The Kobra Manifesto

Chapter Twelve: LAGOFONDO

'Where are you from?'

'London.'

'London England?'

'Yes.'

'Never bin there.'

He took out a cheroot and bit the end off.

'Wanna smoke?'

'No.'

'Keeps the bugs out.' He gave a sudden loud laugh, for no reason, and lit the cigar.

'Your first time out here?'

'Yes,' I said.

I was thinking about Satynovich Zade.

'You ain't no tourist, I guess,'

'Shipping agent.'

'With Booth Line?'

'A subsidiary.'

The last time I saw Satynovich Zade was at Belem Airport and if I didn't see him again then the whole thing was wiped out. Extended surveillance is always nerve-racking but when you have to do it during the end-phase it induces a kind of numbness. Extended surveillance is when you're tagging a man and find out he's got a fixed destination, and instead of keeping him in view you decide to jump ahead of him into his destination and wait for him there. He's still technically under surveillance but it's extended, not constant.

There are a lot of advantages: you avoid the risk of his discovering you in his immediate area and you give yourself time to signal base or change your image, or simply catch up on sleep. The obvious disadvantage is that you're relying on his going to that fixed destination and he can change his mind and you've lost him for good.

'You get anything to eat down there?'

'Yes, I had time for a hamburger.'

'At that joint? Then you got the ears and eyeballs thrown in for free!' He gave another loud laugh.

I watched the two King KX 175 Navcoms.

This was the end-phase and normally I wouldn't have let Zade out of my sight but I'd had to: the authorities at Belem threw me straight into quarantine for twenty-four hours while the objective walked away. Ferris knew it might happen and he got at the local police through Interpol and they put a tag on Zade and that was how we knew he'd booked out on Panair do Brasil Flight 540 in two days' time. The destination was Manaus, on the Amazon. We'd missed the Loide Aereo flight by three hours because of radio trouble and there are only three flights a week from Belem to Manaus at this time of the year.

So we were running the objective on extended surveillance and it had a numbing effect and I wished Chuck Lazenby would stop talking.

'You know something? That jungle's goin' to eat up that whole damn place one day an' all you'll see is the trees, like it was before.'

There was a blinding flash and the windscreen went opaque as we hit the wall of rain.

'Okay,' Chuck shouted, 'here it comes!'

He pulled a knob and the windscreen wipers started waving around but the force of water was too strong and they stopped halfway.

The instrument panel blacked out as the next flash came and then started glowing again and I took a few readings. This was a Twin Beech and the avionics were basic but adequate — the two King Navcoms, an ADF, a Narco transponder, Century III autopilot, a DME and a ten-year-old RCA radar unit — and they were behaving normally and stayed illuminated when the next flash lit up the cockpit. The altimeter was at a steady ten thousand feet 'It's okay when it's kinda yellow-coloured, Chuck called out. 'When it turns white it means it's real close.'

He blew out cigar smoke and adjusted the throttles.

Ferris had found him for me. Ferris had worked non-stop for thirty-six hours and I don't think anyone but a first-class director in the field could have done it and that was why Control had pulled him in from Tokyo for the Kobra mission. He brought my forged papers with him from New York and spent half an hour talking icily to the Immigration officers, hinting at 'obstruction' and 'incompetence' and using the Interpol connection until they got the message and let me through.

He also switched my cover because of the Burdick situation: the journalist image was no longer appropriate and I was now a shipping agent's representative looking for small-boat charter franchise along the Amazon between Manaus and Itacoatiara.

'Gonna ship a little water,' said Chuck. 'She always does. You know what they stuck this windshield in with? Horse shit!'

A trickle was beginning along the left edge of the panel and I kept my legs out of the way. The windscreen wipers were now on the move again and we could see patches of cloud whipping past.

The Burdick situation was now very interesting.

Ferris had seen the same report in the New York Times as I had, and Satynovich Zade had probably been on the look-out for it when he'd brought a paper from the box outside the Varig Airlines area at Kennedy.

Yesterday Pat Burdick, daughter of the Defence Secretary, left Washington for the isolated river-village of Lagofondo near the Amazon in Brazil, with a small party of fellow-adventurers and two experienced guides. 'It's to be an entomological field study,' she told reporters before she left, 'and I guess the bugs out there in the jungle ought to be pretty impressive. It's also to get me away from the intense political atmosphere here in Washington for a while, because I've been finding it very confining and — you know-claustrophobic.' There was no truth whatsoever, she added, that there was any rift between herself and her family. For security reasons the names of her companions are not presently being revealed.

A flash lit the cockpit again and then the din of the rain on the windscreen stopped abruptly as we ran into clear weather. The pale blue ring of Saint Elmo's fire vanished from the propellers and the full moon drifted above the skyline.

'Easy come,' said Chuck, 'easy go!'

He got out another cigar and lit up.

'Was that a bad one?'

'They're all bad, if you wanna worry. Me, I shut my eyes till I'm out the other side.' He laughed noisily and blew out a cloud of smoke.

The second report in the newspaper had been a syndicated piece on the Defense Secretary's brief speech at the Quaker House Hotel in Washington on the increasing need for sophisticated armaments. In the last few lines of the report it was stated that 'Mr Burdick was seen to be suffering from the strain of his many recent engagements.'

Ferris hadn't picked this up because he'd been working the clock round. I didn't know if Zade had noticed it. By itself, it wasn't significant.

'I been runnin' the night-mails a couple of years now, you know that? Start at nine at night, finish around four in the mornin', maybe five.'

'You must know Manaus pretty well.'

'Sure do.' He cranked his seat up an inch and adjusted the soiled belt. 'Like I say, that place is goin' to get eaten up by the jungle one day. Industry's dying, 'cause they won't take the export tax off of electrical goods, an' what else've you got? Bit of rubber, maybe some gold in the mines, animal trapping. Listen-' he took the cigar out of his mouth and jabbed it in the air- 'that place is a thousand miles from the nearest city an' there's no roads in or out, y'imagine that? Okay when the rubber boom was on, but now there's no real money around any more.'

'No tourists?'

He jerked his red crew-cut head to look at me. 'You kiddin'? You know what the Brazilians call this jungle? The Green Hill — I guess you must've heard that.' He pointed with his cigar again, downwards. 'We run outa gas or blow an engine or what the devil an' we go down there an' can't get up again, that's it — you know what I mean? The trees'd just close over this crate like we'd never existed.'

He went on for a while and I thought about Burdick.

In Washington Ferris had told me that Robert Finberg was the only man in the United States who knew about Kobra and knew about our counter-operation but we now assumed Burdick himself had also known and was using Finberg as his representative. We also assumed that at this moment Burdick alone knew, and that with half a dozen major agencies including the FBI and the CIA at his disposal he was keeping strict hush.

Ferris had told me nothing beyond that. London may have told him nothing beyond that, or he might know some of me background but felt it wouldn't concern the executive. Fair enough, but a ferret can think.

Theory: somewhere among the networks of international intelligence an agent had run slap into some highly explosive information — someone like the late Milos Zarkovic — or they'd asked Zarkovic to bring it across to the West. It had been for the eyes of the Bureau only and it had personally concerned the US Secretary of Defence. He could have called in the CIA and he hadn't: he had asked the Bureau to handle it for him with no one else involved and to handle it with the highest possible discretion.

Facts: I'd discovered a tag on Burdick in Washington. He had used his rank to bring me out of Cambodia. His daughter was on an insect-hunting expedition along the Amazon but not on account of a 'family rift'. He himself was seen to be suffering the strain of his 'many recent engagements'.

These facts taken separately were not significant. Put them together and it didn't seem terribly illogical that Satynovich Zade was now on his way to the Kobra rendezvous somewhere along the Amazon.

Question: how much were they asking of James Burdick?

It wouldn't be money.

'Oh holy cow, we got some more shit comin' at us!'

Chuck adjusted the mixture handles and I saw the flame from the port exhaust change to a bluish pink. Ahead of us the broken stratus deck was beginning to pile up into thunder-heads.

'How far are we out, Chuck?'

'Huh? Twenty minutes, I guess. Take thirty, through that stuff.' A distant streak zig-zagged across the mountainous dark of the clouds. 'Don't mind flyin' through it but I don: like landin' in it, know what I mean?'

I said I did.

We began going down and I watched the altimeter, already feeling the warmth of the lower air. Manaus was three degree? below the Equator and the humidity was in the eighties at this time of the year and the man in the outfitter's in Belem had suggested light-weave tropical kit and I'd dumped the New York suit into a rubbish bin together with the rain-cape There'd been time to book out on the same Panair with Zade but we'd have risked blowing the mission and losing the executive because this was the penetration phase and I had to go in very close to the target and the target was Kobra and the Kobra people were now ultra-sensitive about surveillance: their operation was almost certainly centred on the entomological study group along the Amazon and they would be wary of strangers, so I had to jump in ahead of Zade and establish myself as a new image instead of a passenger who'd followed him in from Belem.

'Jesus, look at this!'

Rain hit the windscreens with a white explosion.

Chuck adjusted the set and I heard Manaus Approach Control come in, clearing him down to two thousand feet.

I sat back and went over the mass of data Ferris had given me to study in Belem: the layout of Manaus, location of consulate, airport, police headquarters, so forth. I'd dumped the set of maps when I'd got the essential topography into my head because I was going to present the image of somebody who knew the place well: somebody in other words who hadn't followed any of the Kobra cell to Brazil.

I didn't know if the Pat Burdick party were in Manaus itself or somewhere along the river so I'd gone over the out-lying terrain rather thoroughly. It consisted of two elements the river and the jungle.

Okay 9 Whisky, please turn left heading 200.

Water was trickling again down the side of the windscreen.

Three very bright flashes in quick succession.

'An' screw you too, baby!' Chuck shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and cranked his seat down an inch.

The starboard wing dipped suddenly as I looked past the pilot's head, and the moon lifted out of sight above us. The altimeter was down to a thousand as we intercepted the final approach course a mile out with the airspeed on 90.

The rain had eased and visibility looked workable but I stopped reviewing the local data and noted the angle of the door-lever and the disposition of the fire extinguishers and made a few mental practice runs with the seat-belt release because Chuck was a bit worried and not talking any more.

Bright flash.

The thunder was still rolling when we began going in with the first of the approach lights nicking out of sight below the fuselage.

Gear-down light on.

Flaps at full.

500.

'Whisky, you are cleared to land'

'Roger.'

200.

Another flash lit the cockpit.

I could feel the heat of the tropical night seeping into the cabin. A haze of lights drifted past 100.

One bounce.

The blades of the ceiling fan droned above my head.

I could smell creosote on the moist air, or something like creosote; maybe it was the stuff in the little bowls: they'd lifted the bed and stood its legs in the little bowls and then poured the stuff in, almost to the brim. The boy at the desk downstairs had said it was against the centipedes.

I opened the 8X50s a fraction on the fulcrum and re-focused. Chuck Lazenby had told me where to buy them after we'd got into Manaus. The trouble was they misted up every thirty seconds and I had to keep wiping them.

Chuck had said he'd earned a crate of beer for bringing the Beech in through that storm and I'd spent half an hour with him getting some more data on the environs while he got slowly drunk: the flight in had worried him more than he admitted.

In the circular field of vision I could see their heads, below in the courtyard. Sometimes they disappeared as they moved, then came back into view: the foreground images were complex and consisted of the Indian screen across the lower half of my window, the uprights of the veranda and the leaves of the fan-palms in the courtyard. With the lowering sun throwing oblique light across the hotel I needed this much cover to haze out any glint from the lenses.

There were five men down mere, and a woman.

The girl sat more or less in the middle of them.

Satynovich Zade had come through on the noon plane, still with no baggage.;I saw Ferris a few yards behind him but we made no contact at any time: he was booked in at the Hotel Amazonas. He stayed at the airport long enough to see me lock on to Zade and then got a taxi.

Zade was one of the faces I had in the 8X50s, blurred and merging with the leaves. He was sitting next to the woman, very relaxed, his dark glasses occasionally swinging upwards and turning slowly to scan the first-storey verandas At these times I kept the binoculars perfectly still.

We had come the four miles to Lagofondo in separate boats from Manaus harbour. I had told the Indian boy to keep half a mile distant because the risk of Zade's getting lost was now almost nil: the terrain on each side of the river was thick jungle where according to Chuck Lazenby only a lunatic would go on his own. On the river, nearly seven miles wide in this area, the small-boat traffic provided adequate cover.

Lagofondo was at me neck of a tributary: a cluster of water-front cane-and-thatch dwellings along the steep bank where the jute reeds had been hacked away to make room, with a banana grove and some farm buildings and a church. The hotel had been a German mission house during the rubber boom; it had started to rot when the slump came and had then been repaired and was starting to rot again.

A mosquito whined close and I waited for the silence, then hit the side of my head, bringing blood away on my fingers. I put the field glasses up again.

They were sitting in the shade of the palms: everyone here sat in the shade. The thermometer in the hall had been at 103° when I checked in, and the boy at the desk said it was cooler after the rain. An hour ago I had been sitting in the courtyard myself, talking to a Dutchman who was here collecting Indian artifacts for a mail order line he was running in Canada. I hadn't once looked at the group of people on the other side of the fountain: 1 didn't want to see them but I wanted them to see me, to establish the image. Zade and another man had been drinking pisco sours and the rest had asked for mineral water. They had talked now and then, but with an effort, and always led by Zade. They bad talked about the Amazon and its insects, mostly in English with strong accents.

Sometimes I had heard the soft frightened tones of the girl.

I watched her now. She was centred in the field of vision: pale, fair haired, sitting perfectly still and looking up at the others only when they spoke directly to her. The woman spoke to her more often than the others. Her name was Shadia.

I moved the glasses.

They had that vague familiarity of faces seen before only in photographs: I'd seen the photographs in London and Ferris had shown me some more on the plane between Los Angeles and Washington four days ago.

Sabri Sassine: undercover operator for the Turkish Dev-Genc, released from gaol in the Argentine. Carlos Ramirez: mercenary terrorist, explosives expert. Francisco Ventura: freelance saboteur and sometime Black September assassin, Ilyich Kuznetski: another freelance with the Simplon Tunnel bombing on his record and a gaol shoot-out in Rome. Satynovich Zade: currently wanted by the Dutch police for a political assassination reportedly undertaken for the PLA.

I didn't know who the woman was.

I knew who the college girl was.

She was sipping some water as I watched her.

The woman was talking to her now but I couldn't hear the words intelligibly. The accent was Polish. I moved the field glasses and studied her again, wiping the condensation off the lenses and steadying them with my elbows on my knees. I am a bad judge of people's age but she looked thirty-five. Sun-tan, auburn hair hanging loose, very pale blue eyes that hardly ever moved: when she wanted to look at something she turned her head, in the way of a cat Possibly she had been taken on as a chaperon for Pat Burdick but these men were terrorists and if they wanted to search the girl they would do that and if they wanted to rape her they would do that: I didn't think the woman was a chaperon. More probably she was the current partner of one of the men but in half an hour's constant surveillance I hadn't seen who he was: she hadn't touched any of them, or sat particularly close. Ten minutes ago Zade had said something to her in Polish and she had cut in quickly, turning away, and there'd been a short silence among the group.

I moved the field glasses again to watch Ramirez.

Above my head the fan droned rhythmically: the blades were out of balance and the electric motor was vibrating with each revolution. It produced a warm draught, but the sweat went on running down my face and steaming the lenses.

I wondered again what they were asking of the Defence Secretary.

He would know by now, They would have presented their terms.

The fact was that Burdick could have called in security or investigatory or counter-espionage agencies and he hadn't done that and I could see only one obvious reason: he'd been ordered not to. If this were the standard hostage-and-demands situation then the United States Secretary of Defence was at present under the orders of the five men down there in the courtyard, so long as his daughter was alive.

There was of course a difference in the standard pattern but it didn't affect the situation as such: in this case the hostage hadn't been kidnapped. Pat Burdick was studying insects along the Amazon with a few companions and probably writing home and probably sending photographs as evidence. Only two people had known the truth and one was Finberg and he was dead. The other was James Burdick.

This difference in the standard pattern was crucial. If the group had seized their hostage and concealed her whereabouts there would be nothing Burdick could do for them: the FBI and the counter-terrorist department of the CIA would have been mobilized and the group's demands would have been made public and Burdick would not have been allowed to meet them.

The demands wouldn't be for money. They would be for something only Burdick and a few men in similar positions could supply: military information, arms, technological data, access to ultra-secret documents or blueprints or designs. Pressure to supply them, in whole or in part, could be applied to the Defence Secretary only if he alone knew that his daughter's life was in jeopardy and that these demands were being made.

According to the Bureau intelligence, passed to the executive by his director in the field, Burdick alone knew.

London doesn't pass out disinformation to the people in the field. It doesn't tell you much but when it tells you something then you can believe it.

The glasses were misted up again and I lowered them and wiped them with the corner of my handkerchief. I could feel a swelling on my scalp above the ear: the blood on my fingers had been my own, drawn out by a female mosquito. There hadn't been time to ask for malaria shots but the incubation period would see me 'through the mission if the chances of survival were good enough, I didn't think they were.

This was the end-phase and there was the target: the Kobra rendezvous. When I reported to Ferris in a few minutes from now he was going to throw me the final directive and I knew what it was.

I steadied the field glasses again. The right shoulder was still inclined to ache if I kept it still too long: it had taken most of the impact when I'd hit the ground in the alley in New York. One of the group — Sassine — was moving about restlessly and I wanted to keep them all in sight in case anyone thought of coming up here to my room. They shouldn't do, because security was total: they'd never seen me before and I'd made no specific surveillance of them except from my room and behind adequate cover. But I had believed security to be total when the wall had blown out in Phnom Penh.

Note in passing: James Burdick could say nothing to anyone because his daughter's life was in hazard. The converse must also be true: his daughter had been warned that if she tried to leave the group or seek the help of the police she would bring about her father's killing.

I watched them for another fifteen minutes and then signalled Ferris.

Code-intro. No bugs.

I made my report and he started putting questions: did it look as if any exchange were to be made here in Brazil; did it look as if they were waiting for other members of the Kobra cell; did it look as if they felt on top of the situation they had created; so forth, No, no and yes.

He was silent for half a minute.

'They've still got the road up,' he said at last.

'Have they?'

Directive. He'd been in signals with London, 'This is really quite big. Quite substantial,'

Egerton's word for it I began worrying.

The phase had only just opened and there wasn't much I could do: to get as close to the target as this I'd had to present a frank image and rely on cover and this was very limiting. There hadn't been time to get any leverage, any kind of counter-force that we could apply against the group as a whole: Satynovich Zade was clearly the top kick and I'd obviously go for him as soon as I could arrange something workable but it'd have to be a hundred per cent effective because a stalemate wouldn't be good enough — they still had the girl in their hands.

I thought I could get at Zade and keep him alive and use him to argue with but it might take hours or even days because a lot would depend on luck.

They told me,' I said, 'that it was substantial. What are you trying to do, for Christ's sake-put the fear of — '

'There's nothing to worry about,' he said.

I shut up.

It had just sounded so bloody silly to remind me the mission was 'substantial' because Egerton used that kind of word where people like Parkis or Sargent would say 'hot-war level' or 'Minister's priority' or whatever term they picked on to express something that was going to make a lot of waves, win or lose.

But Ferris doesn't ever say anything bloody silly and he'd just told me he'd been in signals with London through the consulate in Manaus and London had instructed him to remind me that we weren't on just another field exercise and that meant they wanted me to do something difficult, and what Egerton really wanted me to understand was that it was going to be worth it.

Not in terms of any reward, of course: apart from a living wage and a bit extra for roses for Moira we don't ask any reward for doing something we couldn't live without doing even though we know it's going to kill us in the end. Egerton meant in terms of making the necessary effort.

Bloody London for you: they think that when you've finally got the target in your sights and you're set up to go in and get the objective you're either too dead-beat or too ready to chicken out if the going gets rough.

Gut-think: not precisely true.

Egerton was a worried man, that was all. The red light was on the board and he was sitting up there in Signals with his legs hooked over that crate of stuff they hadn't unpacked yet and his shoes covered in clay from down there in the street and he was developing purpose-tremor: with the executive on the target and 'substantial' considerations in the balance he didn't want anything to go wrong. So he'd sent his little ferret a shot in the arm.

'I'm not worrying,' I told Ferris.

'Of course you're not.'

Ramirez had moved and I watched his head vanish and reappear beyond a gap in the leaves. I wasn't using the field glasses because I had the phone in one hand and wouldn't be able to control their movement: any terrorist in the international class is constantly sensitive to surveillance and will catch the glint of a lens if care isn't used, 'Just give me a directive,' I said.

I didn't want to stay on the phone too long because that group down there could split up at any minute and I'd need to keep track of them as long as I could.

'Yes,' I heard Ferris saying. 'We want you to get the objective for us as soon as you can do it safely.'

'The girl,' I said.

He didn't answer right away. I could hear something like static from his end: he was probably in the wireless room at the consulate, and not at the Hotel Amazonas. Conceivably he was getting stuff direct from Control while he had me on the line. I didn't know, and I wasn't going to ask because if he wanted me to know then he'd tell me.

'No,' he said in a moment, 'not the girl. We want the whole group.'

In a couple of seconds I said:

'You want the whole of the Kobra cell.'

There are always a lot of repeats when a major directive is being put on the line, especially when it's being done on the phone. It's not a time for mistakes.

'The whole cell,' Ferris said, 'yes.'

Another mosquito was whining faintly near my head, but I didn't think, for the moment, about swatting it 'Alive?' I asked Ferris.

He answered straight away because he'd expected the question and had already got a directive on it.

'That's immaterial. But if you can get the girl out, everyone would appreciate it,'