crisscrossed with knotted cord for easy handling. He calculated two tons of Colombian puro, over a hundred million dollars’ worth when bashed, or cut, to six times the volume and inflated to street prices inside the USA.

  Carefully, he began to unknot some of the blocks. As he expected, each polyethylene-wrapped block had a design and number on its wrapper, the batch code.

  When he had finished, he replaced the blocks, enveloped them in jute and reknotted the jute exactly as it had been. The steel panel slid back and clicked into place the way Juan Cortez had designed it to.

  His final task was to push the bunk assembly back where it had been and screw it in place. Even the smear of dust and grease that had covered the screwheads was thumbed back over the brass. When he was finally done, he mussed up the cabin, as if it had been searched in vain, and climbed back topside.

  As the Colombian crew were hooded, the SEALs had taken their own masks off. Cdr. Chadwick looked at Dexter and raised an eyebrow. Dexter nodded and climbed back over the edge into the RHIB, pulling his mask back on. The SEALs did the same. The hoods and shackles were taken off the crew.

  Cdr. Chadwick spoke no Spanish, but SEAL Fontana did. Through his officer, the SEAL leader apologized profusely to the Maria Linda’s captain.

  “We have obviously been misinformed, Capitán. Please accept the apologies of the United States Navy. You are free to proceed. Good journey!”

  When he heard the “¡Buen viaje!,” the Colombian smuggler could hardly believe his luck. He did not even pretend outrage at what had been done to him. After all, the Yanquis might start again and find something at the second attempt. He was still beaming hospitably when the sixteen masked men and their dog went back into their inflatables and roared away.

  He waited until they were well over the horizon and the
Maria Linda was chugging north again before he handed the helm to his mate and went below. The screws seemed intact, but, to be on the safe side, he undid them and pulled his bunk to one side.

  The steel hull seemed untouched, but to make sure he opened the trap and checked the bales inside. They, too, had not been touched. He quietly thanked the craftsman, whoever he was, who had made a cache of such amazing ingenuity. It had probably saved his life, and certainly his freedom. Three nights later, the Maria Linda made landfall.

  There are three giant cocaine cartels in Mexico and a few smaller ones. The giants are La Familia, the Gulf cartel operating mainly in the east on the Gulf of Mexico, and the Sinaloa, which works the Pacific Coast. The Maria Linda’s offshore rendezvous with a smelly old shrimper was off Mazatlán in the heart of Sinaloa country.

  The captain and his crew received their enormous (by their standards) fee and a bonus for their success, as one of the extra lures the Don had instituted to refresh the supply of volunteers. The captain saw no point in mentioning the interlude off the coast of Panama. Why make trouble over a lucky escape? His crew agreed with him.

  A WEEK LATER, something very similar happened in the Atlantic. The CIA jet flew quietly into the airport on Sal Island, the most northeasterly of the Cape Verdes. Its only passenger had diplomatic status, so he was waved through passport and customs formalities. His heavy haversack was not examined.

  Leaving the airport concourse, he did not take the regular bus south to the island’s only tourist resort at Santa María but took a cab, and asked where he might hire a car.

  The driver did not seem to know, so they proceeded the two miles to Espargos and asked again. Finally, they ended up at the ferry port of Palmeira, and a local garage owner rented a small Renault. Dexter overpaid the man for his trouble and drove away.

  Sal is called “Salt” for a reason. It is flat and featureless save for miles of salt pans, which had once been the source of its very passing prosperity. It now possesses two roads and a track. One road goes east-west from Pedra Luame via the airport to Palmeira. The other runs south to Santa María. Dexter took the track.

  It runs north over bleak, empty country to the lighthouse at Fiúra Point. Dexter abandoned the car, pinned a note to the windshield to inform any curious finder that he intended to return, hefted his haversack and walked to the beach beside the lighthouse. It was dusk, and the automatic light was starting to turn. He made a cell phone call.

  It was almost dark when the Little Bird came at him across the inky sea. He flashed the recognition code, and the small craft settled gently on the sand beside him. The passenger door was just an open oval. He climbed in, tucked his haversack between his legs and buckled up. The figure in the helmet beside him offered him a duplicate with headphones.

  He pulled it on, and the voice in his ears was very British.

  “Good trip, sir?”

  Why do they always assume you are a senior officer? thought Dexter. The insignia next to him said sublieutenant. He had once made sergeant. It must be the gray hair. He liked the young and eager anyway.

  “No problems,” he called back.

  “Good show. Twenty minutes to base. The lads will have a nice cup of tea on the brew.”

  Good show, he thought. I could do with a nice cup of tea.

  This time, he actually landed on the deck without need of ladders. The Little Bird, so much smaller than the Black Hawk, was lifted gently by the derrick and lowered into her hold, whose hatch then closed over her. The pilot went forward, through a steel door, to the Special Forces mess hall. Dexter was led the other way; into the sterncastle and up to meet the vessel’s skipper and Major Pickering, the SBS team commander. At dinner that night, he also met his two fellow Americans, the comms team who kept the MV Balmoral in touch with Washington and Nevada, and thus the UAV Sam, somewhere above their heads in the darkness.

  They had to wait three days south of the Cape Verdes until Sam spotted the target. She was another fishing boat, like the Belleza del Mar, and her name was Bonita. She did not announce it, but she was heading for an offshore rendezvous in the mangrove swamps of Guinea-Conakry, another failed state and brutal dictatorship. And, like the Belleza, she smelled, using the odor to mask any possible aroma of cocaine.

  But she had made seven trips from South America to West Africa, and although twice spotted by Tim Manhire and his MAOC-Narcotics team in Lisbon there had never been a NATO warship handy. This time there was, although she did not look the part, and even MAOC had not been told about the grain carrier Balmoral.

  Juan Cortez had also worked on the Bonita, one of his first, and he had placed the hiding place at the far stern, abaft the engine room, itself reeking in the heat of engine oil and fish.

  The procedure was almost exactly as it had been in the Pacific. When the commandos left the Bonita, a bewildered and extremely grateful captain received a full apology on behalf of Her Majesty personally for any trouble and delay. When the two arctic RIBs and the Little Bird had disappeared over the horizon, the captain unscrewed the planking behind his engine, eased away the false hull and checked the contents of the hidey-hole. They were absolutely intact. There was absolutely no trick. The gringos with all their probing and sniffing dogs had not found the secret cargo.

  The Bonita made her rendezvous, passed on her cargo, and other fishing smacks took it up past the African coast, past the Pillars of Hercules, past Portugal, and delivered it to the Galicians. As promised by the Don. Three tons of it. But slightly different.

  The Little Bird took Cal Dexter to his bleak strand by the Fiúra Lighthouse, where he was pleased to see his battered Renault still untouched. He drove it back to the airport, left a message for the garage owner to come and retrieve it and a bonus and took a coffee in the restaurant. The CIA jet, alerted by the comms men on the Balmoral, picked him up an hour later.

  At dinner that night aboard the Balmoral, the captain was curious.

  “Are you sure,” he asked Major Pickering, “that there was nothing at all on that fisherman?”

  “That’s what the American said. He was down in that engine room with the hatch closed for an hour. Came up covered in oil and stinking to high heaven. Said he had examined every possible hiding place, and she was clean. Must have been misinformed. Terribly sorry.”

  “Then why has he left us?”

  “No idea.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Not a chance,” said the major.

  “Then what is going on? I thought we were supposed to abduct the crew, sink the trash can and confiscate the coke. What was he up to?”

  “No idea. We must rely again on Tennyson. ‘Ours is not to reason why . . .’ ”

  Six miles above them in the darkness, UAV Sam turned again and headed back to the Brazilian island to refuel. And a twin-engined executive jet borrowed from an increasingly irritable CIA sped back to the northwest. Its sole passenger, offered champagne, preferred a beer from the bottle. He at least knew why the Cobra insisted on keeping his confiscations from the incinerators. He wanted the wrappers.

  CHAPTER 14

  IT FELL TO THE BRITISH SERIOUS AND ORGANISED CRIME Agency and London’s Metropolitan Police to carry out the raid. Both had been laying the groundwork for some time. The target was going to be a drug-smuggling gang called the “Essex Mob.”

  Scotland Yard’s Special Projects Team had known for some time that the Essex Mob, headed by a notorious London-born gangster named Benny Daniels, was a major importer and distributor of cannabis, heroin and cocaine, with a reputation for extreme violence if crossed. The only reason for the gang’s name was that Daniel had used crime’s profits to build himself a large and very flash country mansion in Essex, east of London and north of the Thames Estuary, just outside the harmless market town of Epping.

  As a younger hoodlum in the East End of London, Daniels had built both a reputation for brutality and a crime sheet. But with success came an end to successful prosecutions. He became too big to
need to touch the product personally, and witnesses were hard to come by. The timid among them quickly changed their testimony; the brave disappeared, to be found very dead in the riverside marshes or never at all.

  Benny Daniels was a “target” criminal and one of the Met’s top ten desired arrests. The break the Yard had been waiting for resulted from the Rat List provided by the late Roberto Cárdenas.

  The UK had been lucky inasmuch as only one of its officials had appeared; he was a customs officer in the east coast port of Lowestoft. That meant that top men in customs and excise were brought in at a very early stage.

  Quietly, and in extreme secrecy, a multiunit task force was assembled, equipped with state-of-the-art phone-tapping, tracking and eavesdropping technology.

  The Security Service, or MI5, one of the partners of SOCA, loaned a team of trackers known simply as the “Watchers,” reckoned among the best in the country.

  As wholesale importing of drugs now rated as significant as terrorism, Scotland Yard’s CO19 Firearms Command was also available. The task force was headed by the Yard’s Cdr. Peter Reynolds, but the ones closest to the bribe taker were his own colleagues in customs. The few who were aware of his crimes now bore him a sincere but covert loathing, and it was they who were best placed to watch his every move. His name was Crowther.

  One of the senior men at Lowestoft conveniently developed a serious ulcer and left on sick leave. He could then be replaced by an expert in electronic surveillance. Cdr. Spindler did not want only one bent official and one truck; he wanted to use Crowther to roll up an entire narcotics operation. For this, he was prepared to be patient, even if it meant allowing several cargoes to pass untouched.

  With the port of Lowestoft being on the Suffolk coast, just north of Essex, he suspected Benny Daniels would have a finger somewhere in the pie, and he was right. Part of Lowestoft’s facilities involved roll-on, roll-off juggernauts coming across the North Sea, and it was several of these that Crowther was apparently keen to assist unexamined through the customs channel. In early January, Crowther made a mistake.