Final judgment, p.6
Final Judgment, page 6
“Anytime I want to,” Bolan said, “I can make you and your friends fall down.”
“Kill him!” the second fighter ordered. “Kill him now!”
“Enough!” the third man said. “Shut up!”
He pointed at Bolan. “Who are you?”
“Federal agent,” the soldier replied. “Cease and desist. Leave this area now. You have no business here.”
“He’s lying!” said the man with the sprained knee. “He didn’t identify himself before when he could have. He’s one of them! He’s some kind of scout for Nitzche’s forces!”
“If I was with Klaus Nitzche,” Bolan said, shaking his head, “I would have shot you all and been on my way long before now.”
That silenced them for a time. Finally, the second fighter helped the man with the injured knee to his feet and let him lean on him for support. The two put some space between themselves and Bolan, as if they thought the soldier might lash out and strike them again if they stood too close.
“I told you,” Bolan said. “I’m a federal agent, here to free the hostages being held by Klaus Nitzche.”
“And then what?” said the third fighter. “Nitzche is allowed to remain at large? Or you’ll take him into custody again, so that he can simply break free once more?”
“Exactly what is the alternative?” Bolan asked. “I’m not going to allow him to walk free.”
“You should kill him!” said the man with the injured knee. It wasn’t clear if he was referring to Nitzche or to Bolan. The third man made no attempt to go for his sidearm. Bolan paid careful attention to the other two to make sure neither of them got any ideas.
“I’m out of time,” he told them. “We’re done playing this game. I’m giving you an opportunity to leave. Call it the lesser of the possible evils. Force me to and I’ll take you into custody, too, to keep you out of my way until my work here is done.”
“Do you have any idea how many kilometers of trench and tunnel are between us and that bunker if we take a wrong turn?” said the third man. “Do you really think you, alone, can make your way to Nitzche’s bunker, much less fight past his men?”
“Do you?” Bolan retorted.
“We’re done here,” the man said. “Go your own way, government man. We’ll do the same. Maybe we’ll even see each other along the way.”
“Not acceptable,” Bolan said. His hand shot to the holster behind his hip and he yanked the Desert Eagle free. He brought the big pistol up to cover the third man, the triangular snout of the .44 Magnum pistol centered on the nose of his balaclava. “Now, here’s how it’s going to be. Back off. Go home. Last chance.”
The third man waited through a ten-count before moving or speaking.
“No,” he said simply.
Bolan resisted the urge to swear. The Lantern operative had correctly deduced that the big American was going light on these people. He wasn’t prepared to shoot them dead, not if they weren’t directly threatening his life. However, the Lantern man hadn’t considered that Bolan had force alternatives that weren’t necessarily fatal.
The other two began to bicker with each other in stage whispers. Bolan would deal with them in turn. He worked the scenario quickly through in his mind.
A smash to the face with the barrel of the Desert Eagle would stun the third man, allowing Bolan to cover the other two and, if absolutely necessary, shoot low if they tried for their guns. He would be as cautious as possible, but—
The footfalls were too close when he finally heard them over the arguing men, and it was then that Bolan knew he had been tricked.
“Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” a new voice said.
The barrel of the gun was cold against the back of his neck.
Chapter 6
Eli Berwald Jr., “Aaron” to everyone but his mother when she was alive, crouched in the trench and read the laminated map by the filtered red glow of the tactical LED flashlight he carried. He swore when he realized he wasn’t sure which path was the shortest. The trenches and tunnels were convoluted, switching back on one another deliberately to form kill zones and fatal funnels.
So far, there had been no sign of Nitzche’s forces. For that he was grateful. His people would be forced to fight for their lives soon enough. When that moment came, Berwald wasn’t sure how many would stand and fight and how many would cut and run.
It wasn’t that they suffered deficits of character. Every member was a person of good stature who stood with Lantern because he or she believed in the ideals of the organization. Still, how could he expect his men and women to become soldiers at the drop of a hat? Most were idealists, patriots. They had the will and, in some cases, the training. But none of them were battle-tested.
This day that would change.
Berwald’s father had built a powerful advocacy organization. There was much money to be had in the work of defending Israel and her people from the many who hated her. Despite the countless anti-Semites arrayed against them, and even though many of these forces had powerful lobbies of their own—or perhaps because of it—the elder Berwald had had no trouble making Lantern a lobbying force to be reckoned with. He had begun this work as a young man, upon entering the United States. So profoundly affected was he by his experience in Schlechterwald, and by the loss of his parents there, that Eli Berwald Sr. could think of nothing but ensuring that such a horror never occurred again.
Raising money, and investing that money to make more, had proved easy enough for him. He was even careful to keep all—or most—of what Lantern did with its finances completely legal. They had survived multiple audits by the time Aaron was old enough to come on board, and his dad insisted that this remain the case. When Aaron took over the day to day operations of Lantern, he abided by his father’s wishes.
Less simple was the task of getting him to agree to more direct action.
When Aaron had assumed his position, taking from his father’s shoulders the responsibility for most of the operational and financial functions of Lantern, they were sitting on vast untapped potential. Under the elder Berwald, Lantern had used its money to influence lawmakers, network with lobbying groups, fund Holocaust remembrance functions and memorials, and hire private investigators to locate stray members of the old Nazi regime. Under Aaron, however, the group took its activities a step further, shaping events rather than simply prodding them into being indirectly.
It was because of him that, rather than just spending money on the detectives to find Klaus Nitzche, they had hired the famous television bounty hunter to go to Argentina to bring him back. There would have been no way to drag Nitzche to justice otherwise; even if an arrangement between the government of the United States and that of Argentina could be reached, the Argentines, whom Nitzche almost certainly would have been bribing extensively, couldn’t be trusted to act on it.
Aaron had also begun training his Lantern personnel to fight. That move had been a point a contention between him and his father for some time; Eli the elder, while he lived in fear of a second Holocaust, nonetheless thought making the transition to direct acts of counterviolence was a line that shouldn’t be crossed. The two had argued about it for some time. Aaron had eventually won, because he was more persistent, and because he had already implemented the training programs, regardless of his father’s wishes. Since that time he had focused on stockpiling weapons and other supplies. If society were to break down, if the veneer of civilization were to be torn away, Lantern and its people wouldn’t be taken unaware. Aaron had worried over these concerns of social chaos ever since watching the news reports of Hurricane Katrina, and seeing how quickly society’s members devolved into violent animals.
That savagery, that forsaking of the rules and laws that supposedly protected men and women in modern life, had disturbed Aaron deeply. His father accused him of becoming some latter-day apocalyptic Jew, a survivalist. Aaron countered that the work of Lantern had always been the survival of the Jewish people. There was little difference except venue, in his mind, between fighting anti-Israel legislation in Congress by exerting influence on individual politicians, and in stockpiling food, ammunition and firepower for the day when chaos came to the streets and anti-Semites sought to hang their enemies from lampposts. He had shown his father the literature, the hate sites on the internet, the books and magazines and newspapers produced by latter-day neo-Nazi organizations. In this era of social networking in which every man and woman with a computer could reach untold thousands of potential allies, those who hated Jews weren’t even trying to hide anymore. They spoke freely and, worse, advocated freely for the destruction of innocent men and women.
Arguing with a man of similar ideals who lacked Eli Berwald Sr.’s experiences, Aaron might well have failed to persuade him. But his dad had watched countless friends die in Schlechterwald. He knew well the horrible end of the path that started with mindless hate. He had lived through the gradual, then meteoric rise of tensions within Germany, as Hitler scapegoated the Jews for his own ends.
“Long knives and broken glass,” Aaron had told his father. “That is the future that awaits us again. We can prepare ourselves to fight, or we can let them herd us into camps to die again. Which will you choose?”
He hated using the idea against his father, to gain the man’s assent, but they had to have unity of purpose in this. Reluctantly, fearing that they were perhaps likely to make matters worse, Eli Sr. had given his blessing to the new programs.
Aaron had implemented his operations immediately. There was, unknown to most Americans, a wealth of paramilitary and civilian training available online, through books and DVDs, and by contract. Selecting what he called his Lantern commandos from among their youngest, strongest and most eager new members, he first had them work through a training curriculum he had devised with materials purchased online. Recruits were taught familiarity with weapons and the basics of martial arts, safe gun handling, team tactics and the like. At that point, everything was theoretical, although in the basement shooting range at the Lantern headquarters, recruits learned to load and fire the weapons they were studying.
After this initial training, Aaron had his commandos report to various facilities in the American Midwest, several of which were in Nevada. As any civilian could, the trainees learned to fire handguns, rifles and shotguns with “tactical” skill.
For other specialized instruction Aaron contracted with several famous martial artists and knife combat personalities. There was, to his initial surprise, a thriving industry in teaching individuals the use of the blade in personal combat. From among the most famous and successful of these men and women, Aaron picked half a dozen whom he brought in to teach seminars in the newly converted Lantern gym.
It was many months before his commandos were ready—and then Aaron Berwald had no use for them. This was by design. They would simply wait until they were required to defend Lantern and its people, or take more aggressive action.
Using the celebrity bounty hunter to bring Nitzche to justice had been a compromise. Eli Sr. had wanted nothing to do with actually extracting the evil bastard from a foreign nation. Once Lantern’s extensive intelligence network had identified Nitzche’s properties and verified that the man was there, alive, and actually one and the same as the Klaus Nitzche of Schlechterwald, the elder Berwald had wanted to inform the authorities and leave it to them. He believed Lantern worked best wielding influence behind the scenes, poking and prodding rather than saying and doing. While that formula had served Lantern well during his father’s tenure, Aaron couldn’t justify continuing that lack of involvement.
Lantern would have to be ready to make changes, not merely suggest them, were it and the Jewish people to survive the dark days Aaron Berwald feared were coming. A few times, his attempts to prepare fully for that eventuality had led him into trouble. Each time, Lantern and his father had come to his aid—but the problems had only served to further darken Eli Berwald Sr.’s opinion of his son’s plans. Aaron honestly didn’t blame him. What father wants to worry that his son might go to jail for, say, attempting to purchase automatic weapons from a man who turned out to be a plant from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms?
But all that was different now. When the courts had proved insufficient to hold the old Nazi camp leader, and Heil Nitzche had finally made its real strength known, Aaron realized he had been right all along. He had used his commandos for relatively limited forays into the realm of direct action, earning for Lantern the reputation of vigilante group. Those minor engagements—such as raiding the corporate offices of a global bank, using the stolen data to expose that institution’s commerce with the Nazi regime during World War II―were nothing compared to the full-scale invasion they were now mounting. But everything he had done, everything he had planned, seemed to have led Aaron to this very point.
It would be difficult for any man not to feel vindicated.
His father had insisted that the idea was insane. He had angrily forbade him to go to Kansas. Difficult as it was for Aaron to demonstrate the fact to his father, Eli Berwald Sr. no longer ran the Lantern. Aaron had instructed his commandos to obey his orders and told his father that, regardless of his wishes, the mission to recapture Klaus Nitzche was moving forward. The courts, the authorities, the police weren’t capable of dealing with Nitzche, at least not in the interminable span of time it took to convict and imprison a man in today’s “justice” system.
That left Lantern, and Aaron Berwald. They wouldn’t allow Nitzche to escape. They wouldn’t allow the world to forget.
Justice has a long memory, Aaron thought.
From the moment Nitzche’s men had seized the courthouse, he knew that giving the Nazi to the authorities could never be anything but a disaster. Nitzche was too powerful for the legal system. They should simply have arranged to execute him for his many crimes, once he had been pulled from the safety of his Argentine lair.
This night they were going to put that right.
While the immense bunker Nitzche had managed to build in Kansas was daunting, it was nothing they couldn’t deal with. Lantern had, Aaron would bet, more extensive details of Nitzche’s holdings and properties than the government did. They knew where he would go to ground; they were counting on it. When the terrorist force took the courthouse, Aaron had begun placing calls, making sure there would be no official resistance to Nitzche’s escape plan. Trying to stop Klaus Nitzche would only result in more lives lost. Once he was free, Lantern could go after him on their own terms.
There was the chance of a mistake; Aaron could admit that. It was possible that this warren of fortifications, created by Nitzche’s people to serve as a redoubt in the United States, was still unoccupied. But it wouldn’t make sense for Nitzche to spend so much time, energy and money creating a fortress he then didn’t use. No, the old Nazi was here. Aaron was sure of it.
He only regretted that there had been no time to practice the raid. His people were well-trained, he believed, but still very inexperienced when it came to work of this kind. A few months to run drills in which they worked out precisely how they would take Nitzche’s fortress—that would have been a blessing. Aaron realized he might as well wish for a year, and the support of helicopters and tanks, while he was at it.
So. They would fight with what they had. They would succeed. They were in the right. It was unquestionable.
Nitzche would pay for his crimes.
Behind Aaron in the tunnel was the rest of his contingent of commandos, except for the rear guard. If he had learned anything from the team tactics training, it was the importance of covering his own back. Gabriel, Malachi, Hiram and Jeff would signal if there was any trouble, or come directly to him in the event of—
“Aaron!” Gabriel whispered from the darkness of the trench. “Aaron! We have a problem!”
Aaron cursed. This was exactly what he feared might happen: something for which they hadn’t planned.
The small squad moved quietly, but they were hindered by something Aaron hadn’t thought to imagine. Jeff was also nursing a knee injury of some kind, Aaron noted. The four men were prodding forward at gunpoint a prisoner, dressed in black as they were. Aaron appraised the man, not sure if he liked what he saw.
The man was big, taller than any of his people, and built very solidly. Even at gunpoint he moved with the taut menace of a panther, as if at any moment he might reach out and maul one of the men who held guns on him. His face was smeared with black greasepaint. He was laden with weaponry that Aaron’s team members hadn’t taken from him: an enormous knife, two large handguns—one of which Aaron recognized from the butt and extended magazine as a select-fire Beretta machine pistol—and a tricked-out American assault rifle on a sling across his chest. A heavy canvas bag was slung across his shoulder, and he wore combat webbing covered in grenades and other gear.
