weapon,” Bolan said. “Each war produces innovations and surprises. Put the SEALs or Special Forces on it. Shake things up. They’ll find a guy who knows a guy and track it down.”
“No luck with that so far,” Kurtzman said. “Top priority or otherwise, they’re pumping dry holes over there.”
“One logical alternative,” Bolan replied, “is a defective weapon of some kind. Guerrillas mix and match. Sometimes they fabricate to meet their needs. New weapons frequently have unpredictable results when they’re first used in combat. Maybe your hotshot was a mistake, and they’ve worked out the bugs.”
“We don’t think so,” Brognola said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s surfaced in the States.”
Bolan leaned forward in his chair. “Say what?”
“On Wednesday morning, in Ohio,” the big Fed confirmed. “There’s no mistake.”
“Go on.”
“Somebody hit an armored truck en route from Dayton to Columbus, carrying 65 million dollars. Somebody fired twice through the back doors with the supergun—whatever. Cooked the guard back there and spooked the driver, so he rolled it. After that, they used conventional C-4 to pop the doors, iced the witnesses, then made off with the cash.”
“That’s all we have?” Bolan asked.
“Not quite,” Brognola said. “The guards up front got off a radio alarm about the hit. An old gray van, they said, and ‘something weird,’ which pretty much describes the supergun. A couple of state troopers saw the van and started a pursuit.”
“I’m guessing that they didn’t catch it,” Bolan said.
“You’re right. The fugitives lit up a gasoline truck, killed the driver, forced the troopers off the highway, set the fields on fire.”
“The troopers?” Bolan asked.
“One of them’s in a Cincinnati burn ward as we speak. The other didn’t make it.”
“What about the van?”
“Stolen out of St. Louis two weeks earlier,” Brognola said. “Painted and overhauled. They torched it outside Louisville, Kentucky. Wiped out anything forensically significant, but they left stolen license plates from Little Rock, and we could still see how they modified the van inside.”
“Is that significant?” Bolan asked.
“Absolutely,” Wethers interjected. “First, they built a swivel unit where the backseat used to be, then ditched the shotgun seat and fixed the windshield so the right-hand side would lower on a hinge.”
“To fire the supergun,” Bolan said.
“In our estimation, yes. With the arrangement we discovered, they could aim it fore or aft. They made it mobile, and it served them well.”
“Too bad we don’t know who they are,” Bolan remarked.
“I just might have a lead on that,” Brognola said. “It isn’t definite, by any means, but—”
“Give me what you have,” the Executioner replied.
“How much do you know about Christian Identity?” Brognola asked.
“A neo-Nazi version of King James. The Nordic tribes of Israel. Jews are demons, nonwhites are mud people, the usual racist garbage.”
“That’s it, in a nutshell,” Brognola said, “with the emphasis on nuts. It used to be the creed of choice with white supremacists until the 1990s, when a lot of them turned Odinist to claim their Viking roots. The hard core hanging with Identity is more extreme than ever now, maybe to balance what they lost in numbers.”
“If you want to call that balanced,” Wethers said.
“In any case,” Brognola said, forging ahead, “we’ve got a clique of suspects who line up with the events in question geographically. Are you familiar with an outfit called the Aryan Resistance Movement?”
“Not offhand,” Bolan replied.
“Aaron?”
Kurtzman keyed a button from his chair, and Bolan watched a screen descend behind Brognola. From the far wall opposite, a slide projector hummed to life, projecting a map of the central U.S. on the screen. Brognola half turned in his chair to eye the map, as he continued speaking.
“They’re a neo-Nazi outfit, as you might imagine from the name. Still clinging to Identity theology, against the far-right trend. They have a compound here.” He pointed to the northeastern corner of Arkansas with an infrared beam. “You’ll find their background information in the file I brought you, but to summarize, they started in Missouri, then moved south, and they’ve been getting more extreme—more militant—as time goes by. Nonsense about the call to topple ZOG, and so on.”
“That’s the Zionist Occupation Government,’” Barbara Price reminded him. “Otherwise known as the U.S. of A.”
Bolan nodded, familiar with the term from other contacts on the fascist fringe. He waited for Brognola to continue.
“Anyway,” Brognola said, “geography.” The pointer danced across the broad projected map as he continued. “Here we’ve got the ARM, holed up in what they call Camp Yahweh. A hundred miles to the southwest is Little Rock, source of the stolen license plates. Due north, St. Louis, where the movement got its start—”
“And where the van was stolen,” Bolan finished for him.
“Right, you are. Ohio, where they made the hit on Wednesday, is a straight shot, more or less, from northern Arkansas along the interstates. And coming back, there’s Louisville. Stop by and torch the van that’s served its purpose.”
“It’s suggestive,” Bolan said, “but it’s also circumstantial.”
“Granted, but we’re looking for a weapon, not preparing for a trial.”
“Okay,” Bolan replied. “Convince me.”
“Right. For starters, three known members of the ARM were once associated with the Phineas Priesthood and the Aryan Republican Army.”
Both of those groups, Bolan knew, had robbed banks and armored cars across the United States in the 1990s to finance a scheme they liked to call Racial Holy War. Some members had been prosecuted and were serving time, but others wriggled through the nets for want of solid evidence connecting them to a specific crime. Broader sedition charges filed against both groups had been dismissed on grounds that anyone in the U.S. was free to advocate destruction of the government, as long as they made no attempt to pull it off.
“All right, we’re closer,” Bolan said.
“It’s apparent from the new group’s publications that they idolize the Phineans and ARA,” Brognola added, “but their straight-up heroes are Bob Mathews and The Order.”
In
