“Active hostiles?” Reynolds asked.
“Neutralized,” Bolan replied. “Like him.” He jerked his chin to the terrorist on the floor.
“What’d you do to him?” Reed asked, bending to check the fallen man. “His ear is gushing blood.”
“He wouldn’t listen,” Bolan said.
Reynolds eyed the Executioner disapprovingly. He handed over the identification. “So you’re the one.”
“Sir?” Reed asked.
“His people at Justice have been jerking my chain all morning,” Reynolds said. “They aren’t happy about the decision to let the chopper through. Seems Captain Go-It-Alone here has an attack chopper up there whose pilot doesn’t listen to local authority very well. Maybe he’s hard of hearing, too, Cooper?”
“I was told I would have full authority,” Bolan said. “Your men let the terrorists escape with live hostages. My air support and I could have prevented that.”
“We all answer to somebody, Cooper,” Reynolds said. “My orders come from the top of the chain here in D.C.”
“I doubt that,” Bolan said.
“To go higher you’d have to go to the President, tough guy,” Reynolds stated. When Bolan didn’t blink at that, he looked less sure of himself. “Had you interfered, they might have started killing hostages.”
“Had we cut off their escape,” Bolan said, “killing hostages wouldn’t have done them any good. They’d have traded their own lives for the lives of the captives.”
“I guess we’ll never know,” Reynolds said. “Whatever authority you think you have, Cooper, I’m not interested. Nitzche is gone, and so is your reason to be here. Get out of my crime scene.”
Bolan turned to leave. He paused when Reed looked up. “Strange,” the SRT man said.
“What?” Reynolds asked.
“I wouldn’t have pegged them for the suicide type,” Reed said, searching the pockets of the terrorist’s camouflage fatigues. “That’s not really the profile of…” He stopped. “Hey. What’s this?”
Reed had lifted the hem of the terrorist’s BDU blouse, probably to check for weapons at the waistline. The terrorist was wearing another uniform shirt underneath the fatigues. Reed ripped the BDU open, popping buttons. The logo on the chest of the uniform shirt was unmistakable.
“DCFD,” Reynolds said. The terrorist was dressed as a District of Columbia Firefighter.
“Oh, shit…” Reed said.
Bolan was on the move before the SRT men could think to stop him.
Of course the neo-Nazis weren’t ready to give up their lives. It wasn’t their style; it wasn’t how they did things. If Nitzche had left men behind to cover his escape, he would have provided for them a plausible means of escape. It wouldn’t matter to him if the escape plan actually worked or not. It only had to seem workable to the men staying behind in the courthouse.
It was possible the shooters from the chopper had planned to exit the helicopter at the last moment regardless of resistance offered. That made sense: ensure Nitzche’s escape, then remain behind to counter any last-minute resistance by the locals.
It also made sense that there would be one or two terrorists hiding somewhere in the building to serve as a rear guard. They would have waited for the worst of the battle to pass them by, then blended with the inevitable mop-up chaos—simply by shedding their paramilitary uniforms.
Taking the steps two and three at a time, Bolan ran past startled emergency personnel working their way through the corridors. He hit the street, and the crush of vehicles and bystanders, at a dead run.
Someone screamed.
Bolan looked left, then right. He spotted the fire department vehicles, and then, in the opposite direction, a pair of men dressed as DCFD.
“Federal agent!” Bolan yelled. “Down!”
He brought his carbine to his shoulder and fired.
Chapter 4
Klaus Nitzche prepared his carved ivory pipe, brought for him from his estate in Argentina. The tobacco provided to him wasn’t his favorite blend, but it was tolerable. Anything was better than the cheap, often stale cigarettes with which he had been forced to make do while in prison.
He was cold. Even with the large door shut, and even with his heavy overcoat draped around his shoulders like a cape, the cold seeped into his old bones and made him shiver. It had been cold in his holding cell, too.
It galled him that he still wore the orange jumpsuit in which he had been brought to trial. To deny him the opportunity to face his accusers dressed as a man, to force him to look the part of the criminal before his trial had even begun…these were only some of the many petty insults he had been forced to endure.
Nitzche was a proud man. He had reason to be. From an early age, he had understood that the key to greatness was pride. If a person believed in himself, if he knew himself to be better than others, those beliefs became self-fulfilling prophecies. They drove a man, forced him to be better than his enemies, better than his competitors. They became the measure of what he was. They became everything.
If it was true for a man, it was true for a nation.
He remembered vividly the awful day he’d realized that his nation, his Germany, had no pride. His father was dead, a victim of overwork and a weak heart. Klaus had tried to speak with his mother about it. She was a whipped dog, content to keep her nose down and her standards low. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t help him.
Germany was crippled by war and economic ruin. Its people had the mind-set of the defeated. Its people had lost their pride.
And then everything changed.
Nitzche fussed over the pipe, packing it just so. His fingers trembled. Arthritis threatened to turn his hands into claws. He willed them to work. He wouldn’t be laid low by something as insignificant as sickness. Sickness was of the body, and the body answered to the mind.
Klaus Nitzche’s mind was superior.
From the first rays of hope that were the Führer’s ascendancy to power, Nitzche had known things would be different. He had nothing but hate for those who refused to support Hitler willingly. It was obvious from the outset that Hitler offered Germany everything she had lost: power, respect, position. And something so much more important than the rest: the pride that accompanied these other things, these lesser things.
Indio, faithful Indio, leaned over from his seat and snapped open the chrome pipe lighter he always carried. The enormous Uruguayan had been, in his younger days, a Tupamaro—one of Uruguay’s leftist guerrillas, styled after a legendary Incan leader who once fought a revolution against the Spanish conquistadores. He carried a seemingly endless supply of knives and bore the scars of many a blade fight. The most notable of these was the oldest—a wide runnel marking his forehead, cheek and left eye
