Final Judgment. Don Pendleton

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 socket. The socket held a black glass orb Indio affected for its menace. Around his neck, he wore a necklace of six brass rifle shells, which he claimed were the first six shots he had ever fired as a Tupamaro. On his hip the South American giant carried a well-worn Tokarev pistol, which also dated to his revolutionary days.

      As Nitzche puffed contentedly on his pipe despite the chill, he chuckled to himself. The thought of one like Indio in his employ, much less as a trusted lieutenant and field commander, would have horrified him as a younger man. He had been so full of idealism at that age. So eager to prove that the Führer and his notions of purity were true to the letter of Aryan law.

      Yet those ideas of purity, those assertions to perfection, hadn’t saved Hitler and those closest to him. In the end, even the Führer’s pride had failed him. In the end, he had embraced defeat, reportedly taking his own life rather than be captured by the enemy. Such a waste. Such a tremendous disappointment.

      When the time came for Nitzche to abandon Schlechterwald, as the enemy advanced on the camp, it had been the simplest of matters to marshal the men loyal to him and implement the contingency plans he had put in place. A wise military leader always allowed for the possibility of failure. To do otherwise was, well, it could be called prideful, but Nitzche knew there was a line between pride and hubris that could not be crossed. The latter led one to make foolish mistakes, such as holing up in a bunker and refusing to admit that the war was lost, and some other means of continuing the fight had to be found.

      Working his way up in the wartime German hierarchy hadn’t been difficult. Nitzche was intelligent, ruthless and enthusiastic. Most importantly, he got results, ringing every possible ounce of blood and sweat from Schlechterwald’s forced labor ranks. With the war well under way, Nitzche’s tendency to get results had saved him from the wrath of his superiors when he’d decided to take leadership of the camp more directly in hand. He had, through the years, even managed to forget the name of the SS officer he had killed in order to take over his job.

      Yet he remembered vividly what it had felt like to squeeze the life from the man’s throat. He had grabbed the fool by the neck, placed his thumbs oh so precisely and pressed, squeezed, clenched for all he was worth. The flush brought to the SS commander’s face had been so great that Nitzche could feel the heat radiating from the man’s cheeks. The sound that had escaped the dead man’s lips, when Nitzche had finally released him, was like nothing he had known before or since.

      The things one forgot weren’t strange at all, considering. One remembered the important details. One discarded the irrelevancies.

      He remembered, for example, the day that Indio had joined his employ. In the period immediately before and after the fall of the Third Reich, many refugees from the Nazi regime had fled to Argentina and its somewhat sympathetic commercial and political climates.

      Nitzche was no refugee.

      Power over a camp like Schlechterwald was power over a means of production, over a lot of resources and their distribution. Nitzche had used his power to divert funds and supplies to his contingency plan. As the war effort grew more dire, and Germany’s chances less certain, he had accelerated his own planning. Were his beloved country to know another military defeat at Hitler’s hands and on Hitler’s watch, Nitzche would nonetheless continue on in the spirit of the Führer’s best teachings.

      So when he was forced to withdraw from Schlechterwald with his private forces, the loyalty of which he had cultivated through long familiarity—and more than a few bribes—Nitzche traveled to Argentina not as a fleeing refugee, but as a determined soldier.

      Through the years he’d focused on building his organization. That was made both easier and harder by the fact that Heil Nitzche had no clearly defined goal. Klaus followed global politics keenly and watched as other political and terrorist movements waxed and waned. He followed the social protest movements, too. Without exception they were unfocused, poorly led and ineffectual, even when abundantly funded and resourced.

      Over the years, his perspective on the superiority of the Aryan race also evolved.

      Yes, it was true that those of Aryan descent were superior, but that was no longer a guiding philosophy in and of itself. It simply couldn’t be. Were innate superiority all that mattered, Hitler couldn’t have lost to the coalition of race-mixing inferiors who’d stood against him.

      In time Nitzche had come to liken the idea to a pack of wild dogs. In every pack there were stronger dogs and weaker ones. The latter deferred to the former, but the pack worked toward common goals.

      It would be foolish for Nitzche, as the leader of his own pack, to discard a specific powerful, fearsome dog simply because he judged that dog’s breed inferior. And while ultimately the pack might operate toward some idealistic goal―in Nitzche’s case, the overall ideal of Aryan supremacy represented by political power in Nitzche’s hands—every pack’s more immediate purpose was the protection and furtherance of itself.

      Nitzche and HN had therefore built an organization whose purpose was simply to strengthen Nitzche and his men. This focus on strength for its own sake had allowed HN, and its many resources, to remain below the radar of the many counterterrorist units that operated around the globe.

      It was also that focus of strength as the end goal that had brought to Nitzche’s banner a variety of men who might never have sought his protection otherwise. He was currently alone among those of his contingent who had traveled to Argentina from the collapsing Third Reich. He had outlived them all. That was just as well, for many of the neo-Nazi soldiers Nitzche now cultivated would have caused his old supporters more than slight pause.

      He had begun recruiting from many light-skinned races of color, most extensively those from South America, uniting them as neo-Nazis under the philosophies of national socialism and of might was right. The type of men Nitzche needed to form the ranks of his soldiers―simple, ruthless, obedient, but vicious—responded well to his modified approach. In showing them kindness, in lavishing on them resources and even gifts, in showing them that he valued their devotion to him, he succeeded in creating a cult of personality. Heil Nitzche wasn’t just a neo-Nazi organization. It was an organization devoted