Death Metal

“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.