The Cobra

CHAPTER 5

GUY DAWSON LINED UP, BRAKED GENTLY, STUDIED THE flickering array of instruments once again, glanced at the tarmac glittering under the sun, made his request to the tower and waited for the "Clear for takeoff."

When it came, he eased the two throttles forward. Behind him, two Rolls-Royce Spey jet engines lifted their tone from a whine to a roaring howl, and the old Blackburn Buccaneer started to roll. It was a moment the veteran flier never ceased to savor.

At liftoff speed, the former naval light bomber became light to the touch, the wheel rumble ceased and she tilted up toward the wide blue African sky. Far behind, growing quickly smaller, Thunder City, the private-aviation enclave of Cape Town International, dropped away. Still climbing, Dawson set his first course for Windhoek, Namibia, the short and easy leg of the long haul north.

Dawson was only a year older than the veteran warplane he flew. He'd been born in 1961, when the Buccaneer was a prototype. It began its extraordinary career the following year when it entered operational squadron service with the British Fleet Air Arm. Originally designed to challenge the Soviet Sverdlov-class cruisers, it turned out to be so good at its job that it remained in service until 1994.

The Fleet Air Arm flew it off carriers until 1978. By 1969, the envious Royal Air Force had developed the shore-based version, which finally was eased out in 1994. In the meanwhile, South Africa had bought sixteen, which flew operationally for them until 1991. What even aircraft buffs seldom knew was that it was the vehicle that carried South Africa's atomic bombs until, by the eve of the "Rainbow Revolution," white South Africa had destroyed all six of them (apart from three gutted as museum pieces) and pensioned off the Buccaneer. What Guy Dawson flew that January morning 2011 was one of the last three flying in the world, rescued by warplane enthusiasts, maintained for tourist rides and kept at Thunder City.

Still climbing, Dawson turned away from the blue South Atlantic and headed almost due north toward the barren ocher sands of Namaqualand and Namibia.

His ex-Royal Air Force S.2 version would climb to 35,000 feet and fly at Mach.8, drinking eighty pounds of fuel every minute. But for this short leg, he would have plenty. With eight inboard tanks full, plus the bomb-bay-door tank and two more underwing fuel tanks, his Bucc could carry her full load of 23,000 pounds, giving her a range at optimum power setting of 2,266 nautical miles. But Windhoek was well under 1,000.

Guy Dawson was a happy man. As a young pilot in the South African Air Force in 1985, he had been assigned to 24 Squadron, the cream of the cream despite the faster French Mirage fighters also in service. But the Buccs, already veterans of twenty years, were special.

One of its strange features was its totally enclosed bomb bay with its rotating door. On a light bomber that size, most ordnance was carried under the wings. Having the bombs inside left the exterior clean of drag and improved range and speed.

What the South Africans did was to enlarge the bomb bay even more and install their atom bombs, secretly prepared over years with Israeli help. A variation was to incorporate a huge extra fuel tank in that hidden bay and give the Bucc unmatchable range. It was the range and endurance, giving the Bucc hours of "loiter time" high in the sky, that had clinched it for the noncommittal, wiry American named Dexter who had visited Thunder City in October.

Dawson did not really want to lease his "baby" at all, but the global credit crunch had reduced his pension investments to a fraction of what he had expected for his retirement and the American's offer was too tempting. A one-year lease agreement was clinched for a sum that would get Guy Dawson out of his hole.

He had chosen to fly his own plane all the way to Britain. He knew there was a private group of Bucc enthusiasts based at the old RAF World War II field at Scampton, Lincolnshire. They, too, were restoring a couple of Buccaneers, but they were not ready yet. This he knew because the two groups of enthusiasts were always in touch, and the American knew it, too.

Dawson's trip would be long and arduous. The former navigator's cockpit behind him had been used for fee-paying tourists, but thanks to GPS technology he would fly alone from Windhoek far out over the South Atlantic to the tiny speck of Ascension Island, a British-owned outcrop in the midst of nowhere.

An overnight and a second refuel would see him heading north again to the airport at Sal in the Cape Verde Islands, then to Spanish Gran Canaria and finally to Scampton, UK.

Guy Dawson knew his American patron had set up lines of credit in each stopover to cover fuel and overnight expenses. He did not know why Dexter had chosen the veteran Navy attack plane. There were three reasons.

Dexter had searched high and low, and especially in his native America, where there was an entire culture of enthusiasm for old warplanes that were maintained in flying condition. He had finally settled on the South African Buccaneer because she was obscure. She would pass for an old out-of-commission museum piece being ferried from one place to another for display purposes.

She was simple to maintain and rugged to the point of being almost indestructible. And she could stay up there for hours on end.

What only he and the Cobra knew, as Guy Dawson brought his baby back to the land of her birth, was that this Buccaneer was not going to a museum at all. She was going back to war. WHEN SENOR Julio Luz landed at Terminal 4, Barajas Airport, Madrid, in February 2011, the reception committee was somewhat larger.

Cal Dexter was already there idling in the concourse with Inspector Paco Ortega, quietly watching the stream of passengers emerging from the customs-hall doors. Both men were at the newsstand, Dexter with his back to the arriving target, Ortega riffling through a magazine.

Years earlier, after the Army, after the law degree, working as a Legal Aid counselor in New York, Cal Dexter had found he had so many Hispanic "clients" that it would be useful to master Spanish. So he had. Ortega was impressed. It was rare to find a Yanqui who spoke decent Castilian. It made it unnecessary for him to struggle in English. Without moving, he murmured:

"That's him."

Dexter had no problem with identification. His colleague Bishop had downloaded a membership portrait from the archives of the Bogota Law Association.

The Colombian stuck to his normal procedure. He boarded the hotel limo, clung on to his attache case, allowed the chauffeur to stow the grip in the trunk and relaxed on the drive to Plaza de la Cortes. The police unmarked vehicle overtook the limo, and Dexter, who had checked in earlier, was at the hotel first.

Dexter had brought to Madrid a team of three, all borrowed from the FBI. The Bureau had been curious, but all questions and objections were overridden by presidential authority. One of the team could go through any locking system. And fast. Dexter had insisted on speed. He had described the sort of problems they might meet, and the lockpicker had shrugged in dismissal. Was that all?

The second man could open envelopes, scan the contents in seconds and reseal the envelope invisibly. The third was just the sentinel. They were not billeted at the Villa Real but two hundred yards away, on permanent call by cell phone.

Dexter was in the lobby when the Colombian arrived. He knew the lawyer's room and had checked out the access. They were lucky. It was at the end of a long corridor from the elevator doors, lessening the chance of a sudden and unexpected interruption.

When it comes to watching a target, Dexter had long known the cliched man in the trench coat pretending to read a newspaper in the corner or pointlessly standing in a doorway was as noticeable as a rhino on the vicarage lawn. He preferred to hide in plain sight.

He was in a loud shirt, hunched over his laptop, taking a cell phone call in too loud a voice from someone he called "honey bunny." Luz glanced at him for a second, summed him up and lost all interest.

The man was like a metronome. He checked in, took a light lunch in his room and remained there for a good siesta. At four he reappeared in the East 47 cafe, ordered a pot of Earl Grey and reserved his table for dinner. It seemed the fact that there were other superlative restaurants in Madrid-and that the October evening, though crisp, was fine-eluded him.

Minutes later, Dexter and his team were on his corridor. The sentinel remained by the elevator doors. Every time one came up and stopped with doors open, the men would indicate he was heading down. With polite smiles all around, the doors would close. When the elevator came down, the theater was in reverse. There was no pathetic tying and retying of shoelaces.

It took the locksmith eighteen seconds and a very clever piece of technology to penetrate the electronic door to the suite. Inside, the three worked fast. The grip had been neatly unpacked and its contents hung in the closet or laid carefully in drawers. The attache case was on a chest.

It had locks protected by rollers with numbers 0 to 9. The locksmith attached a listening device with a stethoscope in his ears, rolled the drums carefully and listened. One by one, the numbers achieved their designated slot, and the brass catches flipped upward.

The contents were mainly paperwork. The material scanner went to work. Everything was copied onto a memory stick by hands in white silk gloves. There was no letter. Dexter, also in gloves, flipped through all the pockets in the lid. No letter. He nodded to the cabinets, of which there were half a dozen in the suite. The room safe was found in the cupboard beneath the plasma screen.

It was a good safe, but it was not designed to resist the technology, skill and experience of the man who trained and practiced at the Quantico break-in laboratory. The code turned out to be the first four figures of Julio Luz's membership number at the Bogota Bar. The letter was inside; long, stiff, cream.

It was sealed by its own gum, but a strip of clear adhesive tape was laid over the flap as well. The paperwork man studied it for several seconds, took a piece of technology from his own work case and appeared to iron the seal as one would press the collar of a shirt. When he was done, the envelope's flap lifted without resistance.

White gloves eased out the three folded sheets. With a magnifying glass, the copier checked for any strand of human hair or ultra-fine cotton that might be included as a trap-warning sign. There was none. The sender clearly relied on the lawyer to hand his epistle over intact to Senorita Letizia Arenal.

The letter was copied and replaced; the envelope resealed after the application of a clear and colorless liquid. The letter was placed back in the safe exactly as it had lain before disturbance; the safe closed and reset exactly as it had been. Then the three packed their kit and left.

At the elevator doors, the sentinel shook his head. No sign of target. At that moment, the elevator rose from below and stopped. The four men slipped quickly through the doors to the stairwell and went down on foot. Just as well; the doors opened to disgorge Senor Luz, heading back to his room for a scented bath and some TV before dinner.

Dexter and his team repaired to his own room, where the contents of the attache case were downloaded. He would give Inspector Ortega everything in the case except the letter, which he now read for himself.

He did not attend dinner but stationed two of his team across the room from the Luz table. They reported that the girl arrived, dined, took the letter, thanked the messenger and left.

The next morning, Cal Dexter took the breakfast shift. He watched Luz take a table for two by the wall. The girl joined him, handing over her own letter, which Luz placed in his inside breast pocket. After a quick coffee, the girl smiled her gratitude and left.

Dexter waited until the Colombian departed, then, before the staff could reach the vacated table, he himself passed it and stumbled. He brought the Colombian's almost-empty coffeepot to the carpet. Cursing at his own clumsiness, he took a napkin from the table to dab the stain. A waiter rushed up to insist that that was his job. As the young man bent his head, Dexter slipped a napkin over the cup the girl had used, enveloped it and stuffed both into his trouser pocket.

After more apologies and assurances of "De nada, senor," he walked out of the breakfast room.

"I wish," said Paco Ortega as they sat and watched Julio Luz disappear into the Banco Guzman, "that you would let us pick them all up."

"The day will come, Paco," said the American. "You will have your hour. Just not yet. This money laundering is big. Very big. There are other banks in other countries. We want them all. Let us coordinate and grab the lot."

Ortega grunted his assent. Like any detective, he had carried through stakeout operations that had lasted months before the final pounce. Patience was essential but hugely frustrating.

Dexter was lying. He knew of no other laundering operations like the Luz-Guzman linkage. But he could not divulge the whirl-wind that Project Cobra was going to unleash when the cold-eyed man in Washington was ready.

And now he wanted to get home. He had read the letter in his room. It was long, tender, concerned for the young woman's safety and well-being and signed simply "Papa."

He doubted Julio Luz would now be parted from the reply letter all day or night. Perhaps when he was in the first-class cabin back to Bogota, he might fall asleep, but to do a "lift" of the attache case above his head with the cabin crew looking on was out of the question.

What Dexter wanted to discover before any pounce was made was simply this: who was Letizia Arenal and who was Papa? WINTER was loosening its grip on Washington when Cal Dexter returned at the beginning of March. The forests cloaking those parts of Virginia and Maryland next to the capital were about to clothe themselves in a haze of green.

From the Kapoor yard south of Goa, a message had come from McGregor, who was still sweating it out among the stench of toxic chemicals and malarial heat. The two grain ships were close to their transformation. They would be ready for handover in their new role in May, he said.

He presumed their new role would be what he had been told. This was that a mega-wealthy American consortium wished to enter the treasure-hunting world with two ships equipped for deep-sea diving and wreck recovery. The accommodation would be for the divers and surface crew, the workshops for the servicing of their rigs and the large hold for a small spotter helicopter. It was all very plausible; it was just not true.

The final completion of the transformation from grain merchant to Q-ship would take place at sea. That was when heavily armed marine commandos would fill the berths, and the workshop/ armories would contain some seriously dangerous kit. He was told he was doing a great job, and the two merchant marine crews would fly in at handover.

The paperwork was long since in place, should anyone search. The former ships had disappeared, and the two about to sail were the reconditioned MV Chesapeake and the MV Balmoral. They were owned by a company based in a law office in Aruba, flew the (convenience) flag of that tiny island and would be chartered to carry grain from the wheat-rich north to the hungry south. Their real ownership and purpose were invisible.

The laboratories of the FBI had produced a perfect DNA profile of the young woman in Madrid who had handled the coffee cup in the Villa Real. Cal Dexter had no doubt that she was Colombian, already confirmed by Inspector Ortega. But there were hundreds of Colombian youngsters studying in Madrid. What Dexter craved was a matcher to that DNA.

In theory, at least fifty percent of the DNA should have derived from the father, and he was convinced "Papa" was in Colombia. And who was he who could ask a major player in the cocaine world, albeit a "technical," to play postman for him? And why could he not use the mails? It was a long shot, but he put the request to Colonel Dos Santos, intelligence chief of the anti-drug division of the Policia Judicial. While waiting for a response, he made two quick journeys.

Off the northeast shore of the coast of Brazil is an obscure archipelago of twenty-one small islands of which the main one gives its name to the group: Fernando de Noronha. It is only ten kilometers by three and a half, its total area twenty-six square kilometers. The only town is Vila dos Remedios.

It was once a prison island like France's Devil's Island, and the thick native forests were cut down to prevent the prisoners building rafts to escape. Shrub and scrub replaced the trees. Some wealthy Brazilians had away-from-it-all holiday villas there, but it was the airfield that interested Dexter. Built in 1942 by the U.S. Army Air Force Transport Command, it would make a perfect site for a USAF unit operating Predator or Global Hawk drones, with their amazing capacity to loiter for hours aloft, looking down with cameras, radars and heat sensors. He flew in as a Canadian tourist resort developer, had a look, confirmed his suspicion and flew back out again. His second visit was to Colombia.

By 2009, President Uribe had effectively crushed the FARC terrorist movement which really specialized in kidnap and ransom demands. But his anti-cocaine efforts had been mainly offset by Don Diego Esteban and the mightily efficient cartel he had created.

In that year, he had offended his hard-left neighbors in both Venezuela and Bolivia by inviting American forces into Colombia to lend their superlative technology to help him. Facilities were offered at seven Colombian military bases. One of these was at Malambo, right on the northern coast by Barranquilla. Dexter went in as a serious defense writer with Pentagon approval.

Being in the country, he saw the chance to fly up to Bogota and meet the formidable Colonel Dos Santos. The U.S. Army ran him up to Barranquilla Airport, and he caught the shuttle up to the capital. Between the still-warm tropical coast to the city in the mountains, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.

Neither the chief of the American DEA operation nor the leader of the British SOCA team in Bogota knew who Dexter was or what the Cobra was preparing, but both had been advised, from their HQs on Army Navy Drive and the Albert Embankment, to cooperate. They all spoke fluent Spanish, and Dos Santos had perfect English. He was surprised when it was the stranger who mentioned a DNA sample that had been submitted a fortnight earlier.

"Strange that you should call at this moment," said the youthful and dynamic Colombian detective. "I got a match this morning."

His explanation of how the match was made was stranger than Dexter's arrival, which Dos Santos viewed as a mere coincidence. DNA technology had come late to Colombia due to the parsimony of governments prior to the presidency of Alvaro Uribe. He had increased the budgets.

But Dos Santos read feverishly every publication dealing with modern forensic technology. He had realized earlier than his colleagues that one day DNA would be an awesome weapon in identifying bodies, living and dead (and there were a lot of the latter). Even before his department's laboratories could cope, he had begun to collect samples as and when he could.

Five years earlier, a member of the Drug Squad's rogues' gallery had been in a car crash. The man had never been charged, never convicted, never imprisoned. Any New York civil rights lawyer would have had Dos Santos's badge for what he did.

He and his colleagues, long before the Don created the cartel, were convinced this man was a major career gangster. He had not been seen for years, and certainly had not even been heard of for two. If he was as big as they suspected he was, he would live constantly on the move, shifting from one disguise and safe house to another. He would communicate only by use-once-and-throw cell phones, of which he probably had fifty, constantly renewed after use.

What Dos Santos did was go to the hospital and steal the swabs that had been used on the crash victim's broken nose. When the technology caught up, the DNA was identified and filed. Fifty percent was in the sample sent from Washington with a request for help. He delved into a file and laid a photo on the desk.

The face was brutish, scarred, cruel. A broken nose, pebble eyes, buzz-cut gray hair. It had been taken over ten years earlier but "aged" to show how the man ought to look today.

"We are now convinced he is part of the Don's inner circle, the one whose agents pay off the corrupt officials abroad who help the cartel bring its product through the ports and airports of America and Europe. The ones you call the 'Rats.'"

"Can we find him?" asked the man from SOCA.

"No, or I would have already. He comes from Cartagena, and he is an old dog now. Old dogs do not like to move far from their comfort zone. But he lives under deep cover, invisible."

He turned to Dexter, the source of the mysterious DNA sample of a very close relative.

"You will never find him, senor. And if you did, he would probably kill you. And even if you took him, he would never break. He is hard as flint and twice as sharp. He never travels; he sends agents to do his work. And we understand the Don trusts him totally. I fear your sample is interesting but takes us nowhere."

Cal Dexter looked down at the impenetrable face of Roberto Cardenas, the man who controlled the Rat List. The loving papa of the girl in Madrid. IN THE extreme northeast of Brazil is a vast land of hills and valleys, a few high mountains and much jungle. But also there are enormous ranches of up to half a million acres, grassland well watered by the myriad streams running down from the sierras. Because of their size and remoteness, their estate houses are realistically reached only by air. As a result, they each have one airstrip and sometimes several.

As Cal Dexter took the commercial flight back from Bogota to Miami and Washington, an airplane was being refueled on one such strip. It was a Beech King Air, carrying two pilots, two pumpers and a metric ton of cocaine.

As the fuel-bowser team filled the main and supplementary tanks to the brim, the crew dozed in the shade of a palm-thatched lean-to. They had a long night ahead. An attache case containing brick after brick of hundred-dollar bills had already been handed over to cover the fuel and the fee for the stopover.

If the Brazilian authorities had their suspicions about Rancho Boa Vista, two hundred miles inland from the port city of Fortaleza, there was precious little they could do. The sheer remoteness of the estate meant the slightest hint of a stranger would be noticed. To stake out the complex of main buildings would be futile; using the GPS system, a drug plane could rendezvous with the fuel bowser miles away and never be seen.

For the owners, the fees paid for the fueling stops were rewards far beyond the returns from ranching. For the cartel, the stopovers were vital on the route to Africa.

The Beech C-12, more commonly the King Air, was originally designed and made by Beechcraft as a nineteen-seat, twin turboprop, general-purpose communications mini-airliner. It sold widely across the world. Later versions saw the seats ripped out for conversion to freight carrier and general-purpose hauler. But the version waiting in the afternoon sun at Boa Vista was even more special.

It was never designed to cross the Atlantic. With its all-up fuel load of 2,500 liters the two Pratt and Whitney Canada engines would take it 708 nautical miles. That was in still air, fully loaded, on long-range cruise setting with allowance for starting, taxi, climb and descent. To attempt to leave the coast of Brazil for Africa like that was a recipe for death in the center of the ocean.

In secret workshops belonging to the cartel, hidden beside jungle airstrips in Colombia, the "coke" planes had been modified. Clever artificers had installed extra fuel tanks not under the wings but inside the fuselage. There were usually two, one on each side of the freight hold, with a narrow passage giving access to the flight deck up front.

Technology is expensive, manpower cheap. Rather than have transfer of the extra fuel from the inboard tanks to the main tanks by electric power tapped off the engines, two "peons" were brought along. As the main tanks emptied far out in the dark sky, they began to pump manually.

The route was simple. The first leg was from a hidden airstrip in the Colombian jungle, constantly changed to evade the attentions of Colonel Dos Santos. The pilots would cover the 1,500 miles right across Brazil to Boa Vista on the first night. Flying at 5,000 feet in darkness above the canopy of the Mato Grosso rain forests, they were just about invisible.

At dawn the crew would tuck into a hearty breakfast and sleep through the heat. At dusk the King Air would be again tanked to the brim to face the 1,300 miles from the New World to the Old at its narrowest point.

That evening, as the last light bled from the sky over Rancho Boa Vista, the pilot of the King Air turned into the light breeze, did his final checks and began to roll. His all-up weight was the manufacturer's maximum of 15,000 pounds. He would need 1,200 meters to get airborne, but he had over 1,500 of rolled-flat grassland. The evening star was twinkling when he lifted out of Boa Vista, and the tropical darkness descended like a theater curtain.

There is a saying that there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. Francisco Pons was fifty and had spent years flying in and out of airstrips that would never feature in any official manual. And he had survived because he was careful.

His route was carefully plotted, no detail overlooked. He would refuse to fly in crazy weather, but that night the forecast was for a nice twenty-knot tailwind all the way. He knew there would be no modern airport at the other end but yet another strip hacked out of the bush and lit by the lights from six off-roads parked in a line.

He had memorized the dot-dot-dash signal that would be flashed at him as he approached, to confirm there were no ambushes waiting down there in the warm velvet of the African night. He would fly as usual between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, depending on the cloud layer, well below any need for oxygen. Of course he could fly through clouds all the way, if need be, but it was more agreeable to skim above the layer in moonlight.

With six hours airborne, even flying toward the east and the rising sun, even adding three hours of time change and two for another refuel from a bowser parked in the bush, he would be up and heading back over the African coast, one ton lighter with no cargo, before the African sunrise was more than a pink glow.

And there was the pay. The two pumpers in the back would be paid $5,000 each for three days and nights, for them a fortune. "Captain Pons," as he liked to be called, would collect ten times that and would soon retire a very wealthy man. But then, he was carrying a cargo with a street value in the great cities of Europe of up to a hundred million dollars. He did not think of himself as a bad man. He was just doing his job.

He saw the lights of Fortaleza under his right wing, then the blackness of the ocean replaced the dark of the jungle. An hour later, Fernando de Noronha slipped under the left wing, and he checked time and track. At 250 knots, his best cruise speed, he was on time and true heading. Then the clouds came. He climbed to 10,000 feet and flew on. The two peons started pumping.

He was heading for Cufar airstrip, in Guinea-Bissau, hacked out of the bush during the independence war fought by Amilcar Cabral against the Portuguese many years before. His watch said eleven p.m., Brazil time. One hour to go. The stars were brilliant above, the cloud layer thinning below. Perfect. The peons kept pumping.

He checked his position again. Thank the Lord for Global Positioning, the four-satellite navigator's aid, presented to the world by the Americans and free to use. It made finding a dark bush airstrip as easy as finding Las Vegas in the Nevada desert. He was still flying his course of 040°, as all the way from the Brazilian coast. Now he altered a few points starboard, dropped to 3,000 feet and caught the glitter of the moon on the river Mansoa.

To port he saw a few dim lights in the otherwise blacked-out country. The airport; they must be expecting the Lisbon flight or they would not waste the generator. He slowed to 150 knots and looked ahead for Cufar. In the darkness, fellow Colombians would be waiting, listening for the drone of the Pratt and Whitneys, a sound you could hear for miles over the croak of the frogs and the whining mosquitoes.

Up ahead, a single white bar of light flashed upward, a vertical pillar from a million-candlepower Maglite. Captain Pons was too close. He flashed his landing lights and turned away, then back in a sweeping curve. He knew the airstrip lay on a compass heading east to west. With no wind he could land either way, but by agreement the Jeeps would be at the western end. He needed to sweep in over their heads.

Wheels down, landing flaps, speed dropping, he turned onto final approach. Ahead of him, all the lights blazed alive. It was like noonday down there. He roared over the off-roads at 10 feet and a hundred knots. The King Air settled at her usual eighty-four knots. Before he could close engines and shut off the systems, there were Wranglers racing either side of him. In the back, the two peons were soaked in sweat and limp with tiredness. They had been pumping for over three hours, and the last fifty gallons sloshed in the inboard tanks.

Francisco Pons forbade any smoking on board his flights. Others permitted it, turning their craft, with the danger of petrol fumes, into flying fireballs in the event of a single spark. Safely on the ground, all four men lit up.

There were four Colombians, headed by the boss, Ignacio Romero, chief of all cartel operations in Guinea-Bissau. It was a big cargo, it merited his presence. Local natives hauled off the twenty bales that made up the ton of cocaine. They went into a pickup with tractor tires, and one of the Colombians took them away.

Also piled onto the bales were six Guineans, who were actually soldiers assigned by General Jalo Diallo. He was running the country in the absence of even a titular President. It was a job no one seemed to want. Tenancy tended to be short. The trick was, if possible, to steal a fast fortune and retire to the Portuguese Algarve coast with several young ladies. The "if possible" was the problem.

The bowser driver connected his pipes and began to pump. Romero offered Pons a cup of coffee from his personal flask. Pons sniffed it. Colombian, the best. He nodded his thanks. At ten to four, local time, they were done. Pedro and Pablo, smelling richly of sweat and black tobacco, climbed into the back. They had three more hours to rest as the main fuel tanks were used up. Then more pumping back to Brazil. Pons and his youthful copilot, who was still learning the ropes, bade Romero good-bye and went up to the flight deck.

The Wranglers had repositioned themselves so that when the searchlights came on, Captain Pons had only to turn around and take off toward the west. At five to four, he lifted off, a ton lighter now, and cleared the coast still in darkness.

Somewhere in the bush behind him, the ton of cocaine would be stored in a secret depot and carefully split into smaller consignments. Most would head north by any one of twenty different methods and fifty carriers. It was this diffusion into small packets that had convinced the Cobra the trade could not be stopped once the drug had made landfall.

But right across West Africa, the local help, up to President level, were not paid off in money but in cocaine. Converting this into wealth was their problem. They set up a secondary and parallel traffic, also heading north but in the hands of and under the control of black Africans exclusively. That was where the Nigerians came in. They dominated the in-Africa trade and merchandised their share almost exclusively through the hundreds of Nigerian communities spread over Europe.

Even by 2009 there had been a problem developing locally that would one day cause the Don to experience a red-haze rage. Some of the African allies did not want to remain mere commission takers. They wanted to graduate to being major players, buying direct from the source and turning their slim pickings into the white man's massive markup. But the Don had his European clients to service. He had refused to elevate the Africans' role from servant to equal partner. It was a sleeping feud that the Cobra intended to exploit. FR. ISIDRO had wrestled with his conscience and prayed for many hours. He would have turned to the Father Provincial, but that dignitary had already given his advice. The decision was a personal one, and each parish priest was a free agent. But Fr. Isidro did not feel a free agent. He felt trapped. He had a small encrypted cell phone. It would transmit to only one number. On that number would be a recorded voice; American accented but in fluent Spanish. Or he could text. Or he could stay silent. It was the teenager in the Cartagena Hospital who finally caused his decision.

He had baptized the boy and later confirmed him, one of the many youths of the priest's deeply poor and working-class dockside parish. When he was called to give the last rites, he sat by the bed and ran his beads through his hands and wept.

"Ego te absolvo ab omnibus peccatis tuis," he whispered. "In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." He made the sign of the cross in the air, and the youth died, shriven. The sister nearby quietly raised the white sheet to cover the dead face. Fourteen years old, and an overdose of cocaine had taken him away.

"But what sins had he committed?" he asked his silent God as he recalled the absolution while he walked home through the darkened dockyard streets. That night, he made the call.

He did not believe he was betraying the confidence of Senora Cortez. She was still one of his parishioners, born and raised in the slums, though now moved to a fine bungalow on a private housing estate in the shadow of Cerro de La Popa Mountain. Her husband, Juan, was a freethinker who did not attend Mass. But his wife came, and brought the child, a pleasant boy, high-spirited and mischievous as boys should be, but good-hearted and devout. What the senora had told him was not in the confessional, and she had begged for his help. That was why he was not betraying the seal of confession. So he rang and left a short message.

Cal Dexter listened to the message twenty-four hours later. Then he saw Paul Devereaux.

"There is a man in Cartagena, a welder. Described as 'a craftsman of genius.' He works for the cartel. He creates hiding places inside steel hulls that are so skillfully made as to be virtually undetectable. I think I should visit this Juan Cortez."

"I agree," said the Cobra.