The Cobra Identity Read online

but this season was poor and compounded by the divorce. Tonight, cruising without nets deployed was boring and sitting on the bridge alone meant hours of contemplation. He still loved this wife, but was never able to express it adequately. She had often accused him of having an affair with his boat. It was true that he spent most of his time with it, but that was the life of a commercial fisherman. They never had children, which he imagined made their relationship more difficult. Maybe the sea was his mistress. Their difficulties had started almost from the beginning of their marriage, but stayed just below the surface most of the time. In the past three years, with rising costs and poor fishing, the strains had become too much, so they barely spoke any more. He could imagine life without her … he had his ship, but it wasn’t the life he wanted. He knew she had progressed beyond the point of recovery and reconciliation was no longer an option. He just needed to save his boat from auction.

  This coming night, passing below Miami, he would snag the biggest fish of his life and be able to pay off his wife. He was a patriotic American, and felt he could forgive himself for one transgression. His country would have to absorb a little more dope through Florida. That was enough rationalization for him.

  Around four o’clock in the afternoon, he was opposite Port Canaveral and could see the gambling casinos floating three miles offshore. The term “Casino” was a term for old cruise ships that, twice daily, spend five hours steering in circles at three knots outside the state’s enforcement zone. Other than that, the radar showed a few contacts, but the area over Bahamian shoals was clear. Ned made a routine radio contact with the Coast Guard to give status and position as required each time they entered a new coastal district. He was cruising toward specific coordinates about five hours ahead, southeast of the Port of Miami. The sea was calm and they were making good time against the “Florida Current.” The current was the beginning of the Gulf Stream System. It stretches from the Florida Straits up to Cape Hatteras running north at about four knots. The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon first reported the current when he came to the new world. Destiny was making about fourteen knots forward speed heading due south. The crew was lounging below or sleeping. Work would begin after dark.

  Late that night, Destiny was approaching the pickup point. The sea conditions had risen to be moderately choppy with wind blowing about ten to fifteen knots. The working conditions were not ideal, but tolerable. Ned had gotten a few hours’ sleep, trusting the helm to his first mate, Jim Cooper who was an expert navigator. Nearing the pickup point, with Jim at the helm, Ned worked the navigation equipment and sonar. Fishing boats used sonar to plot the sea floor, locating the troughs where fish congregate. Destiny had a late model Wesmar HD800 system with frequency ranges from 160Hz to 27 kHz. The 110 kHz channel was used the most, whereas 27 kHz was almost never used in Florida waters. Ned instructed Jim to reduce speed to four knots, offsetting the current and minimizing engine noise. He set the selector dial to 27 and pressed three consecutive underwater sound bursts. Then they waited.

  Loitering in one location would raise suspicion because Coast Guard radars were programmed to signal alarms when ships stopped moving off the coast. The algorithms had tolerance for short durations when boats stopped to bring fish aboard, but longer periods could indicate a problem or illegal activity.

  The buoy they were expecting to rise to the surface was a converted Russian Navy “ascending mine” that was designed to be anchored on the ocean floor until it detected a specific acoustic signature. When the sound pattern was detected, the mine was designed to cut its tether and attack a ship or submarine using a water jet motor guided by a homing receiver. Iranian engineers had removed the motor and explosive warhead, using the airspace for compressed air bottles. As the modified buoy released from the sled, airbags inflated and a steel line unrolled as it floated to the surface.

  It was calculated to take about two minutes for the buoy to reach the surface. Ned instructed Jim to circle the ship in a wide arc at six knots while they waited, simulating a net recovery profile. Both men were nervous and sweating profusely. They were now committing a major felony that could send them to prison for a long time and ruin the rest of their lives. Words were few and delivered with an edge that could erupt in an argument at any moment. The buoy took longer to locate than expected. In darkness, radar was used to find it before it could be seen. The crew was called to the fishing deck to “hook” the buoy and bring it aboard. With the chop and wind, maneuvering it aboard took several minutes. Ned began yelling orders, which the crew ignored under the heightened anxiety everyone felt.

  Once the cable was detached from the buoy and secured to the winch, the ship turned southward at four knots to neutralize the current, while pulling the sled toward the surface. Once they had recovered about one hundred feet of cable, Ted ordered them ahead at eight knots, while pulling the sled closer to the surface. Returning to the bridge, he plotted a course around the Florida Keys, northward to Charlotte Harbor. His plan was to remain twenty-five miles from the coast at all times and approach their homeport at night. With no Coast Guard response, they appeared to be safe.

  Army Intelligence

  Rachael Aston was intelligent, young, beautiful and respected in her new role as the Director of Operations and Plans (DAMI-OP), Army Intelligence, at the Pentagon. Her boss was the Deputy Chief of Staff (DCS), Lt. General John Simmons (code G-2). She received her appointment based on a recommendation from the President after helping to stop a terrorist’s plot to explode nuclear bombs in Chicago a year earlier. She had demonstrated skill in coordinating with other federal agencies, particularly the FBI. She was also nearly killed when a bomb exploded in the city, taking several months to recover. It was the kind of real-world experience that most senior defense staff never gained, yet she was a seasoned veteran, and not quite thirty years old.

  As a senior civilian executive in the department, her role was to represent the Army and the Deputy Chief of Staff in the development and coordination of policy in the areas of intelligence gathering, personnel training, weather, imagery, and geospatial intelligence. She coordinated information gathering operations, aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, and cross-discipline intelligence issues. Most significantly, she oversaw the Army’s participation with other U.S. and foreign Intelligence agencies.

  She was always in her office early, even earlier than most of the Flag Officers. Her apartment in Georgetown was close to the University, where she had earned her JD. She loved Georgetown and rode the Metro blue line to work each morning. Her routine was to stop by the underground food court for green tea and a bagel, walk up the long slanted corridors to level three, and then outward to the “D” ring where the G2 offices were located. Security procedures entering the intelligence directorate were rigorous, so it took about fifteen minutes from the train stop.

  Her first priority each day was to prepare the intelligence report for the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) and the Army Chief of Staff and his various deputies. Sitting at her desk, she pushed the power button on her computer, which took more than two minutes to boot up given the security firewalls. Before she checked the COP (common operating picture) intelligence web page, she looked at her email. There was one unusual correspondence.

  The “Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM)” was the Directorate of Military Intelligence for the French Army, an allied intelligence-sharing organization. DRM communiqués were rare. The text of the message included “…Russian merchant ship Morzh bound from Monrovia to Miami carrying unknown quantity of SA-18 shoulder-launched surface to air missiles. Reliability of information is high.”

  The message contained office contact information in Paris. Rachael made this item the top entry in her intelligence report, along with the normal weather and routine information, sending it by email to her standard distribution. She then called LTC Jean Francois Picard in Paris directly, without using the military liaison office responsible for French relations. Colonel Picard was polite and courteous. He said t
he information was HUMINT (human intelligence) in nature, a spy on the ground, and that it had some Algerian content, although he would not divulge any more. It was normal protocol within the intelligence community not to speculate on unverified facts. In most cases, the actual data cannot be correlated readily, so the originating intelligence agency must qualify the data using standard phraseology. “Reliability high” is almost certainly valid.

  Miami FBI

  The Miami FBI field office was located at 16320 Northwest 2nd Avenue, North Miami Beach, with four satellite offices in the South East Florida region. The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the office was Sandra Ryan. Mark Brennan was an Assistant SAC in charge of the Organized Crime Task Force and a member of the Terrorist Task Force. Mark had been in the FBI since graduating from Virginia Tech six years earlier. He was raised in Northern Virginia by career civil service parents. He had been a competitive swimmer throughout his youth and college, and still competed at the “masters” level. His brown hair was perpetually blond from an active outdoor life style. He was athletically built and