The Cobra
Cal Dexter had seen bloodshed before, and he was not squeamish. But as the death toll rose, he again queried what the Cobra was doing. Because he respected his executive officer, Paul Devereaux, who habitually confided in no one, invited him to dinner in Alexandria.
“Calvin, there are about four hundred cities, large and small, in our country. And at least three hundred of them have a major narcotics problem. Part of this concerns marijuana, cannabis resin, heroin, methamphetamine, or crystal meth, and cocaine. I was asked to destroy the cocaine trade because it was the vice growing completely out of control. Most of that problem derives from the fact that, in our country alone, cocaine has a profit value of forty billion dollars a year, almost double that worldwide.”
“I have read the figures,” muttered Dexter.
“Excellent, but you asked for an explanation.”
Paul Devereaux ate as he did most things, sparingly, and his favorite cuisine was Italian. The dinner was wafer-thin piccata al limone, oil-drizzled salad and a dish of olives, helped down by a cool Frascati. Dexter thought he might have to pause on the way home for something out of Kansas, broiled or fried.
“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 tyranny of the gangs and the drugs. Not you, not me, not the DEA or the FBI or any other of our numerous and staggeringly expensive agencies. Not even the President himself. And certainly not the local police, who are like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the tide.”
“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 cannot go on forever, or indeed much longer.
“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 beginning.
THE COLOMBIANS sent forty picked assassins across the Atlantic. Ostensibly, they were to pay a goodwill visit to the Galicians and asked to be supplied from Los Caneos stocks with a variety of automatic weapons. The request was complied with.
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 cannot treat the Don that way.” Then he blew the dying man’s brains out.
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.