The Cobra

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.

AT THE END of October, the message from Hoogstraten reached the Don. He did not believe that the banks had revealed their innermost secrets to the authorities. One, maybe, never two. So there was only one man who knew the numbers of the bank accounts into which the bribes were paid that assured safe clearance of cocaine cargoes in ports across the U.S. and Europe. The Don had his traitor.

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.

CHAPTER 13

THROUGHOUT NOVEMBER, THE COBRA’S ASSAULT ON DON Diego’s cocaine empire continued remorselessly, and finally the fault lines began to show. The standing of the cartel with its numerous and ultra-violent customers across both continents became serious and deteriorating, if not yet fatal.

Don Diego had long realized that even if Roberto Cárdenas had betrayed him, the man who had controlled the Rat List could not have been his only enemy.

Cárdenas could not have known about the hiding places so skillfully constructed by Juan Cortez. He could not have known about ship identities, departure sailings and from which ports. He could not have known about night flights to West Africa and the aircraft used. But there was one man who did.

The Don’s paranoia began to swerve toward the man who knew all that—Alfredo Suárez. Suárez knew perfectly well what had happened to Cárdenas and began to fear for his life.

But the first problem was production. With interceptions, destructions, losses at sea and disappearances running at fifty percent of tonnage dispatched, the Don ordered Emilio Sánchez to increase jungle production to levels never hitherto needed. And the increased costs began to bite into even the cartel’s staggering wealth. Then the Cobra learned about Cárdenas.

It was the peasants who found the mutilated body. The head was missing, never to be found, but to Colonel Dos Santos the use of the chain saw said “cartel,” and he asked the morgue at Cartagena for a DNA swab. It was the DNA that identified the old gangster.

Dos Santos told the DEA chief resident in Bogotá, and the American told Army Navy Drive in Arlington. The Cobra saw it on his patch-through of all communications reaching the Drug Enforcement Administration HQ.

By that point, in an attempt to save the life of the source, only twelve corrupt officials had been caught, and each by supposed coincidence. With Cárdenas dead, there was no need to protect him anymore.

Cal Dexter, accompanied by the DEA’s top drug hunter, Bob Berrigan, toured Europe, eventually briefing delighted customs chiefs in twelve countries. The director of the DEA did the same for North America—Mexico, USA and Canada. In each case, the customs chiefs were urged to use the Hamburg ruse. Instead of going for an immediate snatch and arrest, they were asked to use the new information to grab both the corrupt official and an incoming cargo that he was trying to protect.

Some complied, some could not wait. But before the last of the Rat List went into custody, over forty tons of incoming cocaine had been discovered and confiscated. And it did not stop there.

Cárdenas had used banks in six secret havens for the payoffs, and these banks, under intolerable pressure, reluctantly began to disgorge the nest eggs. Half a billion U.S. dollars were eventually recovered, and most went to swell the coffers of the anti-drug campaigning agencies.

Even that was not the end of it. The great majority of the civil servants sitting in their remand cells were not tough nuts. Faced with guaranteed ruin and a possible life sentence, most sought to improve their situation by cooperating. Though mafiosi in each country put “hit” contracts on their heads, the threat was often counterproductive. It made the opposite threat of immediate release on the street even more frightening. With a top secret jail and round-the-clock guards the only way to stay alive, cooperating became the only option.

The arrested men—and they were all men—recalled the front companies that owned and ran the flatbed trucks on which the sea containers had been collected after clearance. Customs and police raided warehouse after warehouse as the gangs tried hastily to relocate their stocks. More tonnages were confiscated.

Most of these seizures did not hurt the cartel directly because ownership had already passed, but it meant the national gangs lost fortunes, were forced to re-place fresh orders and placate their own clamoring subagents and secondary purchasers. They were allowed to know the leak that was costing them fortunes had come from Colombia, and they were not pleased.

The Cobra had long presumed that there would be a breach of his security sooner or later, and he was right. It came in late August. A Colombian soldier based at Malambo was on leave when he bragged in a bar that while on base he was part of the guard detail of the U.S. compound. He detailed to an impressed girlfriend, and an even more appreciative eavesdropper farther down the bar, that the Yanquis flew a strange airplane out of their heavily guarded zone. High walls prevented anyone seeing it being fueled and serviced, but it was visible when it took off and flew away. Even though these landings and departures were by night, the soldier had seen it in the moonlight.