This was undeniably bad news. So near to their destination and now this. He threw an anxious glance towards the porthole. Just as he’d thought: still lashing rain and heavy seas. Typical. A smooth passage nearly all the way across the Atlantic only to run into this storm at the last minute. But the signal from Colombia was unequivocal. It was short and to the point: ‘Your position identified. Interception imminent.’ Mierda, he thought. When you’re running a suspect cargo into another country it was always a fine judgement whether or not to switch off the ship’s automatic identification system, which shows up its name, port of origin and disposition. Keep it on, hide in plain sight, act the innocent and hope that nobody spots what you’re up to. Switch it off and you’re anonymous, but you’re not invisible and, of course, it shows you have something to hide. The North Koreans, he remembered, had switched off their AIS on that run from Cuba to Panama in 2013 and they’d still got pinged by the Americans with a load of useless old Soviet-era aircraft parts, hidden beneath sacks of sugar.
