After ordering a pot of Earl Grey tea in bed, he retired to the marble bathroom and thence to the lavatory cubicle as always. There he patiently waited for nature to take its course, a sojourn that took up to ten minutes. During that time, with the door closed, he could not hear his own bedroom. That was when the eavesdropper made his call.

On the morning in question, the room was silently entered. The key code was different with every visit, of course, indeed changed for every occupant of the room, but it posed no barrier to the lockpicker Cal Dexter had brought with him again. The deep pile of the carpet reduced footfalls to utter silence. Dexter crossed the room to the chest where the attache case rested. He hoped the roller sequence had not been altered, and he was right. It was still the Bar Association membership number. He had the lid up, the job done and the lid replaced in seconds. He rolled the numbers back to where they had been before. Then he left. Behind the bathroom door, Senor Julio Luz sat and strained.

He might have made it to the first-class departure lounge at Barajas without opening his briefcase, if only he had had his airline ticket in his breast pocket. But he had put it in his travel wallet in the interior lid of the case. So as his hotel checkout record was being printed, he opened his case to get it.

If the shock call from the Colombian Foreign Ministry ten days earlier had been bad, this was calamitous. He felt so weak, he thought he might be having a heart attack. Disregarding the proffered printout, he retired to sit on a lobby chair, case on lap, staring haggard at the floor. A bellhop had to tell him three times that his limo was at the door. Finally, he staggered down the steps and into the car. As it drew away, he glanced behind. Was he being followed? Would he be intercepted, dragged away to a cell for the third degree?

In fact, he could not have been safer. Invisibly tailed on arrival and during his stay, he was now being invisibly escorted to the airport. As the limo left the suburbs behind, he checked again, just in case of an optical illusion. No illusion. It was there, right on top. A cream manila envelope. It was addressed simply to "Papa." THE BRITISH-CREWED MV Balmoral was fifty miles off Ascension when she met her Royal Fleet Auxiliary. As with most of the older RFAs, she was named after one of the Knights of the Round Table, in this case Sir Gawain. She was at the tail end of a long career at her specialty, resupply at sea, known as RAS, or "razzing." Or "coopering."

Out of sight of any prying eyes, the two ships made the transfer, and the SBS men came aboard.

The Special Boat Service, based very discreetly on the coast of Dorset, England, is far smaller than the U.S. Navy SEAL unit. There are seldom more than two hundred "badged" personnel. Though ninety percent drawn from the Royal Marines, they operate like their American cousins on land, sea or in the air. They operate in mountains, deserts, jungles, rivers and the open ocean. And there were just sixteen of them.

The CO was Major Ben Pickering, a veteran of over twenty years. He had been one of the small team who witnessed the massacre of Talib prisoners by the Northern Alliance at the fort of Qala-i-Jangi, northern Afghanistan, in the winter of 1991. He was still a teenager back then. They lay on top of the wall of the fortress looking down on the bloodbath as the Uzbeks of General Dostum slaughtered their prisoners following the Taliban revolt.

One of two CIA special operatives also present, Johnny "Mike" Spann, had already been killed by the Taliban prisoners, and his colleague Dave Tyson had been snatched. Ben Pickering and two others went down into the hellhole, "slotted" the three Taliban holding the American and dragged Tyson out of there.

Major Pickering had done time in Iraq, Afghanistan (again) and Sierra Leone. He also had extensive experience in interception of illegal cargoes at sea, but he had never before commanded a detachment on board a covert Q-ship, because since the Second World War it had never been done.

When Cal Dexter, ostensibly a servant of the Pentagon, had explained the mission at the SBS base, Major Pickering had gone into a huddle with his CO and the armorers to work out what they needed.

For at-sea interceptions, he had chosen two 8.5-meter rigid inflatables, called RIBs, and had picked the "arctic" version. It would take eight men sitting upright in pairs behind the CO and the coxswain, who would actually drive it. But he could also take on board a captured cocaine smuggler, two experts from the "rummage crews" of HM customs and two sniffer dogs. They would follow the attack RIB at a more sedate pace so as not to upset the dogs.

The rummage men were the experts in finding secret compartments, slithering through the lowest holds, detecting cunning deceptions aimed at hiding illegal cargoes. The dogs were cocker spaniels, trained not only to detect the odor of cocaine hydrochloride through several layers of covering but to detect changes in air odor. A bilge that has been opened recently smells different from one not opened for months.

Major Pickering stood beside the captain on the open wing of the bridge of the Balmoral and saw his RIBs swung gently onto the deck of the freighter. Thence, the Balmoral's own derrick took over the cradles and lowered the inflatables into their hold.

Of the SBS's four Sabre Squadrons, the major had a unit from M Squadron, specializing in Marine Counter-Terrorism, or MCT. These were the men who swung aboard after the RIBs, and after them their "kit."

It was voluminous, involving assault carbines, sniper versions, handguns, diving equipment, weather- and sea-proof clothing, grapnel hooks, scaling ladders and a ton of ammunition. Plus two American communications men to liaise with Washington.

Support personnel consisted of armorers and technicians, to maintain the RIBs in perfect working order, and two helicopter pilots from the Army Air Corps, plus their own maintenance engineers. Their concern was the small "chopper" that came aboard last. It was an American Little Bird.

The Royal Navy might have preferred a Sea King or even a Lynx, but the problem was the size of the hold. With rotors spread, the larger helicopters would not fit through the hatch cover to emerge from its belowdecks hangar into the open air. But the Boeing Little Bird could. With a main rotor span of just under twenty-seven feet, it would pass through the main hatch, which was forty feet wide.

The helo was the one piece that could not be winched across the gap of choppy sea separating the two vessels. Freed of its swathes of protective canvas under which it had ridden down to Ascension Island, it took off from the foredeck of the Sir Gawain, circled twice and settled on the closed foreward hatch of the Balmoral. When the two rotors, main and tail, ceased to turn, the nimble little helicopter was hefted by the on-deck derrick and lowered carefully into the enlarged hold, where she was cleated to the deck beneath her.

When there was finally nothing left to transfer and the Balmoral's fuel tanks were full again, the vessels parted. The RFA would go back north to Europe, the now very dangerous Q-ship would head for her first patrol station, north of the Cape Verdes, in the mid-Atlantic between Brazil and the curve of failed states running along the West African seaboard.

The Cobra had divided the Atlantic into two, with a line running north-northeast from Tobago, easternmost of the Antilles, to Iceland. West of that line he designated, in terms of cocaine destination, "Target Zone USA." East of the line was "Target Zone Europe." The Balmoral would take the Atlantic. The Chesapeake, about to meet her supply ship off Puerto Rico, would take the Caribbean. ROBERTO CARDENAS stared at the letter long and hard. He had read it a dozen times. In the corner, Julio Luz was trembling.