The Cobra

"So these staggering funds attract the sharks of every stripe. We have around a thousand gangs purveying this drug and a total national gang membership of around seven hundred fifty thousand, half of them active in narcotics. So your original question: what am I doing and how?"

He refilled both glasses with the pale yellow wine and sipped as he chose his words.

"There is only one force in the country that can destroy the twin tyra

"So the single force is?"

"Themselves. Each other. Calvin, what do you think we have been doing for the past year? First we created, at considerable expense, a cocaine drought. That was deliberate, but it could never be sustained. That fighter pilot in the Cape Verdes. Those Q-ships out at sea. They ca

"The instant they let up, the trade flow will resume. Nothing can impede that level of profit for more than a heartbeat. All we were able to do was cut the supply in half, creating a raging hunger among the clients. And when ferals are starved, they turn on each other.

"Second, we established a supply of bait, which we are now using to provoke the ferals into turning their violence not against lawful citizens but against each other."

"But the bloodletting is disfiguring the country. We are becoming like northern Mexico. How long will the gang wars have to last?"

"Calvin, the violence was never absent. It was only hidden. We kidded ourselves it was all on TV or on the movie screen. Well, it is out in the open now. For a while. If they let me provoke the gangs into destroying each other, their power can be shattered for a generation."

"But in the short term?"

"Alas, many terrible things will have to happen. We have visited these things upon Iraq and Afghanistan. Do our rulers and our people have the fortitude to accept it here?"

Cal Dexter thought back to what he had seen inflicted on Vietnam forty years earlier.

"I doubt it," he said. "Abroad is such a convenient place for violence." ACROSS THE USA, members of the Latin Kings were being slaughtered as the local clique of MS-13 fell upon them, convinced they were themselves being attacked and seeking to acquire both the stocks and clientele of the Kings for their own. The Kings, recovering from the initial shock, retaliated the only way they knew how.

The slaughter between the Bandidos and Outlaws on one side and the Hell's Angels with the racist Aryan Brotherhood on the other scattered corpses from coast to coast in the USA.

Bewildered passersby saw the word "ADIOS" daubed on walls and bridges. It stands for "Angels Die in Outlaw States." All four gangs have enormous chapters in the USA's hardest jails, and the killing spread to these as flame to kindling. In Europe, the revenge of the Don was just begi

The Colombians arrived by air on different flights over three days, and a small advance party provided them with a fleet of camper vans and mobile homes. With these, the avengers motored northwest to Galicia, ravaged in the February custom with rain and gales.

It was not far off Valentine's Day, but the meeting between the Don's emissaries and their unsuspecting hosts took place in a warehouse in the pretty and historic town of Ferrol. The newcomers approvingly inspected the arsenal provided for them, smacked in the magazines, turned and opened fire.

When the last thunder of automatic fire ceased to echo off the warehouse walls, most of the Galician mob had been wiped out. A small, baby-faced man known in his own country as El Animal, the Colombian leader stood over a Galician still alive and looked down at him.

"It is nothing personal," he remarked quietly, "but you just ca

There was no need to remain. The killer party embarked in their vehicles and motored thorough the border into France at Hendaye. Both Spain and France are members of the Schengen Agreement that provides for open, no-control borders.

Spelling each other at the wheel, the Colombians motored east across the foothills of the Pyrenees, over the plains of the Languedoc, through the French Riviera and into Italy. The Spanish-registered vehicles were not stopped. It took thirty-six hours of hard driving to reach Milan.

Seeing the unmistakable batch numbers of the cocaine sent across the Atlantic on the Belleza del Mar turning up in the Essex marshes, Don Diego had quickly learned that the whole consignment had reached Essex not via the Netherlands but from the Ndrangheta, who were supplying the Essex mob. Thus the Calabrians, to whom he had given the overlordship franchise for Europe, had also turned on him. Retribution could simply not be avoided.

The party sent to visit that retribution upon the guilty had spent hours en route studying the geography of Milan and the briefing notes sent by the small resident liaison team from Bogota that lived there.

They knew exactly how to find the three southern suburbs of Buccinasco, Corsico and Assago that the Calabrese had colonized. These suburbs are to the southerners from the deep south of Italy as New York's Brighton Beach is to the Russians: home away from home. Even the language is different.

And the immigrants have brought Calabria with them. Shop signs, bars, restaurants, cafes-almost all bear names and serve meals from the south. The state's Anti-Mafia Commission estimates that eighty percent of Colombian cocaine entering Europe arrives at Calabria, but the distribution hub is Milan and the cockpit these three boroughs. The assassins came by night.

They had no illusions about the ferocity of the Calabrese. No one had ever attacked them. When they fought, it was among one another. The so-called second Ndrangheta war between 1985 and 1999 left seven hundred bodies on the streets of Calabria and Milan.

Italy's history is a litany of wars and bloodshed, and behind the cuisine and the culture the old cobbles have run red many times. Italians consider the Black Hand of Naples and the mafia of Sicily fearsome, but no one argues with the Calabrese. Until that night when the Colombians came.

They had seventeen residential addresses. Their orders were to destroy the head of the serpent and leave before the hundreds of foot soldiers could be mobilized.

By morning, the Naviglio Canal was red. Fifteen of the seventeen chiefs were caught at home and died there. Six Colombians took the Ortomercato, site of the King, the young generation's favorite nightclub. Walking calmly past the Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked by the entrance, the Colombians took down the four minders on the door, entered and opened fire in a series of long, raking fusillades that wiped away all those drinking at the bar and four tables of diners.

The Colombians took one casualty. The barman, in a gesture of self-sacrifice, pulled a gun from beneath his bar top and fired back before he died. He fired at a small man who seemed to be directing the fire and put a bullet through his rosebud mouth. Then he himself choked on three slugs from a MAC-10 machine pistol.

Before dawn, the Special Ops group of the carabinieri in Via Lamarmora was on crisis alert, and the citizens of Italy's commercial and fashion capital were wakened to the screams of ambulances and the wailing of police sirens.

It is the law of the jungle and of the underworld that when the king is dead, long live the next king. The Honorable Society was not dead, and in due course the war with the cartel would visit terrible revenge on the Colombians, the guilty and the i