OF ALL his colleagues in the cartel, the one Alfredo Suárez had to work with most closely was José-María Largo, in charge of merchandising. It was a question of keeping track of every cargo, down to the last kilogram. Suárez could dispatch them, consignment by consignment, but it was vital to know how much arrived at the point of handover to the purchasing mafia and how much was intercepted by the forces of law and order.
Fortunately, every major intercept was immediately blazoned across the media by the FLO. They wanted the credit, kudos from their governments, always angling for larger budgets. Largo’s rules were simple and ironclad. Big customers were allowed to pay fifty percent of the price of the cargo (and that was the cartel’s price) on placement of an order. The balance would be owed after handover, which marked change of ownership. Smaller players had to provide one hundred percent as a single nonnegotiable deposit.
If the national gangs and mafias could charge astronomical fees at street level, that was their business. If they were careless or penetrated by police informants and lost their purchase, that, too, was their business. But confiscation of the cargo after delivery did not absolve them of the need to settle up.
It was when a foreign gang still owed the fifty percent balance, had lost their purchase to the police and refused to pay up, that enforcement was necessary. The Don was adamant about the value of terrible examples being set. And the cartel was truly paranoid about two things: theft of assets and informant betrayal. Neither was forgivable or forgettable, no matter what the cost of retribution. It had to be inflicted. That was the law of the Don . . . and it worked.
Only by conferring with his colleague Largo could Suárez know to the last kilo how much of what he shipped was intercepted before the point of handover.
Only this would show him what shipment methods had the highest chances of getting through and which the least.
Toward the end of 2010, he calculated that interception was running much as ever; between ten and fifteen percent. Given the telephone-number profits, this was quite acceptable. But he always lusted to bring the interception level down to single figures. If cocaine was intercepted while still in the possession of the cartel, the loss was wholly theirs. The Don did not like that.
Suárez’s predecessor, now dismembered and decomposing under a new apartment block, had thrown his entire judgment, after the turn of the century a decade earlier, behind submarines. This ingenious idea involved the construction up hidden rivers of submersible hulls that, powered by a diesel engine, could take a crew of four, a cargo of up to ten tons, along with food and fuel, and then sink to periscope depth.
Even the best of them never went deep. They did not need to. All that showed above the water was a Perspex blister dome, with the captain’s head peering out so that he could steer, and a tube to suck in fresh air for the engine and crew.
The idea was for these invisible submersibles to creep slowly but safely up the Pacific Coast from Colombia to northern Mexico and deliver huge quantities to the Mexican mafias, leaving them to smuggle it the rest of the way across the border into the USA. And they had worked . . . for a while. Then came the disaster.
The guiding genius behind their design and construction was Enrique Portocarrero, who masqueraded as a harmless shrimp fisherman out of Buenaventura down in the south on the Pacific Coast. Then Colonel Dos Santos had got him.
Whether he squealed under “pressure” or whether a search of his premises revealed traces, the main base of the submarine construction yards was discovered, and the Navy moved in. By the time Captain German Borrero had finished, sixty hulls in various stages of construction were smoking ruins. The loss to the cartel had been enormous.
The second mistake of Suárez’s predecessor had been to send extremely high percentages of cargo to the U.S. and Europe by single mules, carrying one or two kilos each. It meant using thousands to carry just a couple of tons.
As Islamist fundamentalism caused the tightening of security in the Western world, more and more passenger suitcases were X-rayed and their illegal contents discovered. This led to a switch to belly cargoes. Idiots prepared to take the risk would numb their gullets with novocaine and then swallow up to a hundred pellets containing about ten grams each.
Some sustained an internal burst and ended their lives frothing on the airport concourse floor. Others were reported by shar
p-eyed stewardesses as being unable to take food or drink on a long-haul flight. They were taken aside, given syrup of figs and given a lavatory with a filter screen at the bottom. American and European jails were filled to bursting with them. Still, over eighty percent got through by sheer volume of numbers and the West’s obsession with civil rights. Then the predecessor to Suárez had his second stroke of bad luck.
It was pioneered in Manchester, England, and it worked. It was a new “virtual strip search” X-ray machine that would not only reveal the passenger as if naked but also reveal implants, insertions into the anus and the contents of the entrails. The machine was so silent that it could be installed below the guichet occupied by the passport control officer so that the presenter of the passport could be observed from thorax to calves by another officer in another room. As more and more Western airports and sea terminals installed them, the rate of intercept of the mules shot upward.
Finally, the Don had had enough. He ordered a change of chief executive of that division—permanently. Suárez had taken over.
He was a dedicated big-cargo man, and his figures showed clearly which were the best routes. For the U.S. it was by surface craft or aircraft up through the Caribbean to deliver to northern Mexico or the southern littoral of the U.S., with the cargoes carried mainly by merchant marine freighters for most of the way, and a final, at-sea transfer to private craft of the sort that teem along both coasts, from fishermen to speedboats to private yachts to leisure boats.
For Europe, he hugely favored the new routes; not direct from the Caribbean to Western and Northern Europe, where interceptions topped twenty percent, but due east to the ring of failed states that comprised the West African coast. With the cargoes changing hands there and the cartel paid off, it was up to the buyers to break the consignments down and filter them north over the deserts to the Mediterranean shore and then over to Southern Europe. And the destination he favored most was the small, ex-Portuguese, civil-war-ravaged failed state and narco-hellhole of Guinea-Bissau.
THIS WAS exactly the conclusion Cal Dexter was coming to as he sat in Vienna with the Canadian narco-hunter Walter Kemp of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The figures on UNODC tallied very closely with those of Tim Manhire down in Lisbon.
Starting only a few years earlier as the recipient of twenty percent of Colombian cocaine heading for Europe, West Africa was now taking over fifty. What neither man sharing a café table in the Prater Park sun could know was that Alfredo Suárez had increased that percentage to seventy.
There were seven coastal republics in West Africa that qualified for the police description “of interest”: Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry (ex-French), Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana.
After being flown or sailed across the Atlantic to West Africa, the cocaine filtered north by a hundred different routes and ruses. Some came by fishing boat, up the coast to Morocco, and then followed the old cannabis run. Other cargoes were flown across the Sahara to the North African coast and thence by small craft to the Spanish mafia across the Pillars of Hercules or to the Calabrian Ndrangheta waiting at the port of Gioia.
Some shipments went by exhausting land train right across the Sahara from south to north. Of extreme interest was the Libyan airline Afriqiyah, which links twelve major West African cities to Tripoli, just across the water from Europe.
“When it comes to freighting northward to Europe,” said Kemp, “they are all in it together. But when it comes to receiving from across the Atlantic, Guinea-Bissau is premier league.”
“Perhaps I should go and have a look,” mused Dexter.
“If you do go,” said the Canadian, “be careful. Have a good cover story. And it might be wise to take some muscle. Of course, the best camouflage is to be black. Can you provide that?”
“No, not this side of the pond.”
Kemp scribbled a name and number on a paper napkin.