In that year, he had offended his hard-left neighbors in both Venezuela and Bolivia by inviting American forces into Colombia to lend their superlative technology to help him. Facilities were offered at seven Colombian military bases. One of these was at Malambo, right on the northern coast by Barranquilla. Dexter went in as a serious defense writer with Pentagon approval.
Being in the country, he saw the chance to fly up to Bogotá and meet the formidable Colonel Dos Santos. The U.S. Army ran him up to Barranquilla Airport, and he caught the shuttle up to the capital. Between the still-warm tropical coast to the city in the mountains, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.
Neither the chief of the American DEA operation nor the leader of the British SOCA team in Bogotá knew who Dexter was or what the Cobra was preparing, but both had been advised, from their HQs on Army Navy Drive and the Albert Embankment, to cooperate. They all spoke fluent Spanish, and Dos Santos had perfect English. He was surprised when it was the stranger who mentioned a DNA sample that had been submitted a fortnight earlier.
“Strange that you should call at this moment,” said the youthful and dynamic Colombian detective. “I got a match this morning.”
His explanation of how the match was made was stranger than Dexter’s arrival, which Dos Santos viewed as a mere coincidence. DNA technology had come late to Colombia due to the parsimony of governments prior to the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. He had increased the budgets.
But Dos Santos read feverishly every publication dealing with modern forensic technology. He had realized earlier than his colleagues that one day DNA would be an awesome weapon in identifying bodies, living and dead (and there were a lot of the latter). Even before his department’s laboratories could cope, he had begun to collect samples as and when he could.
Five years earlier, a member of the Drug Squad’s rogues’ gallery had been in a car crash. The man had never been charged, never convicted, never imprisoned. Any New York civil rights lawyer would have had Dos Santos’s badge for what he did.
He and his colleagues, long before the Don created the cartel, were convinced this man was a major career gangster. He had not been seen for years, and certainly had not even been heard of for two. If he was as big as they suspected he was, he would live constantly on the move, shifting from one disguise and safe house to another. He would communicate only by use-once-and-throw cell phones, of which he probably had fifty, constantly renewed after use.
What Dos Santos did was go to the hospital and steal the swabs that had been used on the crash victim’s broken nose. When the technology caught up, the DNA was identified and filed. Fifty percent was in the sample sent from Washington with a request for help. He delved into a file and laid a photo on the desk.
The face was brutish, scarred, cruel. A broken nose, pebble eyes, buzz-cut gray hair. It had been taken over ten years earlier but “aged” to show how the man ought to look today.
“We are now convinced he is part of the Don’s inner circle, the one whose agents pay off the corrupt officials abroad who help the cartel bring its product through the ports and airports of America and Europe. The ones you call the ‘Rats.’”
“Can we find him?” asked the man from SOCA.
“No, or I would have already. He comes from Cartagena, and he is an old dog now. Old dogs do not like to move far from their comfort zone. But he lives under deep cover, invisible.”
He turned to Dexter, the source of the mysterious DNA sample of a very close relative.
“You will never
find him, señor. And if you did, he would probably kill you. And even if you took him, he would never break. He is hard as flint and twice as sharp. He never travels; he sends agents to do his work. And we understand the Don trusts him totally. I fear your sample is interesting but takes us nowhere.”
Cal Dexter looked down at the impenetrable face of Roberto Cárdenas, the man who controlled the Rat List. The loving papá of the girl in Madrid.
IN THE extreme northeast of Brazil is a vast land of hills and valleys, a few high mountains and much jungle. But also there are enormous ranches of up to half a million acres, grassland well watered by the myriad streams running down from the sierras. Because of their size and remoteness, their estate houses are realistically reached only by air. As a result, they each have one airstrip and sometimes several.
As Cal Dexter took the commercial flight back from Bogotá to Miami and Washington, an airplane was being refueled on one such strip. It was a Beech King Air, carrying two pilots, two pumpers and a metric ton of cocaine.
As the fuel-bowser team filled the main and supplementary tanks to the brim, the crew dozed in the shade of a palm-thatched lean-to. They had a long night ahead. An attaché case containing brick after brick of hundred-dollar bills had already been handed over to cover the fuel and the fee for the stopover.
If the Brazilian authorities had their suspicions about Rancho Boa Vista, two hundred miles inland from the port city of Fortaleza, there was precious little they could do. The sheer remoteness of the estate meant the slightest hint of a stranger would be noticed. To stake out the complex of main buildings would be futile; using the GPS system, a drug plane could rendezvous with the fuel bowser miles away and never be seen.
For the owners, the fees paid for the fueling stops were rewards far beyond the returns from ranching. For the cartel, the stopovers were vital on the route to Africa.
The Beech C-12, more commonly the King Air, was originally designed and made by Beechcraft as a nineteen-seat, twin turboprop, general-purpose communications mini-airliner. It sold widely across the world. Later versions saw the seats ripped out for conversion to freight carrier and general-purpose hauler. But the version waiting in the afternoon sun at Boa Vista was even more special.
It was never designed to cross the Atlantic. With its all-up fuel load of 2,500 liters the two Pratt and Whitney Canada engines would take it 708 nautical miles. That was in still air, fully loaded, on long-range cruise setting with allowance for starting, taxi, climb and descent. To attempt to leave the coast of Brazil for Africa like that was a recipe for death in the center of the ocean.
In secret workshops belonging to the cartel, hidden beside jungle airstrips in Colombia, the “coke” planes had been modified. Clever artificers had installed extra fuel tanks not under the wings but inside the fuselage. There were usually two, one on each side of the freight hold, with a narrow passage giving access to the flight deck up front.
Technology is expensive, manpower cheap. Rather than have transfer of the extra fuel from the inboard tanks to the main tanks by electric power tapped off the engines, two “peons” were brought along. As the main tanks emptied far out in the dark sky, they began to pump manually.
The route was simple. The first leg was from a hidden airstrip in the Colombian jungle, constantly changed to evade the attentions of Colonel Dos Santos. The pilots would cover the 1,500 miles right across Brazil to Boa Vista on the first night. Flying at 5,000 feet in darkness above the canopy of the Mato Grosso rain forests, they were just about invisible.
At dawn the crew would tuck into a hearty breakfast and sleep through the heat. At dusk the King Air would be again tanked to the brim to face the 1,300 miles from the New World to the Old at its narrowest point.
That evening, as the last light bled from the sky over Rancho Boa Vista, the pilot of the King Air turned into the light breeze, did his final checks and began to roll. His all-up weight was the manufacturer’s maximum of 15,000 pounds. He would need 1,200 meters to get airborne, but he had over 1,500 of rolled-flat grassland. The evening star was twinkling when he lifted out of Boa Vista, and the tropical darkness descended like a theater curtain.
There is a saying that there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. Francisco Pons was fifty and had spent years flying in and out of airstrips that would never feature in any official manual. And he had survived because he was careful.