The Cobra

Cargoes lost at sea were almost always hurled overboard by the crew when capture was impossible to avoid.

For the rest, losses at sea were from interceptions by law enforcement agencies or navies. The ship was impounded, the crew arrested, charged, tried and jailed, but they were dispensable and their families bought off with a gracious donation. Everyone knew the rules.

The victors held press conferences, showed the baled cocaine to gleeful media. But the only time product completely disappeared was when it was stolen.

The successive cartels that have dominated the cocaine industry have always been riven by one psychiatric defect: raging paranoia. The capacity for suspicion is instant and uncontrollable. There are two crimes that are unforgivable within their code: to steal the product and to inform the authorities. The thief and the snitch will always be hunted down and revenge exacted. There can be no exceptions.

It took a week for the first lots to sink in because, first, the receiving party in Guinea-Bissau, the chief of operation, Ignacio Romero, complained that a preannounced shipment had simply not arrived. He had waited all night at the appointed time and in the appointed place, but the Belleza del Mar, which he knew well, had never made landfall.

He was asked twice to reconfirm that and did. Then the question of a possible misunderstanding had to be investigated. Had the Belleza gone to the wrong place? And even if so, why had her captain not communicated? He had carefully meaningless two-word messages to send if in trouble.

Then the dispatcher, Alfredo Suárez, had to check the weather. It had been flat calm right across the Atlantic. Fire on board? But the captain had his radio. Even if he had taken to the lifeboat, he had his laptop and cell phone. Finally, he had to report the loss to the Don.

Don Diego thought it over, examined all the evidence that Suárez brought him. It certainly looked like theft, and at the head of the queue of suspects was the captain himself. Either he had stolen the entire cargo to cut a deal with a renegade importer or he had himself been intercepted farther out at sea than the mangroves and murdered, along with his crew. Either was possible, but first things first.

If it was the captain, he would have told his family before the deed or been in contact since his treachery. His family was a wife and three children living in the same muddy village where he kept his old fishing boat, up a creek east of Barranquilla. He sent the Animal to talk to her.

The children were not a problem. They were buried. Alive, of course. In front of the mother. Still, she refused to confess. It took her several hours to die, but she clung to her story that her husband had said nothing and done nothing wrong. Finally, Paco Valdez had no choice but to believe her. He could not continue anyway. She was dead.

The Don was regr

etful. So unpleasant. And, as it turned out, fruitless. But unavoidable. And it posed an even bigger problem. If not the captain, then who? But there was someone else in Colombia even more distressed than Don Diego Esteban.

The Enforcer had practiced his trade after driving the family deep into the jungle. But the jungle is never quite empty. A peasant farmer of Indio descent had heard the screams and peered out through the foliage. When the Enforcer and his crew of two had gone, the peon went into the village and told what he had seen.

The villagers came with an ox wagon and took the four bodies back to the settlement by the creek. There was a Christian burial for them all. The officiating priest was Fr. Eusebio, S.J. He was disgusted by what he had seen before the crude plank coffin was closed.

Back in his mission rooms, he opened the drawer in his dark oak desk and looked down at the gizmo the local Provincial had distributed months before. Normally, he would never have dreamed of using it, but now he was angry. Perhaps one day he would see something outside the seal of confession; and then maybe he would use the American gizmo.

THE SECOND strike went to the SEALs. Again, it was a question of the right time and the right place. Global Hawk Michelle was patrolling the great swathe of the southern Caribbean that extends in an arc from Colombia to the Yucatán. The MV Chesapeake was in the passage between Jamaica and Nicaragua.

Two go-fasts slipped out of the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Urabá on the Colombian coast and headed not southwest to Colón and the Panama Canal but northwest. Their journey was long, the extremity of their range, and both were packed with fuel drums apart from one ton each of baled cocaine amidships.

Michelle spotted them twenty miles out. Although not racing along at their feasible sixty knots, they were cruising at forty, and that was enough to tell Michelle’s radars from 50,000 feet that they could not be anything but speedboats. She began to plot course and speed, and warn the Chesapeake that the go-fasts were heading in her direction. The Q-ship altered course to intercept.

It was on the second day that the two crews of the go-fasts experienced the same bewilderment as the captain of the Belleza del Mar. A helicopter appeared out of nowhere and was ahead of them, hovering above an empty blue sea. There was not a warship in sight. This was simply not possible.

The booming challenge from the loudspeaker to cut engines and heave to was simply ignored. Both racers, long, slim aluminum tubes packing four Yamaha 200 hps at the stern, thought they might outrun the Little Bird. Their speed increased to sixty knots, noses up, only the engines immersed in water, a huge white wake behind each of them. As the Brits had secured Rogue One, these two became Rogues Two and Three.

The Colombians were mistaken about outrunning a helicopter. As they swept under the Little Bird, she tilted her rotors into a violent turn and came after them. At 120 knots, double their speed.

Sitting beside the Navy pilot, clutching his M14 sniper rifle, was Petty Officer Sorenson, the platoon’s ace sharpshooter. With a steady platform and a range of a hundred yards, he was confident he was not going to miss very much.

The pilot used his loudspeaker system again, and he spoke in Spanish.

“Close down your engines and heave to or we fire.”

The go-fasts kept racing toward the north, unaware that there were three inflatables packed with sixteen SEALs powering toward them. Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon had put his big RHIB and both his smaller Zodiacs into the water, but, fast though they were, the aluminum darts of the smugglers were even faster. It was the Little Bird’s job to slow them down.

PO Sorenson had been raised on a farm in Wisconsin, about as far away from the sea as you can get. This may have been why he joined the Navy—to see the sea. The talent he brought from the boondocks was a lifelong expertise with a hunting rifle.

The Colombians knew the drill. They had not been intercepted by helicopters before, but they had been instructed what to do and that was primarily to protect their engines. Without these roaring monsters behind them, they would become helpless.

As they saw the M14 surmounted by its scope sight staring at their engines, two of the crew hurled themselves over the housings to prevent them being hit by rifle fire. The forces of law and order would never fire straight through a man’s torso.

Mistake. Those were the old rules. Back on the farm, PO Sorenson had slotted rabbits at two hundred paces. This target was bigger and closer, and his rules of engagement were clear. His first shot went straight through the brave smuggler, penetrated the cowling and shattered the Yamaha’s engine block.

The other smuggler, with a yelp of alarm, threw himself backward just in time. The second armor-piercing round shattered the next engine. The go-fast continued on two. But slower. She was very heavily laden.