Death Metal

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.