The Cobra

CHAPTER 8

JULIO LUZ, THE ADVOCATE FROM THE CITY OF BOGOTA?, flew into New York clothed in outward calm, but internally a thoroughly frightened man. Since the arrest of Letizia Arenal at Kennedy three days earlier, he had had two long and terrifying interviews with one of the most violent men he had ever met.

Though he had sat with Roberto Cardenas in the meetings of the cartel, that had always been under the chairmanship of Don Diego, whose word was law and who demanded a level of dignity to match his own.

In a room in a farmhouse miles off the beaten track, Cardenas had no such limitations. He had raged and threatened. Like Luz, he had no doubt his daughter's luggage had been interfered with and had convinced himself the insertion of cocaine had been accomplished by some opportunist lowlife in the baggage hall at Barajas Airport, Madrid.

He described what he would do to this baggage handler when he caught up with him, until Julio Luz felt nauseated. Finally, they concocted the story they would present to the New York authorities. Neither man had ever heard of any Domingo de Vega and could not surmise why she had been flying there.

Prisoners' mail out of U.S. correctional institutions is censored, and Letizia had not written any such letter. All Julio Luz knew was what he had been told by the Foreign Ministry.

The lawyer's story would be that the young woman was an orphan, and he was her guardian. Papers were concocted to that effect. Money traceable back to Cardenas was impossible to use. Luz would draw monies from his own practice, and Cardenas would reimburse him later. Luz, arriving in New York, would be in funds, entitled to see his ward in jail and seeking to engage the best criminal attorney money could buy.

And this he did, in that order. Faced with her fellow country-man, even with a Spanish-speaking woman from the DEA sitting in the corner of the room, Letizia Arenal poured out her story to a man she had met only for dinner and breakfast at the Villa Real Hotel.

Luz was aghast, not just at the story of the devilishly handsome pseudo-diplomat from Puerto Rico, nor at the incredibly stupid decision to disobey her father by flying the Atlantic, but at the prospect of the volcanic rage of that father when he heard, as hear he must.

The lawyer could add two and two and come up with four. The phony art-fan Vega was clearly part of a Madrid-based smuggling gang using his gigolo talents to recruit unsuspecting young women to act as "mules" by carrying cocaine into the U.S. He had little doubt that soon after his return to Colombia, there would be an army of Spanish and Colombian thugs coming to Madrid and New York to find the missing Vega.

The fool would be snatched, taken to Colombia, handed over to Cardenas and then God help him. Letizia told him there had been a photo of her fiance in her purse and a larger one in her flat in Moncloa. He made a mental note to demand the first back and have the larger one removed from the Madrid apartment. They would help in the search for the rogue behind this disaster. Luz calculated the young smuggler would not be hiding deep because he would not know who was coming for him, only that he had lost one of his cargoes.

He would, under torture, give up the name of the baggage handler who had inserted the bag of coke at Madrid. A full confession from him, and New York would have to drop the charge. So he reasoned.

Later, there was total denial of there being any photo of any young man in the purse confiscated at Kennedy, and the one in Madrid had already gone. Paco Ortega had seen to that. But first things first. Luz engaged the services of Mr. Boseman Barrow, of Manson Barrow, considered the finest advocate at the criminal bar of Manhattan. The sum involved for Mr. Barrow to drop everything and cross the river into Brooklyn was deeply impressive.

But as the two men returned from the federal correctional institution to Manhattan the following day, the New Yorker's face was grave. Internally, he was not so grave. He saw months and months of work at astronomical fees.

"Senor Luz, I must be brutally frank. Things are not good. Personally, I have no doubt your ward was lured into a disastrous situation by the cocaine smuggler who called himself Domingo de Vega and that she was unaware of what she was doing. She was duped. It happens all the time."

"So that is good," interjected the Colombian.

"It is good that I believe it. But if I am to represent her, I must. The problem is, I am neither the jury nor the judge, and I am certainly not the DEA, the FBI or the District Attorney. And a much bigger problem is that this Vega man has not only vanished, but there is not a shred of evidence that he existed."

The law firm's limousine crossed the East River and Luz stared down glumly at the gray water.

"But Vega was not the baggage handler," he protested. "There must be another man, the one in Madrid who opened her case and put in the package."

"We do not know that," sighed the Manhattan counselor. "He may have been the baggage handler as well. Or have had access to the baggage hall. He may have passed for an Iberia staffer or customs officer with right of access. He may even have been either of these things. How energetic will the Madrid authorities be to divert their precious resources to the task of trying to liberate one they probably see as a dope smuggler, and a non-Spanish to boot?"

They turned onto the East River Drive toward Boseman Barrow's comfort zone, downtown Manhattan.

"I have funds," protested Julio Luz. "I can engage private investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. How you say, 'the sky is the limit.' "

Mr. Barrow beamed down at his companion. He could almost smell the odor of the new wing on his mansion in the Hamptons. This was going to take many months.

"We have one powerful argument, Senor Luz. It is clear that the security apparatus at Madrid Airport screwed up badly."

"Screwed up?"

"Failed. In these paranoid days, all airline baggage heading to the U.S. should be X-ray screened at the airport of departure. Especially in Europe. There are bilateral compacts. The outline of the bag should have shown up at Madrid. And they have sniffer dogs. Why no sniffer dogs? It all points to an insertion after the usual checks…"

"Then we can ask they drop the charges?"

"On an administrative foul-up? I'm afraid dropping the charges is out of the question. As for our chances in court, without some blistering new evidence in her favor, not good. A New York jury simply will not believe a screwup in Madrid Airport is possible.

"They will look at the known evidence, not the protestations of the accused. One passenger from, of all places, Colombia; slipping through the Green Channel; one kilogram of Colombian pure; floods of tears. I am afraid it is very, very common. And the city of New York is getting very, very sick of it."

Mr. Barrow forebore to say that his own engagement would not look good either. Olympian quantities of money were associated by low-budget New Yorkers, the sort who end up on juries, with the cocaine trade. A real, innocent mule would be abandoned to the Legal Aid Office. But no need to secure his own departure from the case.

"What happens now?" asked Luz. His entrails were starting to melt again at the idea of confronting the volcanic temper of Roberto Cardenas with this.

"Well, she will soon appear before the Federal District Court for Brooklyn. The judge will not grant bail. That is a given. She will be transferred to an upstate federal jail on remand, pending trial. These are not nice places. She is not street hardened. Convent educated, you said? Oh dear. There are aggressive lesbians in these places. I am deeply sorry to say that. I doubt it is different in Colombia."

Luz put his face in his hands.

"Dios mio," he murmured. "How long there?"

"Well, not less than six months, I fear. Time for the Prosecutor's Office to prepare its case, somewhere in its vast workload. And for us, of course. For your private eyes to see what they can turn up."

Julio Luz also declined to be frank. He had no doubt a few private eyes would be Cub Scouts compared to the army of hard men Roberto Cardenas would unleash to find the destroyer of his daughter. But he was wrong in that. Cardenas would do no such thing, because Don Diego would find out. The Don did not know about the secret daughter, and the Don insisted on knowing everything. Even Julio Luz had thought she was the gangster's girlfriend and the envelopes he carried were her allowance. He had one last timid question. The limousine hissed through the slush to a halt outside the luxury office block whose penthouse floor housed the small but gold-plated law firm of Manson Barrow.

"If she is found guilty, Senor Barrow, what would be the sentence?"

"Hard to say, of course. Depends on mitigating evidence, if any; my own advocacy; the judge on the day. But I fear in the present mood it might be felt necessary to create an example. A deterrent. In the area of twenty years in a federal penitentiary. Thank heavens her parents are not around to see it."

Julio Luz moaned. Barrow took pity.

"Of course, the picture could be transformed if she became an informant. We call it 'plea bargaining.' The DEA does trade deals for insider information to catch the much bigger fish. Now, if…"

"She cannot," moaned Luz. "She knows nothing. She is truly innocent."

"Ah well, then… such a pity."

Luz was being quite truthful. He alone knew what the jailed young woman's father did, and he certainly did not dare to tell her. MAY SLIPPED into June, and Global Hawk Michelle silently glided and turned over the eastern and southern Caribbean, seeming like a real hawk to ride the thermals on an endless quest for prey. This was not the first time.

In the spring of 2006, a joint Air Force/DEA program had put a Global Hawk over the Caribbean from a base in Florida. It was a Maritime Demonstration Program, and short-term. In its brief time aloft, the Hawk managed to monitor hundreds of sea and air targets. It was enough to convince the Navy that BAMS, or Broad Aspect Maritime Surveillance, was the future, and it placed a huge order.

But the Navy was thinking Russian fleet, Iranian gunboats, North Korean spy ships. The DEA was thinking cocaine smugglers. The trouble was, in 2006 the Hawk could show what it could show, but no one knew which was which, the innocent and the guilty. Thanks to Juan Cortez the wonder-welder, the authorities now had Lloyd's-listed cargo ships by name and tonnage. Close to forty of them.

At AFB Creech, Nevada, shifts of men and women watched Michelle's screen, and every two or three days her tiny onboard computers would make a match-pitting the "Identi-Kit" deck layout provided by Jeremy Bishop against the deck of something moving far below.

When Michelle made a match, Creech would call the shabby warehouse in Anacostia to say:

"Team Cobra. We have the MV Mariposa. She is coming out of the Panama Canal into the Caribbean."

Bishop would acknowledge, and punch up details of the Mariposa on her present voyage. Cargo heading for Baltimore. She might have taken on a consignment of cocaine in Guatemala or at sea. Or maybe not yet. She might be taking her cocaine right into Baltimore itself or dropping it to a speedboat by dead of night somewhere in the vast blackness of Chesapeake Bay. Or she might not be carrying at all.

"Shall we alert Baltimore customs? Or the Maryland Coast Guard?" asked Bishop.

"Not yet" was the answer.

It was not Paul Devereaux's habit to explain to underlings. He kept his logic to himself. If searchers went straight to the secret place, or even made a pretense of finding it with dogs, after two or three successful discoveries the coincidences would be too neat for the cartel to ignore.

He did not want to make intercepts or hand them gift-wrapped to others once the cargo had landed. He was prepared to leave the American and European importing gangs to the local authorities. His target was the Brotherhood, and they took the "hit" directly only if the intercept was at sea, before handover and change of ownership.

As was his habit from the old days when the opponent was the KGB and its satellite goons, he studied his enemy with extreme care. He pored over the wisdom of Sun-tzu as expressed in the Ping-fa, the Art of War. He revered the old Chinese sage whose repeated advice was "Study your enemy."

Devereaux knew who headed the Brotherhood, and he had studied Don Diego Esteban, landowner, gentleman, Catholic scholar, philanthropist, cocaine lord and killer. He knew he had one advantage that would not last forever. He knew about the Don, but the Don knew nothing of the waiting Cobra.

On the other side of South America, right out over the Brazilian coast, Global Hawk Sam had also been patrolling the stratosphere. Everything it saw was sent to a screen in Nevada and then patched to the computers at Anacostia. The merchant vessels were much fewer. Trade by big carriers from South America due east to West Africa was slimmer. What there was was photographed, and though the vessels' names were usually out of sight from 60,000 feet, their images were compared to the files of the MOAC in Lisbon, the UN's ODC in Vienna and the British SOCA in Accra, Ghana.

Five matches could be given names that were on the Cortez list. The Cobra stared at Bishop's screens and promised himself their time would come.

And there was something else Sam noticed and recorded. Airplanes left the Brazilian coast heading due east or northeast for Africa. The commercials were not many and not a problem. But every profile was sent to Creech and then Anacostia. Jeremy Bishop quickly identified them all by type, and a pattern emerged.

Many of them had not the range. They would not make the distance. Unless they had been internally modified. Global Hawk Sam was given fresh instructions. Refueled at the air base on Fernando de Noronha, it went back up and concentrated on the smaller aircraft.

Working backward, as from the rim of a bicycle wheel down the spokes to the hub, Sam established they almost all came from a huge estancia deep inland from the city of Fortaleza. Maps of Brazil from space, the images sent back by Sam and discreet checks within the office of land management at Belem identified the ranch. It was called Boa Vista. THE AMERICANS got there first, as they had the longest cruise ahead of them. Twelve of them flew into Goa International Airport masquerading as tourists in mid-June. Had anyone delved deep into their baggage, which no one did, the searcher would have found that, by a remarkable coincidence, all twelve were fully qualified as merchant seamen. In truth, they were the same U.S. Navy crew that had originally brought the grain vessel now converted into the MV Chesapeake. A coach hired by McGregor brought them down the coast to the Kapoor shipyard.

The Chesapeake was waiting, and as there was no accommodation inside the yard they went straight on board for a long sleep. The next morning they began two days of intensive familiarization.

The senior officer, the new captain, was a Navy commander, and his first officer one rank down. There were two lieutenants and the other eight ran from chief petty officer down to rating. Each specialist concentrated on his individual kingdom: bridge, engine room, galley, radio shack, deck and hatch covers.

It was when they penetrated the five huge grain holds that they stopped in amazement. There was a complete Special Forces barracks down there, all without portholes or natural daylight and therefore all invisible from the outside. At sea, they were told, they would have no call to come forward from their own quarters. The SEALs would fix their own chow and generally look after themselves.

The crew would confine themselves to the ship's normal crew quarters, which were more spacious and more comfortable than they would have had, for example, on a destroyer.

There was a double-bunked guest cabin, purpose unknown. If the SEAL officers wished to confer with the bridge, they would walk belowdecks through four watertight doors connecting the holds and then upward into the daylight.

They were not told, because they did not need to know, or not yet, why the hold nearest the bow was a sort of jail to take prisoners. But they were definitely shown how to remove the hatch covers over two of the five holds to bring their contents up into action. This exercise they would practice repeatedly on their long cruise; partly to while away the hours, partly until they could do it in double time and in their sleep.

On the third day, the parchment-skinned McGregor saw them off to sea. He stood on the end of the seamost groyne, as the Chesapeake came under way and slid past him, and raised an amber glass. He was prepared to live in conditions of heat, malaria, sweat and stench, but never to be without a bottle or two of the distillation of his native islands, the Hebrides.

The shorter route to her destination would have been across the Arabian Sea and through the Suez Canal. Because of the long shot of Somali pirates proving troublesome off the Horn of Africa, and because she had the time, it had been decided she would turn southwest for the Cape of Good Hope, then northwest to her sea rendezvous off Puerto Rico.

Three days later, the British arrived to pick up the MV Balmoral. There were fourteen, all Royal Navy, and under the guidance of McGregor they, too, went through a two-day familiarization process. Because the U.S. Navy is "dry" in alcohol terms, the Americans had brought no duty-free spirits from the airport. The inheritors of Nelson's navy have no such rigors to endure, and they made their mark with Mr. McGregor by bringing several bottles of single malt brew from Islay, his favorite distillery.

When she was ready, the Balmoral also put to sea. Her sea rendezvous was closer; around the Cape of Good Hope and northwest to Ascension Island, where she would meet, out of sight and land, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary carrying her complement of Special Boat Service Marines and the equipment they, too, would need.

When the Balmoral was over the horizon, McGregor packed up what was left. The converter crews and internal outfitters were long gone and their motor homes taken back by the hire company. The old Scot was living in the last of them on his diet of whisky and quinine. The brothers Kapoor had been paid off from bank accounts no one would ever trace and lost all interest in two grain ships they had converted to dive centers. The yard went back to its habitual regime of dismembering ships full of toxic chemicals and asbestos. COLLEEN KECK crouched on the wing of the Buccaneer and puckered her face against the wind. The exposed flat plains of Lincolnshire are not balmy ever in June. She had come to say good-bye to the Brazilian of whom she had become fond.

Beside her, in the forward cockpit of the fighter bomber, sat Major Joao Mendoza, making last and final checks. In the rear cockpit, where she had sat to train him, the seat was gone. Instead was yet another extra fuel tank, and a radio set that fed straight into the flier's headphones. Behind them both, the two Spey engines rumbled at the idling pitch.

When there was no point in waiting anymore, she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek.

"Safe journey, Joao," she shouted. He saw her lips move and realized what she had said. He smiled back and raised his right hand, thumb erect. With the arctic wind, the jets behind him and the voice from the tower in his ears, he could not hear her.

Cdr. Keck slid off the wing and jumped to the ground. The Perspex canopy rolled forward and closed, locking the pilot into his own world; a world of control column, throttles, instruments, gunsight, fuel gauges and tactical air navigator, the TACAN.

He asked for and got final clearance, turned onto the runway, paused again, checked brakes, released and rolled. Seconds later, the ground crew in the van by the tarmac, who had come to see him off, watched as 22,000 pounds of thrust from twin Speys powered the Buccaneer into the skies and saw it bank toward the south.

Because of the changes made, it had been decided Major Mendoza would fly back to the mid-Atlantic by a different route. In the Portuguese islands of the Azores is the U.S. Air Force base of Lajes, home of the 64th Wing, and the Pentagon, operating to unseen strings, had agreed to refuel the "museum piece" ostensibly heading back to South Africa. At 1,395 nautical miles, it was no problem.

Nevertheless, he overnighted in the officers' club at Lajes in order to leave at dawn for Fogo. He had no wish to make his first landing at his new home in the dark. He took off at dawn for the second leg, 1,439 miles to Fogo, well under his 2,200-mile limit.

The skies over the Cape Verde Islands were clear. As he dropped down from his cruise altitude of 35,000 feet, he could see them all with total clarity. At 10,000 feet, the wakes of a few speedboats out at sea were like little white feathers against the blue water. At the south end of the group, west of Santiago, he could make out the jutting caldera of Fogo's extinct volcano and, tucked into the southwestern flank of the rock, the sliver of airport runway.

He dropped farther in a long, curving sweep over the Atlantic, keeping the volcano just off port wing. He knew that he had a designated call sign and frequency, and that the language would not be Portuguese but English. He would be "Pilgrim," and Fogo Central was "Progress." He pressed the Transmit button and called.

"Pilgrim, Pilgrim… Progress Tower, do you read me?"

The voice that came back he recognized. One of the six from Scampton who would be his technical and support team. An English voice, North Country accent. His friend was sitting in the Fogo Airport control tower beside the Verdean traffic controller of commercial flights.

"Read you fine, Pilgrim."

The Scampton enthusiast, another retiree recruited by Cal Dexter with Cobra money, stared out of the plate-glass window of the stumpy little control box and could clearly see the Bucc curving over the sea. He delivered landing instructions: direction of runway, wind strength and direction.

At 1,000 feet, Joao Mendoza lowered undercarriage and flaps to landing setting, watched the airspeed and altitude drop. In such brilliant visibility, there was not much need for technology; this was flying as it used to be. Two miles out, he lined up. The froth of foaming surf swept under him, the wheels thumped the tarmac at the very threshold marker, and he was braking gently down a runway half the length of the Scampton strip. He was fuel light and un-weaponed. It was not a problem.

As he came to a halt with two hundred yards to spare, a small pickup swerved in front, and a figure in the back beckoned him to follow. He taxied away from the terminal to the flight-school complex and finally shut down.

The five who had preceded him from Scampton surrounded him. There were cheery greetings as he climbed down. The sixth was approaching from the tower on his rented scooter. All six had arrived by a British C-130 Hercules two days earlier. With them came rockets for RATO departures, every tool needed to maintain the Bucc in her new role and the all-important Aden cannon ammunition. Among the six, all now assured of much more comfortable pensions than they had faced six months earlier, were rigger, fitter, armorer (the "plumber"), avionics expert, air comms (radio) technician and the air traffic controller who had just talked him down.

Most missions yet to come would be in darkness, both takeoff and landing, which would be trickier, but they had another fortnight to practice. For the moment, they took him off to his quarters, where his kit was already laid out. Then he went to the main mess hall to meet his fellow Brazilian instructors and the Portuguese-speaking cadets. The new CO and his personal museum piece had arrived. The youngsters were eagerly looking forward, after four weeks of classwork and aircraft familiarization, to their first dual-controls flights in the morning.

Compared to their basic simple little Tucano trainers, the former Navy ship killer looked formidable. But it was soon towed to the steel-doored hangar and out of sight. That afternoon, she was refueled, her rockets fitted and her canno packs armed. Night familiarization was two evenings away. A few passengers trooping off the Santiago shuttle into the civilian terminal saw nothing.

That evening, speaking out of Washington, Cal Dexter had a short conversation with Major Mendoza, and, in answer to the obvious question, told him to be patient. He would not have long to wait. JULIO LUZ was trying to act normally. He had been sworn to secrecy by Roberto Cardenas, and yet the thought of deceiving the Don, even by nondisclosure, terrified him. They both terrified him.

He resumed his fortnightly visits to Madrid as if nothing had happened. On this particular trip, his first since his visit to New York and yet another utterly miserable hour reporting to Cardenas, he was again invisibly followed. He was quite unaware, as was the excellent management of the Villa Real Hotel, that his habitual room had been bugged by a team of two from the FBI, directed by Cal Dexter. Every sound he made was listened to by another hotel client, who had taken a room two floors abovehim.

The man sat patiently with "cans" over his ears and blessed the wiry ex-Tunnel Rat who had installed him in a comfortable room instead of his usual billet on stakeouts: a cramped van in a parking lot with rotten coffee and "no facilities." When the target was out at the bank, dining or taking breakfast, he could relax with the TV or the funnies of the International Herald Tribune from the lobby newsstand. But on this particular morning, the day of the target's departure back to the airport, he was listening hard with his cell in his left hand.

The lawyer's personal physician would have been completely understanding of the middle-aged patient's abiding problem. The constant cross-Atlantic journeys played havoc with his constipation. He carried his own supply of syrup of figs at all times. This had been discovered during a raid on his room while he was at the bank.

After ordering a pot of Earl Grey tea in bed, he retired to the marble bathroom and thence to the lavatory cubicle as always. There he patiently waited for nature to take its course, a sojourn that took up to ten minutes. During that time, with the door closed, he could not hear his own bedroom. That was when the eavesdropper made his call.

On the morning in question, the room was silently entered. The key code was different with every visit, of course, indeed changed for every occupant of the room, but it posed no barrier to the lockpicker Cal Dexter had brought with him again. The deep pile of the carpet reduced footfalls to utter silence. Dexter crossed the room to the chest where the attache case rested. He hoped the roller sequence had not been altered, and he was right. It was still the Bar Association membership number. He had the lid up, the job done and the lid replaced in seconds. He rolled the numbers back to where they had been before. Then he left. Behind the bathroom door, Senor Julio Luz sat and strained.

He might have made it to the first-class departure lounge at Barajas without opening his briefcase, if only he had had his airline ticket in his breast pocket. But he had put it in his travel wallet in the interior lid of the case. So as his hotel checkout record was being printed, he opened his case to get it.

If the shock call from the Colombian Foreign Ministry ten days earlier had been bad, this was calamitous. He felt so weak, he thought he might be having a heart attack. Disregarding the proffered printout, he retired to sit on a lobby chair, case on lap, staring haggard at the floor. A bellhop had to tell him three times that his limo was at the door. Finally, he staggered down the steps and into the car. As it drew away, he glanced behind. Was he being followed? Would he be intercepted, dragged away to a cell for the third degree?

In fact, he could not have been safer. Invisibly tailed on arrival and during his stay, he was now being invisibly escorted to the airport. As the limo left the suburbs behind, he checked again, just in case of an optical illusion. No illusion. It was there, right on top. A cream manila envelope. It was addressed simply to "Papa." THE BRITISH-CREWED MV Balmoral was fifty miles off Ascension when she met her Royal Fleet Auxiliary. As with most of the older RFAs, she was named after one of the Knights of the Round Table, in this case Sir Gawain. She was at the tail end of a long career at her specialty, resupply at sea, known as RAS, or "razzing." Or "coopering."

Out of sight of any prying eyes, the two ships made the transfer, and the SBS men came aboard.

The Special Boat Service, based very discreetly on the coast of Dorset, England, is far smaller than the U.S. Navy SEAL unit. There are seldom more than two hundred "badged" personnel. Though ninety percent drawn from the Royal Marines, they operate like their American cousins on land, sea or in the air. They operate in mountains, deserts, jungles, rivers and the open ocean. And there were just sixteen of them.

The CO was Major Ben Pickering, a veteran of over twenty years. He had been one of the small team who witnessed the massacre of Talib prisoners by the Northern Alliance at the fort of Qala-i-Jangi, northern Afghanistan, in the winter of 1991. He was still a teenager back then. They lay on top of the wall of the fortress looking down on the bloodbath as the Uzbeks of General Dostum slaughtered their prisoners following the Taliban revolt.

One of two CIA special operatives also present, Johnny "Mike" Spann, had already been killed by the Taliban prisoners, and his colleague Dave Tyson had been snatched. Ben Pickering and two others went down into the hellhole, "slotted" the three Taliban holding the American and dragged Tyson out of there.

Major Pickering had done time in Iraq, Afghanistan (again) and Sierra Leone. He also had extensive experience in interception of illegal cargoes at sea, but he had never before commanded a detachment on board a covert Q-ship, because since the Second World War it had never been done.

When Cal Dexter, ostensibly a servant of the Pentagon, had explained the mission at the SBS base, Major Pickering had gone into a huddle with his CO and the armorers to work out what they needed.

For at-sea interceptions, he had chosen two 8.5-meter rigid inflatables, called RIBs, and had picked the "arctic" version. It would take eight men sitting upright in pairs behind the CO and the coxswain, who would actually drive it. But he could also take on board a captured cocaine smuggler, two experts from the "rummage crews" of HM customs and two sniffer dogs. They would follow the attack RIB at a more sedate pace so as not to upset the dogs.

The rummage men were the experts in finding secret compartments, slithering through the lowest holds, detecting cunning deceptions aimed at hiding illegal cargoes. The dogs were cocker spaniels, trained not only to detect the odor of cocaine hydrochloride through several layers of covering but to detect changes in air odor. A bilge that has been opened recently smells different from one not opened for months.

Major Pickering stood beside the captain on the open wing of the bridge of the Balmoral and saw his RIBs swung gently onto the deck of the freighter. Thence, the Balmoral's own derrick took over the cradles and lowered the inflatables into their hold.

Of the SBS's four Sabre Squadrons, the major had a unit from M Squadron, specializing in Marine Counter-Terrorism, or MCT. These were the men who swung aboard after the RIBs, and after them their "kit."

It was voluminous, involving assault carbines, sniper versions, handguns, diving equipment, weather- and sea-proof clothing, grapnel hooks, scaling ladders and a ton of ammunition. Plus two American communications men to liaise with Washington.

Support personnel consisted of armorers and technicians, to maintain the RIBs in perfect working order, and two helicopter pilots from the Army Air Corps, plus their own maintenance engineers. Their concern was the small "chopper" that came aboard last. It was an American Little Bird.

The Royal Navy might have preferred a Sea King or even a Lynx, but the problem was the size of the hold. With rotors spread, the larger helicopters would not fit through the hatch cover to emerge from its belowdecks hangar into the open air. But the Boeing Little Bird could. With a main rotor span of just under twenty-seven feet, it would pass through the main hatch, which was forty feet wide.

The helo was the one piece that could not be winched across the gap of choppy sea separating the two vessels. Freed of its swathes of protective canvas under which it had ridden down to Ascension Island, it took off from the foredeck of the Sir Gawain, circled twice and settled on the closed foreward hatch of the Balmoral. When the two rotors, main and tail, ceased to turn, the nimble little helicopter was hefted by the on-deck derrick and lowered carefully into the enlarged hold, where she was cleated to the deck beneath her.

When there was finally nothing left to transfer and the Balmoral's fuel tanks were full again, the vessels parted. The RFA would go back north to Europe, the now very dangerous Q-ship would head for her first patrol station, north of the Cape Verdes, in the mid-Atlantic between Brazil and the curve of failed states running along the West African seaboard.

The Cobra had divided the Atlantic into two, with a line running north-northeast from Tobago, easternmost of the Antilles, to Iceland. West of that line he designated, in terms of cocaine destination, "Target Zone USA." East of the line was "Target Zone Europe." The Balmoral would take the Atlantic. The Chesapeake, about to meet her supply ship off Puerto Rico, would take the Caribbean. ROBERTO CARDENAS stared at the letter long and hard. He had read it a dozen times. In the corner, Julio Luz was trembling.

"It is from the rogue, Vega?" he queried nervously. He was seriously wondering whether he was going to get out of the room alive.

"It has nothing to do with Vega."

At least the letter explained, without saying so, what had happened to his daughter. There would be no revenge on Vega. There was no Vega. Never had been. There was no freelance baggage handler at Barajas Airport who had picked the wrong suitcase in which to plant his cocaine. There never had been. The only reality was twenty years in an American jail for his Letizia. The message in the replica envelope to the ones in which he used to send his own was simple. It said:

"I think we should talk about your daughter Letizia. Next Sunday, at 4 p.m., I will be in my suite under the name of Smith at the Santa Clara Hotel, Cartagena. I shall be alone and unarmed. I shall wait one hour. Please come."