Frederic Forsyth - The Cobra

It purported to be an inside tip from within the intelligence division of the Policia Judicial. The insider claimed Don Diego Esteban had admitted in a private meeting that his future favor would fall upon the eventual clear winner of any settlement of accounts in the European underworld. It was pure disinformation. He had said no such thing. But it triggered the gang war that swept the continent.

The Slavs, in the form of the three main Russian gangs and the Serbs, formed an alliance. But they are hated by the Balts of Latvia and Lithuania, who allied to be available to help the Russians' enemies.

The Albanians are notionally Muslims and ally with the Obshina (the Chechens) and the Turks. The Jamaican Yardbirds and the Nigerians are both black and can work together. In Italy, the Sicilians and Neapolitans, habitually antagonists, formed a very temporary partnership against the outsiders, and the bloodletting began.

It swept Europe as it was sweeping the U.S. No country in the European Union was exempt, even though the biggest, and thus the richest, markets took the brunt.

The media struggled to explain to their readers, listeners and viewers what was going on. There were gang killings from Dublin to Warsaw. Tourists hurled themselves screaming to the floor in bars and restaurants as submachine carbines executed settlements of accounts across dining tables and office parties.

In London, the nanny of the Home Secretary, taking her toddler charges for a walk on Primrose Hill, found a body in the shrubbery. It had no head. In Hamburg, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, cadavers appeared on the street every night for a week. Fourteen corpses were pulled out of French rivers in a single morning. Two were black, and dental work established the rest were not French but from the East.

Not everyone in the gunfights died. The ambulance and emergency surgeries were overwhelmed. All talk of Afghanistan, Somali pirates, greenhouse gases and bloated bankers was banished from the front pages as the headlines screamed impotent outrage.

Police chiefs were called in, shouted at and dismissed to go and shout at their subordinates. Politicians from twenty-seven parliaments in Europe and the Congress in Washington and the fifty states of the Union tried to strike an impressive pose but failed as their complete impotence became ever clearer to their constituents.

The political backlash started in the United States but Europe was not far behind. The phone lines of every mayor, representative and senator in the U.S. were jammed with callers, either outraged or fearful. The media sprouted solemn-faced experts twenty times a day, and they all disagreed with one another.

Iron-faced police chiefs were subjected to press conferences that caused them to flee back behind the curtains. Police forces were overwhelmed, and that applied also to ambulance facilities, morgue space and coroners. In three cities, meatpacking halls had to be commandeered to take the cadavers being pulled off streets, out of riddled cars and from freezing rivers.

No one seemed to have realized the power of the underworld to shock, frighten and disgust the peoples of two indulged and risk-averse continents when that underworld went insane with violence fueled by greed.

The aggregate body count rose past the five hundred mark, and that was on each continent. Gangsters were hardly mourned save by their kith and kin, but harmless civilians were caught in the cross fire. That included children, causing the tabloid newspapers to root through the dictionaries for fresh superlatives of outrage.

It was a quiet-spoken academic and criminologist on television who explained the causal origin of the civil war that seemed to have scarred thirty nations. There is, he said gently, a total dearth of cocaine out there, and it is over the remaining miserable supplies that the wolves of society are fighting.

The alternatives-skunk, crystal meth and heroin-cannot fill the gap. Cocaine had been too easy, too long, the old man said. It has become not a pleasure but a necessity for great swathes of society. It has made too many vast fortunes, and promised many more. A $50 billion-a-year industry on each major Western continent is dying, and we are witnessing the ultra-violent death throes of a monster that has lived among us unrebuked for too long. A thunderstruck newscaster thanked the professor as he left the studio.

After that, the message surging up from the populace to the rulers changed. It became less confused. It said: Sort this out or resign.

Crises may occur in societies at various levels, but there is no level more catastrophic than that politicians may have to forgo their plump employments. At the beginning of March, the phone in an elegant antebellum town house in Alexandria rang.

"Don't hang up," shouted the chief of staff at the White House.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Mr. Silver," said Paul Devereaux.

Each man had retained the habit of using the formal "Mr." address toward the other, almost unheard of in modern Washington. Neither had any talent for bonhomie, so why pretend?

"Would you please get your"-to any other subordinate Jonathan Silver would said "sad ass," but he changed it to-"presence up to the White House at six this evening? I speak on behalf of you know who."

"My pleasure, Mr. Silver," said the Cobra. And hung up. It would not be a pleasure. He knew that. But he also supposed it had always been inevitable.

JONATHAN SILVER HAD THE REPUTATION OF POSSESSING the most abrasive temper in the West Wing. He made it plain as Paul Devereaux entered his office that he did not intend to restrain it.

He held a copy of the Los Angeles Times and waved it in the face of the older man.

"Are you responsible for this?"

Devereaux examined the broadsheet with the detachment of an entomologist surveying a mildly interesting larva. The front page was largely occupied by a picture and the banner headline "Hell on Rodeo." The photo was of a restaurant that had been reduced to carnage by streams of bullets from two machine pistols.

Among the seven dead, said the text, were four now identified as major underworld figures, one passerby who had been leaving as the gunmen entered and two waiters.

"Personally, no," said Devereaux.

"Well, there are a lot of people in this town who think otherwise."

"Your point, Mr. Silver?"

"My point, Mr. Devereaux, is that your goddamn Project Cobra seems to have achieved a form of underworld civil war that is turning this country into the kind of charnel house that we have seen in northern Mexico for the past decade. And it has got to stop."

"May we cut to the chase?"

"Please do."

"Almost two years ago, our mutual commander in chief asked me, quite specifically, whether it would be possible to destroy the cocaine industry and trade, both of which were clearly out of control and had become a nationwide scourge. I replied, after intensive study, that it would be possible if certain conditions were fulfilled and at certain cost-hopefully short-term."

"But you never mentioned the streets of three hundred cities running with blood. You asked for two billion dollars and you got that."

"Which was the financial cost only."

"You never mentioned the civil-outrage cost."

"Because you never asked. Look, this country spends fourteen billion dollars a year via a dozen official agencies and gets nowhere. Why? Because the cocaine industry in the U.S. alone, never mind Europe, is worth four times that. Did you really think the creators of cocaine would switch to jelly beans if we asked them? Did you really think the American gangs, among the most vicious in the world, would move into candy bars without a fight?"

"That is no reason for our country being turned into a war zone."