By the end of the first decade of the third millennium, the surveillance and control of all intercontinental airline passengers had become so total that it was unlikely that Valdez, with his unusual appearance, would not be spotted and followed. So they flew in the Don’s private Grumman G4.

Don Diego was absolutely right . . . up to a point. But the twin-jet executive luxury aircraft still needed to fly a virtually straight line from Bogotá to Guinea-Bissau, and this brought her under the wide patrol circle of Global Hawk Sam. So the Grumman was spotted, identified and logged. When he heard the news, the Cobra smiled with satisfaction.

The Enforcer was met at Bissau Airport by the head of operations for the cartel in Guinea-Bissau, Ignacio Romero. Despite his seniority, Romero was very deferential. For one thing, Valdez was the Don’s personal emissary; for another, his reputation was fear inspiring throughout the cocaine trade; and, for a third, Romero had been forced to report the nonarrival of four major cargoes, two by sea and two by air.

That cargoes should be lost was part of the permanent risk factor involved in the trade. In many parts of that trade, especially the direct routes into North America and Europe, those losses might hover around fifteen percent, which could be absorbed by the Don so long as the explanations were logical and convincing. But losses on the West Africa run had for Romero’s entire tenure in Guinea been close to zero, which was why the Europe-bound percentage using the African dogleg had risen over five years from twenty to seventy percent of the total.

Romero was very proud of his safe-arrival figures. He had a flotilla of Bijagós canoes and several fast pseudo-fishing boats at his disposal, all equipped with GPS locators to ensure pinpoint rendezvous at sea for cocaine transfers.

Added to this, he had the military establishment in his pocket. General Diallo’s soldiers actually did the heavy-lifting work during unloading; the general took his ample cut in the form of cocaine and ran his own shipments north to Europe in cahoots with the Nigerians. Paid off via West Africa’s army of Lebanese money brokers, the general was already a rich man in world terms, and, in local terms, an African Croesus.

And then this. Not simply four lost cargoes but total disappearances without a clue of explanation. His cooperation with the Don’s emissary was a given; he was relieved that the one called the Animal was genial and good-humored toward him. He should have known.

As always when a Colombian passport appeared at the airport, formalities vanished. The crew of three was ordered to live on the G4, use the facilities of the VIP suite, such as it was, and never to leave the jet without at least one onboard. Then Romero drove his guests in his luxury SUV through the war-gutted city and on to his mansion by the beach ten miles out of town.

Valdez had brought two assistants with him. One was short but immensely broad and beefy, the other tall, skinny and pockmarked. They each carried a grip that went uninspected. All experts need their tools.

The Enforcer appeared an easy guest. He demanded a vehicle of his own and a suggestion for a good lunch restaurant out of town. Romero proposed the Mar Azul, out on the banks of the Mansôa behind Quinhámel, for its fresh lobster. He offered to drive his guests there personally, but Valdez waved away the proposal, took a map and left, with the beefy one at the wheel. They were away most of the day.

Romero was bemused. They did not seem interested in his foolproof procedures for cargo-reception and onward-transmission routes to North Africa and Europe.

On the second day, Valdez declared that as lunch by the river had been so splendid, they should all four repeat the outing. He mounted the SUV beside the beefy one, who replaced Romero’s regular driver. Romero and Skinny took the rear seats.

The newcomers seemed to know the route well. They hardly referred to the map and drove unerringly through Quinhámel, the unofficial capital of the Papel tribe. The Papels had been bereft of influence since President Vieira, who was one of them, had been chopped to bits with machetes by the Army a year earlier. Since then, General Diallo, a Balanta, had been the dictator.

After the town, the signposted road to the restaurant left the main highway and went down a sandy track for another six miles. Halfway down, Valdez nodded to the side, and the beefy one swerved into an even smaller track toward an abandoned cashew farm. At this point, Romero began to plead.

“Be quiet, señor,” said the Enforcer quietly. When he would not stop protesting his innocence, the skinny one drew a slim boning knife and held it under his jaw. He began to weep.

The farmhouse was little more than a shack, but it had a chair of sorts. Romero was too distressed to notice that someone had screwed its legs to the floor to stop it from rocking.

The zone chief ’s interrogators were quite matter-of-fact and businesslike. Valdez did nothing but stare from his cherubic little face at the surrounding cashew trees, overgrown and unharvested. His assistants hauled Romero out of the SUV, into the farmhouse, stripped him to the waist and tied him to the chair. What followed took an hour.

The Animal started, because he enjoyed it, until the questioned one lost consciousness, then he handed over. His acolytes used smelling salts to restore consciousness, and after that Valdez simply asked the question. There was only one. What had Romero done with the stolen cargoes?

An hour later, it was almost over. The man in the chair had ceased to scream. His pulped lips uttered only a low moan in the form of a “No-o-o-o-o-o” when, after a brief pause, the two tormentors started again. The beefy one did the hitting, the skinny one the cutting. It was what they were best at.

Toward the end, Romero was unrecognizable. He had no ears, eyes or nose. All the knuckles were crushed and the nails removed. The chair sat in a pool of blood.

Valdez noticed something at his feet, stooped and threw it out through the open door into the eye-searing sunlight outside. In seconds, a mangy dog approached it. There was a dribble of white saliva around its jaws. It was rabid.

The Enforcer pulled an automatic, cocked it, drew a bead and fired once. The slug went through both hips. The foxlike creature uttered a shrill yelp and collapsed, its forepaws scratching for traction, the two rear legs useless. Valdez turned, holstering the gun.

“Finish him,” he said mildly. “He did not do it.” What was left of Romero died with a thrust from the boning knife through the heart.

The three men from Bogotá did not try to hide what they had done. That task could be left to Romero’s deputy, Carlos Sonora, who could now take over. The experience of clearing up would be salutary and a guarantee of future loyalty.

The three took off their splashed plastic raincoats and rolled them up. All were soaked in sweat. As they left, they were careful to step clear of the foaming muzzle of the dying dog. It lay snapping at thin air, still a yard short of the tidbit that had brought it from its lair. It was a human nose.

Escorted by Sonora, Paco Valdez paid a courtesy call on General Jalo Diallo, who received them in his office at Army HQ. Explaining that this was the custom of his people, Valdez brought a personal gift from Don Diego Esteban to his esteemed African colleague. It was an elaborate flower vase of finely turned native pottery and delicately hand-painted.

“For flowers,” said Valdez, “so that when you look at them you can think of our profitable and comradely relationship.”

Sonora translated into Portuguese. The skinny one fetched water from the en suite bathroom. The beefy one had brought a bunch of flowers. They made an attractive display. The general beamed. No one noticed that the vase accommodated remarkably little water, and the stalks of the flowers were rather short. Valdez noted the number of the desk telephone, one of the few in town that actually worked.

The next day was Sunday. The party from Bogotá was about to leave. Sonora would drive them to the airport. Half a mile past Army HQ, Valdez ordered a halt. On his cell phone, operated by MTN, the one local service provider, used only by the elite, the whites and the Chinese, he called the desk phone in General Diallo’s office.

It took a few minutes for the general to walk through from his adjacent residential suite to his office. When he answered, he was a yard from the vase. Valdez pressed the detonator in his hand.

The explosion brought down most of the building and reduced the office to brick rubble. Of the dictator, a few fragments were found and later taken back to Balanta territory for tribal burial among the spirits of the ancestors.

“You will need a new business partner,” Valdez told Sonora on the road to the airport. “An honest one. The Don does not like thieves. See to it.”

The Grumman was ready for takeoff, fully fueled. It passed north of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, where Sam noticed and reported it. The coup in West Africa made the BBC World Service TV news, but it was a reported item without video so it did not last long.

There was a two-minute report on the evening news. By nine p.m. it had been discontinued on editorial grounds. But while it lasted, it showed the ICE car drawing up at international departures, and two marshals escorting a very pretty young woman with a subdued manner across the concourse until they disappeared through the security barrier, where the group was not stopped.

The soundtrack narrated simply that Ms. Arenal had been the victim of an attempt by a criminal baggage handler in Madrid to use her suitcase on a trip to New York as a vehicle for a kilogram of cocaine that had been discovered in a spot check at Kennedy several weeks earlier. The arrest and confession in Spain had exonerated the Colombian student, who had been freed to return to her fine arts course in Madrid.

It made no waves, but it was spotted and recorded in Colombia. After that, Roberto Cárdenas replayed the segment frequently. It enabled him to see the daughter he had not set eyes on in years, and it reminded him of her mother, Conchita, who had been truly beautiful.

Unlike many of the top echelon of the cocaine trade, Cárdenas had never developed the taste for ostentation and luxury. He had come from the gutters and fought his way up through the old cartels. He was one of the first to spot the rising star of Don Diego and realize the benefits of centralization and concentration. This is why the Don, convinced of his loyalty, had taken him into the newly formed Hermandad at an early stage.

Cárdenas had the animal instincts of shy game; he knew his forest, he could sense danger, he never failed to settle a score. He had only one weak point, and a lawyer whose too-regular visits to Madrid had been spotted by a computer surfer far away in Washington had exposed it. When Conchita, who had raised Letizia alone after they parted, died of cancer, Cárdenas had got his daughter out of the nest of pit vipers, which was the world in which he was condemned to live because he knew no other.

He should have made a run for safety after the destruction of Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg. He knew it; his antennae did not let him down. He just refused. He hated a place called “abroad,” and could run his division of bribed foreign officials only through a team of youngsters who moved like fish among the foreign coral. He could not do that and he knew it.

Like a jungle creature, he moved constantly from refuge to refuge, even in his own forest. He had fifty bolt-holes, mainly within the zone around Cartagena, and he bought use-and-throw prepaid cell phones like candies, never making more than one call before heaving the communicator into a river. He was so elusive that sometimes the cartel took a day or so to find him. And that was something the highly effective Colonel Dos Santos, head of intelligence in the anti-drug division of the Policía Judicial, could not do.

His bolt-holes tended to be working cottages, obscure, plainly furnished, even spartan. But there was one indulgence he cherished; he loved his TV. He had the best and newest model of plasma screen, the sharpest aerial dish, and they traveled with him.

He liked to sit with a six-pack of beer flicking through the satellite channels or screening movies on the DVD player below the screen. He loved the cartoons because Wile E. Coyote made him laugh, and he was not by nature a laughing man. He liked the cop dramas because he could deride the incompetence of the criminals, who were always caught, and the uselessness of the detectives, who would never have caught Roberto Cárdenas.

And he loved one taped newscast that he played over and over again. It showed a lovely but haggard young woman on a pavement at Kennedy Airport. Sometimes he would freeze-frame and stare at it for half an hour. After what he had done to enable that clip of film, he knew that sooner or later someone would make a mistake.

While most of the unloading of enormous quantities of oil to keep Europe functioning is accomplished at sea islands of pipes and pumps far out of reach of the city, Rotterdam’s second specialty is its container port; not quite as large as Hamburg but just as modern and mechanized.

Dutch customs, working with the police and, in the time-honored phrase “acting upon information received,” had exposed and arrested a senior customs officer by the name of Peter Hoogstraten.

He was clever, devious and intended to beat the charge. He knew what he had done and where he had banked the payoff money, or, more precisely, where the cartel had banked it for him. He intended to retire, and he intended to enjoy every penny of it. He had not the slightest intention of confessing or admitting a single thing. He intended to play his “civil rights” and his “human rights” down to the last card on the table. The only thing that worried him was how the authorities knew so much. Someone, somewhere, had blown him away; of that, he was certain.

Ultra-liberal though the Netherlands prides itself on being, it plays host to an enormous criminal underworld, and, perhaps because of the extreme permissiveness, a very large part of that underworld is in the hands of European foreigners and non-Europeans.

Hoogstraten worked primarily for one such gang, and they were Turks. He knew the rules of the cocaine trade. The product belonged to the cartel until it rolled out of the sea-container port onto the highways of the European Union. Then it belonged to the Turkish mafia, who had paid fifty percent up front, with fifty percent on delivery. A consignment intercepted by Dutch customs was going to hurt both parties.

The Turks would have to re-place their order, while refusing to pay any further money. But the Turks had customers who had also placed orders and demanded delivery. Hoogstraten’s skill at clearing sea containers and other cargoes was invaluable and paid extremely well. He was only one asset in a procedure that, between Colombian jungle and Dutch dinner party, could easily have twenty layers of different participants, all needing to be paid a cut, but he was a crucial one.

The mistake occurred because of Chief Inspector Van der Merwe’s private problem. He had been in the Royal Dutch Customs all his working life. He had joined the criminal investigation division within three years of entering the profession and had intercepted a mountain of contraband over the years. But the years had taken their toll. He had an enlarged prostate and drank far too much coffee, which exacerbated his weak bladder. It was the source of smothered grins among his younger colleagues, but, as a sufferer, he could not see the joke. Halfway through the sixth interrogation of Peter Hoogstraten, he simply had to go.

It should not have been a problem. He nodded to the colleague beside him that they would all take a break. The colleague intoned, “Interview suspended at . . . ,” and switched off the digital recording machine. Hoogstraten insisted he wanted a cigarette and that meant he had to go to the “Smoking Permitted” area.

Political correctness forbade it, but civil rights allowed it. Van der Merwe longed for his retirement to the country house outside Groningen, with his beloved vegetable garden and orchard, where he could do what he damn well liked for the rest of his life. All three men rose.

Van der Merwe turned, and the tail of his jacket disturbed the file that lay in front of him on the table. The buff file turned ninety degrees, and a paper inside peeked out. It had a column of figures on it. In a second it was back inside the folder, but Hoogstraten had seen it. He recognized the figures. They were from his bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Nothing crossed his face, but a light came on inside his head. The swine had penetrated banking secrecy details. Apart from him, only two sources could know those figures and which bank, half of whose name had been showing for a fraction of a second. One source was the bank itself; the other was the cartel who filled that account. He doubted it was the bank, unless the American DEA had broken through the computer firewalls protecting the accounts.

That was always possible. Nothing was truly impregnable anymore, not even the firewalls of NASA and the Pentagon, as had been proved. Either way, the cartel should be alerted that there was a leak, and a bad one. He had no idea how to contact the Colombian cartel, whose existence he had read about in a long cocaine article in De Telegraaf. But the Turks would know.

Two days later at a bail hearing, Dutch customs had their second piece of bad luck. The judge was a notorious civil rights fanatic who privately favored the legalization of cocaine, which he used himself. He granted bail; Hoogstraten walked out and made his call.

Ortega waited until he was emerging from the bank while behind him two members of staff handed over a pair of heavy Samsonite hard-framed suitcases. Suddenly it rained armed Guardia Civil, led by plainclothes UDYCO men.

In the alley behind the bank, directed by UDYCO’s man on a rooftop five hundred meters away, two men later shown to be hired muscle working for the Galician gangs were snatched along with the bank staff and the suitcases. These contained the fortnightly “settlement of accounts” between the combined underworld of Spain and the Colombian cartel.

The total haul was over €10 million, packed in bricks of five-hundred-euro notes. In the Euro zone, this bill is hardly ever seen, the denomination being so high it is almost impossible to use on the street. It can realistically be used only for huge settlements in cash, and there is only one business that needs this on a constant basis.

At the front of the bank, Julio Luz was arrested, and, inside, the brothers Guzman and their senior accountant. With a court order, UDYCO seized all the books and records. To prove collusion in transcontinental money laundering was going to take a team of the best accountants months of research, but the two suitcases supplied the “holding” charge. They simply could not be lawfully explained being handed over to known gangsters. But it would be much simpler if someone confessed.

Being led to the cells, the Galicians were walked past an open door. Inside was a distraught Julio Luz being offered coffee and sweet biscuits by Paco Ortega, who was beaming down at him as he did.

One of the uniformed Guardia grinned gleefully at his prisoner.

“That’s the guy who is going to get you life in Toledo Penal,” he crowed.

Inside the room, the Colombian lawyer turned toward the door and for one second made eye contact with the scowling gangster. He had no time to protest. The man outside was dragged away along the corridor. Two days later, being transferred from central Madrid to a holding jail in the suburbs, he managed to escape.

It appeared to be an awful breach of basic security, and Ortega apologized profusely to his superiors. The man’s handcuffs had been badly locked, and in the van he had worked one hand free. The van did not drive into the courtyard of the jail but stopped at the curb. The two prisoners were being led across the pavement when one tore himself free and raced off down the street. Pursuit was lamentably slow, and he got away.

Two days later, Paco Ortega walked into the cell of Julio Luz and announced that he had failed to secure an extension of the arrest warrant against the lawyer. He was free to go. More, he would be escorted to the morning’s departure of the Iberia flight for Bogotá and put on it.

Julio Luz lay awake all night in his cell and thought things over. He had no wife and children, and for this he was now grateful. His parents were dead. Nothing bound him to Bogotá, and he was terrified of Don Diego.

The grapevine inside the jail had been abuzz with news of the escape of the Galician thug and the inability of the authorities to find him. Certainly his fellow northwesterners in Madrid, of whom some were part of the underworld, would give him sanctuary and smuggle him home.

Julio Luz thought of the snatch of lies from the Guardia in the corridor. In the morning, he refused to leave. His defending counselor was bewildered. Luz continued to refuse.

“You have no choice, señor,” said Chief Inspector Ortega. “It seems we have no case against you. Your lawyer here has been too clever for me. You have to go back to Bogotá.”

“But if I confess?”

There was silence in the cell. The defending lawyer threw up his hands and left in a huff. He had done his best. He had succeeded. But even he could not defend a fool. Paco Ortega led Luz to an interview room.

“Now,” he said, “let’s talk. Let’s really talk. About lots of things. That is, if you really want sanctuary here.”

And Luz talked. On and on. He knew so much, not just about Banco Guzman but about others. Like Eberhardt Milch in Hamburg, he was just not cut out for this sort of thing.

The seas off Dakar, capital of Senegal to the north of Guinea, teem with big-game fish and attract sportsmen to the area. Waiting out at sea, fifty miles into the Atlantic off Dakar, was a big Hatteras game fisherman. It made a perfect cover because the sight of a fast white vessel sporting tall waving outriggers and a row of rods at the stern tends to disarm suspicion.

The Blue Marlin sat rocking gently on the nocturnal swell as if waiting for the fish to start biting at sunup. Thanks to the modern convenience of GPS, her position was where it was supposed to be, accurate to a square one hundred meters by one hundred. And her crew was waiting with the powerful Maglite to shine the agreed code upward when they heard the engines approaching. But no engines came.

They had ceased to turn five hundred miles to the southwest and were lying with the remaining fragments of the Noratlas on the seabed. At dawn, the crew of the Hatteras, who had no interest in fishing, headed back to Dakar to report in coded e-mail that no rendezvous had taken place and there was no ton of cocaine in the hold beneath the engine bay.

Of the governing board, two were not present. The news of the arrest in Madrid of Julio Luz had been absorbed, though nothing was known of the fact that he had turned traitor.

Roberto Cárdenas could not be contacted. The Don intended to lose patience with the habit of the Cartagenan to disappear into the jungle and not stay in touch by cell phone. But the main point of the meeting was the figures, and the man effectively in the dock was Alfredo Suárez.

The news was bad and getting worse. Placed orders required that a minimum of three hundred tons of pure cocaine had to reach both the U.S. and Europe every year. By this time of the year, two hundred should have got through safely. That figure was under one hundred.

The disasters were happening on three fronts. In ports across the U.S. and Europe, sea containers were being stopped and subjected to spot checks on an increased basis, and far too often the choice for the spot check was accurate. It had long been blazingly obvious to the Don that he was under attack. The black cloud of suspicion fell on the dispatcher, Suárez. He alone knew exactly which sea containers were carrying a secondary cargo of cocaine.

His defense was that of over a hundred ports in two continents that received sea containers, only four had sustained successful interceptions by customs. What Suárez could not know was that there were seven more in the pipeline, as the Cobra dribbled out the names of the corrupt public servants.

The second front concerned merchantmen at sea. There had been a ferocious spike in the number of large freighters stopped and boarded in mid-ocean. These were all large ships. In some cases, the cocaine was secreted onboard in the harbor of departure and retained by the ship until it docked in the port of arrival.

But Suárez had substantially increased the practice of permitting the freighter to leave harbor “clean” and take on board several tons of cocaine from a fishing boat or go-fast at sea. This cargo would be off-loaded in the same manner before the long-distance ship arrived, while it was still up to a hundred miles from its destination. It could then arrive clean, like the Virgen de Valme in Seattle.

The disadvantage was that this way the entire crew could not be prevented from witnessing the transfers at both ends. Sometimes the freighters were genuinely empty of cocaine, and the boarding party had to leave with apologies and nothing else. But the proportion of discoveries in hiding places that should never have been detected was far too high.

In the western sector, three navies, those of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were at it, along with customs and Coast Guard patrols ranging far out to sea. In the east, four European navies were increasingly active.

According to official Western propaganda, the discoveries were due to the arrival of a new piece of technology, developed from the device that could detect buried bodies under concrete and used by homicide divisions worldwide. The development, so ran the official explanations, could penetrate steel like an X-ray through soft tissue and show up packages and bales in cavities created by the late Juan Cortez.

But an impounded ship is a nonearning ship, and even the tiny proportion of merchant shipping world that had been prepared to run the risk carrying contraband was now turning against the cartel despite the cash rewards.

But it was the third front that worried the Don. Even failures had reason; even disasters had explanations. It was the litany of complete disappearances that ate at his core.

He did not know about the two Global Hawks that were operating BAMS—Broad Aspect Maritime Surveillance—over the Caribbean and Atlantic. He did not know about the deck-plan identification that Michelle and Sam could pass in seconds to AFB Creech in Nevada or the master list created by Juan Cortez and now lodged in a warehouse in Washington, D.C. He did not know about the ability of the Hawks to wipe out all radio and e-mail and cell phone communication emanating from a sea area of a circular mile. And he did not know about two Q-ships masquerading as grain merchants in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.

And, most of all, he did not know that the rules had changed and that his vessels and crews were being wiped out, sunk, imprisoned and confiscated without publicity or due process. All he knew was that vessel after vessel and plane after plane were just disappearing. He did not know that he and his cartel were now being treated like foreign-based terrorists under the law.

And it was having an effect. Not only was it harder to find big merchantmen prepared to take the risk, the drivers of the go-fasts were highly skilled mariners, not just dockside muscle, and they were becoming unavailable. Freelance pilots had taken to discovering their aircraft were out-of-order and not fit to fly.

Don Diego was a man of both logic and developed paranoia. The two kept him alive and rich. He was by now totally convinced he had a traitor, and the man was in the midst of his cartel, the Brotherhood, his Hermandad. What he would do to the wretch when he found him was something his thoughts toyed with during the night.

There was a discreet cough to his left. It was José-María Largo, the director of merchandising.

“Don Diego, I much regret to say it but I must. Our clients across two continents are becoming restive, especially the Mexicans, and in Italy, the Ndrangheta, who dominate so much of Europe. You were the one who clinched the two concordats; with La Familia in Mexico and the Calabrians, who have the lion’s share of our product in Europe.

“Now they complain of a shortage of product, of orders unmet, of prices rising due to deficits of delivery.”

Don Diego had to restrain himself from hitting the man. Instead he nodded somberly.

“José-María, dear colleague, I think you should make a tour. Take in our ten biggest clients. Tell them there was a localized and temporary problem which is being coped with.”

And he turned smoothly toward Suárez.

“And coped with, it must surely be, would you not agree, Alfredo?”

The threat was in the air, and it applied to them all. Production would be increased to cope with shortfall. Fishing vessels and small freighters that had never been used before would have to be acquired or recruited for the Atlantic crossing. New pilots would have to be paid with irresistible fees to risk flying to Africa and Mexico.

Privately, he promised himself, the hunt for the traitor would be stepped up until the renegade was found. Then he would be dealt with, and his passing would not be pleasant.

Michelle turned in pursuit and tracked the oddity past the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras, where, had it not had extra fuel tanks, it should have been forced to land and refuel. It did not; it went on past Belize and over the Yucatán. That was when AFB Creech offered the intercept to the Mexican Air Force, which was delighted. Whoever the fool was, he was flying in daylight, unaware that he was being watched or that his watcher had realized he should have been out of fuel.

The Cessna was intercepted by two Mexican jets, who tried to contact it by radio. It failed to respond. They waved to the pilot to divert and land at Mérida. Up ahead was a large cloud formation. The Cessna suddenly made a diving break for the cloud and tried to escape. He must have been one of the Don’s newcomers, not very experienced. The fighter pilots had radar but a limited sense of humor.

The Cessna went down in flames and hit the sea just off Campeche. It had been trying to make a delivery to a strip on a cattle ranch outside Nuevo Laredo on the Texan border. No one survived. Enough bales to weigh in at 500 kgs were hauled out of the shallows by local fishing boats. Some was handed over to the authorities, but not much.

By mid-October, both Q-ships needed replenishing. The Chesapeake met her fleet auxiliary for open-ocean razzing south of Jamaica. She took on board a full load of fuel and food, and a replacement platoon of SEALs, this time Team 3 from Coronado, California. Also leaving her were all her prisoners.

The prisoners, hooded outside their un-windowed prison, were aware from the voices that they were in the hands of the Americans, but not where they were or what vessel they were on. They would eventually be taken ashore, hooded and in a black-windowed bus, transported to Eglin Air Force Base to be led aboard a C-5 freight plane for the long flight to the Chagos Islands, where at last they would see daylight and could sit out the war.

The Balmoral also refueled at sea. Her SBS men remained aboard because the unit was stretched with two entire squadrons deployed in Afghanistan. Her prisoners were taken to Gibraltar, where the same American C-5 did a stopover to pick them up. The British capture of eighteen tons of cocaine was also handed to the Americans at Gibraltar.

But the captures of cocaine, twenty-three tons by the Chesapeake and eighteen tons by the Balmoral, were transferred to another vessel. This was a small freighter operated by the Cobra.

The cocaine captured in different ports in the U.S. and Europe was destroyed by the various national police authorities. Consignments seized at sea were taken in hand by the navies or coast guards responsible and destroyed by them back onshore. The cargoes shot down over the sea were lost forever. But the captures by Cobra, Paul Devereaux ordered to be stored under guard on a tiny leased islet in the Bahamas.

The low mountains of bales were in rows under camouflage netting between the palms, and a small detail of U.S. Marines lived in a series of motor homes parked in the shade just off the beach by the jetty. The only visitor they received was a small freighter bringing fresh deliveries. After the first captures, it was the little freighter that made rendezvous with the Q-ships to relieve them of their bales of drugs.

Roberto Cárdenas was watching the clip of his daughter crossing the sidewalk at Kennedy Airport when the door came down. As ever, his mini-Uzi was within arm’s reach, and he knew how to use it.

He took out six of the Enforcer’s crew before they got him down, and he put a bullet through the hand of El Animal. But numbers will always tell eventually, and Paco Valdez, knowing what he was up against, had brought a dozen.

In life, Roberto Cárdenas was a rough, hard, bad man. In death, he was just another corpse. In five pieces, when the chain saw had finished.

He had ever had only one daughter. And he had loved her very much.