Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

The two Speys increased their howl, and the Bucc shuddered against the brakes, wanting to be free. Mendoza flicked the RATO switch and freed the brakes. The Bucc flung herself forward, he emerged from the shadow of the volcanic mountain and saw the sea gleaming in the moonlight.

The rocket thrust took him in the small of the back. Speed shot up and through takeoff velocity, the wheel rumble ceased and she was up.

"Climb to fifteen thousand feet on heading one-nine-zero," said the warm molasses voice. He checked the compass, steadied the craft on 190° and climbed to height as instructed.

In an hour, he was three hundred miles south of the Cape Verdes, turning in a slow rate 1 circle, waiting. He saw the target at one o'clock low. Above the plateau of cloud, the gibbous moon had appeared and clothed the scene in a pale white light. Then he saw a flitting shadow below him and to his right. It was heading northeast; he was still halfway around a sweeping turn. He completed the turn and came up behind the prey.

"Your target is five miles ahead of you, six thousand feet below."

"Roger, I have it," he said. "Contact."

"Contact acknowledged. Clear engage."

He dropped until the outline of the Transall in the moonlight was quite clear. He had been given an album of likely planes used by cocaine fliers, and there was no doubt this was a Transall. There could simply be no innocent plane like that in the sky.

He flicked off the safety catch of his Aden cannon, placed his thumb over the Fire button and gazed ahead through the gunsight modified at Scampton. He knew his two gun packs were centered to concentrate their united firepower at four hundred meters.

For a moment, he hesitated. There were men in that machine. Then he thought of another man, a boy on a marble slab in the Sao Paolo mortuary. His kid brother. He fired.

There was a mixture of fragmentation, incendiary and tracer in his ammunition packs. The bright tracer would show him his line of fire. The other two would destroy what they hit.

He watched the two lines of red fire race away from him and unite at four hundred meters. Both impacted into the hull of the Transall just to the left of the rear loading doors. For half a second, the freighter seemed to shudder in midair. Then it imploded.

He did not even see it break up, disintegrate and fall. Its crew had evidently only just begun to draw on the inboard reserves, so those tanks inside the hull were brimful. They took the white-hot incendiary rounds, and the whole airplane turned molten. A shower of blazing fragments fell through the cloud layer beneath, and that was it. Gone. One plane, four men, two tons of cocaine.

Major Mendoza had never killed anyone before. He stared for several seconds at the hole in the sky where the Transall had been. He had wondered for days what he would feel. Now he knew. He just felt empty. Neither exultant nor remorseful. He had told himself many times; just think of Manolo on his marble slab, sixteen years old, never to have a life to lead. When he spoke, his voice was quite steady.

"Target down," he said.

"I know," said the voice out of Nevada. She had seen the two blips become one. "Maintain altitude. Steer three-five-five for base."

Seventy minutes later, he watched the runway lights of Fogo turn on for him and shut down when he was taxiing toward the rock hangar. Rogue Four had ceased to be.

Three hundred miles away in Africa, a group of men waited by a jungle airstrip. And waited and waited. At dawn they climbed into their SUVs and drove away. One of them would send a coded e-mail to Bogota. ALFREDO SUAREZ, in charge of all shipments from Colombia to clients, was in fear for his life. Barely four had been lost. He had guaranteed the Don to deliver three hundred tons to each target continent and had been promised a margin of up to two hundred tons as acceptable losses in transit. But that was not the point.

The Hermandad, as the Don was now putting it to him very personally and with frightening calm, had two problems. One was that four separate cargoes in three separate transport methods had apparently been either captured or destroyed; much more perplexing, and the Don hated to be perplexed, was that there was not a trace of a clue as to what had gone wrong.

The captain of the Belleza del Mar should have reported he was in trouble of some kind. He did not. The two go-fasts should have used their cell phones if anything went wrong. They did not. The Transall had also taken off, fully fueled and in good order, and without a Mayday call had vanished off the earth.

"Mysterious, would you not say, my very dear Alfredo?" When the Don spoke in terms of endearment, he was at his most frightening.

"Yes, my Don."

"And what explanation could you possibly imagine?"

"I do not know. All carriers have ample means of communication. Computers, cell phones, ships' radios. And short coded messages to say what is wrong. They have tested their equipment, memorized the messages."

"And yet they are silent," mused Don Diego.

He had listened to the Enforcer's report and concluded that it was extremely unlikely the captain of the Belleza del Mar was the culprit in his own disappearance.

The captain was known to be a dedicated family man, he would have known what would happen if he betrayed the cartel and he had concluded six successful voyages to West Africa before.

There was only one common denominator for two of the three mysteries. Both the fishing boat and the Transall had been heading for Guinea-Bissau. Even though the two go-fasts out of the Gulf of Uraba were an enigma, the finger was still pointing at something going badly wrong in Guinea.

"Do you have another consignment for West Africa soon, Alfredo?"

"Yes, Don Diego. Next week. Five tons going by sea to Liberia."

"Change it to Guinea-Bissau. And you have a very bright young deputy?"

"Alvaro, Alvaro Fuentes. His father was very big in the old Cali cartel. He was born to this work. Very loyal."

"Then he should accompany this cargo. And be in touch every three hours, night and day, all the way. Prerecorded messages on both laptop and cell phone. Nothing to do but press a button. And I want a listening watch at this end. Permanently, on shifts. Do I make myself plain?"

"Perfectly, Don Diego. It will be done." FR. EUSEBIO had never seen anything like it. His parish was large and rural, spread over many villages, but all humble, hardworking and poor. Not for him the bright lights and luxury marinas of Barranquilla and Cartagena. What had moored just off the mouth of the creek that led out of the mangroves to the sea did not belong there.

The whole village went to the frail timber jetty to stare. She was over fifty meters long, gleaming white, with luxury cabins on three decks and brightwork that the crew had polished until it gleamed. No one knew who owned it, and none of its crew had come ashore. Why should they? For one village with a single dirt street, where chickens pecked, and a single bodega?

What the good Father and Jesuit could not know was that the craft moored out of sight of the ocean around two curves in the creek was a very luxurious oceangoing yacht called a "Fead ship." It had six sumptuous staterooms, for the owner and guests, and a crew of ten. It had been built in a Dutch yard three years earlier to the personal order of its owner and would not have appeared in Edmiston's catalog for sale (which it was not) for less than $20 million.

It is an oddity that most people are born at night and many also die at night. Fr. Eusebio was wakened at three in the morning by a tapping on his door. It was a little girl from a family he knew to say that Grandpa was spitting blood, and Mama feared he might not see the morning.

Fr. Eusebio knew the man. He was sixty, looked ninety and had smoked the foulest tobacco for fifty years. The last two, he had been coughing up mucus and blood. The parish priest slipped on a cassock, gathered his shawl and rosary and hurried after the girl.