Before the Balmoral was alongside, there were two skeins of roped bales floating in the water. They were so heavy, it took the derrick of the Arco Soledad to bring them on board. From the deck of the tramp, the Balmoral hoisted them into her guardianship.
Fuentes, the captain and five crew had gone very quiet. Even under their masks they could hear the derrick grinding and heavy thumps as a long series of objects sloshing water came aboard. They knew what they must be. Complaints of piracy ended.
The Colombians followed their cargo onto the Balmoral. They realized they were on a much bigger ship but could never name or describe it. From the deck, they were led to the forward brig and, with hoods removed, moved into quarters formerly occupied by the crew of the Belleza del Mar.
The SBS men came last, the divers streaming water. Ordinarily the sub-aqua men meeting the Arco Soledad would have replaced the removed panels underwater, but, bearing in mind where they were all going, they were allowed to take on water.
The explosives man was last off. When there was half a mile between the ships, he pressed his detonator.
"Smell the coffee," he joked as the Arco Soledad shuddered, flooded and foundered. And indeed there really was a slight odor of roasted coffee on the sea breeze as the PETN for one nanosecond reached 5,000 degrees centigrade. Then she was gone.
One RIB, still in the water, returned to the spot and gathered in the few floating pieces of detritus that a sharp observer might have spotted. These were netted, weighted and sent to the bottom. The ocean, blue and calm in early September, was as she had always been-empty.
Far away across the Atlantic, Alfredo Suarez could not believe the news reaching him or work out a way of telling Don Diego and staying alive. His bright young assistant had ceased transmitting twelve hours earlier. This was disobedience, i.e., madness, or it was disaster.
He had a message from his clients, the Cubans, who controlled most of the cocaine trade in South Florida, that the Orion Lady had not docked in Fort Lauderdale. She was also expected by the harbormaster, who was holding a precious-as-rubies berth for her. Discreet inquiries revealed he had also tried to raise her and failed. She was three days overdue and not answering.
There had been some successful deliveries of cocaine, but the sequence of failed arrivals by sea and air and a big customs coup in Hamburg had reduced his "safe arrival" percentage set against tonnage dispatched to fifty. He had promised the Don a minimum safe arrival percentage of seventy-five. For the first time, he began to fear that his policy of large cargoes but fewer of them, the opposite of the scattergun approach of his departed predecessor, might not be working. Though not a praying man, he prayed there was not worse to come, proof positive that prayer does not always work. There was much worse to come.
Far away in the genteel historic township of Alexandria, by the banks of the Potomac, the man who intended to create that "worse" was considering his campaign to date.
He had created three lines of thrust. One was to use the knowledge of all the merchantmen worked on by Juan Cortez to empower the regular forces of law and order-navies, customs, coast guards-to intercept the giants at sea, "accidentally" discover the secret hiding places and thus both confiscate the cocaine and impound the vessel.
This was because most of the Lloyd's-listed carriers were too big to sink unnoticed without causing a furor in the shipping world, leading to powerful interventions at governmental level. Insurers and owners would dispense with corrupt crews, and pay fines, while declaring complete innocence at board level, but losing the entire ship was a loss too far.
Intercepting at sea at a very official level also frustrated the common tactic of taking the cocaine on board at sea from one fishing vessel and off-loading it before docking in another offshore transfer. This could not last forever, or even for very long. Even though Juan Cortez was seemingly an incinerated corpse in a grave in Cartagena, it must soon become plain that someone knew far too much about all the invisible hiding holes he had created. Any subtlety in seeming to find these places by accident every time would one day run out.
In any case, these triumphs by the official authorities were never hidden. They quickly became public and leaked back to the cartel.
His second thrust was a series of irregular and apparently patternless accidents in various harbors and airports around two continents in which a terrible mischance revealed an incoming cocaine shipment and even led to the arrest of the bribed official who acted as "enabler." These also could not remain accidents forever.
As a lifelong counter-spy, he doffed his hat, a rare phenomenon, to Cal Dexter for acquiring the Rat List. He never asked who the mole inside the cartel could be, though clearly the saga of the Colombian girl framed in New York was linked.
But he hoped that mole could dig a very deep hole indeed, because he could not keep the cocaine enablers unarrested for long. As the number of crippled operations in U.S. and European ports increased, it would become clear someone had leaked names and functions.
The good news, for one who knew a bit about interrogations and who had broken Aldrich Ames, was that these officials, though greedy and venal, were not "hard men" accustomed to the laws of the criminal underworld. The German exposed so far was confessing like a mountain spring. So would most of the others. These tearful spillages would trigger a chain reaction of arrests and close-downs. And future interceptions would, without official help, sky-rocket. That was part of his planning.
But his ace was the third thrust on which he had spent so much time and trouble and so much of his budget over the permitted preparation period.
He called it the "bewilderment factor," and he had used it for years in that espionage world that James Jesus Angleton, his predecessor at the CIA, once referred to as "smoke and mirrors." It was the explanationless disappearance, one after the other, of cargo after cargo.
Meanwhile, he would quietly release the names and details of four more of the Rats. In the middle week of September, Cal Dexter traveled to Athens, Lisbon, Paris and Amsterdam. In each case, his revelations caused shock and horror, but in each case he received assurances that each arrest would be preceded by a carefully arranged accident involving an incoming cargo of cocaine. He described the Hamburg sting and proposed it as a role model.
What he was able to tell the Europeans was that there was a corrupt customs officer in Piraeus, the port of Athens; the Portuguese had a bribe taker in the quite small but busy Algarve Harbor of Faro; France was sheltering a rather large rodent in Marseilles; and the Dutch had a problem in the largest cargo destination in Europe, Euro port Rotterdam. FRANCISCO PONS was retiring and he was damnably glad of it. He had made his peace with his plump and homely wife, Victoria, and even found a buyer for his Beech King Air. He had explained matters to the man for whom he flew the Atlantic, a certain Senor Suarez, who had accepted his explanation of age and stiffness, and it had been agreed that this September would be his last trip for the cartel. It was not so bad, he reasoned with Senor Suarez; his eager young copilot was aching to become a full captain and earn a captain's fee. As for a newer and better plane, that was now necessary anyway. So he lined up on the runway at Fortaleza and took off. Far above, the tiny moving dot was registered by the wide-aspect radar scanner of Global Hawk Sam and logged in the database.
The memory bank did the rest. It identified the moving dot as a King Air, that it was coming out of Rancho Boa Vista, that a Beech King Air cannot cross the Atlantic without large extra in-built fuel tanks and that it was heading northeast toward the 35th longitude. Beyond that, there was only Africa. Someone in Nevada instructed Major Joao Mendoza and his ground crew to prepare to fly.