Enemy Agents

“Don’t matter,” the leader said. “They’re reserved.”

“Someone forgot to post it, then,” replied Halsey, feeling heat rise in his face. “You need to take it up with management.”

“We need this table and these friggin’ chairs,” the biker said with a sneer. “And management ain’t sittin’ in ’em.”

“We’ll be pleased to move,” Halsey replied. “As soon as we’re all finished with our dinner. And dessert.”

He knew the afterthought was pushing it, but figured why not?

Sometimes a spot of trouble couldn’t be avoided after all.

“You’re finished now,” the long-haired biker said, then spat a stream of brown tobacco juice directly onto Halsey’s plate.

“Looks done to me,” another biker observed.

Halsey considered stabbing the tobacco-chewer, but he knew the penalty for using deadly force unless his life was clearly threatened. Stifling the killer urge, he said, “That’s inconvenient. Now I’ll have to get another steak and start from scratch.”

“He’s fuckin’ with you, man,” one of the bikers told his chief.

“You think so?” the leader asked.

“Hell, yeah,” another said.

“That’s one stupid-ass mistake,” the leader said. Addressing Halsey, he inquired, “Is that right, boy? You fuckin’ with me?”

“I can’t imagine anything less appetizing,” Halsey said.

“You got a smart mouth, for a citizen.”

While Halsey understood the slang term for a working stiff of square, he found the comeback irresistible.

“So, what are you?” he asked. “Some kind of wetback?”

With a snarl, the long-haired biker lunged for him, surprised Halsey by clutching his right wrist with one hand, twisting, forcing him to drop the knife, while the biker’s right hand grabbed Halsey’s shirt and hoisted him out of his chair, as if he weighed nothing at all.

“Smart mouth,” the biker said. “Dumbass.”

And then Halsey was airborne, tumbling across the table through clattering plates, silverware and bottles of beer, on his way toward impact with the floor.

BOLAN PUSHED HIS PLATE and coffee cup aside. So far, so good.

He’d watched the seven grungy outlaws swagger toward the table where his targets sat and then interrupt their meal. He’d worried for a moment that the bikers might stand back and wait for one of their intended marks to throw the first punch, when the seated diners didn’t seem inclined to do so, but it worked out in the end. The spokesman for the group lipped off just enough to get himself picked up and tossed across the table.

Bolan stayed where he was watching, waiting.

He couldn’t jump in yet. If it turned out that the targets could handle themselves and were giving the bikers a beating, his uninvited help would be superfluous. Suspicious, even. It could blow his only shot at breaking in.

He had to hope his targets lost the fight—or, rather, started losing in a clear, decisive manner. Bolan couldn’t sit and wait to see them punched unconscious or delay until the cops showed up.

The bartender already had a cell phone open in his hand, but Bolan knew response time was an issue. Apple Valley was an incorporated township sprawling over seventy-odd square miles, with law enforcement covered by a police department composed of fifty-five San Bernardino County sheriff’s officers. Of those, four were administrators, five were detectives and eight were patrol supervisors—which left twelve officers per eight-hour shift, less those with days off or vacation time scheduled.

Bolan had learned all that from the internet, within ten minutes of discovering that he’d be meeting his intended marks in Apple Valley. Now, his first trick would be staying out of jail.

Brognola had arranged the setup—if these were, in fact, his bikers—but he hadn’t shared their secret with the locals. Bolan had no reason to believe that any of the Apple Valley cops were tied to Halsey’s crowd in any way, but small towns thrived on gossip. It was a rule of life.

And anywhere you went, the walls had ears.

So, he’d be going for a ride in cuffs if Apple Valley’s finest caught him brawling with a bunch of thugs in Scoots. He could plead self-defense, of course, then post bail and take a hike. But Bolan didn’t want his face in any mug-shot files, his fingerprints in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—IAFIS—or any other data bank.

He was a dead man, after all.

And planned to stay that way, as long as he was breathing.

The bikers weren’t pulling their punches with Clay Halsey’s men, but the casual diners weren’t punching bags, either. They gave back as good as they got—well, almost—and two of the Diableros were bloodied already, though still on their feet and swinging. One of Halsey’s guys, by contrast, had been punched or booted in the ribs and lay off to one side, hunched in a fetal curl.

Bolan checked his watch—one minute gone and counting. The barkeep was still on his phone, likely giving details to the AVPD dispatcher. Any second, a prowl car would receive instructions, fire up lights and siren, and race through the desert night toward Scoots.

With how many others to follow?

They wouldn’t send one cop to handle a dozen-odd brawlers. More likely, the night shift would roll out en masse, unless some of the shift’s personnel were already scattered on other duties. With approximately seventy-three thousand residents counted in its last census, Apple Valley would have the normal complement of burglaries, car thefts, domestic beefs and nuisance calls distracting officers on any given shift.

Say eight or nine incoming, then, within the next five minutes. As for times on-site, there would be stragglers. Some patrolling at a distance from the roadhouse, others eating fast food with their radios turned on, maybe a bathroom break or two.

A little breathing room.

But if his marks didn’t start losing soon…

Bolan was ready, waiting, when Halsey charged into the middle of the fight and caught a haymaker dead center in his face. It might not be a nose breaker, but there was force enough behind the punch to send Halsey flying again. He hit the floor hard, no table to break his fall this time, and Bolan worried that the man he needed to impress might be unconscious.

No. Halsey was shaking it off, rolling over and wiping a dark smear of blood from his nostrils with his sleeve. Face flushed with impact and anger, he lurched to his feet, wobbled into a fair fighting crouch and began to advance with fists clenched.

Going back in for more.

It was enough.

Bolan slipped from his booth, feeling the rush of battle in his blood. He reached the battleground in four long, loping strides, grabbed Halsey’s adversary by one arm and spun him, scowling as he drove a fist into the biker’s face.

2

Washington, D.C.

Four days earlier, Bolan had strolled through crowds of tourists on the National Mall, making his casual way toward the pale upraised finger of the Washington Monument. His destination lay adjacent to that obelisk, on 1.9 acres of land allotted by Congress in the 1980s, on Fifteenth Street, renamed Raoul Wallenberg Place.

Bolan knew the name from history. Raoul Wallenberg had been a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during the German occupation of 1944–45. He had issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews, saving tens of thousands from slaughter—and then, ironically, was jailed when Soviet troops “liberated” the country from Nazi rule. Dying under questionable circumstances at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947, Wallenberg had been honored worldwide once his story was told.

It was only fitting that his name now marked the street outside of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Bolan entered the museum, collected his free pass from a clerk in the Hall of Witness and proceeded to the first-floor elevator. Self-guided tours were timed, leaving Bolan five minutes to wait in the lobby, and start on the fourth floor, with visitors working their way back down to street level through various halls and exhibits.

Bolan surveyed the first of four permanent exhibitions. This one depicted the Nazi assault on German Jews from 1933 until the 1939 invasion of Poland, including documents, photographs and other relics of the years that included the Reichstag fire and Kristallnacht riots. Lower floors, he knew, presented the rest of a grim history in chronological order: the “Final Solution” on Three, and the nightmare’s “Last Chapter” on Two. Altogether, the museum contained nearly thirteen thousand artifacts, eighty thousand photos, one thousand hours of archival film footage, nine thousand oral histories, and some forty-nine million documents charting the course of brutal genocide.

Tragically, it hadn’t been the last.

Man’s inhumanity to other humans was the world’s oldest story, played out in grim new headlines every day.

Which kept the Executioner busy year-round.

On this bright spring morning, he was killing time indoors, studying bleak reminders of how cruel humankind could be, while waiting for his oldest living friend. Their conversation, subject still unknown to Bolan, would inevitably launch him on another journey to the dark side, where he would find predators aplenty still alive and well, working around the clock to victimize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.

In short, business as usual.

Scanning the photographs of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, studying their smug and ghoulish faces, Bolan wondered if someone like himself could have derailed that tragedy, if sent to solve the problem soon enough. Would half a dozen well-placed bullets have changed anything at all?

Or was the tide of history inevitably tinged with blood?

Bolan’s experience had taught him not to second-guess the vagaries of human nature. Every personality contained a blend of traits, defined as “good” or “bad” by different societies. Some cultures valued warlike attitudes, while others favored meekness and pacivity. Some cultivated stoicism and endurance in the face of suffering, while others honored conscientious suicide.

But every nation, race and culture recognized that some people could only be restrained by force. If left at large, to exercise their will, the predators wreaked havoc.

Sometimes, they wound up in charge.

Bolan harbored no illusions about saving the world. He wasn’t a statesman, diplomat or philosopher. He couldn’t sway the masses with a glib turn of phrase and persuade them to trade in their weapons for schoolbooks or farm implements.

Bolan was a soldier, had been since he’d snagged his high-school diploma en route to the Army recruiting depot, breezing through basic training and moving on to Special Forces training at Fort Benning. And there’d been no looking back from there, until his family at home met a fatal snag that pulled him out of uniform and forced him to pursue a different, more personal kind of war.

That phase of Bolan’s life lay far behind him now. In terms of serving with official sanction, he’d been back on track since the creation of Stony Man Farm. In terms of serving fellow human beings, he had never stopped.

Each blow he struck against the predators saved lives that otherwise would have been diverted into dark and deadly avenues. For the enduring benefit of strangers, Bolan walked those alleyways and jungle trails alone.

They felt like home.

As he moved slowly past the Holocaust exhibits, Bolan wondered how it had to feel to be persecuted for a trait you hadn’t chosen and could never change. An accident of birth, say, that determined pigmentation, hair texture, the shape of eyes or nose.

Bolan knew all about the sense of being hunted, but he’d always brought it on himself, by standing in the way of people who would never stop harassing, robbing, killing others until they, themselves, were stopped dead in their tracks. He stopped them, and when their associates came looking for revenge, he buried them.

How long could it go on?

Bolan had no idea and didn’t let the question trouble him.

Turning from blown-up photographs of Nazi signs and posters that he couldn’t read, but which he understood too well, Bolan saw Hal Brognola moving toward him, past a group of children following their teacher through the gallery. Small faces sad and humbled, learning more than they might care to know about their species.

Bolan went to meet his friend.

“NO PROBLEM PARKING?” Brognola asked, as he clutched Bolan’s hand, pumped twice and let it go.

“The walk was nice,” Bolan replied.

“Sorry you had to come in naked,” Brognola went on. “Security’s been tighter since the shooting.”

“Sometimes the hardware weighs me down,” Bolan said.

Back in June 2009, an octogenarian neo-Nazi ex-convict had carried a .22-caliber rifle into the museum, killed a security guard, then fell under fire while trying to shoot other guards. The gunner had survived and was sitting in jail while his case wound its way through the courts at glacial speed. Attorneys at Justice had a pool going, on whether a jury or Father Time would deal with the creep in the cage.

Brognola, for his part, couldn’t care less. As long as the neo-Nazi was off the streets for good, it suited him.

One down. And how many tens of thousands to go?

God only knew.

Strolling past photo displays of the Kristallnacht riots—dazed victims and grinning, moronic attackers—Brognola got to the point. “I assume you keep up with what’s going on in the militia movement?” he asked.

“Yeah, things have really changed since the sixties and the Minutemen,” Bolan replied. “They organized to save America from Red invaders who never showed up, then started robbing banks to stay afloat and ran out of steam when the brass went to prison. Same thing in the nineties, responding to government action at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Last I heard, they’d done a fade around the turn of the millennium. Arrests and memberships way down, since Y2K fell flat.”

“Way down until the last election,” Brognola corrected him. “As it turns out, there’s one thing that riles the far right more than Communists, Jews and the New World Order all thrown together.”

“Should I guess?” Bolan inquired.

“No need,” Brognola answered. “It’s an African-American in the White House, talking peace and universal health care. Turns out ‘Change We Can Believe In’ translates on the fringe to ‘Grab your guns and go to war’?”

“Same old RAHOWA crap?” Bolan asked.

Brognola was painfully familiar with the acronymy. It stood for Racial Holy War, a slogan coined by a white-supremacist “church,” currently used throughout the racist underground by skinheads, brownshirts, Ku Klux Klanners, and some more supposedly “respectable” types who donned Brooks Brothers suits to peddle their message of hatred. Brognola had seen RAHOWA painted on walls, scrawled at crime scenes, and tattooed on flesh—but he still didn’t know how the fantasy sold to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

“It’s that, and then some,” the big Fed told Bolan. “There’s been talk of white-power nuts plotting to kill the President since he was elected to the Senate, but they stepped up during the White House campaign. The Bureau nabbed four crackpots with a carload of guns at the Democratic Convention. Then, a week before election day, ATF busted a couple of nuts in Tennessee who had the Man at the top of their hit list, with eighty-eight victims in all.”

“Eighty-eight,” Bolan said, shaking shook his head.

“Nothing new under the Nazi sun,” Brognola replied.

H was the alphabet’s eighth letter. Eighty-eight, then, stood for HH—or Heil Hitler to fascists.

“I guess it never goes away,” Bolan said.

“Nope. Keeps getting worse,” Brognola told him. “In September of 2009, someone posted a poll on a social network asking Net geeks if the President should be killed. They took it down pronto, when G-men came calling, but the overnight stats might surprise you. Sometimes I think…aw, hell, never mind.”

He’d been about to say, “The country has gone crazy,” but Brognola knew that wasn’t true. If forced to guess, he would’ve said America harbored roughly the same percentage of bigots as ever, but economic hard times and the fear that money troubles spawned had a potential to inflate the ranks of the lunatic fringe.

“So, long story short?” Bolan prodded.

“Long grim story short, the militias are back,” Brognola said. “They’re growing again, feeding off of the tax protest movement, beating the drum over illegal immigration, and playing more race cards than last time around. You’ve likely heard some of it. ‘The President’s a Muslim,’ ‘he’s not a U.S. citizen,’ whatever crap their tiny brains can generate. It says something about the current atmosphere that millions take at least part of the nonsense seriously.”

“Not much I can do about it,” Bolan said. “You’ve got free speech and freedom of the press, implying freedom to believe some idiotic things. Last time I checked, there was still a Flat Earth Society, and people claiming we never set foot on the moon.”

“Agreed. But none of them intend to kill the President of the United States or spark a civil war.”

“You have someone specific in mind,” Bolan said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”

“It’s like you know me,” the big Fed responded with a weary smile.

Bolan matched the smile and said, “I’m getting there.”

“Okay,” Brognola said. “Clay Halsey. He runs an outfit he calls the New Minuteman Militia out of Southern California. I’ve got the details for you on a CD-ROM. Bottom line, he’s running guns to other fringe groups in the States, and he has ties with neo-fascist groups in Europe.”

“They need guns from us?” Bolan sounded skeptical.

“Call it a mutual admiration society,” Brognola replied. “They’ve been playing the Nazi gig longer than our homegrown crazies. During the Great Depression, you may recall they seized a couple of governments. Final solutions ensued.”

“I know it’s cliché,” Bolan said, “but most people would tell you that can’t happen here.”

“Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. Do we sit back and let them try? Can we afford another murdered president? Another Oklahoma City? God forbid, a homegrown 9/11?”

“If you’ve got the evidence—”

“We don’t,” Brognola interrupted Bolan. “I’m told ATF had someone close to Halsey. An informant, not an agent. Anyway, he dropped some juicy hints and then went MIA. Off-roaders found what the coyotes left of him in the Mojave Desert.”

Bolan frowned. “So, if at first you don’t succeed…”

“Again, it’s like you know me.”

“You want something on this guy before we drop the hammer.”

“I need something on him,” Brognola replied. “To justify whatever happens for the guys upstairs.”

“Well, then,” Bolan replied, “I guess I’d better have a look at that CD.”

BOLAN TOOK THE CD to an internet café in Georgetown, found a carrel in a corner where no one could peer over his shoulder and used an earpiece for the sound track. The first file was titled Background. Bolan opened it and found himself embarking on a history lesson about “militia” subversion.

April 19, 1995, had been the wake-up call, with 168 dead and nearly 700 wounded in the blast that destroyed Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and 324 other structures within a 16-block radius. Since then, Bolan learned, various law-enforcement agencies had interrupted or prosecuted at least 75 right-wing terrorist conspiracies across America, from coast to coast and border to border.

The incidents read like a roster of delusional insanity.

Saboteurs calling themselves the Sons of Gestapo derail a train in Arizona, killing one passenger and injuring dozens more. A massive homemade bomb turns up at Reno’s IRS office, defused with minutes to spare. A so-called Aryan Republican Army robs twenty-two banks, then starts killing its own membership. Lone-wolf gunmen strike repeatedly—at schools, churches and synagogues, the Holocaust Museum and a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles. G-men arrest Klan members on the eve of their attempt to bomb a Texas natural gas refinery, risking the lives of thirty thousand local residents. A “pro-life” terrorist shoots doctors and mails alleged anthrax to dozens of women’s clinics.

The dreadful list went on and on, accompanied by grim-faced mug shots that revealed no hint of common decency, much less remorse. The terrorists who spoke to law enforcement inevitably cast their crimes in terms of patriotic zeal.

We’re taking back our country.

America for real Americans—the ones who look and think and pray like us.

Bolan grew weary of it, closed that file and opened the one titled NMM. As he’d anticipated, it contained a detailed rundown on the New Minuteman Militia, Clay Bertram Halsey commander in chief.

The soldier started with Halsey’s personal dossier, surprised to learn that the man held a doctorate in biochemistry and had taught his subject at a smallish California college until the early nineties, when he’d left the classroom in favor of zany far-right politics. There was no trigger incident on record, nothing to explain the break with academia and sanity. Halsey had drifted through various groups of that era, including a couple with racist leanings, but had reached the twenty-first century without compiling a rap sheet.

As for suspicion, his name had been linked to arms deals, civilian border-watch campaigns in the Southwest, and to a shipment of neo-Nazi pamphlets printed in the States that found their way to Germany, where the recipients were jailed under that nation’s postwar laws proscribing hate speech and denial of the Holocaust. No such statutes existed in the States, so he was free and clear.

Almost.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives—still ATF for short, despite the late addition to its title when it joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2002—had been watching when Halsey founded his New Minuteman Militia in 2008. The group had started small, expanding to an estimated fifteen hundred members concentrated in Southern California, with outposts in Arizona and Nevada.

Headquarters for the NMM was located near Victorville, on the western edge of the same Mojave Desert where the ATF’s informant had been left to feed the wasteland’s scavengers. According to the file Brognola had provided, the militia’s turn-coat had been Joseph Allen Gittes, twenty-six, a marginally employed auto mechanic who’d pulled himself back from the brink of methamphetamine addiction while serving time in state prison, then found Jesus, right-wing politics and the patriot militia movement in no particular order.

It was standard stuff, as Bolan understood extremist groups of both Right and Left. Damaged and disaffected individuals were drawn to militant cliques like iron filings to a magnet trawled through dirt. Some claimed to find new meaning for their lives in radical theory. Others simply tried to exorcise their private demons by attacking others—be the targets ethnic minorities, “traitors,” the System, or “The Man.”

Something, somewhere along the line, apparently had driven Gittes to betray his newfound friends of the NMM. He’d been a walk-in at the ATF’s San Diego field office, where agents initially suspected him of clumsily attempting to spy on them on Halsey’s benefit. In time, though, Gittes had produced leads that resulted in the seizure of two midsize arms shipments, taking a few hundred assault rifles and other hardware off the overloaded streets. Agents had listened more attentively when he began to speak of “something big” in the works.

And then, he’d vanished, lost forever.

The autopsy report on Gittes indicated that his legs were broken, blunt force trauma, leaving him alive to crawl across the vast Mojave, seeking help. The desert sun had baked him, dehydrated him, before a snakebite finished off the job. By that time, it was likely a relief.

Agents had questioned Halsey, who professed dismay and grief in equal measure, claiming that he’d missed Gittes around militia headquarters but had concluded—with regret, of course—that the young man had relapsed into tweaking meth and left the movement for another shot at living on the pipe. A feasible suggestion, but it didn’t track with what the dead man’s handlers had observed.