The Cobra Page 4

  The $5,000 each crewman received—$10,000 for the skippers—regarded as a king’s ransom. What they had carried would sell from dealer to user in the USA for around $84 million.

  By the time the Virgen de Valme entered the Panama Canal, she was just another freighter waiting her turn, unless someone had ventured down to the bilges below the floor of the lowest hold. But no one did. A man would need breathing equipment to survive down there, and the crew passed off their equipment as firefighting gear.

  Clearing Panama on the Pacific side, the freighter turned north. She slid past Central America, Mexico and California. Finally, off Oregon, the twenty drums were brought to deck level, prepared and hidden under canvas covers. On a moonless night, the Virgen de Valme turned at Cape Flattery and headed down the Juan de Fuca Strait, bringing her cargo of Brazilian coffee to Seattle for the discriminating palates of America’s coffee capital.

  Before she turned, the crew heaved twenty drums overboard, suitably weighted with chains, enough to cause each drum to sink gently to the bottom in a hundred feet of water. Then the captain made a single cell phone call. Even if the monitors of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, were listening (which they were), the words spoken were aimless and harmless. Something about a lonely seaman seeing his girlfriend in a few hours.

  The twenty drums were marked by small but brightly colored buoys that bobbed on the gray water at dawn. That was where the four men in the crab boat found them, looking exactly like markers for lobster pots. No one saw them haul the drums out of the deep. Had their radar showed them any patrol boats within miles, they would not have gone near. But the GPS position of the cocaine was accurate to a few square yards, so they could pick their moment.

  From the Fuca Strait, the smugglers headed back into the patchwork of islands north of Seattle and made landfall at a point on the mainland where a fisherman’s track led down to the water. A large beer truck awaited. After transfer, the drums would head inland to become part of the three hundred tons brought into the USA each year. Everyone involved would be paid later in agreed accounts. The crabmen would never know the name of the ship nor the owner of the beer truck. They did not need to know.

  With the landing on U.S. soil, the ownership of the drug had changed. Until then it belonged to the cartel, and all involved would be paid by the cartel. From the beer truck, it belonged to the U.S. importer, and he now owed the cartel a staggering amount of money that would have to be paid.

  A price for 1.2 metric tons of pure had already been negotiated. Small fry had to pay a hundred percent on placement of the order. Big players paid fifty percent, with the balance on delivery. The importer would sell his cocaine with impressive markups between the beer truck and the human nostril in Spokane or Milwaukee.

  He would “settle” with the layers of middlemen and cutouts that kept him out of the grip of the FBI or the DEA. And it would all be in cash. But even when the cartel had been paid its outstanding fifty percent of purchase price, the American gangster would still have a vast ocean of dollars to launder. These would filter outward from himself into a hundred other illegal enterprises.

  And across America, more lives would be ruined by the white powder.

  PAUL DEVEREAUX found he needed four weeks to complete his study. Jonathan Silver called him twice, but he would not be hurried. When he was ready, he met the presidential chief of staff in the West Wing again. He bore a slim folder. Disdaining computers, which he regarded as thoroughly insecure, he memorized almost everything, and, if he had to deal with a lesser brain, wrote succinct reports in elegant if old-fashioned English.

  “Well?” demanded Silver, who prided himself on what he called his no-nonsense approach and hardball attitude but which others referred to as sheer rudeness. “You have come to a view?”

  “I have,” said Devereaux. “Subject to certain conditions being rigorously fulfilled, the cocaine industry could be destroyed as a narcotic mass industry.”

  “How?”

  “First, how not. At the point of source, the creators are beyond reach. Thousands of dirt-poor peasants, the cocaleros, growing their weed in thousands of patches of scrub under the canopy of the jungle, some patches no larger than an acre. So long as there is a cartel prepared to buy their wretched paste, they will produce it and bring it to the buyers in Colombia.”

  “So smacking the peasants is out?”

  “Try as one may, and the present Colombian government really does try, unlike certain of its predecessors and most of its neighbors. But Vietnam ought to have taught us all some home truths about jungles and the people who live in them. Trying to wipe out ants with a rolled-up newspaper is not an option.”

  “So, the refining laboratories? The cartels?”

  “Again, not an option. Like trying to take a moray with your bare hand inside its own hole. This is their territory, not ours. Inside Latin America, they are the masters, not we.”

  “Okay,” said Silver, already running short of his severely limited patience. “Inside the U.S., after the shit has landed in our country? You have any idea how much treasure, how many tax dollars, we spend nationwide on law enforcement? Fifty states, plus the Feds? It’s the national debt, goddammit.”

  “Exactly,” said Devereaux, still unruffled despite Silver’s rising irritation. “I believe the federal government alone spends fourteen billion dollars a year on the narcotics war. That does not even begin to touch the holes in the budgets of the states, all fifty of them. That is why suppression onshore will not work either.”

  “So where is the key?”

  “The Achilles’ heel is water.”

  “Water? You want to put water in the coke?”

  “No, water under the coke. Seawater. Apart from one single land route up from Colombia to Mexico via the narrow spine of Central America, which is so easily controllable that the cartels do not use it, every gram of cocaine heading for the USA or Europe . . .”

  “Forget Europe, they’re not in,” snapped Silver.

  “. . . has got to travel over, across or under the sea. Even from Colombia to Mexico, it goes by sea. That is the cartel’s carotid artery. Cut that, the patient dies.”

  Silver grunted and stared across his desk at the retired spy. The man stared calmly back, seeming not to care a damn if his findings were accepted or not.

  “So, I can tell the President his project is ‘go’ and you are prepared to take it on?”

  “Not entirely. There are conditions. I fear they are not negotiable.”

  “That sounds like a threat. No one threatens the Oval Office. Back off, mister.”

  “It is not a threat, it is a warning. If the conditions are not met, the project would simply fail, expensively and embarrassingly. These are they.”

  Devereaux pushed his slim file across the desk. The chief of staff opened it. Just two sheets that looked as if they had been typed. Five paragraphs. Numbered. He read the first.

  “‘1. I will need total independence of action within the ambit of absolute secrecy. None but the tiniest group around the commander in chief need know what is happening or why, no matter how many feathers are ruffled or noses put out of joint. Everyone below the Oval Office need know only what they need to know; and that shall be the least to accomplish the task required of them.’

  “The federal and military structure does not leak,” snapped Silver.

  “Yes, it does,” said the imperturbable Devereaux. “I have spent half my life trying to prevent them or repairing the damage later.”

  “‘2. I will require presidential authority giving me powers plenipotentiary to require and receive without demur complete cooperation from any other agency or military unit whose cooperation is vital. That must begin with automatic patch through of every scrap of information reaching any other agency in the anti-narcotics campaign to the HQ of what I wish to call “Project Cobra.”’

  “They’ll go crazy,” growled Silver. He knew information was power, and no one willingly ceded
even one smidgen of their power. That included the CIA, DEA, FBI, NSA or the Armed Forces.

  “They all now come under Homeland Security and the Patriot Act,” said Devereaux. “They will obey the President.”

  “Homeland Security is about the terrorism threat,” snapped Silver. “Narc smuggling is crime.”

  “Read on,” murmured the CIA veteran.

  “‘3. I will need to recruit my own staff. Not many, but the ones I need must be seconded to the project without query or refusal.’ ”

  The chief of staff raised no objection until he came to number four.

  “‘4. I will need a budget of two billion dollars, to be disbursed without check or examination. I will then need nine month to prepare for the onslaught and a further nine months to destroy the cocaine industry.”

  There had been covert projects before and secret budgets, but this was huge. The chief of staff could see red lights flashing. Whose budget would be raided? FBI? CIA? DEA? Or would the Treasury be asked for fresh funds?

  “There has to be supervision of expenditure,” he said. “The money men won’t bear the departure into a clear blue sky of two billion dollars because you want to go shopping.”

  “Then it won’t work,” Devereaux replied calmly. “The whole point is that when action is taken against the cocaine cartel and industry, they must not see it coming. Forewarned is still fore-armed. The nature of the acquired equipment and personnel would betray the game plan, and that will assuredly leak to some investigative reporter or blogger the moment accountants or book-keepers take over.”

  “They don’t have to take over, just monitor.”

  “Same difference, Mr. Silver. Once they get involved, cover is blown. And once your cover is blown, you’re dead. Trust me. I know.”

  It was an area the Illinois ex-congressman knew he could not dispute. He passed to condition five.

  “‘5. It will be necessary to recategorize cocaine from a Class A drug whose importation is a crime in law to a national threat whose importation or intended importation is an act of terrorism.’ ”

  Jonathan Silver came out of his chair.

  “Are you crazy? This changes the law.”

  “No, that would need an act of Congress. This simply alters the category of a chemical substance. That needs only an Executive instrument.”

  “What chemical?”

  “Cocaine hydrochloride is only a chemical. It happens to be a banned chemical, whose importation contravenes U.S. criminal law. Anthrax is also a chemical, as is VX nerve gas. But the first is classed as a ‘bacteriological weapon of mass destruction’ and VX as a ‘chemical weapon.’ We invaded Iraq because what passes for our intelligence service since I left was persuaded that it possessed them.”

  “That was different.”

  “No, it was exactly the same. Reclassify cocaine hydrochloride as a threat to the nation, and all the dominoes topple in sequence. Throwing a thousand tons a year at us isn’t a crime anymore: it’s a terror threat. Then, we can lawfully respond in kind. All the law is already in place.”

  “Everything we have in the locker?”

  “The lot. But deployed outside our territorial waters and airspace. And invisibly.”

  “Treat the cartel as we would Al Qaeda?”

  “Crudely but effectively put,” said Devereaux.

  “So what I have to do . . .”

  The silver-haired Bostonian rose.

  “What you have to do, Mr. Chief of Staff, is decide how squeamish you are, and, more important, how squeamish the man down the hall is. When you have decided that, there is not much more to say. I believe the job can be done, but these are the conditions without whose fulfillment it cannot be done. At least not by me.”

  Without being bidden to leave, he paused in the doorway.

  “Please let me know the response of the commander in chief in due course. I shall be at home.”

  Jonathan Silver was not accustomed to being left gazing at a closed door.

  IN THE USA, the highest administrative decree that can be issued is the Presidential Executive Order. They are habitually made public, for they can hardly be obeyed if they are not, but a PEO can be completely secret, known simply as a “finding.”

  Although the old mandarin from Alexandria could not know it, he had convinced the abrasive chief of staff who in turn convinced the President. After consultation with a much surprised professor of constitutional law, cocaine was quietly recategorized as a toxin and a national threat. As such, it came within the ambit of the war against threats to the safety of the nation.

  WELL WEST of the Portuguese coast and almost abreast of the Spanish frontier, the MV Balthazar ploughed her way north with a declared general cargo for the Euro port of Rotterdam. She was not large, a mere 6,000 tons, with a captain and a crew of eight, and they were all smugglers. So lucrative was the criminal side of their labors that the captain was going to retire a wealthy man to his Venezuelan homeland within two years.

  He listened to the weather forecast for Cape Finisterre, which lay only fifty nautical miles ahead. It was for a wind at strength four and a choppy sea, but he knew the Spanish fishermen with whom he had a sea rendezvous were hardy mariners and could work in a lot more than a brisk chop.

  Portuguese Oporto was well behind him and Spanish Vigo lay unseen to his east when he ordered his men to bring the four large bales up from the third hold where they had lain since being taken aboard from a shrimper a hundred miles off Caracas.

  Captain Gonçalves was careful. He refused either to enter or leave port carrying contraband, least of all this one. He would take aboard only far out at sea and off-load in the same manner. Short of being denounced by an informant, his caution made it unlikely he would be caught. Six successful Atlantic crossings had given him a fine house, raised two daughters and put Enrique through college.

  Just after Vigo, the two Spanish fishing boats appeared. He insisted on the harmless-sounding but crucial exchange of greetings as the trawlers bucked in the chop beside him. It was always possible Spanish customs men had penetrated the gang and were now masquerading as fishermen. Realistically, if that had happened, they would be storming aboard by now, but the men half a cable away from his bridge were the men he had come to meet.

  Contact made, identities confirmed, the trawlers slipped away into his wake. Minutes later, the four bales tumbled over the taffrail into the sea. Unlike those dropped off Seattle, these were designed to float. They bobbed on the water as the Balthazar headed north. The trawler men hauled them on board, two each, and bundled them into the fish holds. Ten tons of mackerel were poured over them, and the fishing boats headed for home.

  They came from the small fishing town of Muros on the Gallaecian coast, and when they cruised in the dusk past the mole into the inner harbor, they were “clean” again. Outside the harbor, other men had hauled the bales out of the sea to the beach where a tractor and trailer waited. No other wheeled vehicle could manage the wet sand. From the tractor trailer, the four bales went into a panel van advertising “Atlantic Scampi” that set off for Madrid.

  A man from the Madrid-based importing gang paid them all off in cash, then went to the harbor to settle with the fishermen. Another ton of Colombian pure had entered Europe.

  IT WAS a phone call from the chief of staff that brought the news and a messenger who brought the paperwork. The letters of authority gave Paul Devereaux more power than anyone beneath the Oval Office had had in decades. The money transfers would come later, when he decided where he wanted his $2 billion lodged.

  Among the first things he did was look up a telephone number he had kept for years but had never used. He used it now. It rang in a small bungalow in a side street of a modest town called Pennington, New Jersey. He was in luck. It answered at the third ring.

  “Mr. Dexter?”

  “Who wishes to know?”

  “A voice from the past. My name is Paul Devereaux. I think you will remember it.”

  There was a l
ong pause, as by one who has just been hit in the solar plexus.

  “Are you there, Mr. Dexter?”

  “Yes. I’m here. And I well recall the name. How did you get this number?”

  “Not important. Discreet information used to be my stock-in-trade, as you will also recall.”

  The man in New Jersey recalled extremely well. Ten years earlier he had been the most successful bounty hunter the U.S. ever produced. Unwittingly, he had crossed the Boston Brahmin working out of CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, and Devereaux had tried to have him killed.

  The two men were as unalike as chalk and cheese. Cal Dexter, the wiry, sandy-haired, friendly, smiling, small-town attorney of Pennington, had been born in 1950 in a roach-infested Newark slum. His father had been a construction worker fully employed through World War II and Korea creating new factories, dockyards and government offices along the Jersey Shore.

  But with the ending of the Korean War, work had dried up. Cal was five when his mother walked out of the loveless union and left the boy to be raised by his father. The latter was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he was not a bad man and tried to live by the straight and narrow, and to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio.

  Within two years, Dexter Senior had acquired a trailer home so that he could move where the work was available. And that was how the boy was raised, moving from construction site to site, attending whichever school would take him, and then moving on. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Beatles, over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was also the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam.