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Death Metal
Don Pendleton


DEATH TRACKWhen a Scandinavian heavy-metal band claims to possess the ordnance to wage a war, no one takes them seriously…despite their ties to right-wing extremists. But then a band member is murdered, and the weapons stash proves authentic. A remote, deserted military base on the Norwegian border with Finland harbors a stockpile of firearms and nuclear devices from the Soviet era. With news of the cache spreading, rabid political and paramilitary groups vie to seize the weaponry. The U.S. has just one good move: send in Mack Bolan.Tracking his enemies across the unforgiving Nordic landscape, Bolan blazes a hot path of destruction, even when the trail runs cold. But with so many competing interests, eliminating one threat gives rise to another. The frigid North is about to be blown off the map, unless Bolan can force the warmongers to face the music. And the Executioner's tune is almost always deadly.







DEATH TRACK

When a Scandinavian heavy-metal band claims to possess the ordnance to wage a war, no one takes them seriously...despite their ties to right-wing extremists. But then a band member is murdered, and the weapons stash proves authentic. A remote, deserted military base on the Norwegian border with Finland harbors a stockpile of firearms and nuclear devices from the Soviet era. With news of the cache spreading, rabid political and paramilitary groups vie to seize the weaponry. The U.S. has just one good move: send in Mack Bolan.

Tracking his enemies across the unforgiving Nordic landscape, Bolan blazes a hot path of destruction, even when the trail runs cold. But with so many competing interests, eliminating one threat gives rise to another. The frigid North is about to be blown off the map, unless Bolan can force the warmongers to face the music. And the Executioner’s tune is almost always deadly.


The grenades detonated almost simultaneously

The ground shook with the force of the blasts as Mack Bolan and his partner raced from cover, crouching and firing at the terrorists’ positions, spraying the areas where the grenades had landed.

The two Estonians in the blast range had been silenced, either dead or too injured to return fire. That left just one man, who was forced from his position by the hail of gunfire that peppered his cover. He tried to run, but there was nowhere to hide and he was mowed down quickly.

Knowing that they had to claim the truck and clear the area before the Russian military on-site closed in, Bolan jogged to the vehicle and wrenched open its back doors.

For one moment the world seemed to lurch to a sickening stop. Several of the nuclear devices were stacked inside, the trigger mechanisms attached and the weapons armed….


Death Metal

Don Pendleton







I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

—Ronald Reagan,

1911–2004

No question the world would be a better place if nuclear weapons were rendered impotent. But they aren’t and, until they are, when called upon, I’ll lay my life on the line to keep them out of the hands of madmen.

—Mack Bolan


Contents

CHAPTER ONE (#u13df1616-0b19-50c2-b1d5-e175ed1c084f)

CHAPTER TWO (#ue78af2bb-8297-54f4-bd96-4c7f34a6f967)

CHAPTER THREE (#u1b8e09cb-c445-523b-b6fe-2019fbf17140)

CHAPTER FOUR (#u55a30677-c590-58e6-9c86-a09e99cdf500)

CHAPTER FIVE (#ue08ff332-b9d3-55e6-be2c-f80c2c9d9485)

CHAPTER SIX (#u53c02b76-a607-569b-9a6b-c8b996dc2e96)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#u8c59b9a1-0b5c-5b71-9651-e92dd3460b3c)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE

Shale rolled and slipped beneath the soles of Mack Bolan’s boots as he half ran, half slid down the red dust and rock slope, leaning back against the incline so that he could keep an easy balance. Despite the speed at which he moved, he was breathing easily, hardly working up a sweat. That would come later, when the terrain became really hostile.

Cones and firs littered the surface of the ravine as he reached the shallow dip at the bottom, the creek showing a bed nearly dried by a long drought, the waters reduced to a narrow channel that Bolan traversed with one step. On the far side the rock rose sharply, the gradient harsher than the one he had just run. His pace slowed as he began something that was less of a run, more of a climb. In places he was almost vertical to the rock, using handholds to aid his progress.

His breathing came harder now, the lightweight tent and provision pack on his back starting to register where it had been insignificant just a few minutes before. His ordnance was stripped down: a Beretta 93R pistol holstered in the small of his back and a Lee-Enfield rifle slung across his shoulders.

The soldier felt a pool of sweat gather in the hollow beneath the holster, and his black T-shirt felt clammy. Despite the increased effort, he grinned; this was what he wanted, to push himself a little. The strain and burn in his thigh muscles felt good, and the relief when he reached the summit and was on level ground again was sweet.

Bolan, aka the Executioner, stopped and looked around him, drawing great gulps of air into his lungs. His gaze went back over the ravine and across the plain that he had run since pitching camp that morning. Ten, twelve klicks? Not bad. It was still before noon, judging by the blazing sun that had not yet reached the summit of the sky. He checked his watch and nodded to himself.

He had chosen this part of Colorado because the climactic conditions at this time of year were not that far removed from sections of North Africa and the Middle East. A lot of his work had taken him there in the past few years, and he figured he could use some conditioning for future missions.

Bolan shrugged the Lee-Enfield and the backpack off his shoulders. He had kept his water in the pack as a test of endurance. On his belt it would have been too easy to take in when his dry throat demanded. Secreted in the pack, to yield to temptation would have meant a break in his progress, and that was enough to keep that lure at a distance.

As he took out the water and swallowed a long drink to quench the burning in his throat, he amused himself with the thought that Walt Whitman was getting to him. The soldier rarely found himself with downtime to read anything other than documents and books that were mission related.

So when Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, cyberwizard at Stony Man Farm, had downloaded Leaves of Grass to the soldier’s smartphone with the recommendation that he should break training each evening with a few stanzas appropriate to the landscape he had chosen, Bolan had been skeptical. He had to admit, however, that the nineteenth-century poet had tapped into something eternal about the American landscape. Bolan had been able to push his body and rest his mind.

Choosing this place had given him that luxury. Secluded, isolated and well off the beaten track for any military or civilian activity, he was unlikely to be interrupted. A quick satellite scan from Stony Man before he arrived had confirmed that. It was exactly what he had wanted. Usually Bolan spent his entire life as taut as a wire—something that could not continue indefinitely without that wire snapping. He needed to rest that part of himself, from time to time, even while he pushed his body.

Throughout the morning, unconsciously as he ran, his ears had been tuned to the sounds of nature around him. Each snap of a branch beneath his feet, each tumble of shale, the distant call of circling birds and the rustling of mammals shying away from his intrusive presence. All of that had registered and had been processed by his mind, analyzed and dismissed as nonthreatening as he had passed by.

He needed to switch off a little. It was time to play with the present that Barbara Price, mission controller at the Farm and his sometime lover, had given him the last time he had seen her.

“It’s not my birthday,” he had murmured when she had handed him the package.

“It’ll be a long time before it’s your birthday again,” she had replied knowingly. “Just trying to get a little culture into you,” she had added.

“You’ve been talking to Bear...” he had said cryptically, not bothering to explain as he had unwrapped the MP3 player.

“It’s been loaded with a whole lot of stuff. Put it on Shuffle—you’ll find out there’s more to life than Springsteen, Sinatra and Mellencamp,” she had stated.

Now, out in the wilds, he did as Price had asked, and slipped the buds into his ears before setting the MP3 playlist mode and looking at the vast deserted expanse around him. His grin broadened as the first piece of music swelled in his head, seeming to fill the very air around him, even though the forest’s perfect stillness and silence remained, should he choose to pull the buds from their resting place. He recognized the piece as being by Copland, one of his mother’s favorites, and there was nothing—and no one—who he could think of as more appropriate to his surroundings.

Bolan stood perfectly rigid against the sky as the music took him on a journey that relaxed his mind so that he could feel the tension slip from his body, only the loose elasticity of his easy-but-still-animal-alert muscles betraying anything other than complete relaxation.

Suddenly a charging surge of bilious, overamplified and distorted guitar chords blurred into a white noise punctuated by a barrage of bass drums shot through with a bass guitar so low that it was barely audible—more felt than heard. Smashing through this, like an insistent pickax to the head, a snare drum beat a rhythm that had all the swing of a boot camp parade ground and threatened to spear Bolan’s frontal lobe with a viciousness that felt like a migraine.

As the rhythm became more disjointed and jerky, something that might have been a human voice—but only by association—joined the mix. It sounded for the world as though someone was either belching or hurling or maybe both. Singing was hardly the description Bolan would have used for it, but as there seemed to be syllables that were vaguely related to words somewhere in there, he could only guess that this was the purpose.

“What the—” Bolan pulled the buds from his ears and looked at the face of the MP3 player. It told him that this shapeless and formless mess had a title—so was presumably intended to be a song—and even had a band that was prepared to hold up its hands and claim ownership.

The “song” was appropriately entitled “To the Gates of Oblivion,” and the group claiming credit for this little masterpiece—and on reflection he guessed it probably was in its own way—was named Abaddon Relix. Which was what? A reference to some old demonic mythological figure? Bolan had a vague recollection of the name Abaddon from somewhere, but the Relix bit? Who knew?

One thing was for sure, it was such a testosterone-fuelled racket that Bolan very much doubted Price was responsible for placing it on the playlist.

He was pretty sure he knew who, though. He hit a speed-dial number on his smartphone as he killed the noise—now tinny and hollow at a distance—before dropping the MP3 player on top of his pack.

“Striker, you’re supposed to be chilling out and working that musculature,” Kurtzman said with some surprise. “What’s up?”

“Barbara’s MP3 player,” Bolan replied flatly.

“What? Don’t like the tunes?” Kurtzman asked.

“I’m guessing that you maybe had a say in what she loaded onto it.”

“Aah,” Kurtzman said followed by a pause. “Which little aural delight has tickled your ears, Striker?”

“Abaddon Relix,” Bolan said.

“Interesting little band, isn’t it?”

“That’s one word for it. I know you all think I have limited tastes, but when I hear something like that, I think that may not be such a bad thing.”

“I was just trying to broaden your horizons a little. You’d be surprised at what I put on there without her knowing.”

“I don’t think so,” Bolan replied. “It doesn’t really go with the landscape. Good call on the Whitman, Bear, but I wonder if you may need to get a hearing test.”

“Admittedly it’s not to everyone’s taste,” Kurtzman conceded. “There is one thing, though. It wasn’t entirely for leisure or for the sake of shaking you up a little that I put that band on there. They were on my mind, as the name has cropped up in some unlikely places of late.”

Bolan’s interest was piqued. “Unlikely as in work related?”

“Could be. When you pitch your tent for the night, take a little time to look them up on YouTube.”

“I’m guessing you’re not expecting me to be drooling at the thought of concert footage?”

“There’s plenty of that but no—the more recent video uploads have been of a radically different nature. Tell me, Striker, what do you know about black metal and death metal?”

“There’s a difference?”

“Musically, yes, if you like them. If you don’t, then the similarities mirror the closeness that exists in their worldview. Maybe you should surf a little. It’ll while away the twilight hours.”

“Homework? You think something could be that imminent?”

“I have a hunch, and you know how that works.”

Bolan looked at the sun high above him. If he set out now, he could be at his map objective well before dusk. It looked like he needed to be; it may well prove to be a long evening.

“Oh, yeah, I know how that works,” he eventually replied.

* * *

IT WAS A LONG AND DULL drive from Helsinki to Karelia. Baron Kristalnacht—or Arvo, to his mother and father—sat in the rear of the car, slowly sinking the level of his bottle of vodka while his moaning became a lower rumble in his throat.

He was just the drummer, was he? Everyone made fun of the drummer. Drummers were stupid; they knew nothing; and all they were good for was hitting things. That was what the rest of the band thought. He knew that, and he was slowly getting more and more pissed off about it.

“You think I’m some kind of moron, right?” he slurred in a louder voice.

Severance—Uhro to his parents, who hadn’t realized he was taking the car when he told them he was going out—frowned through the windshield as he leaned over the wheel, trying to see through the sleet that the wipers were barely touching. Arvo was a prick, but not because he was a drummer. He was a prick because he had a big mouth. Severance didn’t need this kind of hassle. He had enough problems, more pressing concerns.

“You’re not answering, man,” the Baron admonished him, gesturing with the bottle and cursing when some of the spirit threatened to slop out of the neck. “Who found it in the first place? Why does that idiot Mauno want to take the credit?”

“Because he has an ego as big as your drinking problem,” Severance replied. “That’s why he went to Norway and we’re here, keeping an eye on things. And that’s why he took Jari with him—because he’s a big lug who hits first and asks questions later.”

The Baron smiled with the absent humor of a drunk. “Man, that Jari, he really is stupid. He should have been a drummer, if not for the fact he can play a guitar like an angel. A dark one, of course,” he corrected himself.

He stopped, looked puzzled for a second, then continued. “Sev, you write the words. You can death grunt better than Mauno, and his guitar playing is shit. Jari could do it all in the studio, and it’s not like we gig that much. Why is Mauno in the band anyway?”

“Because,” Severance said through gritted teeth, “he’s the one with the vision and the drive. That’s what he keeps telling me, anyway. I just wish he’d kept it to the music.”

“Man, that’s our turnoff,” the Baron interrupted, gesturing recklessly with the bottle as they approached.

“I know,” Severance growled. “I’m not a drummer. Now just sit back and shut up until we get there. I need to concentrate in this crappy weather.” He wondered briefly if he should get the Baron to check their guns before they arrived on site, just in case, before figuring that asking a drunk drummer to check firearms in the enclosed space of a car was not a good idea.

They entered the province of Karelia, headed for a spot in the north where the region ran into the border with the old Soviet Union. Severance felt his guts churn. He wondered how Mauno was getting on in Norway.

* * *

FLASH BOMBS EXPLODED on stage and reminded Mauno of the sight he had beheld the previous evening. A small wooden church with a stone foundation, fifty klicks from Trondheim, in a tiny village whose name he couldn’t even remember now.

Five young men had invited Jari and himself along to witness their dedication to the cause. Mauno suspected that it was also to test any nerve that he and Jari might have. He would never have admitted it to anyone, but his bowels turned to water during that night. Jari, now, he was another matter. He was a Neanderthal who knew no fear because he had no sense.

They had driven out of the rehearsal warehouse in Trondheim that Asmodeus used as their base and through the pitch-dark night at frightening speed. The band had played its entire set in practice for this night’s show and had ingested large amounts of whiskey along with fat lines of amphetamine sulfate. That had already pumped them up, long before the anticipation of what they were about to do had increased their adrenaline levels.

“It’s been too long since churches and Christians were put in their rightful place, yes?” Ripper Sodomizer, the bass player, had chuckled.

Just as the rest of the Norwegian band, he was built like a bodybuilder, his face streaked with white and black face paint—they preferred to rehearse as they would play live—that had run with heat and sweat, making him look like a ghostly clown. The band members were known to Mauno only by their stage names, just as he was known to them only as Count Arsneth.

Despite the fact that his identity was also unknown to them, he felt alone and very small as he watched the brawny men—now dressed in black from head to foot with their face paint removed—take explosives from the back of the car, prime them and move in planned formation to plant them. Once they returned to their vehicle, they waited in silence as the timer fuse played out. Then they celebrated with high fives as the night air was shattered and split by the sound of timber and stone being blown into fragments, fire catching on what remained and lighting the night sky.

Jari had joined them, but Mauno had kept his distance under the guise of studying the carnage with approval. When Arvo had told the rest of the band of his discovery, Mauno had seen a way of using this to improve their standing in the underground world of black metal.

For too long, he had told them, there had been bands that only talked and did not follow through on their words. Not like the old days, when the music had been young, and the likes of Count Grisnacht and Euronymous had been willing to walk the walk.

When Arvo pointed out that Grisnacht was serving a life term and Euronymous was dead, Mauno had brushed that aside. He had learned from the mistakes of those pioneers, so they would not be caught.

No one knew their real identities, after all. They did not register their songs; they never signed anything except in their band identities, and even their friends—most of whom had no interest in black metal—didn’t know who they were. They were the four geeks into metal, but that was all. It was like being a superhero and having a secret identity. The secret, hugged close to the chest, was what mattered.

Except that now Mauno was beginning to wonder about that. The Norwegian band had played up a storm, and their fans in the small subterranean club were going nuts. The sound had been deafening, even before the flash bombs. It wasn’t like this in Finland.

Down here, everyone knew who the band members were, called them by real names, not made-up ones. Most of the audience was also part of a band and, from the introductions made earlier in the evening, were also church burners. After a long hiatus, the bands had taken up the attack once more.

It was still small-time enough to be a local phenomenon. As yet it hadn’t been noticed in the rest of the world, though the shell-shocked Norwegians were alert to its implications, and the rest of Scandinavia was catching up. What the metallers wanted was something that would really catch the eye of the world and get them taken seriously.

This was something Abaddon Relix had...and how. That had been their calling card and their bargaining tool to get into the scene.

The problem was that, as the band and the audience drank more and talked more, greeting Mauno and Jari as old friends and new heroes, it struck Mauno that he was getting them all in a hell of a lot deeper than he could cope with.

Eventually the crowd began to disperse and the band collected its meager share of the door money before starting to pack its gear. Jari helped them eagerly, though it didn’t escape the notice of Ripper that Mauno was less than keen.

“You didn’t enjoy yourself, my friend?” he asked.

“Of course I did. It’s just that I have things on my mind,” Mauno hedged.

Ripper eyed him shrewdly. “So have we all. Your discovery and your offer were something that none of us expected. I have to confess, you are not what I expected, but I put that down to you being a thinker rather than doer—a planner and strategist, if you like.

“Now Jari here,” he added with a laugh, clapping the guitarist on the shoulder as he walked by with a Marshall amp in his arms, “he is one of us through and through. If not for him, perhaps I would not have trusted you so quickly. Plus, of course, he plays like a bastard devil.” He shot the guitarist a grin, which was returned.

Ripper left his bandmates and the giant Finn, moving over to Mauno and putting a protective arm around his shoulder as he led him away from the others. He spoke softly but with a firmness that made Mauno’s blood run cold.

“What you offer to us is something that can change the way the world looks at us. They will realize how serious we are about our aims and the purity of our vision. This is not just about music, as you know. We have friends throughout Eastern Europe who were under the Communist heel for far too long and have no wish for liberalism to let that in again by the back door.

“Nor do they wish those same liberal fools to spread miscegenation across lands that have remained true to their own. Like us, they have struggled to be taken seriously. You have given us the tools to make that happen, and for that we will always be grateful, and you will always be heroes of the cause. The name of Abaddon Relix will live on for more than just their excellent music and lyrics.”

“That’s very good of you to say so,” Mauno said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice but wincing as he heard himself and realized that he had not been entirely successful. He was also painfully aware that Ripper had spoken at great length, not just because he wanted Mauno to hear his views, but so Ripper could carefully guide Mauno into a darkened corner of the club, where two men sat at a booth.

They were dressed in black, much as the audience had been, but where those young men had almost prided themselves on their length of hair, these two were proud to sport the cropped version. They had the look of men with a military or paramilitary past. There was a hardness to their chiseled features and defined muscles that spoke of more than being the gym rats the Norwegian band were. These guys were the real deal.

While Ripper introduced them as Milan and Seb, Mauno knew that these were not their real names. They were hiding behind their pseudonyms much as he and his band—and the Norwegian band—hid behind their own more outrageous tags. They shook hands without standing and gestured to Mauno that he should be seated. The firm pressure of Ripper’s arm on his shoulders, pushing him down, allowed him no room for dissent.

“You’re a lucky man,” Milan began without preamble. “You’re in at the start of a glorious revolution. Fate had chosen the four of you to be our figureheads. Of course you’ll need guidance, which we can give you. You rock. We fight. We’ll show you what you need to do. There is just one thing...”

“What’s that?” Mauno asked through a parched throat.

Milan leaned forward. His voice was little more than an impression of a whisper, yet to Mauno it was as loud as the night’s performance.

“You’d better not be lying to us....”


CHAPTER TWO

The clear, star-filled Colorado night was peaceful and still as Bolan sat by the fire he had built near the lightweight tent. Contained by stones, the fire needed hardly any brush to start the flames and was designed to cause as little disruption as possible to the environment while he heated his meal and the water for coffee.

It would have given those who opposed him and what he stood for pause for thought if they could have seen him. For the soldier it felt good to leave as little impact on the immediate environment as possible, seeing how many of the actions he was forced to perform during his workday missions used vast amounts of resources.

There was, however, one form of pollution that he could not avoid. As he lay back under the stars with the remains of the coffee and relaxed in his sleeping bag, noise pollution rent the air as he used his smartphone to browse YouTube.

Kurtzman may have had a sense of humor that left some people baffled, but even allowing for that, Bolan knew that there was no way Kurtzman would want Bolan to endanger his hearing on Abaddon Relix unless there was good cause.

For a band that he had never heard of, they had a hell of a lot of material on the internet. There were clips of them in rehearsal and fewer of them performing in front of a crowd. It took Bolan a while to follow link to link, unpleasant blasts of guitar chords and drum beats spilling tinnily into the otherwise quiet night, before he came to the material that Kurtzman had intended him to find.

It began with some jumpy and hard to follow footage of the four—three of them in view, the other holding a phone or camera—trekking through a clump of forest that was thick and overlain with a carpet of fern and grasses. Their breath misted, and—checking the date uploaded—it had been a recent trip.

The clip then jump cut to an entrance to a bunker. It was too dark to see clearly, either because night fell or the entrance was buried in some way. Bolan paused the clip, made it full screen and was sure that there were earthen walls around them.

Hitting Play, he watched while the three men in front of the camera opened the doors into the bunker. They yielded easily, and the men knew what they were doing. They had been there before. Too young to have been serving soldiers in their lifetimes, it had to be that this was another visit after their initial discovery.

Wherever it was in Finland, it had to be well hidden. Bolan wondered how they had chanced on it, then dismissed the thought from his mind. How was irrelevant. It was what happened from here that was important.

As they hit the lights and the camera whited-out for a second before readjusting to the new levels, the soldier knew that they had been able to scope out the bunker fully on their previous visit or visits. The assurance and speed with which they made their way through the corridors confirmed that.

They were talking rapidly in Finnish. Bolan had only a smattering of it—Finnish wasn’t a language he had ever been required to pick up quickly at any time—and so most of what they had said was lost to him. One thing was for sure: they were excited by their find, and as they showed the rooms to the camera—and so to the outside world—Bolan’s sense of unease began to grow incrementally.

He recognized the design of the bunker. It was Soviet—probably built sometime during the 1970s to judge by its design—and occupied up until the fall of the USSR by border patrols.

Despite the fact that the Soviet authorities had always denied to the free West the existence of such bunkers along all of their borders—and those of any Eastern Bloc country—enough proof of them had turned up since the dissolution of the USSR to prove otherwise. Documentary evidence was scant, but some had been found, along with eyewitness accounts, to stamp the truth into history.

Now it looked like these guys had found yet another bunker. This one was fairly well preserved. The dust and dirt that would gather over a twenty-year period of desertion was there, and the walls were stained with dampness that had seeped through the neglected construction and insulation as the long Finnish winters had taken their toll.

The thing that concerned Bolan most of all was that the bunker had been deserted pretty quickly, rather than with a structured withdrawal. There were still maps, posters, pinups and notices on the walls. The bedding in the dorms had been left on the cots, some still in disarray as though men had risen that very morning and just walked out the door.

There were books scattered about, personal belongings that were either neglected where they had been placed twenty years before or were smashed where these four young men had had some fun before getting bored.

Boredom was something they seemed to get with ease. As those thoughts passed through Bolan’s mind, the video had reached the kitchen of the bunker. Even here twenty-year-old dirty dishes lay in stagnant greasy sinks, covered with scum and accumulated dust, while the fridges still hummed. How the power plant had kept working for so long was a mystery. Leaving maintenance aside, there was the question of fuel for the generator.

If the bunker did not rely solely on its own power source, then it had to be linked in some way to a main supply. Running a cable out to such a remote spot was no easy undertaking.

Bolan watched uneasily while the members of Abaddon Relix took food from the fridge, threw it at each other and made disparaging remarks about Russian food as they did so. Bolan’s Finnish was just strong enough to pick out a few cuss words—the golden rule of any language being that the first thing you learned was to curse—and as much as he wanted to fast forward to what he feared was coming, he did not want to risk missing anything important.

So he remained patient and watched as they fooled around, moving out of the kitchen and down another winding corridor until they were outside a metal door that the Executioner recognized all too well. Their mood had sobered now, and they were talking in more subdued voices. There seemed to be some argument, and then the camera jerked and swooped as it was handed from one to another, the man behind it so far now coming out in front of the camera.

He stared into the lens, his eyes seeming to bore into the viewer. He was undoubtedly the leader of this group—the way in which they had deferred to him seemed to bear that out—and whatever this group had to say, he was damn sure he was the man to say it.

He coughed as he stood in front of the door, and when he spoke, it was in faintly accented English.

“Hey, world. I am Count Arsneth. We are Abaddon Relix, and we are not just a band. Everything we sing and write about has a meaning. All you fools out there think that metal is just music and that we’ll grow out of it. It’s a way of life, and you need to get over it. Our beliefs, along with those of our Norwegian brothers, are about the return of the old ways.

“Men need to make a stand for the purity of their people and their culture. We have evolved a way of life that is true to nature, and is the only way to live honestly and free. Religion just seeks to oppress you and keep you down. Keep you small. You need to think big, man. You are your own destiny. You control yourself when you are a man. We want our nation to be this way and not take any of that other shit from other cultures.

“We don’t want to integrate with people who know nothing about culture other than the weak crap they want to foist on us. Screw them. The time has come to fight back. Already the weak-willed Christians are suffering once more at the hands of our Norwegian brothers. We will take it one step further. We will help them to take it one step further. We will show you all that we are for real....”

He stopped ranting and turned to the door. Bolan had noticed that this Count Arsneth had not blinked once during the machine-gun rattle of his delivery, as though he had learned it by heart and was delivering it like the lyrics of their songs. Only this time he didn’t sound like he was vomiting.

Leaving aside the puerile and adolescent nature of much of what the leader had said, there was an underlying, if unreasoned, streak of extreme right-wing racism in some of his assumptions that put the band perfectly in line with what Bolan knew of black metal politics—even the most cursory search at Kurtzman’s behest earlier in the evening had shown Bolan this, before he had braced himself for the metal onslaught—and placed these four, given their location, firmly in the frame for the extreme right-wing terrorism that was a bubbling undercurrent throughout Eastern Europe.

Given what Bolan was sure these guys had found behind that door, this could never be a good thing.... As he watched, Arsneth opened the heavy metal door and revealed an armory that was fully stocked with boxes of twenty-year-old Russian army–issued SMGs, revolvers, rifles, ammunition and grenades. It had been a fairly large bunker—maybe up to a dozen men at full complement—and the armory reflected that. But there was more. Toward the rear of the room there was another door, which had an electronic locking system that was keypad activated.

Without the key there was no way they should have been able to get into that room, but Bolan knew how the minds of bored, fatigued and jaded soldiers worked. Over time, the code would be forgotten; changing it would be a royal pain in the ass; and so to avoid the hassle, someone would scratch the code into the metal plate above the keypad. After all they were left to their own devices, and the chances of actually having to use the room were so remote...

Bolan cursed the lazy mind of the career soldier left to rot by his government as Arsneth keyed in a series of numbers with confidence, the rusty door creaking and yielding. The concrete frame had shifted in the earth, and the door caught on the floor with a grinding noise as it opened. But open it did. Arsneth walked through, followed by the other band members, with the new cameraman at the rear.

Bolan cursed again under his breath. This time it was because he saw what had excited the band members so much, and made a bunch of teenage misfits with a chip on their shoulder and a fetish for the devil so dangerous.

The room contained a row of squat gray cylinders with painted noses, as well as a sealed safe in one corner, which Bolan knew from its design and his experience was lead lined.

Why the Soviets had desired to stash a small arsenal of nukes on the Finnish border was a mystery. Had they been in transit, in storage, or had there been some contingency plan for defense or attack that had been lost in the ensuing decades? It didn’t matter. The fact that their presence could not now be explained was another irrelevancy. What mattered was that the arsenal was there—and that they had been discovered by one of the least likely and most volatile parties that could have stumbled onto them.

The upload ended with a lingering shot of the gray cylinders. Arsneth had been pretty restrained, as had the other members of the band, and had said nothing, letting the room speak for itself. It was likely that those few souls who actually liked the band for their music—Bolan couldn’t imagine them offhand but was willing to concede that they may exist—would be unable to recognize the missiles for what they were, even though the rest of the armory was pretty identifiable. Viewers might even think the whole thing was a setup, some kind of promotional gimmick. They weren’t the ones who concerned the soldier.

He had little doubt that the kind of right-wing fascist terrorists that Abaddon Relix’s music, geographical location and politics brought them into contact with would be able to identify the missiles and the veracity of the bunker’s contents with no trouble at all.

And they would be all over the teenage metal band like a rash of the worst kind.

A sense of foreboding came over Bolan. So much so that, for a moment, he did not register that YouTube had brought up a menu of associated clips on the screen. Most of them were of the same band and were clips that he had already dismissed. There was, however, one that he had not seen before: burning a church with Count Arsneth. He looked at the date. The video had been uploaded only the day before.

Bolan set the clip to Play and watched the bombing of the Norwegian church that had taken place less than thirty-six hours before. He recognized Arsneth and the giant who had thrown food in the bunker and played guitar. Their other two band members didn’t seem to be there.

Of more concern was the fact that another group, the members of a Norwegian band, instrumental in attacking the church, seemed a whole lot more businesslike. They spoke to the camera forcefully yet calmly. Their rant differed little from that of the previous band, except that it was somewhat better reasoned and a tad more mature in that it lacked the juvenile chip on the shoulder.

Bolan watched their exultation as the church went up in flames and smoke, and noted that, although the giant seemed happy to join them, there was something about Arsneth that was subdued and nervous.

Was he regretting getting in that deep? Posturing was one thing; taking your actions onto the battlefield and into combat was quite another.

Hitting the back button, Bolan ignored the clip of the bunker as it played again. Instead, he looked at how many hits the clip had received and at the comments below. Already it had racked up ten thousand hits, and there were over two hundred comments.

Ignoring the sound track, he read through them. Some were unintelligible, either because they were in Finnish or Norwegian, or because their English was so poor that it was hard to work out what they were trying to say. But some were chillingly comprehensible, messages of white power, of Aryan culture, and of support and even offers of assistance or to buy the weapons from the band.

Bolan put down the smartphone, the clip still reeling, and stood up, walking away from the fire and feeling the chill night air pluck at his skin. The dark outlines of the distant mountains and outcrops were black against the wine-dark sky, its stars distant beacons of light in the wan glow of a crescent moon.

In the name of their supposed freedom, the men who had appended those messages would take away the freedoms and even the lives of others. Bolan believed in freedom and democracy, but not at the expense of someone riding roughshod over others because they didn’t fit Bolan’s view.

Democracy was a funny thing. The rage and hate against others he had just seen was allowed to go unchecked in that name. Didn’t anyone moderate that kind of crap? He guessed they would eventually, but by then, it would be too late. It might already be. How many terrorist groups were after Abaddon Relix, whether the band sought them or not?

Bolan thought about it. Kurtzman had had a hunch, and his hunches were usually informed by a little more than just intuition. He had picked up something and was ahead of the wave, as usual.

The Executioner allowed himself a chuckle. The whole point of being out here was to train and acclimatize for those climates most likely to be points of duty.

It looked like he might be doing a 180 on that and sooner than he would have thought.


CHAPTER THREE

“This is a very nice place. You’re not from here, are you? You must be pretty well loaded.”

Count Arsneth nodded. His mouth was dry, and he felt unable to actually speak in the presence of the two short-haired men. Every word seemed to carry an undertone of threat, to be loaded with a number of meanings. Maybe he was just overthinking things. That was driven from his mind by Jari’s response.

“The Count, his parents, are plenty loaded, man. That’s why he’s in the band—we couldn’t afford shit without his parents.”

Arsneth could have hit him, hard, except Jari was a hell of a lot bigger and would have hit back harder. That wasn’t the only reason Arsneth was angry. He wanted these people to know as little about him as possible. He also didn’t want them to think he was some kind of dilettante—though he was, frankly—as it would put him at a disadvantage in what was to come.

Which, to judge from the way Ripper, Milan and Seb were looking at him, was not going to be good.

“You rent this in your own name then?” Milan asked as he went to the fridge and took out two beers, tossing one to Seb with an implied assumption of ownership that made his point well.

Arsneth nodded. He couldn’t think of himself as Mauno. Mauno was a scared kid; Arsneth was a rock star with a cause.

“Your real name?” Ripper asked, astonished. “You used that? What kind of a idiot are you? You know how easy it will be to trace you back to us?”

“Chill, Rip,” Milan said easily, taking another beer from the fridge and tossing it to the Norwegian musician. “You guys are a lot more careful. The trail stops with a band that doesn’t officially exist. This guy’s a dead end, in more ways than one.”

Jari had thrown himself over the couch into a seated position and had hit the remote for the big-screen TV. He was already in another place, watching a porn channel. But even he could catch the drift of the conversation and was torn away from the grinding on-screen.

“Hey, what did you say to Mauno?” he asked, anger flashing in his eyes. “You screw with him, you screw with me, asswipe.”

Seb grinned. “You can chill, too, big man,” he said, handing Jari a tumbler of Jägermeister poured directly from the bottle. “We just mean that he needs to show us the goods, or we won’t believe him. Anyone can fake a movie set, right?”

Jari took the glass and polished off half of it, before saying, “Hey, Mauno doesn’t lie, and neither do I. Listen, dude, you can come with us to Karelia and see it for yourselves. That’s what we’re here for, right?” Then he finished off the rest of his drink.

“Shut up, Jari,” Mauno snapped in a tight voice.

“What?” Jari queried, his eyes glazing and his brow furrowing. “It is, isn’t it?”

Mauno gave him a look that veered from withering to pitying and back again. It was wasted, a little like Jari. Even as he stared at Mauno, Jari’s eyes rolled, and he began to pass out.

“A little something extra in the drink, just to make sure,” Seb said with some satisfaction. “When he comes around, he won’t remember what happened, which will be useful in more ways than one.”

“You drugged him?” Ripper asked. “Why? He’s supposed to be—”

“He seems like a good soldier,” Milan interrupted, “and he’s a strong enough guy. But he’s loyal to this one—” he indicated Arsneth “—and that makes him dangerous right now. We need answers. We need them quick, and we need to move before we’re beaten to it.”

“Now wait,” Ripper said, stepping between Arsneth and the two terrorists. “Listen, man, he came to us, right? He wants what we want.”

“Does he really?” Milan snapped. “Look at him. He’s a stupid boy playing games who got lucky. They all are. Your men have proved their worth and their dedication to the cause, more than once. These?” He gestured again to Arsneth and to the semicomatose Jari. “They’re kids, rich ones playing at being daring, trying to piss off their parents and leaving a trail that puts us all in danger. It stops now, agreed?”

He eyeballed Ripper, who tensed. Behind him, Arsneth hoped for a moment that the big man would protect him, but this hope was strangled as he saw Ripper’s shoulders slump, and he stepped to one side. Milan stepped into the space and came close to Arsneth, so close that he could smell the sour sweat and the beer on Milan’s breath. When the terrorist spoke, it was softly and with a menace that made Arsneth’s blood run cold.

“You’re going to tell me the location of the bunker. How to get there. And you’re going to tell me where the other two members of your boy group are right now, so we can stop them talking.”

Count Arsneth would have stood up to these men, would have gone down fighting if necessary, never betraying his secret.

Except that Mauno wasn’t Count Arsneth. He was Mauno, a scared nineteen-year-old who was out of his depth and had no escape route. Except that, just maybe, if he told them what they asked, then he would be safe. If he showed them he could cooperate...

In a trembling voice he spilled the location, told them exactly how to get there by road and how to negotiate the woods. Told them that the Baron and Severance were there waiting for Jari and him. And even as he spoke, he knew that it would not save him.

“He’s told you all he can. Let’s just leave him and get on,” Ripper said when Mauno had finished.

“Can’t be done,” Seb said flatly. “He’s gutless. We got that out of him without even having to torture him. He would say anything to anyone. Can’t risk that.”

Mauno felt his stomach flip and his vision blacken at the edges. Hell, it felt like he might have a heart attack and spare them the effort of killing him.

“Don’t worry, little boy, we’ll make it quick,” Milan murmured. Even as the words left his lips, a cheap switchblade knife, palmed as he spoke, found purchase beneath Mauno’s rib cage and drove upward, twisting as it thrust. Mauno, taken by surprise, yielded easily to the blade and doubled over at the force of the blow, his eyes wide in shock. Blood bubbled to his lips as he chokingly tried to scream.

He collapsed onto the floor at Milan’s feet as the terrorist withdrew the blade and let it fall beside the body. He held out his hand and snapped his fingers. Seb passed him a heavy brass horse’s head that had been standing on the mantel. Milan looked at it for a moment and shook his head.

“Shit furnishings and fittings for the price he must have paid,” he muttered before bending and smashing the heavy object on Mauno’s head three times, each blow cracking more of the skull and spreading hair, bone and brain across the carpet. Milan then stood and tossed the brass into the lap of the now comatose Jari.

“What was that about?” Ripper asked, stunned.

Milan shrugged. “The police will figure it out soon enough, but anything that will delay them will give us the time we need.”

“But when Jari comes around—”

“He won’t,” Seb cut in. “He’ll be dead in a few minutes. It will look like alcohol poisoning. At least for a while it will just look like he drank too much, argued with this idiot and then killed him in a drunken rage. By the time they figure it out, we’ll have picked up what we want from the base, gotten rid of the other two kids and be well on our way.”

Ripper shook his head sadly. “He was not a bad guy, this Arsneth. It’s a pity, but...I guess the cause has to come first.”

“It does. And we look after our own,” Milan said coldly as he led them out of the apartment.

As they left, Seb made sure the door was secured so that no one could stumble on the corpses before strictly necessary. The shattered body of Mauno and the slowly dying Jari were left with only the writhing images on the porn channel to show any sign of life.

* * *

BOLAN TOOK OUT his anger by pushing himself harder when the sun came up. The beauty of the Colorado landscape around him did much to take his mind from the idiocy he had seen the night before.

As a soldier he was used to coming up against ideologies that were opposed to his own in the course of combat. That was fine; that was war. He was used to the venality of the criminal mind that would seek to oppress others for its own end. That was fine; there had always been men like that, always would be, and that was why he kept fighting. But the kind of irrational stupidity that he had seen, shapeless and formless, that could almost by accident threaten the innocent and unsuspecting? That was something that angered him.

He ran all day, breaking for water, food and rest at regular intervals. His anger spurred him on so that he covered fifty klicks more than on the day before. He used it to drive his body and tried not to think. That was the worst of it. On a mission he was working to an end. With the Abaddon Relix situation, he had no input; although if Kurtzman was right, it might not be that way for long.

When he settled for the night and made camp, it was still playing on his mind. He waited until he had eaten and was ready to bed down for the night before once more breaking the silence of the Colorado evening with the noise pollution offered by YouTube.

The clip of the bunker was missing. No amount of searches called it up. Most of the nonmusical Abaddon Relix material had also been taken down. He found references to the clip of the burning church, but that too had been removed.

Someone had wanted all evidence of the bunker and of Abaddon Relix’s connection with the Norwegian group to be wiped. The question was who?

Oddly he found this calmed his mind. Something out there was happening, and no way was it good. From frustration he found a sense of purpose flow through him.

It looked like Kurtzman was on the money again.

* * *

BOLAN AWAKENED SHORTLY after dawn. No sooner had he started to rekindle the ashes of his campfire than he was interrupted by his smartphone.

“Striker,” Hal Brognola said when Bolan accepted the call. “Something’s come up. Something urgent. Bear tells me you might have an inkling.”

“Scandinavian climes, Hal? Good morning, by the way.”

“Is it?” the big Fed growled. “I’m not so sure.”

“I couldn’t see a link to the U.S., Hal—how the hell can we justify getting involved in this one?”

Brognola chuckled. “Bear told me you weren’t a fan of death metal or black metal.”

“I wouldn’t have put you down as one, either,” Bolan replied.

“You’ve never met my nephew,” Brognola said, sighing.

“A metal fan, obviously, but what has he got to do with this?”

“Short answer? I buy him stuff, and it’s amazing how much you learn from product description. Florida has been a hotbed of this crap for years. Now they tend not to be the head-case political end of the spectrum down there. More the kind who have just watched too many gore films. But some of them get curious, and there have been tentative links to the far-right bands involved, which kind of links us to the far-right terrorist groups.”

“That links it to the U.S.A., I’ll buy that. But a bunch of rivetheads and survivalists in the swamps aren’t a real threat.”

“Of course not. But the Russians are. Word is that the Russian president has been ranting about how that bunker could have gone unrecovered for so long and how he wants that ordnance back where it belongs.”

“With him, naturally—and we don’t want that, do we?”

“We certainly don’t, Striker, and we also don’t want this to be official. I’ve had Stony Man GPS your cell phone, and there should be a chopper for you within an hour to bring you to Washington for a briefing. Maybe you should have taken that training schedule up to Alaska.”

“Yeah, funny, Hal. Don’t give up your day job.”

* * *

SEVERANCE AND THE BARON were cold, tired and bored. There had been no word from the Count or from Jari—like everyone, they could never think of the Neanderthal by his band name, no matter what—and they had been expecting to get at least a call. Severance had tried to call them, but their cell phones were switched off. That could be for any reason.

In truth what had actually gone down had never occurred to them. As they sat and shivered in the bunker, raiding those sections of the kitchen that Jari hadn’t trashed, running over possibilities between themselves, they figured that the silence was due to security and that the first they would see of their bandmates was when they walked through the bunker doors with the Norwegians.

In between this speculation they moaned at length about how everything else in the bunker seemed to be working except the heating system. Any attempt to get it turned on did nothing more than set the air conditioner to chill the area even more. So they huddled in their blankets, drinking and waiting, hoping that the time would pass quickly and that they would be greeted as heroes by the Count, Jari and the Norwegians.

It didn’t quite go as planned.

Thirty-six hours after they had entered the bunker to guard it, they were awakened from a stupor by the signal that the entrance had been breached. They were sleeping in what had been the control room—a small office with a bank of monitors, only some of which were working, showing the interior of the bunker. Those connected to the outside cameras were blank, the weather having long since eroded their efficiency.

The signal was a regular pulse, accompanied by a flashing red light on the dash. Severance pulled himself to his feet, groaning, and shook the Baron, who was a touch more testy as he awoke.

“They’re here,” Severance muttered.

“Shit. I feel like shit,” the Baron remarked with a tenuous grip on comprehension. “You sure it’s them?”

Severance nodded, wishing as he did that he hadn’t. “They used the right codes.”

The Baron was on the verge of commenting that they could have read them from the scratch marks in the pad—which was what he had done—but refrained as he remembered how long it had taken him to actually locate them—and even then by chance.

“Come on,” Severance continued. “Kitchen. Coffee. They’ll need warming. We need it anyway.”

The two youths made their way to the kitchen area and were in the middle of brewing coffee when Milan, Seb and Ripper entered.

The Baron tried to look past them, expecting to see the Count and Jari, and the other members of Asmodeus.

“Ripper, who are these dudes?” he asked thickly, indicating the short-haired terrorists.

“Where’s Mauno?” Severance added, more to the point. He didn’t have a good feeling about this, though he doubted that his fears had penetrated his companion’s denser brain at this point.

“The Count is dead,” Ripper replied in a monotone. “So is Jari. The rest of my band won’t be coming. This is more serious than that.”

Severance said slowly, “What could be more serious? What do you mean Mauno and Jari are dead? What’s been going on?”

“A lot,” Ripper said as flatly as before.

Severance and the Baron stood facing the three men in silence for a moment, not knowing what to say. Ripper had offered them no explanation; they didn’t know what to think.

“What’s going to happen?” Severance asked quietly.

“I think you know, my friend,” Milan said, speaking for the first time. “What you have found will be invaluable in furthering our cause. Our good friends in Norway know this, which is why they forged these links.”

“Why is only Ripper here, then? And how did Mauno and Jari die?” the Baron persisted. “Do we have enemies we need to guard against?”

Severance looked at his friend. Funny, he had always looked at the Baron as a pain in the ass, but now he realized that the drummer was the only friend he had in the room. The only friend he had in the world, now that Mauno and Jari were gone.

“It’s too late to guard against them, Arvo,” he murmured. “They’re already here.”

“You’re a bright boy,” Milan commented. “Pity your friend had a big mouth. He was a liability. He put you all in the firing line. Maybe you could have been educated and trained, like Ripper’s men.”

“Who says we can’t be?” Severance said desperately.

“Me,” Milan replied simply. “It’s too late. But what you have here will be removed and put to good use before anyone else can get to it. Letting the world know by YouTube was stupid. That kind of idiocy can’t be justified.”

Severance felt his bowels turn to jelly as Milan added a final statement.

“It’ll be quick.”


CHAPTER FOUR

The chopper picked up Bolan from the Colorado Desert, then dropped him in D.C. A waiting unmarked sedan whisked him to the Mall for a meeting with a grim-faced Brognola and Aaron Kurtzman via a conference call on a scrambled line.

After the briefing Bolan had hitched a ride to Bremen with a U.S. troop transport. From there another U.S. service flight had brought him to Oslo on a routine NATO business mission. One thing was for sure. The continued U.S. military presence—even though the Cold War was long dead and buried—was a useful cover for him in hopping around Europe.

The Norges Statsbaner train had taken him from Oslo Airport to Trondheim, this water-surrounded city, the fourth most populated in Norway. Bolan got off the train and felt invigorated by the cold air blowing on his face. After the central heating of the train and the flight that had preceded it, he was glad to feel something sharp on his skin. It refreshed him and reminded him that he was alive.

The hotel he had been booked into was only a short walk from the station, and he took the opportunity to get some air and a feel for the city as he made the journey on foot.

The buildings were a mix of old and new—some clean lines and little exterior decoration with a functionalism that made it of less interest to the tourist than Oslo; plus the city was quieter than Oslo. Maybe that was why the black metal activists preferred to live here rather than the capital.

Even going about their everyday business and keeping their heads down, anyone who looked like the guys Bolan had seen in the videos would be noticeable. Long-haired metal fans were a minority; even without their face paint, these guys would have the tattoos and piercings that would set them apart.

As Bolan checked in and went up to his room, settling in, he went over the briefing he had received before leaving the States.

* * *

“IT’S STRANGE HOW I suddenly became an expert because of tastes that got me laughed at the rest of the time,” Kurtzman had remarked. “Black metal is a strange beast, Striker. For such a macho and posturing music, its protagonists can be surprisingly mild mannered. Either because they’re kids compensating for adolescent feelings of inferiority, or because they realize all their aggressive tendencies through their chosen art form—”

“Like Polynesian traditional theater or Japanese Noh theater,” Bolan interjected.

“Hey, you do read some of those books I leave in your quarters,” Kurtzman commented.

“It’s interesting how people work out their aggressions,” Bolan said. “If more people did that, there would be a whole lot less work for me to do.”

“You’re not about to become redundant,” Brognola growled, cutting across the conversation. “Can we stick to the point?”

“Of course,” Kurtzman said. “My point, in the middle of that discourse, was that the minority of people in these bands—and it’s primarily a male preserve, as you might expect—are committed or obsessive enough to follow through on their beliefs, to take action to realize the aims they profess. But when they do, they can be incredibly destructive.”

“I saw the clip of the burning church,” Bolan commented, keeping the disgust out of his voice. “It’s been a while since they were doing that.”

“Yes, but sadly that’s not the only instance in recent times. However distasteful we find that, though, it’s not the real problem. Since the pendulum started to swing right in Eastern Europe, the bands and followers who take their views seriously have found a lot of people who are willing to help them realize their fantasies and in turn enlist their help.”

“What do the locals have to say about this?” Bolan asked, turning to Brognola.

“The police in Trondheim are attributing the murder to the dead guitarist, who apparently died from acute alcohol poisoning.”

“If he could kill someone with the force and direction indicated by the medical report you emailed to me, then he can’t have been that drunk when he did it. Why keep on drinking? Why not try to get away?”

“Indeed,” Kurtzman said with a sardonic edge. “Particularly as an inventory of the apartment doesn’t seem to indicate there was enough booze there to actually induce the condition. Let alone account for the evidence that at least two other people were there around the estimated time of death.”

“So the locals are happy to tie it up regardless of any evidence to the contrary. Nice.”

“They’re embarrassed about the churches, and it took a long time to recover from the damage the black metal deaths caused back in the nineties.”

“There were links to far-right groups in Trondheim?” Bolan queried.

“Only after that nut-job metalhead—what’s his name—was banged up,” Aaron Kurtzman replied. “And the Norwegian security services have no evidence of any real links between far-right groups and the bands beyond a few messages of support between the two on websites. There are no documented meetings between the factions, and no communications that can be traced.”

“That says more about the Norwegian security services than anything else,” Bolan remarked.

“You were never the most diplomatic of men, Striker,” Brognola murmured, “but I can’t fault your logic. These rogue groups get smarter all the time.”

Bolan sat in silence for a moment, then said, “I guess there’s no point in relying on any local liaison to fill me in. On the other hand, there’s no one to get in my way, and I won’t be interfering with any official lines of inquiry, as there aren’t any. A clear field...it could be a hell of a lot worse.”

* * *

BOLAN WENT OVER this intel to date as he showered and changed before hitting the streets. He had brought with him currencies for both Norway and Finland. The trail began here in Trondheim, but he figured that it would rapidly take him across the border to the lost bunker. The last thing he wanted was to waste time on logistics.

He carried his favored Beretta 93R handgun in an underarm holster, and a micro Uzi SMG clipped to the belt of his blacksuit. Some spare magazines and a couple grenades—smoke and fragmentation— completed his immediate armory, though he had some in reserve in his case. The convenience of using USAF transport was that he could ferry ordnance across borders with no problems.

Stashing his case, he left the hotel, the blacksuit covered by a winter jacket and baggy ski pants, his combat boots not appearing out of place in this cold environment.

Searches by various intelligence services—those of the U.S. and Finland, plus Stony Man’s own resources—had yielded no background on the band Asmodeus, whose members had been at the root of the church burning, and who were known contacts for the dead Finns.

The only proof of their existence entailed email addresses and a website domain—paid for with a credit card that was then paid off in cash and billed to a P.O. Box under the name of a man who had been dead for seven years. Even their music and related videos had no material presence, bought solely on download. Their few local shows seemed to be organized by equally shadowy men under aliases that disintegrated under close examination.

Whoever they were, these ghosts were adept at covering their tracks. In their everyday lives they would be unable to hide their allegiance to a certain type of music because of their looks but would probably pay lip service to a less controversial form of the music. But they had to rehearse somewhere. Sure they would be using other names, but because of the nature of what they played, they would want some privacy.

This was the Achilles’ heel that the Stony Man intel team needed. It was a relatively simple task for them to isolate all rehearsal spaces in Trondheim, or other locales that were hired and used for such a purpose, and whittle down the possibilities.

All the conventional rehearsal spots for musicians could be dismissed out of hand. These would be used by a number of bands, of varying types, and so would be too open for such a necessarily secretive group.

Of the warehouses and spaces remaining, there were eight: two of them were along the dock, and were in areas that were well populated during the working day but deserted at night. The other six were within the city itself, and could hardly be said to be private or isolated at any time.

Bolan opted to check out the isolated venues first. If either of the dockside warehouses were used by Asmodeus, then night would be the best time to scout them out. The band would not wish to be seen by day. As it was now early afternoon, it gave Bolan time to navigate the city and check out the businesses surrounding these prime targets. He was pretty sure that one of the two dock locations would be his objective, but it would be politic to double check.

The first site was not one warehouse but a collection of them. The first two businesses were closed, but a few discreet questions in adjoining shops elicited the information that one warehouse was used by a progressive rock band that spent entire weekends working on complex arrangements that—per the bartender who sold them beer during their breaks—had so far never seen the light of a stage.

A second warehouse in this segment was used by a traditional folk group who threw the space open on weekends for dances and cultural events celebrating Norwegian folk traditions.

The soldier found that the next space was used by a young punk band that was bankrolled by one member’s father—a wealthy lawyer who would do anything to keep his son off the street and out of trouble. That came straight from the lawyer himself, who Bolan encountered helping the band lug its gear into the warehouse.

That left three spaces. In two he found a caretaker—one lugubrious, but the other glad of the chance to stop and talk and let go his mop—from whom Bolan learned that one spot was used by a Norwegian beat group from the sixties who got back together as they hit retirement and sought a hobby, using the space for themselves and also for any musical endeavors of their children and grandchildren. The other was used by a covers band that was working in Denmark for a month, and tended to use the space in concentrated periods to work up an ever-changing set between engagements.

By the time Bolan reached the last space, he felt he knew more about the musical habits of the Norwegians than he really wanted to. He had drawn a blank, but in a sense that was exactly what he wanted. The two locations he would scout tonight were, he was sure, where he would find his prey.

The group he found working in the last space taught him something more about this country of seeming opposites. They were a radical Socialist rock group and theater company, with lyrics that—from his basic knowledge of the language—were clearly enunciated and were about the inequality of capitalism and the need for redistribution of wealth within a free state. With mime, which he could well have done without.

Nonetheless, as he left them to their earnest endeavors, he was reminded that this was a land where the people dealt in extreme views. When they had been invaded by the Nazis during WWII, many had fled to fight in the U.K. for the exiled Norwegian king. Others had formed a resistance at home. And yet around fifteen thousand of the population in this small country had chosen to join the Nazi armed forces, many of them opting for the Waffen-SS, the most feared and vicious of units, as well as the most loyal to the Nazi ideal.

As Bolan made his way down to the docks, night fell with the suddenness common to Scandinavia. In a few hours, he had narrowed possibilities to two, only about fifteen minutes apart. He mentally tossed a coin to decide which one to check first, as one was just as viable as the other. There were no clues to give him any indication otherwise.

The Executioner hurried through the deserted dock area, the cranes and warehouses now empty, apart from a few late workers loading trucks that would hit the highway for all-night drives to their destinations. Bolan kept to the shadows so that the few workers heading to their homes did not see him as they passed. There was plenty of cover, and the workers were intent on their own journey, so it was easy for him to keep hidden.

When Bolan reached the location of the chosen warehouse, he knew he had been directed to the wrong place before he was even within close proximity.

Two cars were drawn up outside the warehouse, and one of the large gated doors was hanging open, letting the noise from within filter out into the quiet evening. As he watched from the cover of an adjoining building, a third car roared along the dockside, pulling up with an exaggerated squeal of brakes and a handbrake turn that was designed to impress the squealing girls, clad in leather and lace, who spilled out of the battered vehicle, followed by two young men in denim and leather, both clutching a number of liquor bottles. They had long hair, sure, but they were a little more colorful—as were their women—than the men he sought. They were certainly less than discreet.

At a distance he followed them. They yelled greetings as they entered the warehouse, and Bolan could see that they had arrived in the middle of a full-scale party. There were around twenty people inside, including three men on a raised dais made from pallets. Two of them wielded guitar and bass, while the third sat behind a drum kit that dwarfed him. They pounded out a form of metal that was far more bluesy and—to Bolan’s ears—more melodic that the black metal he was seeking.

As the new arrivals were greeted by those already drunk and partying, and the band broke off to greet them before falling into their loose groove once again, Bolan withdrew into the shadows.

Whatever recreational chemicals may be added to the alcohol, and whatever licentious activity may take place as a result, they were a relatively innocent group. The soldier could see why they had chosen such a place: isolated, with no prying neighbors to complain, they could celebrate all night and be as rowdy as they liked without fear of their party being broken up by the law.

It had to be the last location then. If not, he was back where he had started with no leads at all and time running out.

Moving with speed—but not so fast that he could not recon his surroundings as he moved across the dock area—Bolan reached the final location before the ringing in his ears from the last site had died away.

At first glance it seemed that Stony Man’s intel was dead wrong. The warehouse front was as dark and deserted as any others at that time of night. Moving closer, Bolan could see little sign of life.

This was either not the location or he was too late and Asmodeus—and whoever they were allied to—had already moved toward their objective. Given the lack of intel he was working with, the soldier hoped not. The plan was to catch up with them and tail them to the location of the bunker before taking them down.

He would have to watch and wait tonight.

Fortune favored the stubborn as well as the brave Bolan decided, when, after hunkering down for half an hour and feeling as if his haunches would freeze, a black truck approached the warehouse and slowed to a stop. The windows were dark, obscuring how many people were inside. The engine was killed, and the vehicle sat waiting.

Bolan felt encouraged, more so when a second black truck pulled up less than five minutes later. As it drew near, the first truck chugged to life, its headlights illuminating the front of the warehouse.

The driver’s door of the second truck opened as the engine died, and a heavily muscled man in black—with a flowing ebony mane and piercings that glinted in the light of the first truck’s lights—got out. He walked across to the warehouse and unlocked the gated door with keys from a large bunch at his belt. He beckoned to the shrouded inhabitants of the first truck as two men spilled from his vehicle and jogged to the open warehouse door. They were of a similar appearance.

The other engine was shut off, and three men joined them from the first truck: a long haired man in black and two men with cropped hair. Bolan could almost smell the mercenary on them, even at a distance.

It looked like Lady Luck was with him, after all.


CHAPTER FIVE

The six men gathered in the warehouse. One central line of fluorescent lighting illuminated what had once been the central aisle, and was now a walkway to the stage area that the band members had created in the middle of the warehouse. It stood silent and brooding, the stacks of amplifiers and the large drum kit flanked by instruments propped on stands, leads plugged in and ready to go. It looked exactly like a set before the beginning of a gig, which was just how the band liked it. On either side of the stage area were flight cases, and boxes that held pyro and effects for the show. Crates for shipping amps stood behind those, fading into the shadows of the unlit warehouse areas.

Most of the building was empty, devoid of anything approaching cover for Bolan as he approached the open door and slipped into the dark interior. He had removed his outer clothing, despite the intense cold, and the blacksuit underneath allowed him to blend in to the dark with ease. He could only safely stay at the periphery, however. The lack of cover precluded a closer approach until he could recon the rest of the warehouse space. Provided, of course, that his prey stayed where it was and gave him that precious time.

Right now he wished that he had packed some of the surveillance equipment that Stony Man usually provided: a long-range mic would have solved this problem easily. Those were the breaks; he would have to do this the hard way.

While this ran through his mind, he was moving along the wall of the warehouse, to his left, seeking darker patches away from the central light where he could gain ground toward a cluster of packing crates that would allow him to close in.

The fact that the band had chosen such a large space and seemingly used so little of it was initially baffling, until Bolan remembered the last warehouse: private parties would be easy here for black metallers who wanted their musical preferences to remain secret.

Not just musical preferences. The privacy this location afforded could be very convenient for keeping political and terrorist activities under wraps.

By now the soldier had made his way to the cover of the stacked crates and could hear what the six men in the center were discussing in hushed tones.

* * *

RIPPER WAS THE BAND LEADER by virtue of having the strongest convictions and the most overwhelming personality. Milan and Seb had identified that about him from the beginning and so had made him their focus. But now that they knew the location of the bunker, they were unwilling to risk their own men until the ordnance had been safely removed.

The site had been secured, and they needed transportation. They were aware that the local police were treating Arsneth’s murder as a closed case with the corpse of Jari providing a convenient scapegoat. But it was only a matter of time before someone questioned the scenario, and they did not want to bring their trained personnel into such a situation until they were ready to put their main plan into action.

This was just the preliminary stage. They might have been able to take any evidence of the bunker that could identify its location off the internet, but there had been enough time for interested parties to start assembling clues.

They needed cannon fodder, and they needed it now. Ripper’s bandmates were known only by their assumed band names: Hellhammer, Visigoth and Emperor Hades. That was all they needed; as Seb and Milan stood in front of the stage and addressed them, they saw reflected back four dour and intense faces, serious about their task.

And their task this night was to learn about the weapons they may need if they encountered resistance at the bunker. Briefly Seb outlined the location they were headed to, and the formation they would take: two trucks, three men each truck, ordnance for a firefight if necessary and space to pack the mother lode, with Seb and Milan riding shotgun to each truck driver.

“We may not be alone,” Ripper continued, walking over to the crate stack where Bolan had hidden himself. “Others may be on the trail. We are sure that Arsneth did not tell anyone else the exact location, but it may be that interested parties have worked out the map reference. We must be prepared. I know that you have explosives and small arms experience, and that some of you are used to hunting rifles. As far as I’m aware, despite shipping and storing these babies for us, you’ve never used them. Time to learn.”

He cracked open a crate, pushing back the top to reveal a cache of Heckler & Koch MP5s, each wrapped in oiled cloth. He took one out and uncovered it, then tossed it to Emperor Hades, who caught it without an eyelid flickering.

Seb grinned at Milan; this should be simple.

* * *

BOLAN HELD HIS BREATH as the mercenary turned and walked toward the stack. Bolan had the micro Uzi SMG in hand—spray’n’pray may be his best bet if discovered at such close range, but he would rather not fire at all...yet.

He almost sighed with relief when the merc picked a crate at the front of the stack and then turned away. One of the musicians caught the weapon thrown at him and examined it while the leader returned to the crate and took another out, repeating the process.

With as much stealth as he could muster, Bolan drew back into the shadows, quickening his pace as he made his way toward the exit. He had heard enough to know their plans, and also that he had time to execute some of his own while the mercenaries ran through some basic weapons training for their troops.

Outside in the cold air with his breath frosting, Bolan located his thick coat and put it back on. He was going to be outside for a while, and he couldn’t afford to slow down due to the temperature. He intended to follow the trucks and required a vehicle of his own. He had some ideas about that, but first he needed a way of tracking the vehicles if he lost visual contact.

His lack of surveillance equipment was an oversight that he couldn’t let happen again, but in the meantime, he had the ingenuity to improvise. He had his smartphone on him, and that was fitted with a GPS tracker in addition to the one that came standard to the phone.

Keeping in the shadows with one eye on the open doorway of the warehouse, the soldier took the back off his phone and located the tracker where it had been fitted under the cover. He replaced the cover and hit a speed-dial number.

“Bear, don’t speak. I’ve taken my personal tracker out of my phone and am placing it on a target vehicle. That one I want followed in case I lose it. I’ll be on the network tracker.”

“I’ll adjust accordingly,” Kurtzman replied simply before disconnecting. It was the least Bolan had heard him say for a long, long time, and despite the situation, it brought a smile to his face as he moved forward across the open space between his cover and the two vehicles.

He chose the one nearest him, the vehicle by the doorway providing him with some cover as he slid underneath the chassis and secured the tracker in a gap the bodywork gave him behind the rear wheel well. He rolled out, got to his feet and made his way back into the cover of the dark and silence.

The first part of his task was complete. Now for the second.

* * *

MILAN HELD UP A HAND to stop Seb as he was about to run through the action of the MP5.

“If we’re going to run some targets, then we need to make sure we’re not overheard.”

“Man, we’ve played sets where we set off the full pyro and nobody cares. There’s a trash band that has a warehouse down the block who have all-night parties with the doors open, and no one pays it any attention. Who will hear?” Ripper complained.

Milan smiled coldly. “You’d be surprised at how gunfire can travel and how it can catch the ear when other things get ignored. It’s always best to take precautions. Wait...”

The mercenary made his way from the pool of light and across the darkened floor toward the warehouse gateway. When he reached it, some instinct gave him pause. Cautiously he stepped out into the dark night, scanning the locale. Initially he could hear nothing, only the distant sounds of music and traffic carried on the freezing night air from the edge of the dock. There was an undertone to it that seemed out of place—a rustling of shale, footsteps on damp concrete?

It was then that he saw him: in the far distance, moving around the side of a warehouse, caught for a fraction of a second in moonlight that was bright enough in contrast to the dark shadows to highlight his figure.

He was moving in the opposite direction to where Milan stood, and the merc was pretty sure that no one had been closer, but nonetheless...

He closed the door, locked it and strode back to the center of the warehouse.

“Let’s speed this up. The sooner we’re gone, the better.”

* * *

BOLAN APPROACHED THE TWO CARS outside the partying warehouse. Light and noise spilled out, with the occasional shadow cast as someone reeled close to the entrance. Voices screamed and yelled to make themselves heard, blending in with the noise of the band as they riffed endlessly on one chord, jamming loosely and covering any noise Bolan could make. If anyone came out while he was claiming one of the vehicles, he would have to disable him, but with the minimum of harm.

To look at, the two vehicles were suitably undistinguished: at least five years old, painted in drab colors and with no distinguishing marks. They both looked like they had been driven hard and recklessly, which wasn’t good. Bolan was hoping for something reliable.

He tried the driver’s side door of both. One had been left unlocked, and in the interest of saving time, he opted for that vehicle, as there seemed little to choose between them.

Hot-wiring a car—even in the days of sophisticated locking systems and computerized engine control that sometimes didn’t require a key—was still a simple task for the soldier, and in a matter of seconds he had the engine purring into life. Luck was with him, as it turned over nicely and was in better condition than the bodywork had led him to believe. The tank was three-quarters full, which was a bonus. If his luck held, then he would be able to keep on the enemy’s tail until they needed to refuel without losing ground.

He slipped the car into gear and pulled slowly away from the warehouse, heading back down the dock to a spot where he could keep his prey under surveillance.

* * *

THE MERCENARIES HAD completed their run-through of basic SMG training in double-quick time. The Norwegian band members were fast learners, and their prior knowledge of some armament was a bonus. Setting up targets, the mercenaries were soon satisfied that the four black metallers were proficient enough to hit a target well enough to stop it.

Milan divided up a crate of MP5s and spare magazines so that each man had a second SMG and enough ammunition to stop a division, let alone the handful of men that he was expecting at worst. He hadn’t mentioned what he had seen to the others, but his fellow merc knew there was something wrong and took him to one side.

“It might have been nothing. I saw a man nearby. He was in the shadows, moving away from us. But my gut—”

“Is something I trust,” Seb interrupted. “Was he here?”

Milan shrugged. “I doubt it. But the sooner we move, the less risk. And watch those shadows when we leave.”

Seb nodded and joined the four musicians as they took their weapons to the trucks, splitting into pairs. Milan killed the light, shut the warehouse door and locked it. As he turned back to the trucks, where he would join Ripper and Hellhammer, he sniffed the air like a dog. There was something there, he was sure. But what?

“Is everything okay?” Ripper queried as Milan climbed into the truck.

“Maybe. Let’s roll—but slow.”

Ripper grinned. “You don’t want us to draw attention to ourselves?”

“Something like that.”

* * *

BOLAN HAD PARKED the car between two warehouses, looking out on the main road that led to the dock entrance. There was only the one way in and out of the complex, so the enemy would have to pass him. He sat in darkness, only the red lights on the dash illuminating the interior of the vehicle, the headlights extinguished.

He was jolted from his resting state to full awareness as one of the trucks pulled past the recess in which he was parked. The soldier prepared to turn the ignition and follow after a moment or two, but the second truck didn’t show up.

He cursed. It was an obvious precaution, and he should have expected it. Despite that, the tension still gnawed at him as he waited. Should he follow the first truck and risk discovery, even though the second truck may not move for some time?

He knew from what he had heard that the mercs were in a hurry. Their nerves would be cracking right now, and he figured that they were likely to move the second truck sooner rather than later.

* * *

RIPPER GAVE MILAN a puzzled look as the mercenary directed him to turn off the wide road and head down the narrow gap between two warehouses. The truck behind moved past them. In his side mirror Ripper saw Hades stare at them as he passed, with the same puzzled stare.

“Seb understands. Trust me,” Milan said.

“I don’t get it. We have to leave the same way as them,” Ripper muttered.

“Turn the lights out and take it slow,” Milan said, ignoring him. He fingered the MP5 in his grasp. Maybe he would need it.

“I can’t go any slower than this,” Ripper cautioned as the truck moved at a crawl.

“Suits me fine. We can catch up with them,” Milan murmured, his eyes narrowing in the dim light.

There was a maze of narrow roads between the warehouses that populated the docks. They were built in rough squares, so that each had some loading and unloading space to the front, with the narrow spaces between being purely for access. That made them hard to negotiate, and even harder to recon from within a moving vehicle.

“Got you,” Milan whispered to himself as they passed the far end of the narrow passage where Bolan had parked. He indicated to Ripper to back up.

“Who the hell is that?” Ripper asked as he put the truck into Reverse.

“Don’t know, don’t care, won’t ask,” Milan said softly. “Turn down there and hit full beam,” he added, racking the SMG. “Let’s flush him out.”

* * *

BOLAN CURSED WHEN he saw movement in the rearview mirror. It was a momentary darkening of an already black space, but it was enough to make him realize what the second truck was doing.

He had been certain that he had not been seen. Maybe his luck wasn’t as good as he’d thought.

Bolan opened the door, slipping out and letting it fall back so that it appeared to be closed. He moved in front of the vehicle, edging toward the wide ribbon of road. If nothing else, he was pretty sure that would now be secure.

He edged around so that he could see down the narrow alley as the black shape passed back again. The soldier racked the micro Uzi SMG.

Any moment now...


CHAPTER SIX

The night was rent by the sharp and deafening chatter of SMG fire as the headlights of the truck illuminated the car while Milan—having slid out of his seat and resting the barrel of his weapon on the doorsill to steady it—sprayed an arc that spewed glass and acrylic paint chips across the ground and the backseat of the vehicle.

As he ceased fire, the silence was oppressive, closing in suddenly as the SMG fire echoed swiftly away. Ripper and Hellhammer were transfixed in the truck, staring at the damage inflicted on the sedan.

“What the hell...” Milan left the cover of the door and moved forward quickly, MP5 held at waist level. He peered into the interior of the vehicle, gun barrel up and ready. He had expected to see his enemy, incapacitated if not dead. Instead there was just empty space.

He turned angrily as he heard Ripper laugh nervously.

“An empty car, man. No big deal.”

“Then what is it doing here? Why—”

“Hey, it doesn’t matter. Now come on, let’s get going before they get too far ahead.”

Milan gestured to the giant to be quiet, angrily scoping the ground in front of him. He couldn’t see anything, but he just knew that the car’s driver was out there. Waiting...

* * *

BOLAN PULLED BACK as the lights of the truck winked on brighter and heard rather than saw the barrage of fire. His gaze narrowed at the thought of being detected that easily.

It was no longer safe to be in the area. Gunfire in the open would attract attention, and he didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions and get tied up in red tape. One of the trucks was headed for the bunker. If it was the one he had fitted the tracker to, then things were good. If not, he needed to pick up the trail as soon as possible.

He heard the exchange between the Norwegian and the merc, and could picture their relative positions. He had seen two men in the front of the truck that had passed him. That meant one, maybe two more at most beside the pair he had heard.

Bolan stepped out across the line of the alley, snapping off three short bursts of fire before stepping back.

* * *

MILAN WAS DISTRACTED for one full second, yet it was enough. He knew that the enemy was close, but when he had heard Hellhammer mutter to Ripper, he turned back to silence him. It was an instinctive move and an error.

The merc’s head was turned away when Bolan appeared behind him. Milan had time to register Ripper’s expression, but no more, before the first short burst stitched him across the ribs and spine. By the time the second and third bursts had shattered the truck’s headlights and damaged the fender and open door, he was out of the game.

The return fire had panicked the two musicians. Hellhammer was yelling at Ripper to get the truck in gear and out of there. In his panicked state, the driver was grinding the gears, the truck jolting forward with a sickening lurch and crunching into the rear fender of the car before hitting Reverse and screeching backward with rubber burning smoke on the concrete.

Bolan moved down the alley, hurrying past the car and the prone mercenary, needing only the most cursory of glances to see that he was no threat. He snapped off another burst at the dark shape that the truck had become as it reversed and skidded sideways. He wanted to take out the windshield, maybe take down the driver. A burst of glass signaled that he had taken out the side window on the driver’s door, but the Norwegian must have ducked and got lucky as the truck continued on, skidding wildly across the confined space and smacking into the warehouse on each side, the front fender screeching and buckling under the impact.

The vehicle slowed, the agonizing sound of scraping metal betraying that the wheel well had closed in on at least one of the front wheels. But still it moved forward. The soldier could come out behind it and take out the tires, or he could go for a frontal assault, if he was fast enough.

He gambled that he was. Running back past the now useless car, he came out onto the main ribbon of concrete at the dock and ran hard. In his mind’s eye he could see the layout of the warehouses and the narrow alleys between the open squares as they were clustered.

The mercs were headed for the sole exit, and there was only one way they could get there. If Bolan was quick enough, he could get there before the enemy.

He cursed as he ran full-out into a straggling group of drunk and stoned metalheads who had wandered from their warehouse, attracted by the noise of the firefight. They were spread over the road, and Bolan would have to take evasive action to avoid running into them. That was rendered unnecessary when one of the women realized through her stupor that he was carrying a gun and screamed in fear. It had the effect of making them scatter, some of the young men grabbing women and pulling them away, sheltering them with their bodies.

The Executioner was past them, cutting across and down an unlit passage, when he heard an angry voice raised above the confusion. The owner of the car he had hot-wired had discovered its final resting place.

No time to worry about that now. The soldier had cut across an angle in the wide road as it took a curve at the dock and was now at a point where the crippled truck would have to come out if it was to head for the dock entrance.

In the gloom of the overhanging warehouse walls, Bolan could hear rather than see his prey as it approached. He could also hear distant sirens. One of the partygoers obviously had had sense enough to use his or her cell phone. He took a moment to reload his Uzi SMG.

It was time to bring this to a close, Bolan decided. As the dark shape of the truck closed on him, the shrieking of metal setting his teeth on edge, he aimed low and with two short bursts took out the front tires. Whatever control the driver had over the damaged vehicle was gone now, and it swerved wildly within the narrow gap, cannoning off the walls with showers of sparks where metal scraped concrete and more metal.

Bolan wanted to advance and finish the confrontation quickly, aware of the rapidly closing authorities, but he was stymied by the erratic progress of the truck. He didn’t want to risk being caught and pinned in a confined area.

The truck slewed to a halt, sliding around so that it became jammed at an angle between the two walls of the alley. It prevented anyone from exiting the back doors as they were constrained by one wall, but it did leave Bolan on the wrong side of one cab door if a person chose to run.

The soldier snapped off another burst, shattering the window of the driver’s door. He had wanted to take alive the men inside, so that he could question them, but circumstances altered that plan.

He closed in on the truck, micro Uzi SMG held at shoulder level.

“Out. Now. Facedown,” he yelled in English, which was one of the main languages of the nation.

In the relative silence, now that the engine had coughed and died, he could hear moaning from within the truck. There was no faking the sounds he heard. The impact of the crash and the results of his gunfire had disabled the threat within.

Weapon still leveled, he yanked open the driver’s door and stepped back quickly as the driver’s unconscious body spilled out onto the ground. He was covered in blood from wounds that were superficial and caused by glass. Somehow the burst of gunfire had miraculously missed his head and torso, but he was still out of the game.

Stepping over the musician and vaulting into the cab, Bolan found a figure lying across the back of the vehicle. He was the only other person in the truck. Bolan had a slim penlight in one of the slit pockets of the blacksuit, and with its aid he could see that the long-haired man lay at an odd angle, his arm twisted beneath him where the impact had dislocated his shoulder. His eyes were half-closed, unfocused.

There was no way he could get any intel from this man, either, not in the time Bolan would have. He pushed at the far side door; it was jammed solid. No chance of making an escape into the shadows then. He would have to risk the open road.

As the Executioner scrambled out of the truck, he was aware of approaching footsteps and turned to find some of the young men from the warehouse party, armed with wooden pallet stakes and chains. They stood at the head of the alley. Bolan could see that they had taken the women away from the area of conflict before arming themselves and, despite their obvious nerves, were sticking together.

He had to admire their courage, which he wouldn’t have expected, but there was no time for explanations or niceties.

“You speak English, right?” he barked as he leveled his weapon at them. “If I set this on rapid fire, you all go down before you take two steps. You back off, and you’re fine.”

He waited, muscles tense and straining to move as he heard the sirens grow nearer. The young men did not answer him; glances among them betrayed their fear.

Bolan stepped forward slowly, allowing them time to react. For a moment he thought he would have to fire a warning burst to convince them, but as he got closer, they melted away, backing off.

“Wise move, guys. They’re alive back there. Get the police to ask them about Count Arsneth.”

Moving backward so that he could keep his face to them, the soldier moved down the road. He was heading toward the sirens, but he was banking on his words having an effect on the group.

Curiosity, bewilderment and the subconscious desire not to risk death held sway. The group of young metalheads moved toward the truck.

With relief that he hadn’t needed any more punitive measures, Bolan turned and ran, angling toward the next narrow alley leading onto the main drag. His progress was not being watched, and the authorities were not yet within sight. With luck—something that had treated him erratically this night—he could melt into the dark and effect an escape.

It was risky trying to direct the police to Arsneth’s real murderer but inevitable. He was sure that once the authorities found the corpse of the merc Bolan had taken down, then the dead guy’s true identity would open up a whole can of worms.

Time was getting tighter.

* * *

BOLAN MADE IT BACK to his hotel room without further incident. The gates to the docks had been manned by the authorities on their arrival, but the rest of the perimeter fence had been ignored. Weaving his way through the dark side roads until he was as far from the gates as he could get, he had easily scaled the fence. There was a risk it was wired to set off an alarm, but the area was so quiet that he could take that chance. Police patrols had not spread out, allowing the soldier time to blend into the town without being observed.

Now he showered. There was little point in hurrying. He had no vehicle and would have to wait until morning before hiring a car. If the truck that had escaped carried the GPS, then Kurtzman would be on it. If not, Bolan was back to where he had started.

That could get complicated, and he might have to pull some strings. If he was going to get necessary rest before starting the next phase, then he needed to know. Once out of the shower, he hit a speed-dial number on his smartphone.

“Striker, you’re in Trondheim, and your tracker isn’t. What went wrong?”

Bolan filled him in on the evening’s events. Bolan was already relieved, as Kurtzman’s first words had determined Bolan’s course of action.

A course that would be made easier by the fact that the target truck was headed for Oslo, and not on the main highway to the north and the Finnish border. Why? That was the question. It could be that the enemy knew they had suffered casualties and sought additional men for the raid on the bunker. If so, that might give the soldier a lead. He asked Kurtzman to send him any intel on far-right groups and black metal bands within the city, particularly those with some link to Count Arsneth’s band.

It was a place to start. As Bolan settled to the complete blackout that was sleep, a fleeting thought crossed his mind: if the band needed that much manpower, then who were they expecting to meet on the way?

* * *

IT WAS EARLY MORNING when the black truck hit Oslo. The three men inside had made the journey in silence. No one in the second truck was answering cell phone calls, and the guys in the black truck had received no communication as to why.

Seb knew that Milan had been right. Someone had been spying on them, and whomever it was had in some way stopped the truck. Milan was good. Whoever had taken him out had to be a professional. It was imperative that they pick up more men.

It was only when they pulled up at a neat and tidy suburban house on the outskirts of the city that Seb finally spoke.

“We need another truck. Men, too. You need to know that, if they have stopped Milan and your bandmates, then they are good. You must be ready to fight.”

Visigoth sniffed hard. “Maybe they will not be at the bunker. Maybe they need to follow us to find it.”

Seb nodded. “That would make sense. In which case, we have lost them for now. At least we will be prepared.”

The three men got out of the truck and walked across the deserted street to the front of the house. They were expected; the door opened before they were halfway up the drive. They were greeted by a shaved-headed man in black, with Celtic tattoos showing beneath his black T-shirt.

“Good. You are here. There’s something you need to see,” he said without preamble.

Seb realized what he meant when he saw the news channel tuned to on the flat-screen TV.

* * *

BOLAN SLEPT FOR a few hours, then rose and checked out of his hotel before renting a vehicle with a credit card under his Matthew Cooper alias. He tuned the car radio to a station that broadcast in English, but the altercation in Trondheim was not big enough news, so he selected a Norwegian station and struggled with the language before giving up and driving for a while in silence.

As he traveled, he thought about what he had heard in the warehouse before the firefight had kicked off. It was pretty clear that the mercs and at least one of the band members had been to the bunker. He thought it likely that the two remaining members of Abaddon Relix had been there and had joined their dead friends in Valhalla. In which case, why train the Norwegians for a firefight? Were they actually expecting opposition when they went back to the bunker to transport the ordnance, or was it precautionary?

The Russians were keen to get their weapons back. The fact that they hadn’t gone straight in as soon as the first video had appeared on YouTube suggested that any record of its location had been destroyed—either accidentally or with force—when glasnost had happened. So they would be in the same position as the soldier: reliant on piecing together clues from what had appeared online, or else identifying and following the Norwegians.

He had been unaware of anyone else in Trondheim who could be following his line of thinking but could only preclude it at his own risk.

There were a lot of unknown factors at present: Who, if anyone, was following? What were the Russians planning? Who were the terrorist groups vying for the ordnance? Was the bunker manned or deserted? And if manned, then by whom? The big question hanging over all of this was simple: what did they want the ordnance for?

This made planning difficult. Covering all possibilities for an offensive or defensive battle when the circumstances, the motives, were so ill defined was almost impossible. The only thing he could do was to keep it simple: follow and intercept at the point of pickup, dealing with eventualities if and when they arose.

Bolan would have been happier with a larger armory at his disposal than the one he currently carried. If possible, he would gather more along the way.

He stopped for coffee and to call Stony Man when he neared Oslo. Researching for the mission, he had found that 90 percent of the population growth in Norway over the last decade was due to immigration, and that the city with the largest portion of immigrants was Oslo. This would explain the resurgence of fascism in black metal activism and in general. Coming from America—a land built on immigrants in search of a better way of life—it seemed a strange attitude. But Europe had always had pockets of insular thinking, and when times were hard, that thinking became more hard-line.

Kurtzman was businesslike this morning. There was no time for the usual pleasantries. He gave Bolan a GPS setting to put in the rental car’s navigation system that would take him to where the black truck was parked. Bear also informed the soldier that the Trondheim authorities were holding two men recovered from the scene in connection with the death of Count Arsneth.

Bolan nodded to himself. The partygoers had understood Bolan, and his gamble had paid off. The warehouse used by Asmodeus had not been identified, but the dead man had: Milan Millevich, a Bosnian by birth who had long-standing right-wing affiliations, and was linked to an Estonian group called Freedom Right.

“Any intel on them?” Bolan queried.

“We found out some small-scale bombings and bank raids in their homeland have been attributed to the group, but more recently they’ve been forging links in Scandinavia. Nothing big up to now.”

“But this could be their entry into the big leagues,” Bolan mused. “Not if I can help it, Bear.”


CHAPTER SEVEN

“Why have we come here?” Visigoth asked. “Why not just head out and meet up along the way?”

Seb looked up from the laptop, which displayed maps of the northern Karelia region.

“We need to pick up another vehicle, plus additional men and brief them,” he said shortly. “More than that, we need to make sure no one is following us.”

“We didn’t see anyone,” Visigoth continued in a whining tone.

“Yeah, and now you know they were there when we left the warehouse,” Seb said, sneering. “These people are professionals. You’re not likely to spot them.”

“So we wait and see if they attack us here?” Hades interjected. “Where we’re in a position of strength and not in the open? Then move on?” He looked at Seb like an eager puppy, keen to prove his ability to think tactically.

“You know, you could learn a lot from your friend,” Seb said, directing the comment at Visigoth. “He picks things up quickly.”

Hades looked pathetically pleased at these words of praise, and Visigoth shot him a look of pure loathing, feeling as though he had obscurely been condemned.

Seb left them to their petty jealousies and returned to the maps. Milan had already planned their route, but he was dead and things had changed. If there were alternatives, then it would be good to have them as backup. And while Seb had understood the reasoning behind using the Norwegians for the pickup, that too had changed. Now there were only two of them and one professional. More bodies were needed for logistics, and the possibility of combat had made it essential that they were trained and experienced.

If anything Seb now felt that they would be carrying the Norwegians, rather than using them effectively. If only he could dispose of them without causing some ripples of discontent. Unfortunately the black metal scene in Norway was close-knit, and their disappearance without explanation would endanger links and lines of communication that were invaluable to Seb’s group in their current situation. The brief given to Milan and himself had been simple: secure the ordnance, keep the locals sweet, but never lose sight of the bigger picture.

As they were in the house of Erik Manus, who owned and produced for the largest black metal specialist recording company, Seb was in exactly the wrong place to attend to that bigger picture.

Moreover, Manus—who was currently preparing a meal for them—was a relatively well-known figure in what was otherwise an underground and secretive scene. His status made him a key link in the chain, but his profile made him the most risky in circumstances like this.

Seb checked his watch. Thirty-three minutes had passed since he had called for backup. How long did it take them, for Christ’s sake?

* * *

BOLAN DROVE PAST twice to get a good look at the place. This was a fairly affluent suburb, and the houses were spaced widely apart. Circling the block he could see that the houses had large yards and gardens that were not easily accessible. If he had to go in through the back, it would take time he could ill afford. However, that very space gave them a great deal of privacy. By now it was almost midmorning, and on each pass he noticed that there were few people about. So few that he was a little concerned that his car would be noticed on its second pass. He had chosen a nondescript vehicle in order to blend in as much as possible, but when there was nothing to blend with, then that became irrelevant.

The black truck was off to one side of the house, by itself. Bolan parked a couple hundred yards back and got out of his car, appearing to check an imaginary fender dent while he took a good look up and down the street.

Under his coat he had the micro Uzi SMG, Beretta 93R and grenades that he had carried the previous night. He also carried a Benelli M3T combat shotgun with folding stock that he had stashed in his case, and which fit nicely beneath the heavy overcoat covering his blacksuit. With seven rounds in the tube magazine and one in the chamber, its double O buckshot .33 caliber pellets, with twenty-seven in each round, made it a weapon that was less than subtle but extremely useful in enclosed spaces where he may be outnumbered.




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