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 satisfac
tion. “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 terrori
st 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.
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