other humans was the world’s oldest story, played out in grim new headlines every day.
Which kept the Executioner busy year-round.
On this bright spring morning, he was killing time indoors, studying bleak reminders of how cruel humankind could be, while waiting for his oldest living friend. Their conversation, subject still unknown to Bolan, would inevitably launch him on another journey to the dark side, where he would find predators aplenty still alive and well, working around the clock to victimize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.
In short, business as usual.
Scanning the photographs of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, studying their smug and ghoulish faces, Bolan wondered if someone like himself could have derailed that tragedy, if sent to solve the problem soon enough. Would half a dozen well-placed bullets have changed anything at all?
Or was the tide of history inevitably tinged with blood?
Bolan’s experience had taught him not to second-guess the vagaries of human nature. Every personality contained a blend of traits, defined as “good” or “bad” by different societies. Some cultures valued warlike attitudes, while others favored meekness and pacivity. Some cultivated stoicism and endurance in the face of suffering, while others honored conscientious suicide.
But every nation, race and culture recognized that some people could only be restrained by force. If left at large, to exercise their will, the predators wreaked havoc.
Sometimes, they wound up in charge.
Bolan harbored no illusions about saving the world. He wasn’t a statesman, diplomat or philosopher. He couldn’t sway the masses with a glib turn of phrase and persuade them to trade in their weapons for schoolbooks or farm implements.
Bolan was a soldier, had been since he’d snagged his high-school diploma en route to the Army recruiting depot, breezing through basic training and moving on to Special Forces training at Fort Benning. And there’d been no looking back from there, until his family at home met a fatal snag that pulled him out of uniform and forced him to pursue a different, more personal kind of war.
That phase of Bolan’s life lay far behind him now. In terms of serving with official sanction, he’d been back on track since the creation of Stony Man Farm. In terms of serving fellow human beings, he had never stopped.
Each blow he struck against the predators saved lives that otherwise would have been diverted into dark and deadly avenues. For the enduring benefit of strangers, Bolan walked those alleyways and jungle trails alone.
They felt like home.
As he moved slowly past the Holocaust exhibits, Bolan wondered how it had to feel to be persecuted for a trait you hadn’t chosen and could never change. An accident of birth, say, that determined pigmentation, hair texture, the shape of eyes or nose.
Bolan knew all about the sense of being hunted, but he’d always brought it on himself, by standing in the way of people who would never stop harassing, robbing, killing others until they, themselves, were stopped dead in their tracks. He stopped them, and when their associates came looking for revenge, he buried them.
How long could it go on?
Bolan had no idea and didn’t let the question trouble him.
Turning from blown-up photographs of Nazi signs and posters that he couldn’t read, but which he understood too well, Bolan saw Hal Brognola moving toward him, past a group of children following their teacher through the gallery. Small faces sad and humbled, learning more than they might care to know about their species.
Bolan went to meet his friend.
“NO PROBLEM PARKING?” Brognola asked, as he clutched Bolan’s hand, pumped twice and let it go.
“The walk was nice,” Bolan replied.
“Sorry you had to come in naked,” Brognola went on. “Security’s been tighter since the shooting.”
“Sometimes the hardware weighs me down,” Bolan said.
Back in June 2009, an octogenarian neo-Nazi ex-convict had carried a .22-caliber rifle into the museum, killed a security guard, then fell under fire while trying to shoot other guards. The gunner had survived and was sitting in jail while his case wound its way through the courts at glacial speed. Attorneys at Justice had a pool going, on whether a jury or Father Time would deal with the creep in the cage.
Brognola, for his part, couldn’t care less. As long as the neo-Nazi was off the streets for good, it suited him.
One down. And how many tens of thousands to go?
God only knew.
Strolling past photo displays of the Kristallnacht riots—dazed victims and grinning, moronic attackers—Brognola got to the point. “I assume you keep up with what’s going on in the militia movement?” he asked.
“Yeah, things have really changed since the sixties and the Minutemen,” Bolan replied. “They organized to save America from Red invaders who never showed up, then started robbing banks to stay afloat and ran out of steam when the brass went to prison. Same thing in the nineties, responding to government action at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Last I heard, they’d done a fade around the turn of the millennium. Arrests and memberships way down, since Y2K fell flat.”
“Way down until the last election,” Brognola corrected him. “As it turns out, there’s one thing that riles the far right more than Communists, Jews and the New World Order all thrown together.”
“Should I guess?” Bolan inquired.
“No need,” Brognola answered. “It’s an African-American in the White House, talking peace and universal health care. Turns out ‘Change We Can Believe In’ translates on the fringe to ‘Grab your guns and go to war’?”
“Same old RAHOWA crap?” Bolan asked.
Brognola was painfully familiar with the acronymy. It stood for Racial Holy War, a slogan coined by a white-supremacist “church,” currently used throughout the racist underground by skinheads, brownshirts, Ku Klux Klanners, and some more supposedly “respectable” types who donned Brooks Brothers suits to peddle their message of hatred. Brognola had seen RAHOWA painted on walls, scrawled at crime scenes, and tattooed on flesh—but he still didn’t know how the fantasy sold to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.
“It’s that, and then some,” the big Fed told Bolan. “There’s been talk of white-power nuts plotting to kill the President since he was elected to the Senate, but they stepped up during the White House campaign. The Bureau nabbed four crackpots with a carload of guns at the Democratic Convention. Then, a week before election day, ATF busted a couple of nuts in Tennessee who had the Man at the top of their hit list, with eighty-eight victims in all.”
“Eighty-eight,” Bolan said, shaking shook his head.
“Nothing new under the Nazi sun,” Brognola replied.
H was the alphabet’s eighth letter. Eighty-eight, then, stood for HH—or Heil Hitler to fascists.
“I guess it never goes away,” Bolan said.
“Nope. Keeps
