Death Metal

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.”

* * *