Читать книгу Colony Of Evil - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

Two days earlier, Northern Virginia

The Blue Ridge Mountains looked entirely different from the air than they appeared to earthbound motorists and hikers. Bolan was reminded of that fact each time he flew to Stony Man Farm.

Airborne, he always tried to picture how the area had looked before the first human arrived, despoiling it with axes, saws and plows, road graders and the rest. Sometimes Bolan thought he was close, but then the pristine image always wavered, faded and was gone.

Maybe next time, he thought.

The Hughes 500 helicopter was a four-seater, but Bolan and the pilot had it to themselves.

On any graduated scale of secrecy, the Farm and its activities would rank above “Top Secret,” somewhere off the chart. From day one, Stony Man’s assignment—seeking justice by extraordinary, often extralegal means—had been one of the deepest, darkest secrets of the U.S. government. Beside it, aliens at Roswell and the stealth experiments performed at Nevada’s Area 51 paled into insignificance. Aside from on-site personnel and agents in the field, only a handful of Americans knew Stony Man existed.

Fewer still knew the extent of what it did, had done and might do in the future.

At its birth, the concept had been simple: organize a unit that, when necessary, in the last extremity, would set the U.S. Constitution and established laws aside to deal with urgent threats and/or to punish those whose skill at gliding through the system made them constant threats to civilized society at large.

Some might have called it vigilante justice; others, sheer necessity. In either case, it worked because the operation wasn’t public, wasn’t influenced by politics, and didn’t choose its targets based on race or creed or any factor other than their danger to humanity. Sometimes, Bolan thought it was more like dumping toxic waste.

“Ten minutes,” the pilot said, as if Bolan didn’t know exactly where they were, tracking the course of Skyline Drive, a thousand feet above the treetops. Cars passing below them looked like toys, the scattered hikers more like ants. If any of the hardy souls on foot looked up or waved at Bolan’s chopper, his eyes couldn’t pick them out.

Bolan had been wrapping up a job in Canada when Hal Brognola called and asked him for a meeting at the Farm. Quebec was heating up, with biker gangs running arms across the border from New York. Some of the hardware, swiped from U.S. shipments headed overseas, traveled from Buffalo by ship, on the St. Lawrence River, while the rest was trucked across the border at Fort Covington. Don Vincent Gaglioni, Buffalo’s pale version of The Godfather, procured the guns and pocketed the cash.

It had to stop, but agents of the ATF and FBI were getting nowhere with their separate, often competitive investigations. By the time Bolan was sent to clean it up, they’d lost two veteran informants and an agent who was riding with his top stool pigeon when the turncoat’s car exploded in a parking lot.

Bolan had sunk two of the Gaglioni Family’s cargo ships with limpet mines, shot up a convoy moving overland, then trailed Don Gaglioni to a sit-down with the gang leaders outside Drummondville, Quebec. The meeting had been tense to start with, but they’d never had a chance to settle their dispute. Bolan’s unscheduled intervention, with an Mk 19 full-auto grenade launcher had spoiled the bash for all concerned.

It had been like old times, for just a minute there, but Bolan didn’t set much store in strolls down Memory Lane. Especially when the path was littered with rubble and corpses.

There was enough of that in his future, he knew, without trying to resurrect the Bad Old Days of his one-man war against the Mafia. A little object lesson now and then was fine, but there could be no turning back the clock.

Which brought him to the job at hand—whatever it might be. Brognola hadn’t called him for a birthday party or a house-warming. There would be dirty work ahead, the kind Bolan did best, and he was ready for it.

Which was not to say that he enjoyed it.

In Bolan’s mind, the day a killer started to enjoy his killing trade, the time had come for him to find another line of work. Only a psychopath loved killing, and the best thing anyone could do for such an individual was to put him down before he caused more misery.

Soldiers were trained to kill, the same way surgeons learned to cut and plumbers learned to weld. The difference, of course, was that a warrior mended nothing, built nothing. In battle, warriors killed, albeit sometimes for a cause so great that only blood could sanctify it. Some opponents were impervious to grand diplomacy, or even backroom bribes.

In some cases, only brute force would do.

But those were not the situations to be celebrated, in a sane and stable world. Peace was the goal, the end to which all means were theoretically applied.

Back in the sixties, bumper stickers ridiculed the war in Vietnam by asking whether it was possible to kill for peace. The answer—then, as now—was “Yes.”

Sometimes a soldier had no choice.

And sometimes, he was bound to choose.

“We’re here,” the pilot said as Bolan saw the farmhouse up ahead. Below, a tractor churned across a field, its driver muttering into a two-way radio. There would be other watchers Bolan couldn’t see, tracking the chopper toward the helipad. Fingers on triggers, just in case.

They reached the pad and hovered, then began to settle down. Bolan looked through the bubble windscreen at familiar faces on the deck, none of them smiling yet.

It wasn’t home, but it would do.

Until they sent him off to war again.

“GLAD YOU COULD MAKE IT,” Hal Brognola said, while pumping Bolan’s hand. “So, how’s the Great White North?”

“Still there,” Bolan replied as he released his old friend’s hand.

Beside Brognola, Barbara Price surveyed Bolan with cool detachment, civil but entirely business-like. The things they did in private, now and then, might not be absolutely secret from Brognola or the Stony Man team, but Barbara shunned public displays. She was the perfect operations chief: intelligent, professional and absolutely ruthless when she had to be.

“You want some time to chill? Maybe a drink? A walk around the place?” Brognola asked.

“We may as well get to it,” Bolan said.

Clearly relieved, Brognola said, “Okay. Let’s hit the War Room, then.”

Bolan trailed the big Fed and Price into the rambling farmhouse that was Stony Man’s cosmetic centerpiece and active headquarters. From the outside, unless you climbed atop the roof and counted dish antennae, the place looked normal, precisely what a stranger would expect to see on a Virginia farm.

Not that a stranger, trespassing, would ever make it to the house alive.

Inside, it was a very different story, comfort vying with utility of every square inch of the house. It featured living quarters, kitchen, dining room—the usual, in short—but also had communications and computer rooms, though major functions were in the Annex, an arsenal second to none outside of any full-size military base, and other features that the standard home, rural or urban, couldn’t claim.

The basement War Room was a case in point. Accessible by stairs or elevator, it contained a conference table seating twenty, maps and charts for every part of Mother Earth, and audio-visual gear that would do Disney Studios proud.

How many times had Bolan sat inside that room to hear details of a mission that would send him halfway around the world, perhaps to meet his death?

Too many, right.

But it would never be enough, until the predators got wise and left the weaker members of the human herd alone.

Aaron Kurtzman met them on the threshold of the War Room, crunched Bolan’s hand in his fist, then spun his wheel-chair to lead them inside. As Stony Man’s tech master, Kurtzman commonly attended mission briefings and controlled whatever AV elements Brognola’s presentation might require.

Brognola took his usual seat at the head of the table, his back to a large wallscreen. Price sat to the big Fed’s right, Bolan on his left, while Kurtzman chose a spot midway along the table’s left-hand side. A keyboard waited for him on the tabletop, plugged into some concealed receptacle.

“Okay,” Brognola said, “before we start, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to keep up with the news these past few days.”

“Not much,” Bolan said. “Scraps from radio, while I was driving. Headlines showing from the newspaper dispensers.”

“Fair enough. We’re in the middle of a flap that has the White House nervous, not to mention certain friends abroad. Starting three days ago, on Thursday, we’ve experienced a series of attacks on Jews, here in the States and down in Mexico. It has the White House in an uproar, for assorted reasons, and we’ve got our marching orders.”

Bolan knew the protocol for Stony Man briefings. Brognola went by a script of sorts, and liked to keep his ducks all in a row.

“Who were the victims?” Bolan asked.

The big Fed tipped a nod to Kurtzman and the overheads dimmed just enough to simulate twilight. Behind Brognola’s back, a photo of a smiling couple dressed for formal partying filled up the screen.

“That’s Aderet Venjamin on the left,” Brognola said, without glancing around. “His wife’s Naomi. For the past five years, Venjamin has been assigned to the Israeli consulate in New York City.”

“Someone hit him?” Bolan asked. It was the logical assumption.

“Nope. The wife.”

Bolan’s surprise was indicated by a raised eyebrow.

“On Thursday morning,” Brognola pressed on, “she went out shopping on Park Avenue. One bodyguard, one driver, both ex-military. As she left a jeweler’s, two men on the sidewalk shot the guard, threw nitric acid in her face and fled on foot. No clear description of the perps, no vehicle observed.”

“Survivors?” Bolan asked.

“The lady’s still alive,” Hal said, “if you can call it living. Left eye gone, partially blinded in the right. Skin grafts may help a little, but she’ll never look like that again.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the screen behind him.

“Anyone claim credit for it?” Bolan asked.

“We’re not sure.”

“Meaning?”

“Two days prior to the attack, the consulate received a note, postmarked Bogotá. It took nine days to be delivered. No one in the postal service can explain exactly why.”

Another nod to Kurtzman, and the happy-couple photo was replaced by a plain sheet of paper. Roughly centered on it was a typed message: “See now, how ugly are the Jews who suck our blood.”

“That’s it?” Bolan asked. “I’d imagine the Israeli consulate gets bags of poison-pen notes every day.”

“You’d win that bet,” Brognola said. “I checked it out. Apparently they average fifteen pounds of hate mail daily, double that around well-known religious holidays.”

“So what sets this apart? The timing or the ‘ugly’ reference?”

“The postmark, actually,” Brognola replied. “But that’s hindsight. Stay with me for a minute, here.”

A nod, another change of photos. Now the carcass of a tour bus filled the screen. Fire damage showed around the frames of shattered windows. Bolan picked out bullet holes along the one side he could see. The bus’s logo, what was left of it, read Tourismo Grand de Sonora.

“This went down about an hour after the Park Avenue attack,” Brognola said. “A busload of Israeli tourists traveling around Sonora, as I’m sure you gathered from the sign. They were en route to Hermosillo, from some kind of mission, when a group of masked men stopped the bus and started shooting. Passersby, they left alone.”

“They wanted witnesses,” Bolan observed.

“Apparently.”

“Survivors on the bus?”

“Not one.”

“You’re linking this to acid on Park Avenue, because…?”

“Of this,” Brognola said, and Kurtzman keyed the next slide. Once again, it showed a common piece of stationery with a one-line message: “Jews suck the lifeblood of nations.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t see it, either,” Brognola replied, “but the Mossad and FBI agree that both notes were prepared on the same manual typewriter. It’s a vintage German model, specifically an Erika Naumann Model 6, last manufactured between 1938 and early 1945.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I wish. It just gets worse.”

This time the picture changed without a signal from Brognola. On the screen, a body sprawled in blood and sunshine, with pastel storefronts and palm trees in the background. Bolan couldn’t see the dead man’s face.

Small favors.

“Ira Margulies,” Brognola said. “One of the top fifteen or twenty richest people in Miami Beach. He was a force to reckon with in banking, real estate, what have you—until Friday morning, when a shooter took him down.”

“Where was the note?” asked Bolan.

“Tucked under his left elbow, away from the blood flow,” Brognola said.

And as he spoke, another note filled up the hanging screen. It read, “The Jews are not the people who are blamed for nothing.”

Bolan frowned and asked, “Why does that sound familiar?”

Price fielded that one, telling him, “It’s similar, but not identical, to a note left at one of Jack the Ripper’s London crime scenes back in 1888. The original note misspelled ‘Jews,’ and a couple of other words are slightly different. For plagiarism, it’s a sloppy job.”

“You said, from 1888?”

She nodded, adding, “But it’s quoted in every book and article written about the Ripper since then. How many hundreds are there, all over the world? We think it stuck in someone’s mind. They’re playing games.”

“Same typewriter?”

“Affirmative,” Brognola said.

“But only one note sent by mail,” Bolan observed.

“We think,” Brognola said, “that they were leery of a drop-off at the consulate.”

“One source for all three notes,” Bolan confirmed. “One mind behind the crimes.”

It was the big Fed’s turn to nod. “And on the rare occasions when he mails a note—”

“It comes from Bogotá,” Bolan finished the thought.

“Or somewhere in Colombia, at least. We think the author’s tied in to a Nazi clique established in the country during 1948 or ’49. Are you familiar with a place known as Colonia Victoria?”

“Victory Colony?” Bolan translated with his meager Spanish. “It’s not ringing any bells.”

“No reason why it should, really,” Brognola said. “It gets some bad publicity every ten years or so, but mostly it’s a hush-hush operation. The Colombians don’t like to talk about it, with their public image in the crapper as it is. The German immigrants and their descendants in the colony, well, it’s in their best interest if they don’t get too much ink or TV time.”

“How so?” Bolan asked.

“The colony was founded by war criminals, for starters,” Brognola replied. He slid a dossier across to Bolan, an inch-thick manila folder with a CD-ROM on top. “You’ll find the major players there. Or what we know of them, at least. Nutshell, they’ve got substantial acreage in coca and they deal with the Aznar cartel. Some say they use native slave labor, harvesting the crop, refining it. The local police take their bribes and look the other way.”

“So, Nazi narcotraffickers?”

“Tip of the iceberg,” Brognola said. “Through the years, there’ve been reports that the resident führer—one Hans Dietrich, formerly an SS captain under Eichmann—runs some kind of cult. We’ve had reports of child-molesting and polygamy, you name it. As I said, the local cops are deaf and blind. On one or two occasions, when investigators made the trip from Bogotá, they claimed the place checked out okay. Whatever that means, when you think about the status quo down there.”

“Somebody’s getting greased,” Bolan suggested.

“Six or seven ways from Sunday,” Brognola agreed. “Bribes are a given. On the flip side, the Israelis and a few left-wing reporters have tried sneaking in, over the years. Most of them disappear without a trace. One, as I understand it, wound up eaten by a jaguar or a crocodile, something like that.”

Old Nazis raising new ones in the jungle. And an antique German typewriter.

“It’s thin,” Bolan said, “if that postmark’s all you’ve got.”

“Did I say that?” Brognola’s grin was just this side of sly.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“When Margulies got hit, down in Miami Beach, somebody got the shooter’s license tag. Of course, it was a rental car.”

“Dead end,” Bolan said.

“But they keep a photocopy of the client’s driver’s license,” the big Fed stated.

Another image on the screen. It was a blow-up of an Alabama driver’s license, with a color photograph of one George Allen Carter and a home address in Birmingham. The photo’s subject was a crew-cut man of twenty-four, if you believed the license stats.

“Phony?” Bolan surmised.

“As the proverbial three-dollar bill. Except for the mug shot.”

“How did you trace it?”

“CIA,” Brognola said. “Computers are a miracle, you know? Put in a face, and if it’s ever shown up in a friendly nation’s dossier, voilà!”

“I’m guessing that he doesn’t come from Alabama,” Bolan said.

“Not even close. He kept his old initials, though. Meet Georg—no e on that one—Abel Kaltenbrunner. Born and raised, as far as anyone can tell, inside Colonia Victoria.”

“He got away.” It didn’t come out as a question.

“Sure he did. Clean as a whistle, with a passport in some other name. We’ll run it down, one of these days, and it will be another phony, long since shredded.”

“Well, then,” Bolan said. “It looks like I’ll be going to Colombia.”

BOLAN’S ROOM was at the northeast corner of the second floor. He occupied the small room’s only chair, a laptop humming on the table before him, with documents spread out around it. Everything he saw and read convinced him that someone before him should have undertaken this assignment long ago.

The founder of Colonia Victoria, Hans Gunter Dietrich, had been charged with genocidal actions at the Nuremberg tribunal, after World War II, but he’d slipped through the net, using the old ODESSA network, slipping out of Germany through Franco’s fascist Spain to Argentina, then to Paraguay, and finally Colombia. After the allies hanged a handful of his cronies and imprisoned several hundred more, the Nazis who escaped were basically forgotten by the world at large, except for the Israelis and a few die-hard Resistance veterans in France. Many who went to jail were sprung ahead of schedule, “rehabilitated” and recruited to the service of their former enemies, as Britain and America began their long cold war with Russia.

Names like Bormann, Eichmann, Mengele, and Barbie—Klaus, that is, who never had a doll cast in his honor—still cropped up from time to time, as they were sighted here and there around the world, sometimes kidnapped or executed by Mossad hit teams. But thousands got away and never spent a night in custody for their horrific crimes.

Hans Dietrich was a perfect case in point.

Fleeing the Reich before V-E Day, fortified with looted gold, artwork and God alone knew what else, he’d bribed politicians when they still came cheap, bought sweeping tracts of land that no one wanted, and had built himself a kingdom, welcoming his fellow fugitives from justice, acting as a law unto himself within his fiefdom, ruling those who had acquired the habit of obedience in Germany and knew no other way to live.

Dietrich had been a young man then, midtwenties when Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had collapsed after twelve years of pure Hell on Earth. He would be pushing ninety now, unless you bought the argument advanced by certain theorists on the Internet, that he had died and been replaced by a successor, clone or robot—take your pick.

Colonia Victoria had grown with time. More Nazis joined the fold, by one means or another. How many were born inside the colony, over the past six decades? No one knew. Some sources claimed as many as three thousand had left homes in other countries where their racial hatred was unwelcome, and had sworn allegiance to Herr Dietrich in Colombia. They straggled in from Europe, North America, South Africa, the Balkans—aging fascists, skinhead punks, veterans of cliques and Klans and fascist parties few people would even recognize by name.

Colonia Victoria was aptly named, Bolan decided. While it wasn’t huge, by any means—one hundred square miles, give or take an acre—Dietrich ruled a territory nearly twice the size of Liechtenstein. Most of his land was cloaked in montane forests, ideal for the coca crop that guaranteed his little realm would never want for cash.

That had to be a victory of sorts, in anybody’s book.

Some of the immigrants to Dietrich’s colony, upon reflection, had decided that Colonia Victoria was not their cup of tea. Those who returned from Nazi Never Land told grim, disturbing tales of what went on inside the colony. Hal’s list had barely scratched the surface with reports of slavery, polygamy, weird rites and child abuse. Some also spoke of human sacrifice to pagan gods, blood-drinking and executions without trial.

According to the information Brognola supplied, Colombian authorities had made three separate investigations of the colony, based on complaints from former residents. Meaning white residents, since tales spread by the forest-dwelling aboriginals were generally ignored by everyone except a couple of devoted missionaries living in the bush. After the missionaries disappeared, such stories passed unnoticed by the denizens of “civilized” society.

The first investigation had been launched in 1955. A couple from West Germany, Gunter and Ilse Stern, spent two years at Colonia Victoria, then left, complaining to Colombian authorities that Hans Dietrich reserved unto himself the right to “sample” wives and daughters, to ensure their fitness for the task of breeding little Aryans. A prosecutor visited the colony with two detectives, spent the night and then reported that he found no evidence of any impropriety. The fact that he immediately bought a brand-new Cadillac convertible was certainly a mere coincidence.

The next official look-see came in 1970, when a teenager named Rolf Schumacher surfaced in Mocoa, forty miles northwest of Dietrich’s colony. He’d been delirious from fever, ultimately lost one leg to hemorrhage from a snakebite, and took weeks to tell his halting story in disjointed bits and pieces. Bottom line: Schumacher claimed that Dietrich and his SS-style Home Guard had killed Rolf’s parents and two brothers when the family opposed Dietrich’s selection of their teen daughters for his breeding program. Rolf had managed to escape, eluded trackers in the forest, but had worse luck when it came to Mother Nature.

Once again, investigators made the trek to Dietrich’s hideaway. This time they spent three nights and came back empty-handed. Their report, which had been classified on grounds of “national security, then photocopied by a contract agent of the CIA and sent to Langley, found no evidence of any “organized eugenics program,” sexual abuse of minors or restraint of any resident against his-or-her will. In fact, the bureaucrats found nothing to suggest that any Schumachers had ever joined the colony.

The third and last official peek inside Dietrich’s domain occurred in 1995. On that occasion, a Mossad agent informed the DAS—Colombia’s Administrative Department of Security, equivalent to the FBI—that Dietrich was allied with certain drug cartels and with a global network of Muslim ex-tremists. DAS Deputy Director Joaquin Menendez had promised a thorough investigation, but nothing seemed to happen. Except, that is, a car-bombing in Cali that killed the complaining Mossad agent seven weeks later. Israel had not protested, since the agent’s presence in Colombia was technically illegal, but a CIA informant claimed that two low-level DAS agents were subsequently executed by Mossad, for the bombing.

Menendez, meanwhile, kept his post at DAS headquarters and compiled a record Hans Dietrich himself might have admired. In May 2000, acting on information supplied by Menendez, soldiers of the Colombian Army’s Third Brigade ambushed and killed ten members of an elite police narcotics unit trained by the DEA. In its two years of existence, the unit had captured 205 cocaine smugglers, including several who were sent to the United States for trial. The massacre—or “tragic accident,” as local newspapers described it—had occurred, Menendez said, because one of his most reliable informants had mistaken the police for leftist rebels. The list went on.

Menendez, in the photos Brognola provided, scowled behind a set of bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache. His eyes were dark brown, nearly black, and in the shots provided seemed devoid of all humanity.

As for the Sword of Allah, documents procured from the Mossad alleged that one of the group’s top planners, Nasser Khalil, spent an average four months per year at Colonia Victoria, flying in to Dietrich’s private airstrip without interference from the DAS or anybody else. Khalil was sought by Israel, France and Italy for acts of terrorism planned and carried out against them, while the CIA had placed a bounty on his head, on general principles. He was suspected of collaborating with al Qaeda and Hamas on various attacks over the past ten years, but he had never been arrested or detained for questioning by any of the governments pursuing him.

If Bolan had an opportunity to meet him…

Gentle rapping at his door distracted Bolan from the files in front of him. He rose and crossed the room, opened the door, and felt himself relax at sight of Price’s smile.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want company,” she said.

“Always,” he told her, stepping back to clear the doorway.

“You’ve got a lot to read and memorize.”

“I’m nearly done.”

“Any surprises?”

“Anytime I see the old Hitlerian mystique crop up again, I guess a part of me’s surprised,” he said. “My father fought those guys, you know? It’s hard to fathom anyone believing in the Master Race and all that crap, after so many years.”

“Some people never learn,” she said.

“I guess they need another lesson, then.”

“You’ll be careful, right? Colombia’s no place to let your guard down for a nanosecond.”

“Hey,” he said, “careful’s my middle name.”

“Your middle name is Sam, and careful is the farthest thing from what you are,” she answered.

“Well…”

“I mean it, Mack. Nazis, the DAS and drug cartels, the Sword of Allah. Toss them all together, and you don’t have many friends down there.”

“There’s always Jorge Guzman,” Bolan said.

“I say it again, be careful. Just because he draws a paycheck from the DEA and the CIA, it doesn’t mean he’s clean. You know the kinds of characters they deal with. Watch yourself, is all I’m saying.”

Bolan said, “I always do. But at the moment…”

“What?”

“I’m busy watching you.”

“Smooth talker.”

“I’m a little out of practice,” he admitted.

“I hope so.”

She wore a jumpsuit with a zipper down the front, running from chest to somewhere south of modesty. As Bolan watched, she gripped the tab and lowered a fraction of an inch, teasing.

“I was about to have a shower,” Bolan said.

She smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”