Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

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.