Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

The exposing of the bilges beneath the fish hold gave rise to an even fouler stench. The rummage men had their masks and breathers on. Everyone else stood back.

One of the rummagers went in, torso first, with a flashlight. The other held his legs. The first man wriggled back and held up a thumb. Bingo! He went in with grapnel and cord. One by one, the men on deck pulled out twenty bales, just over a hundred pounds' weight each. The Balmoral came alongside, towering above them.

It took another hour. The Belleza's crew, still hooded, were helped up the Jacob's ladder into the Balmoral and guided below. When they were released from shackles and hoods, they were in the forward brig, prisoners below the waterline.

Two weeks later, transferred to the Fleet Auxiliary in a second razzing, they would be taken to the British outpost of Gibraltar, rehooded, transferred by night to an American Starlifter and flown to the Indian Ocean. The hoods would come off again to reveal a tropical paradise and the instruction:

"Have fun, don't communicate with anyone and don't try to escape."

The first of these were optional, the rest impossible.

The ton of cocaine also went aboard the Balmoral. It, too, would be guarded until off-loaded to American custody at sea. The last task on the Belleza del Mar was left to the squad's explosives man. He went below for fifteen minutes, came up and leapt over the side into the second RIB.

Most of his companions were back on board. The Little Bird was already stowed again in her hold. So was the first RIB. The Balmoral went to "Slow ahead," and a lazy wake appeared behind her stern. The second RIB followed her. When there was two hundred yards of clear sea between them and the scummy old fishing boat, the explosive man pressed a button on his detonator.

The shaped charges of PETN plastic explosive he had left behind uttered only a low crack but cut a hole the size of a barn door in the hull. Within thirty seconds, she was gone forever, on a long, lonely, mile-long dive to the seabed.

The RIB reboarded and was stowed. No one else in the central Atlantic had seen a thing. The Beauty of the Sea, her captain, crew and cargo had simply vaporized. IT WAS a week before the loss of the Belleza del Mar was wholly believed in the heart of the cartel, and even then the reaction was only perplexity.

Vessels, crews and cargoes had been lost before, but, other than the total disappearance of the death-trap submersibles heading up the Pacific Coast to Mexico, there were always traces or reasons. Some small vessel had gone down in oceanic storms. The Pacific, so named by Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to see it, because on that day it looked so calm, could sometimes go crazy. The balmy Caribbean of the tourist brochures could play host to insane hurricane winds. But it was rare.

Cargoes lost at sea were almost always hurled overboard by the crew when capture was impossible to avoid.

For the rest, losses at sea were from interceptions by law enforcement agencies or navies. The ship was impounded, the crew arrested, charged, tried and jailed, but they were dispensable and their families bought off with a gracious donation. Everyone knew the rules.

The victors held press conferences, showed the baled cocaine to gleeful media. But the only time product completely disappeared was when it was stolen.

The successive cartels that have dominated the cocaine industry have always been riven by one psychiatric defect: raging paranoia. The capacity for suspicion is instant and uncontrollable. There are two crimes that are unforgivable within their code: to steal the product and to inform the authorities. The thief and the snitch will always be hunted down and revenge exacted. There can be no exceptions.

It took a week for the first lots to sink in because, first, the receiving party in Guinea-Bissau, the chief of operation, Ignacio Romero, complained that a preannounced shipment had simply not arrived. He had waited all night at the appointed time and in the appointed place, but the Belleza del Mar, which he knew well, had never made landfall.

He was asked twice to reconfirm that and did. Then the question of a possible misunderstanding had to be investigated. Had the Belleza gone to the wrong place? And even if so, why had her captain not communicated? He had carefully meaningless two-word messages to send if in trouble.

Then the dispatcher, Alfredo Suarez, had to check the weather. It had been flat calm right across the Atlantic. Fire on board? But the captain had his radio. Even if he had taken to the lifeboat, he had his laptop and cell phone. Finally, he had to report the loss to the Don.

Don Diego thought it over, examined all the evidence that Suarez brought him. It certainly looked like theft, and at the head of the queue of suspects was the captain himself. Either he had stolen the entire cargo to cut a deal with a renegade importer or he had himself been intercepted farther out at sea than the mangroves and murdered, along with his crew. Either was possible, but first things first.

If it was the captain, he would have told his family before the deed or been in contact since his treachery. His family was a wife and three children living in the same muddy village where he kept his old fishing boat, up a creek east of Barranquilla. He sent the Animal to talk to her.

The children were not a problem. They were buried. Alive, of course. In front of the mother. Still, she refused to confess. It took her several hours to die, but she clung to her story that her husband had said nothing and done nothing wrong. Finally, Paco Valdez had no choice but to believe her. He could not continue anyway. She was dead.

The Don was regretful. So unpleasant. And, as it turned out, fruitless. But unavoidable. And it posed an even bigger problem. If not the captain, then who? But there was someone else in Colombia even more distressed than Don Diego Esteban.

The Enforcer had practiced his trade after driving the family deep into the jungle. But the jungle is never quite empty. A peasant farmer of Indio descent had heard the screams and peered out through the foliage. When the Enforcer and his crew of two had gone, the peon went into the village and told what he had seen.

The villagers came with an ox wagon and took the four bodies back to the settlement by the creek. There was a Christian burial for them all. The officiating priest was Fr. Eusebio, S.J. He was disgusted by what he had seen before the crude plank coffin was closed.

Back in his mission rooms, he opened the drawer in his dark oak desk and looked down at the gizmo the local Provincial had distributed months before. Normally, he would never have dreamed of using it, but now he was angry. Perhaps one day he would see something outside the seal of confession; and then maybe he would use the American gizmo. THE SECOND strike went to the SEALs. Again, it was a question of the right time and the right place. Global Hawk Michelle was patrolling the great swathe of the southern Caribbean that extends in an arc from Colombia to the Yucatan. The MV Chesapeake was in the passage between Jamaica and Nicaragua.

Two go-fasts slipped out of the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Uraba on the Colombian coast and headed not southwest to Colon and the Panama Canal but northwest. Their journey was long, the extremity of their range, and both were packed with fuel drums apart from one ton each of baled cocaine amidships.

Michelle spotted them twenty miles out. Although not racing along at their feasible sixty knots, they were cruising at forty, and that was enough to tell Michelle's radars from 50,000 feet that they could not be anything but speedboats. She began to plot course and speed, and warn the Chesapeake that the go-fasts were heading in her direction. The Q-ship altered course to intercept.