The Cobra

“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.