Death Metal

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.”