Just Finished Reading The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth

Frederick Forsyth is most known for his early novels The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, but this British author/journalist/spy has continued his writing through the decades, coming out with The Cobra in 2010.  I hadn't read any of Forsyth's works before I picked up The Cobra...I was impressed with this book although I found it difficult at times to keep up with some of the rather technical military information conveyed in it as well as many nautical and aeronautical terms...

The Cobra features two characters from an earlier Forsyth story, Avenger, as former spyboss Paul Devereaux hires his old nemesis Cal Dexter to head an extremely ambitious project authorized by the president (who too closely resembles Obama) to rid the world of organized cocaine trafficking.  It seems that processing and transportation operations are almost exclusively controlled by a single Colombian cartel run by Don Diego Esteban...  He has on his "board" men who are responsible for different crucial aspects of the organization and runs it with an iron fist...he's very soft-spoken but also very cruel and vengeful when he suspects betrayal.  Also very soft-spoken and ultimately cold-blooded is Devereaux, who convinces the "Obama-like-but-not-really-Obama" president to reclassify cocaine trafficking as terrorism in order to greatly curb those pesky due process civil rights that the suspected are entitled to for their criminal activity.  This irked me and reminded me of several crime novels I've read...most notably by James Patterson...in which the bad guys are always taking advantage of the legal system to escape justice, implying that it might be better to just get rid of that annoying due process nonsense...

The very intricate plan developed by Devereaux and carried out by Dexter works nearly perfectly...before too long the cartel loses an enormous percentage of its cocaine and Don Diego soon sees traitors in his organization everywhere.  It all implodes and final victory...i.e. the end of large-scale illicit cocaine trade...seems in sight.  And then the author inserted some plot twists to bring it all back to reality...after all, I don't think that cocaine trafficking ever got eliminated, did it?

In spite of the heavy handed way in which smaller players were handled by the "good guys", I did appreciate Forsyth's "mission impossible" intricacy as the various parts of his plan came together to choke off the enemy.  But what I liked the most was that aforementioned plot twist at the end, and how the decisions that Devereaux and Dexter made at this point led to one of the best closing lines I've read in a novel...but you'll have to read it for yourself to find out...

I recommend The Cobra, but I suspect that Frederick Forsyth's earlier works were better...well, I guess I'd better go find out...