The Cobra

by Frederick Forsyth

  A truck arrived on a ferry from Flushing, the Netherlands, with a cargo of Dutch cheese for a noted supermarket chain. A junior officer was about to request an examination of the cargo when Crowther hurried up, pulled rank and gave speedy clearance.

  The junior was not in on the secret, but the replacement was watching. He managed to slip a tiny GPS tracker under the rear bumper of the Dutch truck as it rolled out of the dock gates. Then he made an urgent phone call. Three unmarked cars began to follow, switching places with one another so as not to be noticed, but the driver appeared unworried.

  The lorry was tailed halfway across Suffolk until it pulled into a lay-by. There it was met by a group of men, who disgorged from a black Mercedes. A passing tracker car swept by, did not stop but took the number. Within seconds, the Benz was identified. It belonged to a shell company but had been seen weeks earlier entering the grounds of Benny Daniels’s mansion.

  The Dutch driver was taken in a perfectly friendly manner to the café behind the lay-by. Two of the gang stayed with him for the two hours his truck was missing. When it was returned to him, he was handed a fat wad of cash and allowed to proceed to the Midlands unloading bay of the supermarket. The whole procedure was a replica of that used to smuggle illegal immigrants into the UK, and the task force feared they might just end up with a clutch of bewildered and dejected Iraqis.

  While the Dutchman sipped his coffee in the roadside café, the other two men from the Mercedes had driven his lorry away to unload its real treasure; not Iraqis looking for a new life but a ton of high-grade Colombian cocaine.

  The truck was tailed off the Suffolk lay-by and south into Essex. This time the driver and his companion were wary all the way, and it took the tailing cars all their skill to switch and pass each other to remain unsuspicious. As it crossed the county line, Essex police provided two more unmarked surveillance vehicles to help out.

  Finally, the destination was reached, an old and seemingly abandoned aircraft hangar in the salt marches flanking the estuary of the Blackwater. The landscape was so flat and bleak that the watchers dared not follow, but a helicopter from the Essex traffic division spotted the doors of the hangar rolling closed. The truck remained in the hangar for forty minutes before it emerged and drove back to the waiting Dutch driver in the café.

  By the time it left, the lorry had ceased to be of much interest, but there was a team of four rural surveillance experts hidden deep in the reedbeds with powerful binoculars. Then a call was made from the warehouse; it was recorded by SOCA and Government Communications HQ at Cheltenham. It was answered by someone inside Benny Daniels’s mansion twenty miles away. It referred to the removal of “goods” the following morning, and Cdr. Reynolds had little choice but to mount the raid for that night.

  In agreement with previous requests from Washington, it was decided that the raid should have a serious public relations angle, and a TV team from the program Crimewatch should be allowed to attend.

  DON DIEGO ESTEBAN also had a public relations problem, and a bad one. But his public was confined to his twenty major clients: ten in the U.S. and ten in Europe. He ordered José-María Largo to tour North America, reassuring the ten biggest buyers of the cartel’s product that the problems that had dogged all their operations since the spring would be overcome and delivery resumed. But the clients were genuinely angry.

  Being the big ten, they were among the privileged of whom only a fifty percent down payment was demanded. But that still ran into tens of millions of dollars per gang. They would be required to produce only the fifty percent balance on safe arrival of the consignment.

  Every interception, loss or disappearance in transit between Colombia and the handover point was a loss to the cartel. But that was not the point. Thanks to the disaster of the Rat List, U.S. customs and state or city police had made scores of successful raids on inland depots, and the losses were hurting badly.

  And there was more. Each giant importing gang had a huge grid of smaller clients whose needs had to be satisfied. There is no loyalty in this business. If a habitual supplier cannot supply and a different one can, the smaller dealer will simply switch his custom.

  Finally, with safe arrivals running at fifty percent of expectations, a national shortage was developing. Prices were rising in accordance with market forces. Importers were cutting the puro not six or seven to one but up to ten to one, trying to spin out supplies and keep customers. Some users were snorting only a seven percent mix. The bulking-up materials were becoming more and more just junk, with the chemists throwing in insane quantities of substitute drugs like ketamine to try to fool the user that he was getting a high-quality sensation instead of a large dose of horse tranquilizer, which just happened to look and smell the same.

  There was another dangerous spin-off from the shortage. The paranoia that is never really absent from professional criminality was moving to the surface. Suspicions arose between the big gangs that others might be getting preferential treatment. The very possibility that the secret depot of one mob might be raided by a rival crew threw up the chance of an extremely violent underworld war.

  It was Largo’s task to try to calm the shark pool with assurances of a speedy resumption of normal service. He had to start with Mexico.

  Although the USA is assailed by light aircraft, speedboats, private yachts, airline passengers and mules with a full stomach, all smuggling cocaine, the gigantic headache is the three-thousand-mile meandering border with Mexico. It runs from the Pacific south of San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. It borders California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

  South of the border, northern Mexico has been virtually a war zone for years as rival gangs fight for supremacy or even a place in the scramble. Thousands of tortured and executed bodies have been thrown into the streets or tossed in the deserts as the cartel leaders and gang bosses have employed virtually insane enforcers to exterminate rivals, and thousands of innocent passersby have died in the cross fire.

  Largo’s task was to talk to the chiefs of the cartels known as Sinaloa, Gulf and La Familia, all in a state of rage at their nonarriving orders. He would start with the Sinaloa, covering most of the Pacific Coast. It was just his misfortune that, although the Maria Linda had got through, the day he flew north the successor to that freighter had simply disappeared without trace.

  The task of Europe was given to Largo’s deputy, the clever, college-educated Jorge Calzado, who spoke fluent English, apart from his native Spanish, and had a working knowledge of Italian. He arrived in Madrid the night the SOCA raided the old hangar in the Essex marshes.

  IT WAS a good raid, and it would have been even better if the whole Essex mob had been there to be arrested, or even Benny Daniels himself. But the gangster was too clever to be within miles of the drugs he imported into southern England. He used underlings for that.

  The intercepted phone call had mentioned a pickup and transfer of the contents of the hangar “in the morning.” The raiding party moved silently into position, lights out, black on black, just before midnight and waited. There was a complete ban on speech, flashlights, even coffee flasks in case of a tinkle of metal on metal. Just before four a.m., the lights of a vehicle came down the track to the darkened building.

  The watchers heard the rumble of the doors rolling open and saw a dim light inside. As there was no second vehicle coming, they moved. The CO19 Firearms officers were first to secure the warehouse. Behind them came amplifiers booming commands, dogs straining, snipers squinting in case of armed defense, searchlights bathing the target in a harsh white blaze.

  The surprise was total, considering that there had been fifty men and women crouching in the reeds with their equipment. The catch was satisfying in terms of drugs, rather less so in criminals.

  There were three of the latter. Two had come with the truck. They were, at a glance, low-level errand runners, and they belonged to a Midlands gang for whom part of the cargo was destined. The other part would have been distributed by Benny Dani
els.

  The night watchman was the only Essex Mob member caught in the net. He turned out to be Justin Coker, late twenties, a bit of a babe magnet, with dark good looks, and a long criminal record. But he was not a main player.

  What the truck had come to collect was piled on the open concrete floor where the light aircraft of the long-departed flying club had been serviced. There was about a ton, and it was still in its jute wrapping, held together with crisscrossed cords.

  The cameras were allowed to enter, one for TV and one press photographer for a major agency. They photographed the square pile of bales and watched as a senior customs man, masked to preserve his anonymity, sliced through some cords to rip the jute away and expose the polyethylene-encased blocks of cocaine inside. There was even a paper label on one of the blocks with a number on it. Everything was photographed, including the three arrested men with blankets over their heads, only handcuffed wrists visible. But more than enough to make prime-time TV and several front pages. A pink midwinter dawn eventually began to steal across the Essex marshes. For the senior police and customs officers, it was going to be a long day.

  ANOTHER PLANE went down somewhere east of the 35th longitude. On instructions, the desperate young pilot, who had defied the advice of older men not to fly, had been uttering short and meaningless blips on his radio to indicate “sign of life.” He did this every fifteen minutes after leaving the Brazilian coast. Then he stopped. He was heading for an upcountry airstrip in unpoliced Liberia, and he never arrived.

  With an approximate indication of where he must have gone down, the cartel sent a spotter aircraft in broad daylight to fly the same route, but low over the water, to look for traces. It found nothing.

  When an aircraft hits the sea in one piece, or even several, various bits float until finally, waterlogged, they drift down. They may be seat cushions, items of clothing, paperback books, curtains, anything lighter than water, but when an airplane becomes one huge fireball of exploding fuel at 10,000 feet all that is flammable is consumed. Only the metal falls to the sea, and metal sinks. The spotter gave up and turned back. That was the last attempt to fly the Atlantic.

  JOSÉ-MARÍA LARGO flew out of Mexico to the U.S. via private charter airplane; just a short hop from Monterrey to Corpus Christi, Texas. His passport was Spanish and quite genuine, obtained for him through the good offices of the now-defunct Banco Guzman. It should have served him well, but the bank had let him down.

  That passport had once belonged to a genuine Spaniard with a reasonable resemblance to Largo. A mere facial comparison might have fooled the immigration officer at the Texas airport. But the former passport holder had once visited the U.S. and had thoughtlessly stared into the lens of the iris-recognition camera. Largo did the same. The iris of the human eye is like a DNA sample. It does not lie.

  The face of the immigration officer did not move a muscle. He stared at the screen, noted what it told him and asked the visiting businessman if he would step into a side room. The procedures took half an hour. Then Largo was profusely apologized to and allowed to go. His inner terror turned to relief. He was through, undetected after all. He was wrong.

  Such is the speed of IT communication that his details had gone through to the ICE, the FBI, the CIA and, bearing in mind where he was coming from, the DEA. He had been covertly photographed and flashed onto a screen at Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Virginia.

  The ever-helpful Colonel Dos Santos of Bogotá had provided facial pictures of all the high members of the cartel of which he could be certain, and José-María Largo was one of them. Even though the man in the archive at Arlington was younger and slimmer than the visitor kicking his heels in southern Texas, feature-recognition technology identified him in half a second.

  Southern Texas, by far the biggest campaign zone for the USA’s anti-cocaine struggle, teems with DEA men. As Largo left the concourse, picked up his rental car and rolled out of the parking lot an unmarked coupe with two DEA men in it slid in behind him. He would never spot them, but trailing escorts would follow him to all his client meetings.

  He had been instructed to contact and reassure the three biggest all-white biker gangs importing cocaine into the U.S.: the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws and the Bandidos. He knew that while all three could be psychopathically violent and loathed one another, none would be stupid enough to harm an emissary of the Colombian cartel if they ever wanted to see another gram of the Don’s cocaine.

  He also had to contact the two main all-black gangs; the Bloods and the Crips. The other five on his list were fellow Hispanics: the Latin Kings, the Cubans, his fellow Colombians, the Puerto Ricans and, by far the most dangerous of all, the Salvadoreans, known simply as MS-13 and headquartered mainly in California.

  He spent two weeks talking, arguing, reassuring and sweating profusely before he was finally allowed to escape back from San Diego to the sanctuary of his native Colombia. There were some extremely violent men there also, but at least, he comforted himself, they were on his side. The message he had received from the cartel’s clients in the U.S. was clear: profits were plunging and the Colombians were responsible.

  His private judgment, which he relayed to Don Diego, was that unless the wolves were satisfied with successfully arriving consignments, there would be an intergang war to make northern Mexico look like a barn dance. He was glad he was not Alfredo Suárez.

  The Don’s conclusion was slightly different. He might have to dispense with Suárez, but that was not the solution. The point was that someone was stealing vast quantities of his product, an unforgivable sin. He had to find the thieves and destroy them or be himself destroyed.

  THE CHARGING of Justin Coker at Chelmsford Magistrates Court did not take long. The charge was being in possession with intent to supply a Class A drug, contrary to etc., etc.

  The legal adviser to the magistrates read out the charge and asked for remand in custody on the grounds, as Your Worships will well understand, that police investigations were continuing etc., etc. Everyone knew it was all a formality, but the Legal Aid lawyer rose to ask for bail.

  A nonprofessional justice of the peace, the magistrate flicked through the terms of the Bail Act of 1976 as she listened. Before agreeing to become a magistrate, she had been headmistress of a large girls’ school for years and had heard just about every excuse known to the human race.

  Coker, like his employer, had come from the East End of London, starting in petty crime as a teenager and graduating to “a likely lad” until he had caught the attention of Benny Daniels. The gang leader had taken him on as a general dogsbody. He had no talent as muscle—Daniels had several truck-built thugs in his entourage for that sort of thing—but he was streetwise and a good runner of errands. That was why he had been left overnight in charge of a ton of cocaine.

  The defense lawyer—the “dock brief ”—finished his hopeless application for bail, and the magistrate offered a quick smile of encouragement.

  “Remand in custody for seven days,” she said. Coker was removed from the dock and down the steps to the cells beneath. From there he was led to a closed white van, accompanied by four outriders from the Special Escort Group just in case the Essex Mob had any clever ideas of getting him out of there.

  It seemed that Daniels and his crew were satisfied that Justin Coker would keep his mouth shut for they were nowhere to be found. They had all gone on the run.

  In earlier years it was the custom of British mobsters to take refuge in southern Spain, buying villas on the Costa del Sol. With a rapid-extradition treaty between Spain and the UK, the Costa was no longer a safe haven. Benny Daniels had built himself a chalet in the enclave of northern Cyprus, an unrecognized mini-state that had no treaty with the UK. It was suspected he had fled there after the raid on the hangar to let things cool down.

  Nevertheless, Scotland Yard wanted Coker under their eye in London; Essex had no objection, and from Chelmsford he was driven to Belmarsh Prison in London.

  The story of a ton
of cocaine in a marshland warehouse was a good one for the national press and even bigger one for the local media. The Essex Chronicle had a large front-page picture of the haul. Standing beside the pile of cocaine briquettes was Justin Coker, face blurred to protect his anonymity according to the law. But the stripped-down jute packaging was clearly visible, as were the pale bricks beneath it and the wrapping paper with the batch number.

  JORGE CALZADO’S tour of Europe was no more agreeable than José-María Largo’s experience in North America. On every side he was met with angry reproaches and demands for a restoration of their regular supply. Stocks were low, prices were rising, customers were switching to other narcotics, and what the European gangs did have left were being cut ten to one, almost as weak as it could get.

  Calzado had no need to visit the Galician gangs who had already been reassured by the Don himself, but the other main clients and importers were vital.

  Though over a hundred gangs supply and trade cocaine between Ireland and the Russian border, most acquire their stocks from the dozen giants who deal directly with Colombia and sub-franchise once the product has safely arrived on European land.

  Calzado made contact with the Russians, Serbians and Lithuanians from the east; the Nigerians and Jamaican “Yardies”; the Turks, who, although originally from the southeast, predominated in Germany; the Albanians, who terrified him; and the three oldest gang groups in Europe—the mafia of Sicily, the camorra of Naples and the biggest and most feared of them all, the Ndrangheta.

  If the map of the Republic of Italy looks like a riding boot, Calabria is the toe, south of Naples, facing Sicily across the Strait of Messina. There were once Greek and Phoenician colonies in that harsh and sun-scorched land, and the local language, hardly intelligible to other Italians, derives from Greek. The name Ndrangheta simply means “the Honorable Society.” Unlike the highly publicized mafia of Sicily or the more recently famous camorra of Naples, the Calabrese pride themselves on an almost invisible profile.