Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

Julio Luz lay awake all night in his cell and thought things over. He had no wife and children, and for this he was now grateful. His parents were dead. Nothing bound him to Bogota, and he was terrified of Don Diego.

The grapevine inside the jail had been abuzz with news of the escape of the Galician thug and the inability of the authorities to find him. Certainly his fellow northwesterners in Madrid, of whom some were part of the underworld, would give him sanctuary and smuggle him home.

Julio Luz thought of the snatch of lies from the Guardia in the corridor. In the morning, he refused to leave. His defending counselor was bewildered. Luz continued to refuse.

"You have no choice, senor," said Chief Inspector Ortega. "It seems we have no case against you. Your lawyer here has been too clever for me. You have to go back to Bogota."

"But if I confess?"

There was silence in the cell. The defending lawyer threw up his hands and left in a huff. He had done his best. He had succeeded. But even he could not defend a fool. Paco Ortega led Luz to an interview room.

"Now," he said, "let's talk. Let's really talk. About lots of things. That is, if you really want sanctuary here."

And Luz talked. On and on. He knew so much, not just about Banco Guzman but about others. Like Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg, he was just not cut out for this sort of thing. JOAO MENDOZA'S third strike was a former French Noratlas, quite unmistakable in the moonlight because of its twin-boomed tail and rear-opening cargo doors. It was not even heading for Guinea-Bissau.

The seas off Dakar, capital of Senegal to the north of Guinea, teem with big-game fish and attract sportsmen to the area. Waiting out at sea, fifty miles into the Atlantic off Dakar, was a big Hatteras game fisherman. It made a perfect cover because the sight of a fast white vessel sporting tall waving outriggers and a row of rods at the stern tends to disarm suspicion.

The Blue Marlin sat rocking gently on the nocturnal swell as if waiting for the fish to start biting at sunup. Thanks to the modern convenience of GPS, her position was where it was supposed to be, accurate to a square one hundred meters by one hundred. And her crew was waiting with the powerful Maglite to shine the agreed code upward when they heard the engines approaching. But no engines came.

They had ceased to turn five hundred miles to the southwest and were lying with the remaining fragments of the Noratlas on the seabed. At dawn, the crew of the Hatteras, who had no interest in fishing, headed back to Dakar to report in coded e-mail that no rendezvous had taken place and there was no ton of cocaine in the hold beneath the engine bay. AS SEPTEMBER moved into October, Don Diego Esteban convened an emergency council. It was not so much for analysis as postmortem.

Of the governing board, two were not present. The news of the arrest in Madrid of Julio Luz had been absorbed, though nothing was known of the fact that he had turned traitor.

Roberto Cardenas could not be contacted. The Don intended to lose patience with the habit of the Cartagenan to disappear into the jungle and not stay in touch by cell phone. But the main point of the meeting was the figures, and the man effectively in the dock was Alfredo Suarez.

The news was bad and getting worse. Placed orders required that a minimum of three hundred tons of pure cocaine had to reach both the U.S. and Europe every year. By this time of the year, two hundred should have got through safely. That figure was under one hundred.

The disasters were happening on three fronts. In ports across the U.S. and Europe, sea containers were being stopped and subjected to spot checks on an increased basis, and far too often the choice for the spot check was accurate. It had long been blazingly obvious to the Don that he was under attack. The black cloud of suspicion fell on the dispatcher, Suarez. He alone knew exactly which sea containers were carrying a secondary cargo of cocaine.

His defense was that of over a hundred ports in two continents that received sea containers, only four had sustained successful interceptions by customs. What Suarez could not know was that there were seven more in the pipeline, as the Cobra dribbled out the names of the corrupt public servants.

The second front concerned merchantmen at sea. There had been a ferocious spike in the number of large freighters stopped and boarded in mid-ocean. These were all large ships. In some cases, the cocaine was secreted onboard in the harbor of departure and retained by the ship until it docked in the port of arrival.

But Suarez had substantially increased the practice of permitting the freighter to leave harbor "clean" and take on board several tons of cocaine from a fishing boat or go-fast at sea. This cargo would be off-loaded in the same manner before the long-distance ship arrived, while it was still up to a hundred miles from its destination. It could then arrive clean, like the Virgen de Valme in Seattle.

The disadvantage was that this way the entire crew could not be prevented from witnessing the transfers at both ends. Sometimes the freighters were genuinely empty of cocaine, and the boarding party had to leave with apologies and nothing else. But the proportion of discoveries in hiding places that should never have been detected was far too high.

In the western sector, three navies, those of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were at it, along with customs and Coast Guard patrols ranging far out to sea. In the east, four European navies were increasingly active.

According to official Western propaganda, the discoveries were due to the arrival of a new piece of technology, developed from the device that could detect buried bodies under concrete and used by homicide divisions worldwide. The development, so ran the official explanations, could penetrate steel like an X-ray through soft tissue and show up packages and bales in cavities created by the late Juan Cortez.

But an impounded ship is a nonearning ship, and even the tiny proportion of merchant shipping world that had been prepared to run the risk carrying contraband was now turning against the cartel despite the cash rewards.

But it was the third front that worried the Don. Even failures had reason; even disasters had explanations. It was the litany of complete disappearances that ate at his core.

He did not know about the two Global Hawks that were operating BAMS-Broad Aspect Maritime Surveillance-over the Caribbean and Atlantic. He did not know about the deck-plan identification that Michelle and Sam could pass in seconds to AFB Creech in Nevada or the master list created by Juan Cortez and now lodged in a warehouse in Washington, D.C. He did not know about the ability of the Hawks to wipe out all radio and e-mail and cell phone communication emanating from a sea area of a circular mile. And he did not know about two Q-ships masquerading as grain merchants in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.

And, most of all, he did not know that the rules had changed and that his vessels and crews were being wiped out, sunk, imprisoned and confiscated without publicity or due process. All he knew was that vessel after vessel and plane after plane were just disappearing. He did not know that he and his cartel were now being treated like foreign-based terrorists under the law.

And it was having an effect. Not only was it harder to find big merchantmen prepared to take the risk, the drivers of the go-fasts were highly skilled mariners, not just dockside muscle, and they were becoming unavailable. Freelance pilots had taken to discovering their aircraft were out-of-order and not fit to fly.

Don Diego was a man of both logic and developed paranoia. The two kept him alive and rich. He was by now totally convinced he had a traitor, and the man was in the midst of his cartel, the Brotherhood, his Hermandad. What he would do to the wretch when he found him was something his thoughts toyed with during the night.