The Cobra

“There are two ways of doing this job,” a news agency bureau chief told me once. “You can not bother and get it incorrect, or take the distress and get it right. In my office, we get it right.”

He was a excellent journalist and taught me a lot. Even when I switched from foreign correspondent to novelist, the training stuck. Even though it is fiction, I try to get it right.

Anyway, readers nowadays have been around, seen a lot, traveled a lot. And there is the Internet. If they want to check you out, they can. So if it is uncheckable, you can make it up, but if it can be checked, it had better be right. That is why I go all over, looking, probing, inquiring, conversing in low places, until I am damn certain that even the smallest detail really is the way it is.

That includes the weird places to be visited. For The Cobra, a deep delve into the murky world of cocaine, smugglers, Coast Guards, cops, and gangsters, there were certain “must-go” targets. The HQ of the DEA in Washington, the backstreets of Bogotá, the dockside dives of Cartagena. But the more I researched, the more I came across a recurring name: Guinea-Bissau.

Once a Portuguese West African colony, G-B went through eighteen years of independence war and about the same of civil war. The two left it a shattered, burned-out hellhole. The essential failed state. It still is. And the cocaine cartels spotted a perfect shipment point for coke going from South America to Europe. They stirred in, place nearly every major official and politico on the payroll, and started to shift scores of tons of puro through from Colombia to Europe. This I had to see, so I went, posing as a bird-watcher (the swamps and marshes are a wintering ground for European wading birds).

It was not my fault I landed in the middle of yet another coup d’état. It ongoing while I was airborne from Lisbon to Bissau city. When I arrived, my contact was in a hell of a state. Flashing his diplomatic pass, he whisked us both through the formalities. It was two a.m.: sweaty hot.

“What’s the hasten?” I questioned, as he raced his SUV down the pitted track to the city. “Look behind you,” he said.

The horizon in the rearview mirror was aglow with headlights. A rancorous Army was also heading for the city. At eight-thirty the previous evening, a name had place a bucket of Semtex under the Army chief of staff. He was all over the ceiling. The Army reckoned it was the President—different tribes and eternal enemies. They were coming to settle accounts.

I was in my hotel by three a.m. but unable to sleep, so I place on the light. It was the only modern hotel and had a generator. There is no public lighting in Bissau. At four-thirty, trying to read, I heard the boom, about five hundred yards down the street. Not thunder, not a head-on crash. Ammo, huge ammo. One remembers the sound. Really, it was the Army putting an RPG through the President’s bedroom window.

It seems the explosion did not kill the ancient boy, even at seventy-one. He crawled out of bed. Then the building collapsed on him. Still alive, he crawled from the rubble to the lawn, where the soldiers were waiting. They shot him three times in the chest. When he still wouldn’t die, they realized he had a juju that made him immune to bullets.

But that juju cannot prevail against machetes. Everyone knows that. So they chopped him up. He died.

The next day was kind of silent, apart from the patrolling Army jeeps bristling with the usual Kalashnikovs, looking for the murderers of their boss. My contact waved his diplomatic pass; I beamed and distributed signed photos of a smiling Queen Elizabeth, with assurances that she wished them well (the Third World reveres the queen, even with a facsimile signature). We were waved through.

The airport was clogged; ditto the limits. I was trapped inside, but no one could get in either. In the trade, it’s called an exclusive. So I borrowed my host’s mobile and filed a thousand-word summing-up to London’s Daily Prompt, for whom I do a weekly column. I had the Prompt call me back and dictated the tale to a lady with headset in London. No one has filed news like that since Dan Rather was in college. Ancient-fashioned, but secure from intercept, I thought.

But of course the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland, heard it all and told the CIA. In the matter of coups in West Africa, I have what London’s Cockneys call “a bit of previous.” I wrote The Dogs of War long ago about that very theme.

After the tale, half the West’s media was trying to get me, but I was out in the creeks checking out the sumptuous mansion of the Colombians, notable for their ponytails, chains of gold bling, and black-windowed SUVs. When I got back to Bissau, a very voluble wife, Sandy, was on the phone.

It seems she was fitting a lunch date with a girlfriend and clarified in her e-mail: “I’m free for lunch ’cos Freddie is away in Guinea-Bissau.” Mistake. The e-mail vanished off the screen unfinished. Her mailbox vaporized. Database wiped. Instructions appeared on her screen: “Do not open this file. Stop all sending or we will respond.”

I had a zany mental image of the morning talks at Langley. Confront suite, seventh floor, Ancient Building.

“What’s this going on in Africa, block?”

“A coup in Guinea-Bissau, Director. Several assassinations. It could be that damn limey again.”

“Can we take him out of there?”

“It seems not. He is somewhere in the jungle.”

“Well, zap his wife’s lunch dates. That’ll teach him.”

The same night, I dined with new friends, and my national at the table was an elderly Dutchman. “You work here?” I questioned.

“Ja. Three-year secondment. I am a forensic pathologist. I run the mortuary.”

The only things that work in Bissau are the gift-aid projects donated by the developed world. The Dutch built the modern mortuary. Shrewdly, they place it next to the locally run all-purpose hospital. Smart, because no one leaves the hospital save feetfirst on a gurney heading for the morgue.

“Been busy?” I questioned. He nodded solemnly.

“Ja, very busy all day. Stitching the President back together.”

It seemed the government wanted the ancient boy in his coffin more or less in the right order. I tucked into my stewed goat.

It took three days for things to cool down and the airport to reopen. I was on the next flight to Lisbon and London. At Heathrow, a passport officer checked the stamps, raised an eyebrow, and passed the document to a colleague. He contemplated both the passport and its owner for a while, then gave it back.

“How was Guinea-Bissau, Mr. Forsyth?” he questioned mildly.

“Cancel the trip,” I advised. “You won’t like it.” Both smiled thinly. Officials don’t do that. Never jest with officialdom. I stepped out into the crisp morning air of March 1, 2009. Perfectly cool. Excellent to be home.

Of course, West Africa got its own back. It permanently does. Twenty days later, my left leg blew up like a vegetable marrow, a real prizewinner. Dark red and hurting like hell. The first medic thought deep vein thrombosis. Bull feathers. Even I know DVT cuts in much sooner after the jet flight and there is no swelling.

The second surgeon did an ultrasound scan and got it in one. A sting, a bite, a scratch, who knows? But leading to a pretty vicious staphylococcal infection, aka septicemia or blood poisoning.

So into ER went the ancient scribe, and then to ICU. They pumped enough amoxicillin into a catheter to sink the USS Saratoga and saved the leg, though they were close to scrubbing up to take it off.

I came out after three weeks and spent the rest of the summer finishing the research among our Special Forces. Then wrote the novel October through December. Now it is with the publisher, due out mid-August.

So if you are interested, dear reader, it’s all in The Cobra. The dives of Cartagena, the U.S. Navy SEALs, their British equivalents the SBS, the Global Predator UAVs, oh, and dear ancient Guinea-Bissau. And it’s all right. Well, okay, it’s not all right, it’s a novel. But it’s accurate.

–Frederick Forsyth