The Cobra – Frederick Forsyth, 2010 ★

A Master on Auto-Pilot

A problem with writing great novels is that people expect you to continue writing them.

But what if you run out of ideas? What if you can’t make yourself care about your characters anymore? What if your idea of yarnspinning has gone from elaborate potboiler to Bang, you’re dead, now gimme my money!

That’s where Frederick Forsyth has wound up in the late autumn of a distinguished career. Every few years he shakes off the cobwebs, sees what hot topic is on CNN, ruminates on how to make it a story, and then sets to work researching the subject. When it comes to research, Forsyth has been a longtime master and still delivers. It’s the rest of his career that’s gone south.

The hot topic in The Cobra is drugs. An unnamed President Barack Obama is moved to action when the son of a White House waitress is found dead from an overdose. Eventually, this sets in motion a multi-billion, multi-national secret enterprise led by our title character, ex-CIA man Paul Devereaux. His solution is to take on the entire narcotics underworld by going after its main industry, cocaine, at its main source point, Colombia.

“A demand will always produce a supply,” is how he explains it to a Jesuit priest he is trying to recruit as a source of information. “But the reverse is also true. A supply will always create a demand. Eventually. If the supply dies, the appetite will wither away.”

If you like books in which good guys set a plot in motion and then have it unfold like clockwork, Cobra may work for you more than it did me. The entire novel reads like a white paper detailing many aspects of what constitutes the drug trade and suggesting, in a grandly naïve way, how it might be curtailed. The ensuing story plays like a hypothesis, spun out in such a way as to make fanciful ideas seem coldly rational.

For example, the Cobra sells President Obama on the idea of drugs as a form of terrorism that warrant extra-legal means of removal, such as blowing suspected transport planes out of the sky or holding sailors of contraband ships without trial on a secret base near Diego Garcia. I doubt any president would go along with that, least of all Obama.

There’s also Forsyth’s insistence for the purposes of his plot that nearly all cocaine in Colombia goes through one man, Don Diego Estaban. For the Cobra’s scheme to work, you need a Blofeldian figure at the helm, reacting with cruel violence against any setback and not thinking through much of anything. But is this at all realistic?

That greed makes people do bad things is the consistent message of The Cobra; what the Cobra sees as the vehicle for sowing the cartel’s ruination. To this end, Forsyth spends a great deal of his novel outlining just how money gets made, and how poor are people in places like Colombia and Guinea-Bissau, which serve as key supply points:

The profits were so vast that no amount of arrests could stop the army of volunteers screaming to take the place of the dead and the imprisoned; profits big enough to make Gates and Buffett look like street vendors.

Hence the need for extreme countermeasures. In addition to the Jesuit, used to get inside information on God-fearing criminals within Colombia, the Cobra lines up both American SEAL and British Special Boat Service personnel as well as break-in specialists and even a kidnapped ship welder who is responsible for nearly all the secret compartments in cocaine-carrying ships.

Most of the wet jobs, blowing suspicious aircraft out of the sky over the Atlantic, are delegated to a Brazilian officer who has only to think of his kid brother, “a boy on a marble slab in the São Paolo mortuary,” before doing what needs to be done.

A Blackburn Buccaneer is taken out of retirement by the Cobra to hunt down and destroy suspected smuggers. An ex-pilot himself, Forsyth writes a lot more effectively about the aircraft than he does the story around it. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/robvanrensburg1/blackburn-buccaneer/.

All this Dirty-Harry-extralegal-cop stuff is cringe-inducing. Yet in the right hands, it could have been compelling entertainment, say like Forsyth’s 20 years ago. The Cobra has other issues, though.

After about a hundred or so pages of briefings and backstory, the core of Forsyth’s storyline involves a rote succession of planes blowing up and ships being boarded. There’s some cloak-and-dagger early on where a piece of paper containing all the cartel’s clandestine bank information is stolen from a hotel room, and the daughter of a drug boss set up on a phony trafficking charge so the Cobra can blackmail her father.

One risible scene has the Cobra’s chief lieutenant, Cal Dexter, arrange to meet this drug boss in a hotel room to discuss terms. Dexter tells him his daughter is safe but “distressed,” tosses a business card to the floor, then steps out to the porch and grabs a rope ladder dangling from a hovering helicopter, which whisks him away. The implication is that the message, now delivered, will cause the boss to sing like a canary and expose more cartel secrets.

Does that strike you as realistic? It doesn’t even work as fiction, lending the whole enterprise a trite quality.

Throughout the novel, Forsyth bends reality to accommodate his storycraft. At the same time, he keeps the plan working so perfectly that Don Diego himself never suspects what’s really going out until very late. This allows the Cobra to eventually turn the drug trade’s own considerable powers against itself. Put enough serpents in a tight place, he figures, and they will turn on one another:

The successive cartels that have dominated the cocaine industry have always been riven by one psychiatric defect: raging paranoia. The capacity for suspicion is instant and uncontrollable.

Not for a moment does Don Diego stop and think why so many of his business partners might have gone bad on him at the same time. Instead, he orders hits on them, little caring that such carnage might knock him out of business. Meanwhile, the Cobra looks on with smug satisfaction.

Such neatness ill becomes the author of such gloriously messy spy yarns as The Day Of The Jackal and The Fourth Protocol, where complications and unexpected developments were used to engage readers more deeply.

Here, as there, Forsyth has done his research, and does a fine job sharing it. There’s a lot of detail about special “go-fast” boats used to ferry product to isolated African islands, about the use of coffee on cargo boats to frustrate drug-sniffing dogs, about how the undersides of hulls can be used for smuggling.

But such information is never tied to a gripping plot. People get stopped, and sometimes killed, yet you are never made to care.

The more I read, the more I could feel Forsyth writing himself into a ditch. His problem is this: By following his story to its only logical conclusion, the Cobra’s plot would result in the end of drugs as we know it, rendering the basic framework of the novel patently ridiculous.

Did Forsyth set out to write a shrill call-to-arms like that? I don’t think so. He clearly wanted to write a solid page-turner like he had two novels before with Avenger, which features both Devereaux and Dexter. But in trying to take on such a huge problem as drugs, he let the enormity of the problem dictate his approach. Instead of going after one piece of the drug problem and having his characters strike a blow that way, which would have been a more realistic story and tenser besides, he got carried away taking a frail hypothesis to its absurd conclusion.

The ending of the book suggests he noticed this, and tried to make amends. It’s a twist ending, and all I will say about it is as much as it throws up everything that happened before, it does in such a way that you see, if you didn’t before, how Forsyth was just going through the motions.

There’s a sadly enervated quality to The Cobra, in the way it unfolds, and the way it takes stock of its situation. It feels less a novel than a fleshed-out outline, which prompted one Amazon.com reviewer to quote Woody Allen’s joke about bad food served in small portions. Forsyth has a good idea here but lacked a healthy-enough interest in building a real plot around it. A younger, hungrier Forsyth might have fought through this hard enough to provide a rousing if improbable adventure yarn, a la The Devil’s Alternative, or else a cardboard if still effective diversion such as his most overrated work, The Dogs Of War.

But Forsyth has a life, and probably wanted to return to it after trying to till this unfertile ground. I knew the feeling all too well when I finally, happily, put this down.