Hunter Killer - Alex King Series 12 (2021) by A P BATEMAN

Author:A P BATEMAN [BATEMAN, A P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lake Como, Italy

Located in a large basin within mountains giving way to numerous steep valleys through which funnelled wind met the water, Lake Como was renowned for its complex weather system. Often the lake could be seen dotted with masts and spray from sailing boats crashing through troughs, sails full and tacking dramatically tight courses, only for those same boats to be stranded in the middle of calm water, held hostage to still air and a mirrored surface from which there was often no escape for hours on end. There were few places on earth with such complex and fickle sailing conditions, and the locals even had names for the winds. There was the Breva - the prevailing wind, with its anticyclonic rotation it blew frequently. In the Alto Lago di Como, compared to the rest of the lake, the Breva wind was strengthened by an intensity that easily exceeded twenty-knots, accompanied often by significant wave motion. The Tivano was the morning thermal wind, with lower intensity. And the Ventone or Vento was the northerly wind that blows in strong gusts during the afternoons, often reaching forty knots. The Fohn was a wind that was accompanied by a rise in temperature, and the Garzeno or Garzenasco wind descended from the valleys of Garzeno and was usually associated with thunderstorms concentrated on the high ground above the town of Dongo.

Giuseppe Fortez did not tire of watching the lake and its turbulent waters. Since arriving here, he had noticed how the wind whipped up the lake, but how the conditions never lasted long, and as the days had warmed to spring, he could now set his watch by the change in wind and the daily temperature. There was little else for him to do here. Of course, he had been lucky to live through the takeover. What his grandfather had built up, the empire born from unions and workers’ rights had swelled to organised crime, wartime profiteering, switching of wartime allegiances and heavy-handed domination of the backstreets of towns and cities, and then entire regions of his beloved Italy. His father before him had commanded the regions of Tuscany and Umbria with the same ruthlessness as the Dons of Sicily but had remained out of the witch-hunts that had followed, paying off the right people and the wrong people with a little bit more. After he had succeeded his father Giuseppe Fortez had ruled with an iron fist, and had built a fortune, but in handing over the reins to his two sons, that fortune had been slowly eroded. Poor investments, battles with rival gangs and families, encroaching foreign organised crime and the reliance upon drugs and weapons as their stock-in-trade had weakened the family. The focus had changed, and his sons had forgotten the old ways. To intimidate and harm one’s enemies, rather than merely kill them meant that there was the chance for further extortion. Yes, the previous generations of Fortez men had killed, but to kill too soon was to close an account, a line of opportunity.

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