Frederick Forsyth on 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 wrong, or take
the trouble and get it right. In my office, we get it right.”
He was a good 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 ultimate failed
state. It still is. And the cocaine cartels spotted a perfect
shipment point for coke going from South America to Europe. They
moved in, put almost every major official and politico on the
payroll, and began 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 started 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 hurry?” I asked, 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
vengeful Army was also heading for the city. At eight-thirty the
previous evening, someone had put 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 , so I put 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 c. Ammo, big ammo. One remembers
the sound. Actually, it was the Army putting an RPG through the
President’s bedroom window.
It seems the explosion did not kill the old 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 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 quiet, 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 closed; ditto the borders. 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 Express, for whom I do
a weekly column. I had the Express call me back and dictated the
story to a lady with earphones in London. No one has filed news
like that since Dan Rather was in college. Old-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 subject.
After the story, 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 fixing a lunch date with a girlfriend and
explained 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. Cease all sending
or we will respond.”
I had a zany mental image of the morning conference at Langley.
Corner suite, seventh floor, Old Building.
“What’s this going on in Africa, Chuck?”
“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 neighbor at the
table was an elderly Dutchman. “You work here?” I asked.
“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 put it next to the locally run general
hospital. Smart, because no one leaves the hospital save
feetfirst on a gurney heading for the morgue.
“Been busy?” I asked. He nodded solemnly.
“Ja, very busy all day. St the President back together.”
It seemed the government wanted the old boy in his coffin more
or less in the right order. I tucked into my stewed goat.
It took three days for things to calm 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 asked mildly.
“Cancel the vacation,” 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. Beautifully cool. Good to be home.
Of course, West Africa got its own back. It always 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 old scribe, and then to ICU. They pumped
enough 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 old
Guinea-Bissau. And it’s all true. Well, okay, it’s not all true,
it’s a novel. But it’s accurate.
--Frederick Forsyth
