The Cobra

CHAPTER 11

THERE WERE 117 NAMES ON THE RAT LIST. THEY COVERED officials on the public payroll in eighteen countries. Two of those were the U.S. and Canada, the other sixteen in Europe. Before he would countenance the release of Ms. Letizia Arenal from her detention in New York, the Cobra insisted on one acid test at least, chosen at random. He picked Herr Eberhardt Milch, a senior customs inspector in the Port of Hamburg. Cal Dexter flew to the Hanseatic port to break the bad news.

It was a somewhat puzzled meeting that convened at the American's request at the headquarters of Hamburg's Customs Direction on the Rodingsmarkt.

Dexter was flanked by the senior DEA representative in Germany, who was already known to the German delegation. He in turn was rather mystified by the status of the man from Washington whom he had never heard of. But the instructions out of Army Navy Drive, the HQ of the DEA, were short and succinct. He has mojo; just cooperate.

Two had flown in from Berlin, one from the ZKA, the German federal customs, the other from the organized crime division of the Federal Criminal Police, the BKA. The fifth and sixth were local men, Hamburgers from the state customs and state police. The former of these two was their host; they met in his office. But it was Joachim Ziegler of the customs criminal division who carried the rank and faced Dexter.

Dexter kept it short. There was no need for explanations, they were all professionals, and the four Germans knew they would not have been asked to host the two Americans unless there was something wrong. Nor was there any need for interpreters.

All Dexter could say, and this was perfectly understood, was that the DEA in Colombia had acquired certain information. The word "mole" hung in the air unspoken. There was coffee, but no one drank.

Dexter slid several sheets of paper across to Herr Ziegler, who studied them carefully and passed them to his colleagues. The Hamburg ZKA man whistled softly.

"I know him," he muttered.

"And?" asked Ziegler. He was profoundly embarrassed. Germany is immensely proud of its vast, ultra-modern Hamburg. That the Americans should bring him this was appalling.

The Hamburg man shrugged.

"Personnel will have the full details, of course. So far as I can recall, an entire career in the service, a few years to retirement. Not a blemish."

Ziegler tapped the papers in front of him.

"And if you have been misinformed? Even dis-informed?"

Dexter's reply was to slide a few more papers across the table. The clincher. Joachim Ziegler studied them. Bank records. From a small private bank in Grand Cayman. About as secret as you can get. If they, too, were genuine… Anyone can run up bank records so long as they can never be checked out. Dexter spoke:

"Gentlemen, we all understand the rules of 'need to know.' We are not beginners at our strange trade. You will have understood that there is a source. At all costs, we have to protect that source. More, you will not wish to jump into an arrest and find you have a case based on un-confirmable allegations that not a court in Germany would accept. May I suggest a stratagem?"

What he proposed was a covert operation. Milch would be covertly and invisibly tailed until he intervened very personally to assist a specific arriving container or cargo through the formalities. Then there would be a spot check, seeming haphazard, a random selection by a junior officer.

If the information from Cobra was accurate, Milch would have to intervene to overrule his junior. Their altercation would be interrupted, also coincidentally, by a passing ZKA officer. The word of the criminal division would prevail. The consignment would be opened. If there was nothing, the Americans were wrong. Profuse apologies all around. No harm done. But Milch's home phone and mobile would still be tapped for weeks.

It took a week to set up and another before the sting could be used. The sea container in question was one of hundreds disgorged by a huge freighter from Venezuela. Only one man noticed the two small circles, one inside the other, and the Maltese cross inside the inner one. Chief Inspector Milch cleared it personally for loading onto the flatbed truck waiting for it before departure into the hinterland.

The driver, who turned out to be an Albanian, was at the very last barrier when, having lifted, it came down again. A young, pink-cheeked customs man gestured the truck into a lay-by.

"Spot check," he said. "Papiere, bitte."

The Albanian looked bewildered. He had his clearance papers, signed and stamped. He obeyed and made a rapid cell phone call. Inaudible inside his high cab, he uttered a few sentences in Albanian.

Hamburg customs normally has two levels of spot check for trucks and their cargoes. The cursory one is X-ray only; the other is "Open up." The young officer was really a ZKA operative, which was why he looked like a newcomer on the job. He beckoned the flatbed toward the zone reserved for major checking. He was interrupted by a much more senior officer hurrying from the control house.

A very new, very young, very inexperienced Inspektor does not argue with a veteran Oberinspektor. This one did. He stuck to his decision. The older man remonstrated. He had cleared this truck on the basis of his own spot check. There was no need to double-task. They were wasting their time. He did not see the small sedan slide up behind him. Two plainclothes ZKA men emerged and flashed badges.

" Was ist los da?" asked one of them quite genially. Rank is important in German bureaucracy. The ZKA men were of equal rank to Milch, but being from the criminal division took precedence. The container was duly opened. Sniffer dogs arrived. The contents were unloaded. The dogs ignored the cargo but started sniffing and whining at the rear of the interior. Measurements were taken. The interior was shorter than the exterior. The truck was moved to a fully equipped workshop. The customs team went with it. The three ZKA men, two overt and the young undercover lad making his "bones" with his first real "sting," kept up their charade of geniality.

The oxyacetylene man cut the false back off. When the blocks behind it were weighed, they turned out to be two tons of Colombian puro. The Albanian was already in cuffs. The pretense was maintained that all four, Milch included, had secured a remarkable stroke of good fortune, despite Milch's earlier but understandable error. The importing company was, after all, a thoroughly respectable coffee warehouse in Dusseldorf. Over celebratory coffee, Milch excused himself, went to the gents' and made a call.

Mistake. It was on intercept. Every word was heard in a van half a kilometer away. One of the men around the coffee table took a call on his own cell. When Milch came out of the restroom, he was arrested.

His protestations began in earnest once he was seated in the interrogation room. No mention was made of any bank accounts in Grand Cayman. By agreement with Dexter, that would have blown the informant in Colombia. But it also gave Milch a first-class defense. He could have pleaded "We all make mistakes." It would have been hard to prove he had been doing this for years. Or that he was going to retire extremely rich. A good lawyer could have got him bail by nightfall and an acquittal at trial, if it ever came to that. The words on the intercepted call were coded; a harmless reference to being home late. The number called was not his wife but a cell phone that would immediately disappear. But we all dial wrong numbers.

Chief Inspector Ziegler, who apart from a career in customs also had a law degree, knew the weakness of his hand. But he wanted to stop those two tons of cocaine entering Germany and he had succeeded.

The Albanian, hard as nails, was not saying a word, other than that he was a simple driver. Dusseldorf Police were raiding the coffee warehouse where their sniffer dogs were going hysterical over the aroma of cocaine, which they had been trained to differentiate from coffee, often used as a "masker."

Then Ziegler, who was a first-class cop, played a hunch. Milch would not speak Albanian. Hardly anyone did except Albanians. He sat Milch behind a one-way mirror but with sound from the neighboring interrogation suite turned up loud and clear. He could watch the Albanian driver being questioned.

The Albanian-speaking interpreter was putting the questions from the German officer to the driver and translating his answers. The questions were predictable. Milch could understand them; they were in his language, but he relied on the interpreter to understand the answers. Though the Albanian was really protesting his innocence, what came through the speakers was a comprehensive admission that if the driver was ever in trouble in Hamburg docks he should immediately appeal to a certain Oberinspektor Eberhardt Milch, who would sort out everything and send him on his way without cargo inspection.

That was when a shattered Milch broke. His full confession took almost two days and a team of stenographers to transcribe. THE ORION LADY was in that sweeping expanse of the Caribbean Basin south of Jamaica and east of Nicaragua when her captain, immaculate in pressed white tropical uniform, standing beside the helmsman on the bridge, saw something that made him blink in disbelief.

He rapidly checked his sea-scanning radar. There was not a vessel in miles, horizon to horizon. But the helicopter was definitely a helicopter. And it was coming from dead ahead, low above the blue water. He knew perfectly well what he was carrying for he had helped load it thirty hours earlier, and the first eel of fear stirred deep inside. The chopper was small, not much more than a spotter craft, but when it wheeled past his port bow and turned the words "U.S. Navy" on the boom were unmistakable. He rang the main salon to alert his employer.

Nelson Bianco joined him on the bridge. The playboy was in a flowered Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts and barefoot. His black locks were, as always, dyed and lacquer-set, and he clutched his trademark Cohiba cigar. Unusually for him, and only because of the cargo from Colombia, he did not have five or six upscale call girls on board.

The two men watched the Little Bird, just above the ocean, and then they saw that in the open circle of the passenger door, well harnessed and turned toward them, was a SEAL in black coveralls. He held an M14 sniper rifle, and it was pointed straight at them. A voice boomed out from the tiny helo.

"Orion Lady, Orion Lady, we are the United States Navy. Please close down your engines. We are going to come aboard."

Bianco could not figure out how they were going to achieve that. There was a helipad aft, but his own tarpaulined Sikorsky was on it. Then his captain nudged him and gestured ahead. There were three black dots on the water, one large, two small; they were nose up, racing fast and coming toward him.

"Full speed," snapped Bianco. "Full speed ahead."

It was a foolish reaction, as the captain spotted immediately.

"Boss, we will never outrun them. If we try, we just give ourselves away."

Bianco glanced at the hovering Little Bird, the racing RHIBs and the rifle pointed at his head from fifty yards. There was nothing for it but to brazen it out. He nodded.

"Cut engines," he said, and stepped outside. The wind ruffled his hair, then died away. He spread a big, expansive smile and waved, as one delighted to cooperate. The SEALs were aboard in five minutes.

Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon was scrupulously polite. He had been told his target was carrying, and that was good enough. Declining offers of champagne for him and his men, he had the owner and crew shepherded aft and held at gunpoint. There was still no sign of the Chesapeake on the horizon. His diver donned his Drager unit and went over the edge. He was down there half an hour. When he came up, he reported no trapdoors in the hull, no blimps or blisters and no dangling nylon cords.

The two rummage men began to search. They did not know that the short and frightened cell phone call from a parish priest had mentioned only "a great quantity." But how much was that?

It was the spaniel that got the scent, and it turned out to be a ton. The Orion Lady was not one of those vessels into which Juan Cortez had built a virtually undiscoverable hideaway. Bianco had thought to get away with it through sheer arrogance. He presumed such a luxurious yacht, well known in the most expensive and famous watering holes of the world, from Monte Carlo to Fort Lauderdale, would be above suspicion, and he with it. But for an old Jesuit who had buried four tortured bodies in a jungle grave, he might have been right.

Once again, as with the British SBS, it was the spaniel's ultra-sensitivity to the aroma of air texture that caused it to worry a certain panel in the floor of the engine room. The air was too fresh; it had been lifted recently. It led to the bilges.

As with the British in the Atlantic, the rummage men donned breathing masks and slithered into the bilges. Even on a luxury yacht, bilges still stink. One by one, the bales came out, and the SEALs not on prisoner guard duty hauled them topside and stacked them between the main salon and the helipad. Bianco protested noisily that he had no idea what they were… It was all a trick… a misunderstanding… He knew the governor of Florida. The shouting sank to a mumble when the black hood went on. Cdr. Dixon fired his maroon rocket upward, and the circling Global Hawk Michelle switched off her jammers. In fact, the Orion Lady had not even tried to transmit. When he had comms again, Dixon summoned the Chesapeake to approach.

Two hours later, Nelson Bianco, his captain and crew, were in the forward brig with the seven surviving men from the two go-fasts. The millionaire playboy did not usually mix with such company and he did not like it. But these were to be his companions and dining partners for a long time, and his taste for the tropics was to be fully indulged but in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And party girls were off the menu.

Even the explosives man was regretful.

"We really have to waste her, sir? She is such a beauty."

"Orders," said the CO. "No exceptions."

The SEALs stood on the Chesapeake and watched the Orion Lady erupt and sink. "Hooyah!" said one of them, but the word, normally the SEALs' sign of jubilation, was said somewhat regretfully. When the sea was empty again, the Chesapeake steamed away. An hour later, another freighter went past her, and the merchant skipper, looking through his binoculars, saw just a grain ship going about her business and took no notice. RIGHT ACROSS GERMANY, the FLO were having a field day. In his copious confession, Eberhardt Milch, now buried under layers of official secrecy to keep him alive, had named a dozen major importers whose cargoes he had eased through the container port of Hamburg. They were all being raided and closed down.

Federal and state police were hitting warehouses, pizza parlors (the favorite front of the Calabrian Ndrangheta), food stores and craft shops specializing in ethnic carvings from South America. They were cutting open shipments of tinned tropical fruit for the pouch of white powder in each can and shattering Mayan idols from Guatemala. Thanks to one man, the Don's German operation was in ruins.

But the Cobra was very aware that if the cocaine imports had passed the point of handover, the loss was sustained by the European gangs. Only before that point was the loss down to the cartel. That included the false-backed sea container in Hamburg that had never left the docks and the cargo of the Orion Lady that was destined for the Cuban gang of South Florida and which was supposed to be still at sea. The nonarrival in Fort Lauderdale had not been noticed. Yet.

But the Rat List had proved itself. The Cobra had selected the Hamburg Rat at random, one of the 117 names, the odds were too long that it had all been invented.

"Shall we set the girl free?" asked Dexter.

Devereaux nodded. Personally, he could not have cared. His capacity for compassion was virtually nonexistent. But she had served her purpose.

Dexter set the wheels in motion. Due to quiet intervention, Inspector Paco Ortega of the UDYCO in Madrid had been promoted to chief inspector. He had been promised Julio Luz and the Guzman bank anytime soon.

Across the Atlantic, he listened to Cal Dexter and planned his deception. A young undercover officer played the part of the baggage handler. He was noisily and publicly arrested in a bar, and the media were tipped off. Reporters interviewed the barman and two regulars, who concurred.

Acting on further nonattributable information, El Pais ran a big feature on the breaking of a gang attempting to use baggage handlers to smuggle drugs in the luggage of unsuspecting travelers from Barajas to Kennedy, New York. Most of the gang had fled, but one such baggage handler had been taken and was naming flights on which he had opened suitcases after the usual screening in order to insert cocaine. In some cases, he even recalled the suitcases by description.

Mr. Boseman Barrow was not a betting man. He had no taste for casinos, dice, cards or horses as a way of throwing money away. But if he was, he had to admit, he would surely have placed a large wager on Senorita Letizia Arenal going to jail for many years. And he would have lost.

The Madrid file reached the DEA in Washington, and some unknown authority ordered that a copy of those sections concerning Mr. Barrow's client go to the District Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. Once there, it had to be acted upon. Lawyers are not all bad, unfashionable though that view may be. The DA's Office apprised Boseman Barrow of the news from Madrid. He at once entered a motion to dismiss charges. Even if innocence had not been conclusively proved, there was now a doubt the size of a barn door.

There was an in-chambers hearing with a judge who had been at law school with Boseman Barrow, and the motion was granted. The fate of Letizia Arenal passed from the Prosecutor's Office to the ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They decreed that even though she was no longer to be prosecuted, the Colombian was not to stay in the USA either. She was asked where she wished to be deported to, and she chose Spain. Two ICE marshals took her to Kennedy. PAUL DEVEREAUX knew that his first cover was running out. That cover had been his nonexistence. He had studied with every scrap of information he could glean the figure and character of a certain Don Diego Esteban, believed to be but never proved to be the supreme head of the cartel.

That this ruthless hidalgo, this postimperial, Spanish-descended aristocrat, had remained untouchable for so long derived from many factors.

One was the absolute refusal of anyone to testify against him. Another was the convenient disappearance of anyone who opposed him. But even that would not have been enough without enormous political clout. He had influence in high places, and a lot of it.

He was a relentless donor to good causes, all publicized. He endowed schools, hospitals, bursaries, scholarships; and always for the poor of the barrios.

He donated, but much more quietly, not to one political party but to all of them, including that of President Alvaro Uribe, who had sworn to crush the cocaine industry. In each case, he allowed these gifts to become known to those who mattered. He even paid for the raising of the orphans of murdered police and customs officers, even though their colleagues suspected who had ordered the killing.

And above all he ingratiated himself with the Catholic Church. Not a monastery or priest's house fell on hard times but he would not donate toward the restoration. This he made highly visible, as also his regular worship right among the peasant and estate workers in the parish church adjoining his country mansion, meaning his official rural residence, not the many and varied farms owned in false names where he met other members of the Brotherhood he had created to manufacture and market up to eight hundred tons of cocaine each year.

"He is," mused Devereaux admiringly, "a maestro." He hoped the Don had not also read the Ping-fa, the Art of War.

The Cobra knew that the litany of missing cargoes, arrested agents and ruined buyer networks would not be written off as coincidence for much longer. There are just so many coincidences that a clever man will accept, and the higher the level of paranoia, the fewer the number. The first cover, of nonexistence, would soon be disbelieved, and the Don would realize he had a new and much more dangerous enemy who did not play by the rules.

After that would come cover number two: invisibility. Sun-tzu had declared that a man cannot defeat an invisible enemy. The wise old Chinese man had lived long before the ultra-high technology of the Cobra's world. But there were new weapons that could keep the Cobra invisible long after the Don had realized that there was a new enemy out there.

A primary factor in the exposure of his existence was going to be the Rat List. To blow away 117 corrupt officials in a series of strikes across two continents in a single campaign would be too much. He would feed the Rats into the FLO mincer very slowly until the peso dropped somewhere in Colombia. And, anyway, sooner or later, there would be a leak.

But that week in August, he sent Cal Dexter to break the sad news to three governmental authorities under conditions, he hoped, of massive discretion.

In a hard week of traveling and conferring, Cal Dexter apprised the USA there was a bad one in the docks of San Francisco; the Italians learned they had a corrupt senior customs official in Ostia; and the Spanish should start to tail a dock master at Santander.

In each case, he begged for the arrangement of an accidental stumbling-upon of a cocaine consignment that could lead to the necessary arrest. He received his pledges.

The Cobra did not give a fig about the American and European street gangs. These scum were not his problem. But every time one of the cartel's little helpers left the stage, the interception rate would rise exponentially. And before handover at the dock gates, the loss would be taken by the cartel. And the orders would have to be replaced. And refilled. And that would not be possible. ALVARO FUENTES was certainly not going to cross the Atlantic to Africa in a smelly fishing boat like the Belleza del Mar. As first deputy to Alfredo Suarez, he went on a 6,000-ton general freighter, the Arco Soledad.

She was big enough to have a master's cabin, not large but private, and this was taken over by Fuentes. The unhappy captain had to bunk with the first mate, but he knew his place and made no demur.

As demanded by the Don, the Arco Soledad had been redirected from Monrovia, Liberia, to Guinea-Bissau, where the problem seemed to lie. But she still carried a full five tons of pure cocaine.

She was one of those merchant ships on which Juan Cortez had worked his skills. Below the waterline, she carried two stabilizers welded to her hull. But they had a dual purpose. Apart from stabilizing the vessel to make her more sea-friendly and give her crew a gentler ride in wild water, they were hollow, and each contained two and half tons of carefully packed bales.

The main problem with underwater panniers was that they could be loaded and emptied only if the boat was brought out of the water. This meant either the great complexity of a dry dock, with all its chances of witnesses, or beaching until the tide went out, which meant hours of waiting.

Cortez had fitted virtually invisible snap-release catches with which a scuba diver could quickly remove large panels in each stabilizer. With these gone, the bales, thoroughly waterproofed and roped together, could be drawn out until they floated to the surface for collection by the offshore "greeter" vessel.

And finally the Arco Soledad had a perfectly legitimate cargo of coffee in her holds and paperwork to prove it was paid for and expected by a trading company in Bissau city. That was where the good news ran out.

The bad news was that the Arco Soledad had long been spotted with Juan Cortez's description and photographed from above. As she crossed the 35th longitude, the cruising Global Hawk Sam picked up her image, made the comparison, clinched the identification and informed AFB Creech, Nevada.

Nevada told Washington, and the shabby warehouse in Anacostia told the MV Balmoral, which moved to intercept. Before Major Pickering and his divers even got onto the water, they would know exactly what they were looking for, where it was and how to operate the hidden catches.

For the first three days at sea, Alvaro Fuentes abided strictly by his instructions. Every three hours, night and day, he sent dutiful e-mails to his waiting "wife" in Barranquilla. They were so banal and so common at sea, that normally the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, would not have bothered with them. But, forewarned, each one was plucked out of cyberspace and patched through to Anacostia.

When Sam, circling at 40,000 feet, could see the Arco Soledad and the Balmoral forty miles apart, she put on her jammers over the freighter, and Fuentes went into a blank zone. When he saw the helicopter fluttering above the horizon and then turning toward him, he made an emergency, out-of-sequence report. It went nowhere.

There was no point in the Arco Soledad attempting to resist the black-clad commandos when they came over the rail. The captain, with a fine show of indignation, brandished his ship's papers, cargo manifest and copies of the coffee order from Bissau. The men in black took no notice.

Still yelling "Piracy," the captain, crew and Alvaro Fuentes were shackled, hooded and herded to the stern. As soon as they could see nothing, the jamming ceased, and Major Pickering summoned the Balmoral. While she steamed toward the stationary freighter, the two divers went to work. It took just under an hour. The spaniels were not needed; they stayed on the mother ship.

Before the Balmoral was alongside, there were two skeins of roped bales floating in the water. They were so heavy, it took the derrick of the Arco Soledad to bring them on board. From the deck of the tramp, the Balmoral hoisted them into her guardianship.

Fuentes, the captain and five crew had gone very quiet. Even under their masks they could hear the derrick grinding and heavy thumps as a long series of objects sloshing water came aboard. They knew what they must be. Complaints of piracy ended.

The Colombians followed their cargo onto the Balmoral. They realized they were on a much bigger ship but could never name or describe it. From the deck, they were led to the forward brig and, with hoods removed, moved into quarters formerly occupied by the crew of the Belleza del Mar.

The SBS men came last, the divers streaming water. Ordinarily the sub-aqua men meeting the Arco Soledad would have replaced the removed panels underwater, but, bearing in mind where they were all going, they were allowed to take on water.

The explosives man was last off. When there was half a mile between the ships, he pressed his detonator.

"Smell the coffee," he joked as the Arco Soledad shuddered, flooded and foundered. And indeed there really was a slight odor of roasted coffee on the sea breeze as the PETN for one nanosecond reached 5,000 degrees centigrade. Then she was gone.

One RIB, still in the water, returned to the spot and gathered in the few floating pieces of detritus that a sharp observer might have spotted. These were netted, weighted and sent to the bottom. The ocean, blue and calm in early September, was as she had always been-empty.

Far away across the Atlantic, Alfredo Suarez could not believe the news reaching him or work out a way of telling Don Diego and staying alive. His bright young assistant had ceased transmitting twelve hours earlier. This was disobedience, i.e., madness, or it was disaster.

He had a message from his clients, the Cubans, who controlled most of the cocaine trade in South Florida, that the Orion Lady had not docked in Fort Lauderdale. She was also expected by the harbormaster, who was holding a precious-as-rubies berth for her. Discreet inquiries revealed he had also tried to raise her and failed. She was three days overdue and not answering.

There had been some successful deliveries of cocaine, but the sequence of failed arrivals by sea and air and a big customs coup in Hamburg had reduced his "safe arrival" percentage set against tonnage dispatched to fifty. He had promised the Don a minimum safe arrival percentage of seventy-five. For the first time, he began to fear that his policy of large cargoes but fewer of them, the opposite of the scattergun approach of his departed predecessor, might not be working. Though not a praying man, he prayed there was not worse to come, proof positive that prayer does not always work. There was much worse to come.

Far away in the genteel historic township of Alexandria, by the banks of the Potomac, the man who intended to create that "worse" was considering his campaign to date.

He had created three lines of thrust. One was to use the knowledge of all the merchantmen worked on by Juan Cortez to empower the regular forces of law and order-navies, customs, coast guards-to intercept the giants at sea, "accidentally" discover the secret hiding places and thus both confiscate the cocaine and impound the vessel.

This was because most of the Lloyd's-listed carriers were too big to sink unnoticed without causing a furor in the shipping world, leading to powerful interventions at governmental level. Insurers and owners would dispense with corrupt crews, and pay fines, while declaring complete innocence at board level, but losing the entire ship was a loss too far.

Intercepting at sea at a very official level also frustrated the common tactic of taking the cocaine on board at sea from one fishing vessel and off-loading it before docking in another offshore transfer. This could not last forever, or even for very long. Even though Juan Cortez was seemingly an incinerated corpse in a grave in Cartagena, it must soon become plain that someone knew far too much about all the invisible hiding holes he had created. Any subtlety in seeming to find these places by accident every time would one day run out.

In any case, these triumphs by the official authorities were never hidden. They quickly became public and leaked back to the cartel.

His second thrust was a series of irregular and apparently patternless accidents in various harbors and airports around two continents in which a terrible mischance revealed an incoming cocaine shipment and even led to the arrest of the bribed official who acted as "enabler." These also could not remain accidents forever.

As a lifelong counter-spy, he doffed his hat, a rare phenomenon, to Cal Dexter for acquiring the Rat List. He never asked who the mole inside the cartel could be, though clearly the saga of the Colombian girl framed in New York was linked.

But he hoped that mole could dig a very deep hole indeed, because he could not keep the cocaine enablers unarrested for long. As the number of crippled operations in U.S. and European ports increased, it would become clear someone had leaked names and functions.

The good news, for one who knew a bit about interrogations and who had broken Aldrich Ames, was that these officials, though greedy and venal, were not "hard men" accustomed to the laws of the criminal underworld. The German exposed so far was confessing like a mountain spring. So would most of the others. These tearful spillages would trigger a chain reaction of arrests and close-downs. And future interceptions would, without official help, sky-rocket. That was part of his planning.

But his ace was the third thrust on which he had spent so much time and trouble and so much of his budget over the permitted preparation period.

He called it the "bewilderment factor," and he had used it for years in that espionage world that James Jesus Angleton, his predecessor at the CIA, once referred to as "smoke and mirrors." It was the explanationless disappearance, one after the other, of cargo after cargo.

Meanwhile, he would quietly release the names and details of four more of the Rats. In the middle week of September, Cal Dexter traveled to Athens, Lisbon, Paris and Amsterdam. In each case, his revelations caused shock and horror, but in each case he received assurances that each arrest would be preceded by a carefully arranged accident involving an incoming cargo of cocaine. He described the Hamburg sting and proposed it as a role model.

What he was able to tell the Europeans was that there was a corrupt customs officer in Piraeus, the port of Athens; the Portuguese had a bribe taker in the quite small but busy Algarve Harbor of Faro; France was sheltering a rather large rodent in Marseilles; and the Dutch had a problem in the largest cargo destination in Europe, Euro port Rotterdam. FRANCISCO PONS was retiring and he was damnably glad of it. He had made his peace with his plump and homely wife, Victoria, and even found a buyer for his Beech King Air. He had explained matters to the man for whom he flew the Atlantic, a certain Senor Suarez, who had accepted his explanation of age and stiffness, and it had been agreed that this September would be his last trip for the cartel. It was not so bad, he reasoned with Senor Suarez; his eager young copilot was aching to become a full captain and earn a captain's fee. As for a newer and better plane, that was now necessary anyway. So he lined up on the runway at Fortaleza and took off. Far above, the tiny moving dot was registered by the wide-aspect radar scanner of Global Hawk Sam and logged in the database.

The memory bank did the rest. It identified the moving dot as a King Air, that it was coming out of Rancho Boa Vista, that a Beech King Air cannot cross the Atlantic without large extra in-built fuel tanks and that it was heading northeast toward the 35th longitude. Beyond that, there was only Africa. Someone in Nevada instructed Major Joao Mendoza and his ground crew to prepare to fly.

The oncoming Beech was two hours into its flight, almost on the last of its main wing tanks, and the copilot had the controls. Far below and somewhere ahead, the Buccaneer felt the hammer blow of the RATO rockets, plunged down the runway and roared away over the dark sea. It was a moonless night.

Sixty minutes later, the Brazilian was at his intercept station, circling at a lazy three hundred knots. Somewhere to his southwest, invisible in the blackness, the King Air plodded along, now running on reserve tanks, with the two pumpers working away behind the flight deck.

"Climb to twelve thousand, continue in rate one turn," said the warm voice from Nevada. Like the Lorelei, it was a pretty voice to lure men to die. The reason for the instruction was that Sam had reported the King Air had climbed to ride over a cloud bank.

Even without a moon, the stars over Africa are fiercely bright, and a cloudscape is like a white bedsheet, reflecting light, showing up shadows against the pale surface. The Buccaneer was vectored to a position five miles behind the King Air and a thousand feet above. Mendoza scanned the pale plateau ahead of him. It was not entirely flat; there were knobs of altocumulus jutting out of it. He eased back his speed for fear of overtaking too quickly.

Then he saw it. Just a shadow between two hills of cumulus disfiguring the line of the stratus. Then it was gone, then back again.

"I have it," he said. "No mistake?"

"Negative," said the voice in his ears. "There is nothing else in the sky."

"Roger that. Contact."

"Contact acknowledged. Stop, clear, engage."

He eased on some throttle, the distance closed. Safety catch off. Target swimming into the gunsight, range closing. Four hundred meters.

The two streams of cannon shells streamed out and coalesced at the tail of the Beech. The tail fragmented, but the shells went on into the fuselage, racing up the line through the extra fuel tanks and into the flight deck. Both pumpers died in a tenth of a second, blown apart; the two pilots would have followed, but the exploding fuel did it faster. As with the Transall, the Beech imploded, fragmented and fell blazing through the cloud sheet.

"Target down," said Mendoza. Another ton of cocaine was not going to reach Europe.

"Turn for home," said the voice. "Your course is…" ALFREDO SUAREZ had no choice about telling the Don the litany of bad news because he was sent for. The master of the cartel had not survived so long in one of the most vicious milieus on earth without a sixth sense for danger.

Item by item, he forced the director of dispatch to tell him all. The two ships and now two airplanes lost before reaching Guinea-Bissau; the two go-fasts in the Caribbean that never made their rendezvous and had not been seen since, including eight crewmen; the playboy who disappeared with a ton of puro destined for the valuable Cuban clients in South Florida. And the disaster in Hamburg.

He had expected Don Diego to explode in rage. The reverse happened. The Don had been taught as a boy that gentility required that even if one is irritable over small things, big disasters require a gentlemanly calm. He bade Suarez remain at the table. He lit one of his slim black cheroots and went for a stroll in his garden.

Internally, he was in a homicidal rage. There would be blood, he vowed. There would be screams. There would be death. But first, analysis.

Against Roberto Cardenas, there could be nothing proved. One exposure of one of his on-the-payroll agents in Hamburg was probably bad luck. A coincidence. But not the rest. Not five vessels at sea and two planes in the air. Not the forces of law and order-they would have held press conferences, flaunted confiscated bales. He was used to that. Let them gloat over fragments. The entire cocaine industry was worth $300 billion a year. More than the national budget of most of the nations outside the G30 of the richest.

The profits were so vast that no amount of arrests could stop the army of volunteers screaming to take the places of the dead and imprisoned; profits big enough to make Gates and Buffett look like street vendors. The equal of their entire wealth was generated each year by cocaine.

But nonarrival, that was dangerous. The purchasing monster had to be fed. If the cartel was violent and vengeful, so also were the Mexicans, Italians, Cubans, Turks, Albanians, Spaniards and the rest whose organized gangs would slaughter over an ill-advised word.

So if not coincidence, and that was now no longer to be entertained as a reason, who was stealing his product, killing his crews, causing his shipments to vanish into thin air?

For the Don, this was treachery or theft, which was another form of treachery. And treachery had only one response. Identify and punish with insensate violence. Whoever they were, they had to learn. Nothing personal, but you cannot treat the Don like that.

He went back to his trembling guest.

"Send the Enforcer to me," he said.