The Don suspected there was one brain behind all this, and he was right. As he ushered his Galician guests to the SUV to take them to the airstrip, the Cobra was in his elegant house in Alexandria on the Potomac enjoying a Mozart concerto on his sound system. IN THE FIRST week of 2012, a harmless-looking grain ship, the MV Chesapeake, slipped south through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific. Had anyone asked, or, even more unlikely, had the authority to examine paperwork, she could have proved she was proceeding south to Chile with wheat from Canada.
In fact, she did turn south on emerging into the Pacific, but only to comply with the order that she hold position fifty miles off the Colombian coast and await a passenger.
That passenger flew south from the U.S. in a CIA-owned executive jet and landed at Malambo, the Colombian base on the Caribbean coast. There were no customs formalities, and even if there had been the American had a diplomatic passport preventing his luggage being examined.
That luggage was one heavy haversack, from which he politely declined to be parted even though hefty U.S. Marines offered to carry it for him. Not that he was on base long. A Black Hawk had been ordered to stand by for him.
Cal Dexter knew the pilot, who greeted him with a grin.
"In or out this time, sir?" he asked. He was the flier who had plucked Dexter off the balcony of the Santa Clara Hotel after the hazardous meeting with Cardenas. He checked his route plan as the Black Hawk lifted off the pad, rose and turned southwest over the Gulf of Darien.
From 5,000 feet, the pilot and his front-seat passenger could see the rolling jungle beneath, and, beyond it, the gleam of the Pacific. Dexter had seen his first jungle when, as a teenage grunt, he had been flown into the Iron Triangle in Vietnam. He soon lost all illusions about rain forests back then, and had never gained any.
From the air they always looked lush and spongy, comfortable, even welcoming; but in reality they were lethal to land in. The Gulf of Darien dropped behind them, and they crossed the isthmus just south of the Panamanian border.
Over the sea, the pilot made contact, checked his course and altered it by a few points. Then minutes later the speck of the waiting Chesapeake came over the horizon. Apart from several fisherman close inshore, the sea was empty, and the trawlermen below them would not see the transfer.
As the Black Hawk dropped, those on board could see several figures standing on the hatch covers to receive their guest. Behind Dexter, the loadmaster eased back the door, and the warm wind, lashed by the rotors above, washed into the cabin. Due to the single derrick jutting up from the Chesapeake and the wide sweep of those rotors, it was agreed Dexter would go down by harness.
First his haversack was lowered on a thin steel cable. Down below, the haversack swung in the downdraft until strong hands caught and unhooked it. The cable came back up. The loadmaster nodded to Dexter, who rose and stepped to the door. The two double cleats were hooked to his harness, and he stepped out into space.
The pilot was holding the Black Hawk rock steady at 50 feet above the deck; the sea was a millpond; the reaching hands grabbed him and brought him down the last few feet. When his boots touched the deck, the cleats came off and the cable was whisked back up. He turned, gave the thumbs-up to the faces staring down and the Black Hawk turned for base.
There were four to greet him: the captain of the vessel, the U.S. Navy commander pretending to be a merchant seaman; one of the two comms men who kept the Chesapeake in contact at all times with Project Cobra; Lt. Cdr. Bull Chadwick, commanding the Team 3 SEALs; and a burly young SEAL to carry the haversack. It was the first time Dexter had let go of it.
When they were off the deck, the Chesapeake came under power, and they headed farther out to sea.
The waiting took twenty-four hours. The two comms men spelled each other in their radio shack until, the following afternoon, AFB Creech in Nevada saw something on the screen that Global Hawk Michelle was transmitting.
When the Cobra team in Washington had noticed the cartel switching their traffic from Caribbean to Pacific two weeks earlier, Michelle's patrol pattern had also changed. She was now at 60,000 feet, sipping gasoline, staring down at the coast from Tumaco in the deep south of Colombia up to Costa Rica, and as far as two hundred miles out into the ocean. And she had spotted something.
Creech passed the image to Anacostia, Washington, D.C., where Jeremy Bishop, who never seemed to sleep and lived on lethal fast food at his computer banks, ran it through the database. The vessel that would have been an invisible speck from 60,000 feet was magnified to fill his screen.
It was one of the last vessels on which Juan Cortez had worked his magic with the welding torch. It had last been seen, and photographed, at berth in a Venezuelan port months earlier, and its presence in the Pacific confirmed the switch of tactics.
The vessel was too small to be Lloyd's listed; a 6,000-ton rust-bucket tramp steamer more accustomed to working along the Caribbean coast or making sorties to the many islands supplied only by such coasters. She had just come of out of Buenaventura, and her name was the Maria Linda. Michelle was ordered to keep tracking her northward, and the waiting Chesapeake moved into position.
The SEALs were now highly practiced at their routine, with several interceptions already behind them. The Chesapeake positioned herself twenty-five miles farther out to sea than the freighter, and just after dawn of the third day the Little Bird was hoisted to the deck.
Clear of the derrick, her rotors whirled, and she lifted off. Cdr. Chadwick's big RHIB and his two lighter CRRC raiders were already in the water, and as the Little Bird rose they raced toward the freighter over the horizon. Sitting in the rear of the RHIB, with the two-man rummage crew, the dog handler and his spaniel, was Cal Dexter, clutching his haversack. The sea was flat, and the deadly little flotilla piled on the power to skim the surface at forty knots.
Of course the helicopter got there first, swerving past the bridge of the Maria Linda to let her captain see "U.S. Navy" on the boom, then hovering forward of the bridge with a sniper rifle pointing straight at his face while the loudspeaker ordered him to heave to. He obeyed.
The captain knew his orders. He muttered a short command to his mate, out of sight down the companionway to the cabins, and the mate tried to send out the warning message to the listening cartel operator. Nothing worked. He tried the cell phone, a text on the same machine, the laptop and, in desperation, an old-fashioned radio call. Overhead, out of sight and sound, Michelle just turned and jammed. Then the captain saw the RIBs racing toward him.
Boarding was not a problem. The SEALs, clad in black, masked, H amp;K MP5s on each hip, just swarmed over each side, and the crew threw up their hands. The captain protested, of course; Cdr. Chadwick kept it formal and very courteous, of course.
The crew had time to see the rummage crew and the spaniel come aboard, then the black hoods went on and they were herded to the stern. The captain knew exactly what he was carrying and prayed the raiders would not find it. What awaited, he thought, would be years in a Yanqui jail. He was in international waters; the rules were on the side of the Americans; the nearest coast was Panama, which would cooperate with Washington and extradite them all north of that dreadful border. All servants of the cartel, from the highest to the lowest, have a horror of extradition to the U.S. It means a long sentence and no chance of a quick release in return for a bribe.
What the captain did not see was the older figure, a bit stiffer in the joints, being helped on board with his haversack. When the hoods went on, not only was sight blotted out but also sound; the hoods were internally padded to muffle external noise.