Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

There was a discreet cough to his left. It was Jose-Maria Largo, the director of merchandising.

"Don Diego, I much regret to say it but I must. Our clients across two continents are becoming restive, especially the Mexicans, and in Italy, the Ndrangheta, who dominate so much of Europe. You were the one who clinched the two concordats; with La Familia in Mexico and the Calabrians, who have the lion's share of our product in Europe.

"Now they complain of a shortage of product, of orders unmet, of prices rising due to deficits of delivery."

Don Diego had to restrain himself from hitting the man. Instead he nodded somberly.

"Jose-Maria, dear colleague, I think you should make a tour. Take in our ten biggest clients. Tell them there was a localized and temporary problem which is being coped with."

And he turned smoothly toward Suarez.

"And coped with, it must surely be, would you not agree, Alfredo?"

The threat was in the air, and it applied to them all. Production would be increased to cope with shortfall. Fishing vessels and small freighters that had never been used before would have to be acquired or recruited for the Atlantic crossing. New pilots would have to be paid with irresistible fees to risk flying to Africa and Mexico.

Privately, he promised himself, the hunt for the traitor would be stepped up until the renegade was found. Then he would be dealt with, and his passing would not be pleasant. IN MID-OCTOBER, Michelle spotted a speck coming out of the jungles of Colombia and heading north over the sea. Enlargement revealed a twin-engined Cessna 441. It attracted attention because it came out of a tiny airstrip in the middle of nowhere that would normally not dispatch passenger planes to international destinations; it was not an executive jet full of business executives; and, on a course of 325°, it was heading for Mexico.

Michelle turned in pursuit and tracked the oddity past the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras, where, had it not had extra fuel tanks, it should have been forced to land and refuel. It did not; it went on past Belize and over the Yucatan. That was when AFB Creech offered the intercept to the Mexican Air Force, which was delighted. Whoever the fool was, he was flying in daylight, unaware that he was being watched or that his watcher had realized he should have been out of fuel.

The Cessna was intercepted by two Mexican jets, who tried to contact it by radio. It failed to respond. They waved to the pilot to divert and land at Merida. Up ahead was a large cloud formation. The Cessna suddenly made a diving break for the cloud and tried to escape. He must have been one of the Don's newcomers, not very experienced. The fighter pilots had radar but a limited sense of humor.

The Cessna went down in flames and hit the sea just off Campeche. It had been trying to make a delivery to a strip on a cattle ranch outside Nuevo Laredo on the Texan border. No one survived. Enough bales to weigh in at 500 kgs were hauled out of the shallows by local fishing boats. Some was handed over to the authorities, but not much.

By mid-October, both Q-ships needed replenishing. The Chesapeake met her fleet auxiliary for open-ocean razzing south of Jamaica. She took on board a full load of fuel and food, and a replacement platoon of SEALs, this time Team 3 from Coronado, California. Also leaving her were all her prisoners.

The prisoners, hooded outside their un-windowed prison, were aware from the voices that they were in the hands of the Americans, but not where they were or what vessel they were on. They would eventually be taken ashore, hooded and in a black-windowed bus, transported to Eglin Air Force Base to be led aboard a C-5 freight plane for the long flight to the Chagos Islands, where at last they would see daylight and could sit out the war.

The Balmoral also refueled at sea. Her SBS men remained aboard because the unit was stretched with two entire squadrons deployed in Afghanistan. Her prisoners were taken to Gibraltar, where the same American C-5 did a stopover to pick them up. The British capture of eighteen tons of cocaine was also handed to the Americans at Gibraltar.

But the captures of cocaine, twenty-three tons by the Chesapeake and eighteen tons by the Balmoral, were transferred to another vessel. This was a small freighter operated by the Cobra.

The cocaine captured in different ports in the U.S. and Europe was destroyed by the various national police authorities. Consignments seized at sea were taken in hand by the navies or coast guards responsible and destroyed by them back onshore. The cargoes shot down over the sea were lost forever. But the captures by Cobra, Paul Devereaux ordered to be stored under guard on a tiny leased islet in the Bahamas.

The low mountains of bales were in rows under camouflage netting between the palms, and a small detail of U.S. Marines lived in a series of motor homes parked in the shade just off the beach by the jetty. The only visitor they received was a small freighter bringing fresh deliveries. After the first captures, it was the little freighter that made rendezvous with the Q-ships to relieve them of their bales of drugs. AT THE END of October, the message from Hoogstraten reached the Don. He did not believe that the banks had revealed their innermost secrets to the authorities. One, maybe, never two. So there was only one man who knew the numbers of the bank accounts into which the bribes were paid that assured safe clearance of cocaine cargoes in ports across the U.S. and Europe. The Don had his traitor.

Roberto Cardenas was watching the clip of his daughter crossing the sidewalk at Kennedy Airport when the door came down. As ever, his mini-Uzi was within arm's reach, and he knew how to use it.

He took out six of the Enforcer's crew before they got him down, and he put a bullet through the hand of El Animal. But numbers will always tell eventually, and Paco Valdez, knowing what he was up against, had brought a dozen.

In life, Roberto Cardenas was a rough, hard, bad man. In death, he was just another corpse. In five pieces, when the chain saw had finished.

He had ever had only one daughter. And he had loved her very much.

THROUGHOUT NOVEMBER, THE COBRA'S ASSAULT ON DON Diego's cocaine empire continued remorselessly, and finally the fault lines began to show. The standing of the cartel with its numerous and ultra-violent customers across both continents became serious and deteriorating, if not yet fatal.

Don Diego had long realized that even if Roberto Cardenas had betrayed him, the man who had controlled the Rat List could not have been his only enemy.

Cardenas could not have known about the hiding places so skillfully constructed by Juan Cortez. He could not have known about ship identities, departure sailings and from which ports. He could not have known about night flights to West Africa and the aircraft used. But there was one man who did.

The Don's paranoia began to swerve toward the man who knew all that-Alfredo Suarez. Suarez knew perfectly well what had happened to Cardenas and began to fear for his life.

But the first problem was production. With interceptions, destructions, losses at sea and disappearances running at fifty percent of tonnage dispatched, the Don ordered Emilio Sanchez to increase jungle production to levels never hitherto needed. And the increased costs began to bite into even the cartel's staggering wealth. Then the Cobra learned about Cardenas.

It was the peasants who found the mutilated body. The head was missing, never to be found, but to Colonel Dos Santos the use of the chain saw said "cartel," and he asked the morgue at Cartagena for a DNA swab. It was the DNA that identified the old gangster.

Dos Santos told the DEA chief resident in Bogota, and the American told Army Navy Drive in Arlington. The Cobra saw it on his patch-through of all communications reaching the Drug Enforcement Administration HQ.