"It is from the rogue, Vega?" he queried nervously. He was seriously wondering whether he was going to get out of the room alive.

"It has nothing to do with Vega."

At least the letter explained, without saying so, what had happened to his daughter. There would be no revenge on Vega. There was no Vega. Never had been. There was no freelance baggage handler at Barajas Airport who had picked the wrong suitcase in which to plant his cocaine. There never had been. The only reality was twenty years in an American jail for his Letizia. The message in the replica envelope to the ones in which he used to send his own was simple. It said:

"I think we should talk about your daughter Letizia. Next Sunday, at 4 p.m., I will be in my suite under the name of Smith at the Santa Clara Hotel, Cartagena. I shall be alone and unarmed. I shall wait one hour. Please come."

THE U.S. NAVY SEALS BOARDED THEIR Q-SHIP ONE hundred miles north of Puerto Rico, where the supply vessel had herself been loaded at Roosevelt Roads, the U.S. base on that island.

The SEALs are at least four times larger than the British SBS. Their parent group, the Naval Special Welfare Command, contains twenty-five hundred personnel, of which just under a thousand are "badged" operatives and the rest support units.

The ones who wear the coveted trident emblem of a SEAL are divided into eight teams, each with three forty-man troops. It was a platoon of half that number that had been assigned to live on the MV Chesapeake, and they came from SEAL Team 2 based on the East Coast at Little Creek, Virginia Beach.

Their CO was Lt. Cdr. Casey Dixon, and, like his British opposite number out in the Atlantic, he, too, was a veteran. As a young ensign, he had taken part in Operation Anaconda. While the SBS man was in northern Afghanistan watching the slaughter at Qala-i-Jangi, Ensign Dixon had been Al Qaeda hunting in the Tora Bora White Range when things went badly wrong.

Dixon had been one of a troop coming into land on a flat area high in the mountains when his Chinook was raked by machine-gun fire from a hidden nest in the rocks. The huge helicopter was mortally hit and lurched wildly as the pilot fought for control. One of the helicopter crew skidded on the hydraulic fluid washing around on the floor and went over the tail ramp into the freezing darkness outside. He was saved from falling by his tether.

But a SEAL near the falling man, Boatswain's Mate Neil Roberts, tried to catch him and also slipped out. He had no tether and fell to the rocks a few feet below. Casey Dixon reached wildly for Roberts's webbing, missed by inches and watched him fall.

The pilot recovered, not enough to save the ship but enough to limp three miles and dump the Chinook out of machine-gun range. But Roberts was left alone in the rocks surrounded by twenty Al Qaeda killers. It is the pride of the SEALs that they have never left a mate behind, alive or dead. Transferring to another Chinook, Dixon and the rest went back for him, picking up a squad of Green Berets and a British SAS team on the way. What followed is hallowed in SEAL legend.

Neil Roberts activated his beacon to let his mates know he was alive. He also realized the machine-gun nest was still active and ready to blast any rescue effort out of the sky. With his hand grenades, he wiped out the machine-gun crew but gave away his position. The Al Qaeda came for him. He sold himself very dear, fighting and killing down to the last bullet and dying with his combat knife in his hand.

When the rescuers came back, they were too late for Roberts, but the Al Qaeda were still there. There was an eight-hour, close-quarter firefight among the rocks, as hundreds more jihadis poured in to join the sixty who had ambushed the Chinook. Six Americans died, two SEALs were badly injured. But in the morning light, they counted three hundred Al Qaeda corpses. The U.S. dead were all brought home, including the body of Neil Roberts.

Casey Dixon carried the body to the evacuation chopper, and, because he had taken a flesh wound to the thigh, was also flown to the States, and attended the memorial service a week later at the base chapel at Little Creek. After that, whenever he glanced at the jagged scar on his right thigh, he remembered the wild night among the rocks of Tora Bora.

But nine years later, he stood in the warm evening east of the Turks and Caicos and watched his men and their kit transfer from the mother ship to their new home, the former grain carrier, now the Chesapeake. High above, a patrolling EP-3 out of Roosevelt Roads told them the sea was empty. There were no watchers.

For attack off the sea, he had brought one large, eleven-meter Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat, or RHIB. This could take his entire platoon and pound along over calm water at forty knots. He also had two of the smaller Zodiacs, known as Combat Rubber Raiding Craft, or CRRC. Each was only fifteen feet long, just as fast and would take four armed men comfortably.

Also transferring were two ship-search experts from the U.S. Coast Guard, two dog handlers from customs, two communications men from Command HQ and, waiting on their helicopter pad over the stern of the mother ship, the two pilots from the Navy. They sat inside their Little Bird, something the SEALs had rarely seen and never used before.

If they were ever deployed in helicopters, it would be in the new Boeing Knight Hawk. But the little spotter was the only helo whose rotors would descend into the hold of the Chesapeake when its hatch covers were open.

Also in the transferring equipment were the usual German-made Heckler amp; Koch MP5a submachine guns, the SEALs' weapon of choice for anything close-quarter; diving gear, the standard Drager units; rifles for the four snipers and a mass of ammunition.

As the light faded, the EP-3 above told them the sea was still clear. The Little Bird lifted off, circled like an angry bee and settled on the Chesapeake. As both rotors stopped, the onboard derrick lifted the small helicopter and lowered her into the hold. The deck covers, moving smoothly on their rails, closed over the holds, and the coatings sealed them against rain and spray.

The two ships parted company, and the mother ship edged away into the gloom. On her bridge, some jokester flashed a message in code from an Aldis lamp, the technology of a hundred years ago. On the bridge of the Chesapeake, it was the Navy captain who worked it out. It said "G-O-D-S-P-E-E-D."

During the night, the Chesapeake slipped through the islands into her patrol areas; the Caribbean Basin and the Gulf of Mexico. Any inquirer on the Internet would have been told she was a perfectly lawful grain ship taking wheat from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the hungry mouths of South America.

Belowdecks, the SEALs were cleaning and checking weapons yet again; the engineers were bringing the outboards and the helicopter to combat readiness; the cooks were rustling up some dinner, as they stocked their lockers and fridges; and the comms men were setting up their gear for a twenty-four-hour listening watch on a covert and encrypted channel coming out of a shabby warehouse in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

The call they had been told to wait for might come in ten weeks, ten days or ten minutes. When it came, they intended to be combat ready. THE HOTEL SANTA CLARA is a luxury lodging in the heart of the historic center of Cartagena, a conversion from a nunnery hundreds of years old. Its complete details had been forwarded to Cal Dexter by the SOCA agent who lived undercover as a teacher at the naval cadet school. Dexter had studied the plans and insisted on one certain suite.

He checked in as "Mr. Smith" just after noon on the appointed Sunday. Perfectly aware that five muscled hoodlums were rather visibly sitting without drinks in the inner courtyard or studying notices pinned to the walls of the lobby, he took a light lunch in an atrium under the trees. As he ate, a toucan fluttered out of the leaves, settled on the chair opposite and stared at him.