Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

Immense precautions were taken to ensure that the two Europeans, important though they were, had no idea in which hacienda the reception took place. There was no language problem; the two men were Spanish and both from Galicia.

This storm-lashed northwestern province of Spain has long been the smuggling star performer of the old European kingdom. It has an ancient tradition of producing seafarers who can take on any ocean, no matter how wild. They say seawater flows in the blood along that wild coast from Ferrol to Vigo, indented by a thousand creeks and inlets, home to a hundred fishing villages.

Another tradition is a cavalier attitude to the unwanted attentions of customs and excise men. Smugglers have often been seen in a romantic light, but there is nothing lighthearted in the ruthlessness with which smugglers fight the authorities and punish squealers. With the rise of the drug culture in Europe, Galicia emerged as one of the main centers.

For years, two gangs have dominated the cocaine industry of Galicia-the Charlins and the Los Caneos. Formerly allies, they had a major falling-out and blood feud in the nineties but had recently resolved their differences and unified again into an alliance. It was a deputy from each wing that had flown to Colombia to protest to Don Diego. He had agreed to receive them because of the long and strong links between Latin America and Galicia, a heritage of many Galician sailors who settled in the New World long ago, and the size of the Galicians' habitual orders for cocaine.

The visitors were not happy. It had been two of their own whom Chief Inspector Paco Ortega had seized with two suitcases containing €10 million of laundered five-hundred-euro notes. This disaster, the Galicians maintained, had stemmed from a security failure by the lawyer Julio Luz, now looking at twenty years in a Spanish jail and reportedly singing like a canary in a plea-bargaining deal.

Don Diego listened in icy silence. More than anything else on earth, he hated to be humiliated, and now he had to sit and be lectured to, he fumed, by these two peons from Coruna. Worse, they were right. The fault was with Luz. If the fool had had family, they would have paid in pain for the absent betrayer. But the Galicians had more.

Their principal clients were the British gangs who imported cocaine into the UK. Forty percent of British cocaine came via Galicia, and these supplies came up from West Africa and entirely by sea. Those portions of the trade from West Africa that came overland to the coast between Morocco and Libya before crossing to Southern Europe went to other gangs. The Galicians depended on the marine traffic, and it had dried up.

The strongly implied question was: what are you going to do about it? He graciously bade his visitors to take wine in the sun while he went inside to confer.

How much, he inquired of Jose-Maria Largo, are the Galicians worth to us? Too much, admitted Largo. Of the estimated three hundred tons that had to reach Europe every year, the Spanish, which was to say the Galicians, took twenty percent, or sixty tons. The only ones bigger were the Italian Ndrangheta, bigger even than the camorra of Naples and the Cosa Nostra of Sicily.

"We need them, Don Diego. Suarez needs to take special measures to keep them satisfied."

Before his amalgamation of the mini-cartels into the giant Brotherhood, the Galicians had mainly secured their supplies from the Norte del Valle cartel run by Montoya, now in an American jail. Norte del Valle had been the last of the independents to succumb to amalgamation, but they still produced their own supplies. If the powerful Galicians went back to their original provider, others might follow, provoking the steady breakup of his empire. Don Diego returned to the terrace.

"Senores," he told them. "You have the word of Don Diego Esteban. Your supplies will resume."

It was easier said than done. Suarez's switch of method from thousands of human mules swallowing up to a kilogram each, or carrying two or three kilos in a suitcase and hoping to get through airports intact, had seemed sensible at the time. The new invisible X-ray machines that penetrated clothing and body fat had certainly made stomach carrying a lost cause. Furthermore, the intensive security in baggage-handling halls, which he put down to the Islamic fundamentalists whom he cursed every day of his life, had sent suitcase interception through the roof. Big and few, had seemed a sensible new direction. But since July, there had been a welter of interceptions and disappearances, and each loss had been between one and twelve tons.

He had lost his money launderer, his controller of the Rat List had betrayed him and a hundred-plus officials who had been working covertly for him were under lock and key. At-sea interceptions of big freighters carrying cocaine were over fifty; eight pairs of go-fasts had disappeared without trace, plus fifteen smaller tramps, and the air bridge to West Africa was history.

He knew he had an enemy, and a very, very bad one. The revelation of the two UAVs constantly patrolling the skies and spotting surface craft and perhaps his airplanes would explain part of his losses.

But where were the U.S. and British warships that must be doing the interceptions? Where were his captured ships? Where were the crews? Why were they not paraded before the cameras as usual? Why were the customs officials not gloating over bales of captured cocaine as they always did?

Whoever "they" were, they could not be keeping his crews secretly prisoner. That was against their human rights. They could not be sinking his ships. That was against the laws of the sea, the rules of CRIJICA. And they could not be shooting down his planes. Even his worst enemies, the American DEA and the British SOCA, had to abide by their own laws. And, finally, why had not one of the smugglers sent a single distress call from programmed senders?

The Don suspected there was one brain behind all this, and he was right. As he ushered his Galician guests to the SUV to take them to the airstrip, the Cobra was in his elegant house in Alexandria on the Potomac enjoying a Mozart concerto on his sound system. IN THE FIRST week of 2012, a harmless-looking grain ship, the MV Chesapeake, slipped south through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific. Had anyone asked, or, even more unlikely, had the authority to examine paperwork, she could have proved she was proceeding south to Chile with wheat from Canada.

In fact, she did turn south on emerging into the Pacific, but only to comply with the order that she hold position fifty miles off the Colombian coast and await a passenger.

That passenger flew south from the U.S. in a CIA-owned executive jet and landed at Malambo, the Colombian base on the Caribbean coast. There were no customs formalities, and even if there had been the American had a diplomatic passport preventing his luggage being examined.

That luggage was one heavy haversack, from which he politely declined to be parted even though hefty U.S. Marines offered to carry it for him. Not that he was on base long. A Black Hawk had been ordered to stand by for him.

Cal Dexter knew the pilot, who greeted him with a grin.

"In or out this time, sir?" he asked. He was the flier who had plucked Dexter off the balcony of the Santa Clara Hotel after the hazardous meeting with Cardenas. He checked his route plan as the Black Hawk lifted off the pad, rose and turned southwest over the Gulf of Darien.

From 5,000 feet, the pilot and his front-seat passenger could see the rolling jungle beneath, and, beyond it, the gleam of the Pacific. Dexter had seen his first jungle when, as a teenage grunt, he had been flown into the Iron Triangle in Vietnam. He soon lost all illusions about rain forests back then, and had never gained any.

From the air they always looked lush and spongy, comfortable, even welcoming; but in reality they were lethal to land in. The Gulf of Darien dropped behind them, and they crossed the isthmus just south of the Panamanian border.