Don Pendleton - Colony Of Evil

“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.