The oncoming Beech was two hours into its flight, almost on the last of its main wing tanks, and the copilot had the controls. Far below and somewhere ahead, the Buccaneer felt the hammer blow of the RATO rockets, plunged down the runway and roared away over the dark sea. It was a moonless night.
Sixty minutes later, the Brazilian was at his intercept station, circling at a lazy three hundred knots. Somewhere to his southwest, invisible in the blackness, the King Air plodded along, now running on reserve tanks, with the two pumpers working away behind the flight deck.
"Climb to twelve thousand, continue in rate one turn," said the warm voice from Nevada. Like the Lorelei, it was a pretty voice to lure men to die. The reason for the instruction was that Sam had reported the King Air had climbed to ride over a cloud bank.
Even without a moon, the stars over Africa are fiercely bright, and a cloudscape is like a white bedsheet, reflecting light, showing up shadows against the pale surface. The Buccaneer was vectored to a position five miles behind the King Air and a thousand feet above. Mendoza scanned the pale plateau ahead of him. It was not entirely flat; there were knobs of altocumulus jutting out of it. He eased back his speed for fear of overtaking too quickly.
Then he saw it. Just a shadow between two hills of cumulus disfiguring the line of the stratus. Then it was gone, then back again.
"I have it," he said. "No mistake?"
"Negative," said the voice in his ears. "There is nothing else in the sky."
"Roger that. Contact."
"Contact acknowledged. Stop, clear, engage."
He eased on some throttle, the distance closed. Safety catch off. Target swimming into the gunsight, range closing. Four hundred meters.
The two streams of cannon shells streamed out and coalesced at the tail of the Beech. The tail fragmented, but the shells went on into the fuselage, racing up the line through the extra fuel tanks and into the flight deck. Both pumpers died in a tenth of a second, blown apart; the two pilots would have followed, but the exploding fuel did it faster. As with the Transall, the Beech imploded, fragmented and fell blazing through the cloud sheet.
"Target down," said Mendoza. Another ton of cocaine was not going to reach Europe.
"Turn for home," said the voice. "Your course is…" ALFREDO SUAREZ had no choice about telling the Don the litany of bad news because he was sent for. The master of the cartel had not survived so long in one of the most vicious milieus on earth without a sixth sense for danger.
Item by item, he forced the director of dispatch to tell him all. The two ships and now two airplanes lost before reaching Guinea-Bissau; the two go-fasts in the Caribbean that never made their rendezvous and had not been seen since, including eight crewmen; the playboy who disappeared with a ton of puro destined for the valuable Cuban clients in South Florida. And the disaster in Hamburg.
He had expected Don Diego to explode in rage. The reverse happened. The Don had been taught as a boy that gentility required that even if one is irritable over small things, big disasters require a gentlemanly calm. He bade Suarez remain at the table. He lit one of his slim black cheroots and went for a stroll in his garden.
Internally, he was in a homicidal rage. There would be blood, he vowed. There would be screams. There would be death. But first, analysis.
Against Roberto Cardenas, there could be nothing proved. One exposure of one of his on-the-payroll agents in Hamburg was probably bad luck. A coincidence. But not the rest. Not five vessels at sea and two planes in the air. Not the forces of law and order-they would have held press conferences, flaunted confiscated bales. He was used to that. Let them gloat over fragments. The entire cocaine industry was worth $300 billion a year. More than the national budget of most of the nations outside the G30 of the richest.
The profits were so vast that no amount of arrests could stop the army of volunteers screaming to take the places of the dead and imprisoned; profits big enough to make Gates and Buffett look like street vendors. The equal of their entire wealth was generated each year by cocaine.
But nonarrival, that was dangerous. The purchasing monster had to be fed. If the cartel was violent and vengeful, so also were the Mexicans, Italians, Cubans, Turks, Albanians, Spaniards and the rest whose organized gangs would slaughter over an ill-advised word.
So if not coincidence, and that was now no longer to be entertained as a reason, who was stealing his product, killing his crews, causing his shipments to vanish into thin air?
For the Don, this was treachery or theft, which was another form of treachery. And treachery had only one response. Identify and punish with insensate violence. Whoever they were, they had to learn. Nothing personal, but you cannot treat the Don like that.
He went back to his trembling guest.
"Send the Enforcer to me," he said.
CHAPTER 12
PACO VALDEZ, THE ENFORCER, AND HIS TWO COMPANIONS flew into Guinea-Bissau. The Don was not prepared to risk any more high-seas disappearances. Nor was he going to indulge the American DEA by having his creatures travel by scheduled commercial airline.
By the end of the first decade of the third millennium, the surveillance and control of all intercontinental airline passengers had become so total that it was unlikely that Valdez, with his unusual appearance, would not be spotted and followed. So they flew in the Don's private Grumman G4.
Don Diego was absolutely right… up to a point. But the twin-jet executive luxury aircraft still needed to fly a virtually straight line from Bogota to Guinea-Bissau, and this brought her under the wide patrol circle of Global Hawk Sam. So the Grumman was spotted, identified and logged. When he heard the news, the Cobra smiled with satisfaction.
The Enforcer was met at Bissau Airport by the head of operations for the cartel in Guinea-Bissau, Ignacio Romero. Despite his seniority, Romero was very deferential. For one thing, Valdez was the Don's personal emissary; for another, his reputation was fear inspiring throughout the cocaine trade; and, for a third, Romero had been forced to report the nonarrival of four major cargoes, two by sea and two by air.
That cargoes should be lost was part of the permanent risk factor involved in the trade. In many parts of that trade, especially the direct routes into North America and Europe, those losses might hover around fifteen percent, which could be absorbed by the Don so long as the explanations were logical and convincing. But losses on the West Africa run had for Romero's entire tenure in Guinea been close to zero, which was why the Europe-bound percentage using the African dogleg had risen over five years from twenty to seventy percent of the total.
Romero was very proud of his safe-arrival figures. He had a flotilla of Bijagos canoes and several fast pseudo-fishing boats at his disposal, all equipped with GPS locators to ensure pinpoint rendezvous at sea for cocaine transfers.
Added to this, he had the military establishment in his pocket. General Diallo's soldiers actually did the heavy-lifting work during unloading; the general took his ample cut in the form of cocaine and ran his own shipments north to Europe in cahoots with the Nigerians. Paid off via West Africa's army of Lebanese money brokers, the general was already a rich man in world terms, and, in local terms, an African Croesus.
And then this. Not simply four lost cargoes but total disappearances without a clue of explanation. His cooperation with the Don's emissary was a given; he was relieved that the one called the Animal was genial and good-humored toward him. He should have known.
As always when a Colombian passport appeared at the airport, formalities vanished. The crew of three was ordered to live on the G4, use the facilities of the VIP suite, such as it was, and never to leave the jet without at least one onboard. Then Romero drove his guests in his luxury SUV through the war-gutted city and on to his mansion by the beach ten miles out of town.