Arctic Kill. Don Pendleton
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he had no true authority. Kraft was the muscle, and if the muscle failed, not even the most efficient brain could make it work. He picked up another cigarette, caught sight of Kraft’s face and stuck it behind his ear. “Sparrow hasn’t called.”
Kraft’s face betrayed nothing, but his eyes slid to the satellite phone on the desk in the corner. “Interference,” he said. He knew the routine as well as Mervin did. Better, most likely, though he would never say so. Kraft’s loyalty was like iron. He appeared to regard Mervin as a sibling, someone to be protected or coddled. Whether that was due to the orders of their immediate superiors—who, Mervin knew, valued him—or because of some snag in Kraft’s emotional makeup, Mervin did not know, nor did he care.
“Possibly,” Mervin said. “We will act as if that is the case.” He pulled an old-fashioned pocket watch out of his coat pocket and opened it. It was his only memento, a gift from his mother. Or so he assumed. He had not known her well and barely recalled her voice. “We will give them an additional hour. If they haven’t called by then, we continue with the plan.” That, too, was part of the routine, a routine Mervin had spent years crafting. The servants of the Society of Thylea operated like well-oiled clockwork. If one gear slipped or was stripped, another took its place. Mervin appreciated clockwork. Besides nicotine, only the click of clockwork could soothe his mind when it skipped its track. The regular rhythm settled his heart rate and helped him slide his thoughts into their proper alignment.
“Without Ackroyd, it’s going to be difficult,” Kraft said. He scraped his palm across his freshly shaved chin, thinking. Mervin hated the sound flesh on stubble made. It grated on his nerves. He snapped the watch closed.
“But not impossible.”
“No,” Kraft agreed. He smiled. “Nothing is impossible for us. It will be a great day, the day after it is done. It will be a new era for the pure peoples, Vril-YA!”
“Yes, yes, Vril-YA,” Mervin agreed. He wished, sometimes, that he had Kraft’s devotion to the Promise of Tomorrow. But the ruthless, implacable logic that made Mervin useful to the Society also prevented him from fully buying into the Nazi bedtime story that had propelled them for almost a century.
Facts shifted in the Rolodex of his mind. Where Kraft was an engine of destruction, Mervin was an engine of calculation, and as such, he collected facts and fancies with a glutton’s instinctive frenzy. The Society had first flown the banners of Thylea in 1918, envisioning a hyperborean mega-continent of ice-sculpture citadels and pure-blooded Nordic giants linked to the Vril, the life-blood of the cosmos. A Jotunheim Utopia, where gods and giants were one and the same, that ruled over the past and future of the Aryan Race. The Society of Thylea had been founded on the principles of that nonexistent continent, and was ruthless in seeking to bring about their particular melanin-based Ragnarok. They longed to create the Aryan utopia only dreamt of by frantic xenophobes, believing that it would bring a sacred peace to the world.
It was all rot, of course. In Mervin’s opinion, there was no more truth to these tales than to the stories of the Bible or the Koran. Stories told to justify and rationalize a campaign of murder and obfuscation that had been going on for almost a hundred years. Men like Kraft clung to the stories of Thylea with brutal naiveté. But Mervin was a man of logic. He saw little need to waste energy on self-justification. Not when there were more important matters at hand.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Society of Thylea had gone underground, as had so many groups and persons with ties to the Nazis. Unlike those groups, however, the Society had money, and lots of it. Even today it had its financial supporters. And using the resources of those supporters, the Society had, for decades, hunted for weapons it could employ in its battle against the lesser races. It had sought to find the singular spear of destiny it could thrust into the heart of sub-humanity.
And, eventually, it had found something, in a place called HYPERBOREA.
It was pure poetry, that name. And a fair amount of serendipity, too.
Mervin was growing tired of the Society. More, he was growing tired of Kraft. He looked at the big man, his expression bland, imagining Kraft broken, bloody and dead. There was no particular reason for his enmity. It was simply his nature. Familiarity bred contempt. He was good at hiding it, he thought. If any of them suspected, they said nothing.
“Are the others ready?” he asked.
Kraft frowned. “If not, I’ll have their hides.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Kraft grinned. “So precise,” he said. “Yes, they are ready. The charter plane has been booked. We will deal with the pilot on the day, given that we don’t need her.” He made a face. “She is a native. Likely a bad pilot, anyway.”
“Given the reviews of her business, I doubt that,” Mervin said. He sighed as he caught Kraft’s deepening frown. “A bad pilot is statistically unlikely to care for his plane, or to have a reputation that guarantees noninterference. Neither of those things would be of help to us. I chose the best pilot available. Ergo, she is a good pilot.”
“I meant no insult,” Kraft said, smiling slightly. He patted Mervin’s shoulder. “And what if Sparrow calls?”
“Then we follow through with the current plan. We will meet the others at the airport and escort Dr. Ackroyd to the charter plane. You will dispose of the pilot in front of Ackroyd, as an object lesson, and then we will go to meet our destiny.”
“Object lesson, eh?”
“Waste not, want not,” Mervin said. Kraft laughed heartily. Mervin hated that laugh.
The Society thought HYPERBOREA would mean a new beginning.
And for Saul Mervin, it would.
Reno, Nevada
Bolan’s fingers scrabbled at the hood of the SUV as he fought to hold on. The vibration of the engine thrummed through him and he felt as if his teeth might rattle loose from his jaw. Horns blared as the vehicle bulled through traffic, weaving back and forth across the median as it roared toward Reno’s commercial district. Bolan hooked his feet into the front grille and tried to shove himself up, but the SUV was simply moving too fast and his own weight was acting against him. He grabbed for the hood ornament and it snapped away in his hand. His arms and legs ached with tension and he knew it was only a matter of time until he lost his grip or was dislodged from his perch by a speed bump.
Traffic whipped around the Executioner in a blur of lights and sounds. The SUV jerked to the side and, caught by surprise, Bolan half swung off the front end, cursing, before he crashed back against the vehicle and regained his grip. He had to get off the SUV and soon. He could make out the thin squeal of distant sirens. The police weren’t far behind. The way Sparrow was driving, he wouldn’t be able to avoid their notice. Maybe he didn’t intend to. Bolan met Sparrow’s furious gaze through the cracked windshield. The kidnapper wasn’t happy about his stowaway. Bolan wasn’t exactly enthused himself. If he’d been thinking more clearly, he’d have let Sparrow go and simply followed. But there hadn’t been time to think. He’d been determined to bring down the last of the kidnappers, and now he was clinging to the front of an erratically driven SUV. If Bolan had his KA-BAR combat knife, he might’ve been able to punch a hole in the radiator, but as it was, he was at the mercy of gravity and physics and unless he acted—and soon—he was going to suffer the same fate as every unlucky insect ever to strike a windshield.
The SUV began to weave again. A four-door sedan was brushed aside in a scream of crumpled metal and shattered glass. Bolan hunched forward. The SUV drifted to the side and Bolan realized that Sparrow was trying to scrape him off. Twisting his head, he saw that they were approaching the Virginia Street Bridge. That would have to be his stop. Bolan felt a twinge of regret at having to leave Ackroyd in the hands of his captor, but there was nothing for it. He wouldn’t do Ackroyd much good smeared across downtown Reno. I won’t do anyone much good that way, he thought grimly. Too much was depending on him.