Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

By that point, in an attempt to save the life of the source, only twelve corrupt officials had been caught, and each by supposed coincidence. With Cardenas dead, there was no need to protect him anymore.

Cal Dexter, accompanied by the DEA's top drug hunter, Bob Berrigan, toured Europe, eventually briefing delighted customs chiefs in twelve countries. The director of the DEA did the same for North America-Mexico, USA and Canada. In each case, the customs chiefs were urged to use the Hamburg ruse. Instead of going for an immediate snatch and arrest, they were asked to use the new information to grab both the corrupt official and an incoming cargo that he was trying to protect.

Some complied, some could not wait. But before the last of the Rat List went into custody, over forty tons of incoming cocaine had been discovered and confiscated. And it did not stop there.

Cardenas had used banks in six secret havens for the payoffs, and these banks, under intolerable pressure, reluctantly began to disgorge the nest eggs. Half a billion U.S. dollars were eventually recovered, and most went to swell the coffers of the anti-drug campaigning agencies.

Even that was not the end of it. The great majority of the civil servants sitting in their remand cells were not tough nuts. Faced with guaranteed ruin and a possible life sentence, most sought to improve their situation by cooperating. Though mafiosi in each country put "hit" contracts on their heads, the threat was often counterproductive. It made the opposite threat of immediate release on the street even more frightening. With a top secret jail and round-the-clock guards the only way to stay alive, cooperating became the only option.

The arrested men-and they were all men-recalled the front companies that owned and ran the flatbed trucks on which the sea containers had been collected after clearance. Customs and police raided warehouse after warehouse as the gangs tried hastily to relocate their stocks. More tonnages were confiscated.

Most of these seizures did not hurt the cartel directly because ownership had already passed, but it meant the national gangs lost fortunes, were forced to re-place fresh orders and placate their own clamoring subagents and secondary purchasers. They were allowed to know the leak that was costing them fortunes had come from Colombia, and they were not pleased.

The Cobra had long presumed that there would be a breach of his security sooner or later, and he was right. It came in late August. A Colombian soldier based at Malambo was on leave when he bragged in a bar that while on base he was part of the guard detail of the U.S. compound. He detailed to an impressed girlfriend, and an even more appreciative eavesdropper farther down the bar, that the Yanquis flew a strange airplane out of their heavily guarded zone. High walls prevented anyone seeing it being fueled and serviced, but it was visible when it took off and flew away. Even though these landings and departures were by night, the soldier had seen it in the moonlight.

It looked like a model from a toy shop, he said; propeller-driven, with its power unit on the back. More strange still, it had no pilot, but rumors in the canteen insisted the creature had amazing cameras that could see for miles and penetrate night, cloud and fog.

Relayed to the cartel, the ramblings of the corporal could mean only one thing; the Americans were flying UAVs out of Malambo to spy on all seacraft leaving the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

A week later, there was an attack on Malambo base. For his assault troops, the Don did not employ his Enforcer, still nursing his bullet-shattered left hand. He used his private army of former guerrillas of the FARC terrorist group, still commanded by jungle veteran Rodrigo Perez.

The attack was at night, and the assault group swept through the main gate and headed straight for the U.S. compound at the center of the base. Five Colombian soldiers died around the gate, but the shots alerted the U.S. Marine unit guarding the inner sanctum just in time.

In a suicidal wave, the attackers breached the high wall but were cut down trying to get to the hangar where the UAV was stored. The two FARC men who got inside just before they died were disappointed. Michelle was two hundred miles out to sea, turning lazily as she jammed two go-fasts while they were being intercepted by SEALs from the Chesapeake.

Apart from some pockmarks in the concrete, no damage was done to the hangar or the workshops. No U.S. Marines died, and just five Colombian soldiers. There were over seventy FARC bodies found in the morning. Out at sea, two more go-fasts vanished without a trace, their crews were lodged in the forward brig below the waterline and four tons of cocaine impounded.

But twenty-four hours later, the Cobra learned the cartel knew about Michelle. What Don Diego did not know was the existence of the second UAV flying out of an obscure Brazilian island.

With its guidance, Major Mendoza shot down four more cocaine traffickers in midair. This was despite the switch by the cartel from Rancho Boa Vista to another refueling hacienda even deeper in the bush. Four of the staff at Boa Vista had been lengthily tortured by El Animal and his crew when it was suspected they must be the source of the flight-plan leaks.

At the end of the month, a Brazilian financier, holidaying on Fernando de Noronha, spoke on the phone to his brother in Rio about a strange toy airplane the Americans were flying out of the far side of the airport. Two days later, there was an excited article in O Globo, the morning daily, and the second story was out in the open.

But the offshore island was beyond the reach even of the Don's FARC troopers; the Malambo base was strengthened, and the two UAVs went on flying. In neighboring Venezuela, hard-left president Hugo Chavez, who, despite his high moral tone, had allowed his country and its northern coast to become a major departure point for cocaine, fulminated his rage but could do little else.

Believing there might be some kind of a curse on Guinea-Bissau, pilots prepared to run the Atlantic gauntlet had insisted on flying to other destinations. The four shot down in December had been heading for Guinea-Conakry, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where they were supposed to drop their cargoes from midair, but low, over waiting fishing boats. It availed nothing because none arrived.

When the changing of the refueling stop from Boa Vista to a new ranch, and the switching of the destinations failed to work, the supply of volunteer pilots simply dried up no matter the money offered. The Atlantic run became known in crew rooms across Colombia and Venezuela as "los vuelos de la muerte"-the flights of death.

Detective work in Europe, with the help of Eberhardt Milch, had revealed the small stenciled code of the double circles and Maltese cross on certain steel sea containers. These had been traced back to the Suriname capital and port of Paramaribo and thence upcountry to the banana plantation from which they had all come. With American funding and help, that was raided and closed down.

A frantic Alfredo Suarez, desperately seeking to please Don Diego, realized that no freight ship had been intercepted in the Pacific, and, as Colombia has a coast on both oceans, he switched a large proportion of his dispatches away from the Caribbean side to the western rim.

Michelle spotted the change when a tramp steamer in her memory bank, one of those on the fast-diminishing Cortez list, was seen heading north past the western coast of Panama. It was too late to intercept it, but it was traced back to the Colombian Pacific port of Tumaco.

In mid-December, Don Diego Esteban agreed to receive an emissary from one of the cartel's biggest and therefore most reliable European clients. He rarely if ever received anyone personally from outside his small coterie of fellow Colombians, but his head of merchandising, Jose-Maria Largo, responsible for client relationships worldwide, had entreated him.