Death Metal Read online

  They entered the province of Karelia, headed for a spot in the north where the region ran into the border with the old Soviet Union. Severance felt his guts churn. He wondered how Mauno was getting on in Norway.

  * * *

  FLASH BOMBS EXPLODED on stage and reminded Mauno of the sight he had beheld the previous evening. A small wooden church with a stone foundation, fifty klicks from Trondheim, in a tiny village whose name he couldn’t even remember now.

  Five young men had invited Jari and himself along to witness their dedication to the cause. Mauno suspected that it was also to test any nerve that he and Jari might have. He would never have admitted it to anyone, but his bowels turned to water during that night. Jari, now, he was another matter. He was a Neanderthal who knew no fear because he had no sense.

  They had driven out of the rehearsal warehouse in Trondheim that Asmodeus used as their base and through the pitch-dark night at frightening speed. The band had played its entire set in practice for this night’s show and had ingested large amounts of whiskey along with fat lines of amphetamine sulfate. That had already pumped them up, long before the anticipation of what they were about to do had increased their adrenaline levels.

  “It’s been too long since churches and Christians were put in their rightful place, yes?” Ripper Sodomizer, the bass player, had chuckled.

  Just as the rest of the Norwegian band, he was built like a bodybuilder, his face streaked with white and black face paint—they preferred to rehearse as they would play live—that had run with heat and sweat, making him look like a ghostly clown. The band members were known to Mauno only by their stage names, just as he was known to them only as Count Arsneth.

  Despite the fact that his identity was also unknown to them, he felt alone and very small as he watched the brawny men—now dressed in black from head to foot with their face paint removed—take explosives from the back of the car, prime them and move in planned formation to plant them. Once they returned to their vehicle, they waited in silence as the timer fuse played out. Then they celebrated with high fives as the night air was shattered and split by the sound of timber and stone being blown into fragments, fire catching on what remained and lighting the night sky.

  Jari had joined them, but Mauno had kept his distance under the guise of studying the carnage with approval. When Arvo had told the rest of the band of his discovery, Mauno had seen a way of using this to improve their standing in the underground world of black metal.

  For too long, he had told them, there had been bands that only talked and did not follow through on their words. Not like the old days, when the music had been young, and the likes of Count Grisnacht and Euronymous had been willing to walk the walk.

  When Arvo pointed out that Grisnacht was serving a life term and Euronymous was dead, Mauno had brushed that aside. He had learned from the mistakes of those pioneers, so they would not be caught.

  No one knew their real identities, after all. They did not register their songs; they never signed anything except in their band identities, and even their friends—most of whom had no interest in black metal—didn’t know who they were. They were the four geeks into metal, but that was all. It was like being a superhero and having a secret identity. The secret, hugged close to the chest, was what mattered.

  Except that now Mauno was beginning to wonder about that. The Norwegian band had played up a storm, and their fans in the small subterranean club were going nuts. The sound had been deafening, even before the flash bombs. It wasn’t like this in Finland.

  Down here, everyone knew who the band members were, called them by real names, not made-up ones. Most of the audience was also part of a band and, from the introductions made earlier in the evening, were also church burners. After a long hiatus, the bands had taken up the attack once more.

  It was still small-time enough to be a local phenomenon. As yet it hadn’t been noticed in the rest of the world, though the shell-shocked Norwegians were alert to its implications, and the rest of Scandinavia was catching up. What the metallers wanted was something that would really catch the eye of the world and get them taken seriously.

  This was something Abaddon Relix had...and how. That had been their calling card and their bargaining tool to get into the scene.

  The problem was that, as the band and the audience drank more and talked more, greeting Mauno and Jari as old friends and new heroes, it struck Mauno that he was getting them all in a hell of a lot deeper than he could cope with.

  Eventually the crowd began to disperse and the band collected its meager share of the door money before starting to pack its gear. Jari helped them eagerly, though it didn’t escape the notice of Ripper that Mauno was less than keen.

  “You didn’t enjoy yourself, my friend?” he asked.

  “Of course I did. It’s just that I have things on my mind,” Mauno hedged.

  Ripper eyed him shrewdly. “So have we all. Your discovery and your offer were something that none of us expected. I have to confess, you are not what I expected, but I put that down to you being a thinker rather than doer—a planner and strategist, if you like.

  “Now Jari here,” he added with a laugh, clapping the guitarist on the shoulder as he walked by with a Marshall amp in his arms, “he is one of us through and through. If not for him, perhaps I would not have trusted you so quickly. Plus, of course, he plays like a bastard devil.” He shot the guitarist a grin, which was returned.

  Ripper left his bandmates and the giant Finn, moving over to Mauno and putting a protective arm around his shoulder as he led him away from the others. He spoke softly but with a firmness that made Mauno’s blood run cold.

  “What you offer to us is something that can change the way the world looks at us. They will realize how serious we are about our aims and the purity of our vision. This is not just about music, as you know. We have friends throughout Eastern Europe who were under the Communist heel for far too long and have no wish for liberalism to let that in again by the back door.

  “Nor do they wish those same liberal fools to spread miscegenation across lands that have remained true to their own. Like us, they have struggled to be taken seriously. You have given us the tools to make that happen, and for that we will always be grateful, and you will always be heroes of the cause. The name of Abaddon Relix will live on for more than just their excellent music and lyrics.”

  “That’s very good of you to say so,” Mauno said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice but wincing as he heard himself and realized that he had not been entirely successful. He was also painfully aware that Ripper had spoken at great length, not just because he wanted Mauno to hear his views, but so Ripper could carefully guide Mauno into a darkened corner of the club, where two men sat at a booth.

  They were dressed in black, much as the audience had been, but where those young men had almost prided themselves on their length of hair, these two were proud to sport the cropped version. They had the look of men with a military or paramilitary past. There was a hardness to their chiseled features and defined muscles that spoke of more than being the gym rats the Norwegian band were. These guys were the real deal.

  While Ripper introduced them as Milan and Seb, Mauno knew that these were not their real names. They were hiding behind their pseudonyms much as he and his band—and the Norwegian band—hid behind their own more outrageous tags. They shook hands without standing and gestured to Mauno that he should be seated. The firm pressure of Ripper’s arm on his shoulders, pushing him down, allowed him no room for dissent.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Milan began without preamble. “You’re in at the start of a glorious revolution. Fate had chosen the four of you to be our figureheads. Of course you’ll need guidance, which we can give you. You rock. We fight. We’ll show you what you need to do. There is just one thing...”

  “What’s that?” Mauno asked through a parched t
hroat.

  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.