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 Rödingsmarkt.
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 Düsseldorf. 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. Düsseldorf 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
Dräger 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 País 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 Señorita 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
Álvaro 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.
ÁLVARO 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 Suárez, 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, Álvaro 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
Álvaro 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 Suárez 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 Señor Suárez, 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 Señor
Suárez; 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 João 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 SUÁREZ 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 Suárez 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 Cárdenas, 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.