From his vantage point, the flier of the Little Bird could see the name on the prow of the rogue vessel. It was Belleza del Mar—Beauty of the Sea—the most optimistic title on the ocean. She was in fact a fishing boat, rusted, stained, a hundred feet long and stinking of fish. That was the point. The ton of cocaine in roped bales was under the rotting fish.
The captain tried to take the initiative by starting his engines. The helicopter swerved and dropped until it was abeam, 10 feet off the water and thirty yards from the side of the Belleza del Mar. At that range the sniper could have whisked off either ear according to choice.
“Paré los motores,” boomed a voice from Little Bird’s loudspeaker. “Cut your motors.” The captain did so. He could not hear them over the roar from the helicopter, but he had seen the spray plume of two approaching attack boats.
That, too, was incomprehensible. They were many miles from land. Where the hell was the warship? There was nothing hard to understand about the men who poured out of the two RIBs that roared up to his side, hurled grapnels over the edge, made fast and leapt aboard. They were young, black-clothed, masked, armed and fit.
The captain had himself and seven crew. The “Don’t resist” instruction was shrewd. They would have lasted seconds. Two of the masked men approached him; the rest covered his crew, all of whom had their hands well above their heads. One of the masked men seemed in charge, but he spoke only English. The other man interpreted. Neither removed their black masks.
“Captain, we believe you are carrying illegal substances. Drugs, specifically cocaine. We intend to search your vessel.”
“It is not true, I carry only fish. And you have no right to search my vessel. It is against the laws of the sea. It is piracy.”
He had been told to say this. Unfortunately, his advice on law was less shrewd than that of staying alive. He had never heard of CRIJICA and would not have understood it if he had.
But Major Ben Pickering was perfectly within his rights. The Criminal Justice (International Cooperation) Act of 1990, known as CRIJICA, contains several clauses covering interception at sea of vessels believed to carry drugs. It also contains the rights of the accused. What the captain of the Belleza del Mar did not know was that he and his vessel had been quietly recategorized as a threat to the British nation like any other terrorist. That meant that, unfortunately for the skipper, the rule book, civil rights included, had just gone where the cocaine would have gone if he had had the time—over the edge.
The SBS men had been rehearsing for two weeks and had the drill cut to a few minutes.
All seven of the crew and the captain were expertly frisked for weapons or devices of transmission. Cell phones were confiscated for later analysis. The radio shack was smashed. The eight Colombians were shackled with hands in front of waists and hooded. When they could neither see nor resist, they were herded to the stern and made to sit.
Major Pickering nodded, and one of his men produced a rocket tube. The maroon rocket went up five hundred feet and exploded in a ball of flame. High above, the heat sensors of the Global Hawk took in the signal, and the man over the screen in Nevada shut off the jammers. The major told the Balmoral she was clear to steam, and the Q-ship came over the horizon to berth alongside.
One of the commandos was in full scuba gear. He went over the edge to search the hull below the water. A common ruse was to carry illegal cargo in a blister welded on the bottom of the hull or even to dangle bales on a nylon cord a hundred feet down, out of sight during any search.
The swimmer hardly needed his full wet suit, for the water was bathtub warm. And the sun, now well over the eastern horizon, illuminated the water as by searchlight. He spent twenty minutes down there among the weeds and barnacles of the neglected hull. There were no blisters, no secret underwater doors, no dangling cords. In fact, Major Pickering knew where the cocaine was.
As soon as the jammers were removed, he could give the Balmoral the name of the intercepted fisherman. She was after all on the Cortez list, one of the smaller vessels not on any international shipping list, just a dirty fisher from an obscure village. Obscure or not, she was on her seventh voyage to West Africa, carrying ten thousand times her own value. He was told where to look.
Major Pickering muttered instructions to the rummage crew from the Coast Guard. The man from customs cradled his cocker spaniel. The hold covers came off to reveal tons of fish no longer fresh but still netted. The Belleza’s own derrick hoisted the fish out and dumped them. A mile down, the crabs would be grateful.
When the floor of the fish hold was exposed, the rummage men looked for the panel Cortez had described. It was brilliantly hidden, and the stench of fish would have confused the dog. The hooded crew could not know what they were doing nor see the approaching Balmoral.
It took a jimmy and twenty minutes to get the plate off. Left alone, the crew would have done this at leisure ten miles off the mangroves of the Bijagós Islands, ready to hand the cargo over the side to waiting canoes in the creeks. Then they would have taken on fuel barrels in exchange, tanked up and headed for home.
The exposing of the bilges beneath the fish hold gave rise to an even fouler stench. The rummage men had their masks and breathers on. Everyone else stood back.
One of the rummagers went in, torso first, with a flashlight. The other held his legs. The first man wriggled back and held up a thumb. Bingo! He went in with grapnel and cord. One by one, the men on deck pulled out twenty bales, just over a hundred pounds’ weight each. The Balmoral came alongside, towering above them.
It took another hour. The Belleza’s crew, still hooded, were helped up the Jacob’s ladder into the Balmoral and guided below. When they were released from shackles and hoods, they were in the forward brig, prisoners below the waterline.
Two weeks later, transferred to the Fleet Auxiliary in a second razzing, they would be taken to the British outpost of Gibraltar, rehooded, transferred by night to an American Starlifter and flown to the Indian Ocean. The hoods would come off again to reveal a tropical paradise and the instruction:
“Have fun, don’t communicate with anyone and don’t try to escape.”
The first of these were optional, the rest impossible.
The ton of cocaine also went aboard the Balmoral. It, too, would be guarded until off-loaded to American custody at sea. The last task on the Belleza del Mar was left to the squad’s explosives man. He went below for fifteen minutes, came up and leapt over the side into the second RIB.
Most of his companions were back on board. The Little Bird was already stowed again in her hold. So was the first RIB. The Balmoral went to “Slow ahead,” and a lazy wake appeared behind her stern. The second RIB followed her. When there was two hundred yards of clear sea between them and the scummy old fishing boat, the explosive man pressed a button on his detonator.
The shaped charges of PETN plastic explosive he had left behind uttered only a low crack but cut a hole the size of a barn door in the hull. Within thirty seconds, she was gone forever, on a long, lonely, mile-long dive to the seabed.
The RIB reboarded and was stowed. No one else in the central Atlantic had seen a thing. The Beauty of the Sea, her captain, crew and cargo had simply vaporized.
IT WAS a week before the loss of the Belleza del Mar was wholly believed in the heart of the cartel, and even then the reaction was only perplexity.
Vessels, crews and cargoes had been lost before, but, other than the total disappearance of the death-trap submersibles heading up the Pacific Coast to Mexico, there were always traces or reasons. Some small vessel had gone down in oceanic storms. The Pacific, so named by Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the first European to see it, because on that day it looked so calm, could sometimes go crazy. The balmy Caribbean of the tourist brochures could play host to insane hurricane winds. But it was rare.