Death Merchant #67: Escape From Gulag Taria

Gulag Death

Deep in the frozen wastelands of Siberia, in an impregnable hospital fortress, a would-be defector with a powerful secret is being held prisoner. He is a Soviet physicist whose work in weather control could give the Cold War a whole new twist. The CIA's problem: how to kidnap him from a psychiatric staff of Soviet sadists and KGB killers. The answer: Richard Camellion. Who else in their right mind would lead a ragtag band of fanatic dissidents against the whole of Mother Russia and find a deadly mission the perfect chance to go a little crazy?

****

In The Silicon Valley Connection (DM #58), Joseph Rosenberger wrote:

Throughout the length and breadth of the USSR, in thousands of camps, in prisons and on trains, was hidden a population larger than that of Canada4, as large as Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, or of Belgium and Austria put together; and in each prison and in each work camp were the KGB sadists, the parilka, or "sweat room," and an utter lack of hope.

4 In Death Merchant number 68, Escape from Gulag Taria—yet to be published—a full explanation of the Soviet slave system will be given—information printed for the first time anywhere.

Rosenberger doesn't deliver on that promise of "a full explanation" of the "slave system", although throughout the first half of the book, several Russians "traitors" working with Camellion continually tell him how awful things are in "this prison of a nation". We hear mostly about the pessimistic character of the typical Russian and his relationship to his repressive government, but we also learn about coarse toilet paper and women who do not shave their legs. (In an odd aside, Rosenberger states that Camellion's extreme, long-standing, and oft-stated prejudice against everything Russian was "based strictly on emotion and had no foundation in fact".)

So the Death Merchant is in southeastern Siberia, on a mission to rescue (or kidnap, in the KGBs mind) Dr. Georgi Ulomov from "Special Psychiatric Hospital UZh-15/5 ITK-14", where he has been imprisoned for speaking out against weather modification. ("The nation that could fully control the weather could control the world.") Much of the story takes place in the area of Yakutsk, located about 450 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.

Camellion is working with several Russians, including an attractive woman named Zoya Beliyev:

Not immune to the charms of even a female pig farmer (or a roll in the hay, even if the hay was in the Soviet Union), the Death Merchant reflected that Zoya did have a nice body. Each breast was a good handful, and while her hips were a trifle too wide, her stomach was firm and flat, her navel so deep it could hide half a tongue. For a Russian woman, she did have slim legs, and shapely, too, not too thick in the calves and thighs. Nor was she unattractive facially either.

Zoya seems to be flirting with Camellion at one point, but nothing happens as the Death Merchant can't get past "those damned hairy legs"! (Actually, Camellion seems completely immune to the charms of females. He's not gay; sex plays almost no part in any of these books. Once in a while, maybe every 10 books, Rosenberger writes that the Death Merchant finds a woman attractive. I think Camellion has had sex maybe two or three times in the entire series.)

Camellion and two others attempt to get Ulomov out of the hospital by posing as three Russian officers with transfer papers. But the KGB (often referred to as the Kah Gay Beh) at the hospital see through their ruse and the three have to shoot their way out. They steal a jeep and escape. They go into hiding at Beliyev's grandmother's house as the KGB searches for the "terrorists" who killed roughly a dozen men at the hospital.

There are several ambushes or skirmishes that pop up every so often. Camellion and a Russian named Kirill Tarkovsky are driving and find the road has been blocked by an accident. They decide to wait in a cafe. The militia comes in and demands to see everyone's papers. The two men have fake papers and they end up having to blast their way to safety, leaving a pile of slug-stabbed bodies behind. Once the road is cleared, they drive on -- and are followed by more KGB agents. And so there is yet another bloody shootout.

Camellion's plan is to attack the hospital, assuming that while the Russians may think he'll attempt another kidnapping, he won't go all out and attack the place. With explosives and many weapons, he sneaks into the hospital grounds and causes much havoc. Camellion forces one guard at gunpoint to lead him to Ulomov and he gets him out of the hospital. While they are driving away with Ulomov, the Death Merchant and his group are set upon by the KGB. Cue the high-velocity projectiles and subsequent gore.

They eventually make their way to the coast where they are supposed to meet some Navy SEALs before swimming out to a waiting submarine. On the beach, they encounter - not Navy SEALs - but "Mad Mike" Quinlan and about thirty of his Thunderbolt Unit Omega mercenaries. Quinlan says his group has been hired by the CIA because they are "expendable". Soon enough, nearly ten armored KGB cars are converging on the beach. Rosenberger is once again at his best in describing the in-close gunfighting and hand-to-hand combat. In the finale to this volume, he gives us about 10 pages of meticulously described action.

Some trademark Rosenberger gore:

Five .45 THV copper projectiles had shot through the engine, turning two of the cylinders into junk. The other sixteen THVs had not increased the longevity of the three members of the militia and the KGB officer. The copper-points had poked through the door and the driver as easily as if the metal and cloth and flesh and bone had been soggy tissue paper. ... Neither man had time to cry out or even think of his mother.

Neither did the two men in the rear, three slugs hitting the man on the left and four striking Paul Raske, who was on the right. When the Death Merchant had triggered the Ingram, Raske had been bending over to pick up an AKR submachine gun. Three of the slugs that ripped through his seatmate bored through Raske's left side. A fourth projectile smacked him in the side of the head with such force that his skull exploded. There was a loud pop that no one heard, and pieces of ripped flesh and bits of bone and bloody brain were suddenly all over the floor, the rear of the front seat, and the right side of the dead dummy to the left. ...

Phyyyt. The first .22-caliber hollow point caught the KGB boob with the flashlight in the mouth and blew out the back of his neck. He dropped the lantern and was falling backward when Camellion fired four more times, the silenced Ruger pistol whispering. The second Russian went down with an exploded heart and a slug that had angled through his right lung and rested against the innerside of the scapula. The third guard took the last fall of his life with slugs that had cut through the thin zygomatic bone of his face and had tickled the pons, the brain stem. He, too, had become as useful as a parachute on an ocean liner. ...

On the left side of the cab, Alexey Perchany was rolling under the rig as slugs from the chattering Ingram chopped into the six troopers and the three KGB agents. Byhairin's head seem to jump six inches from his neck. It had. Three .45 THV slugs had almost decapitated him. He fell with his head held by only a strand of flesh and flopping like a football, bouncing back and forth between his shoulder blades. The blood spurting from the stub of his neck splashed all over Lieutenants Norvorzhev and Josef Perikiriv. Both men were stone dead, their upper chests having been ripped open by the axelike Tres Haute Vitesse projectiles. ...

Mad Mike Quinlan was having a slight problem of his own at the moment, in the form of a big Russian coming at him with an AKR assault rifle with a bayonet attached.
"You stupid son of a bitch!" Mike taunted Branko Voukelich. "I'm going to take that frog sticker away from you and use it to pin your ass to the sand!"
Enraged, Voukelich made a quick thrust at Mike's stomach, and instantly received his Big Shock of the day. Quinlan side-stepped and with lightning speed used the palm of his right hand to parry the thrust, shoving against the side of the barrel and the handle of the bayonet. At the same time he stepped to his right oblique. He was now in a position facing the bayonet, with his groin area protected by his right leg. Before the startled—and now a bit frightened—Voukelich could pull back and try for another thrust, Quinlan grabbed the upper portion of the assault rifle with his left hand and used a right sword-ridge hand to strike the inside of Voukelich's left elbow, the sharp slam causing the Russian trooper to let out a yell of pain and release his left hand from the forward underneath portion of the AKR assault rifle. Quinlan grabbed the AKR with both hands and, as he kicked Voukelich in the left kneecap with his left foot, twisted the assault rifle and its bayonet free. Just as quickly, Quinlan hooked the instep of his left foot in back of Voukelich's left ankle and jerked. Down went Voukelich, flat on his back. A quick reversal of the assault rifle by Mad Mike and an even faster downward thrust. Voukelich screamed a very short wail of agony as the blade of the bayonet cut through his colon and tickled his spine. His body jerked several times. His eyes rolled back and his mouth went slack. He was lucky. He would never suffer from cancer.

A well-hidden secret room at a church:

Only half listening to the conversation, the Death Merchant felt it was ironic that monks of the Russian Orthodox Church—dead for two hundred years—had saved his life. Their ingenuity in constructing the secret rooms beneath the Church of Our Savior deserved gold stars. A stone trapdoor in the floor behind the high altar could be opened by releasing a tiny catch concealed in one of the confessionals. Beneath the trapdoor was a square shaft, then down twenty-nine feet on a ladder to a low, narrow passage that stretched for sixty feet to the north. Twenty-three feet to the north was another trapdoor concealed in the floor; beneath it was the first occultated room. A cleverly hidden door in its south wall opened to another room. At the end of the sixty-foot passage was a door concealed in the stones of the north wall. The outer stones of the door were so finely cut that, when the door was closed, the edge of a razorblade couldn't be inserted. Beyond the door was a large crypt, behind its west wall a smaller catacomb containing the sealed sepulcher of four monks. In the north wall was still another hidden door, beyond it another vault filled with broken stones. The Soviet government knew about these five rooms. The KGB knew. What the KGB didn't know was that Yuri Gagarin had discovered two more tomblike rooms. In the floor of the rubble-filled chamber was a trapdoor that opened to a shaft. Ten feet below and at the end of the shaft was a large chamber. Beyond the south wall of this chamber was the last and final space. It was to this room that Gagarin brought the Death Merchant and Kirill Tarkovsky.

Camellion muses on some End of the World nonsense:

As silent as a shadow, the Death Merchant moved out and headed toward the east wall. There wasn't any need to linger. Either the guards in the towers would see him or they wouldn't. ... He moved south rapidly, thinking that success or failure really didn't matter. Both, like life and living, were illusory, as vaporous as Man's search for peace. In only a short time—on the scale of history, ten years is far less than a second—the world would be plunged into the darkness of death and destruction, of blood and violence and barbarism. The living would envy the dead, and the long night of horror would begin.

And the obligatory weapons porn:

A Slingshot APILAS—Armor-Piercing, Infantry, Light Arm System—was bulky and ungainly looking. The main body was a fifty-two-inch one-piece launch tube into which could be thrust a 108 mm missile with a shaped HE charge. The rocket engine of the missile was very fast burning and pushed the warhead along at better than 1,200 feet per second, to give a very short time of flight to its effective range of 300 yards. The warhead was so powerful it could dig right through 700 mm of armor or six feet of reinforced concrete. ...

Vito Rinletti turned and looked at Mike Quinlan, who was putting a cylinder into a CAWS (Close Assault Weapons System) Pancor Mk-3 Jackhammer shotgun, a weapon that looked like something out of the twenty-first century. For one thing, the magazine was a detachable cylinder that held ten rounds of twelve-gauge ammo. For another, the cylinder and all the shotgun's major subassemblies were injection-molded from a new high-strength synthetic material called Rynite SST. ...

Camellion aimed for the head, wanting instant kill-shots, his logic based on the fact that for most pistol calibers the maximum velocity of the bullet never exceeds 1,200 feet per second. At speeds between 400 and 1,200 fps, the bullet has a tendency to bore a hole through the body, creating a channel wound, with damage confined to the channel. At velocities over 1,200 fps, the bullet carries enough energy so that a more severe wound can result, but as a rule the bullet only passes through the body. It is only after the bullet has been accelerated above 2,400 fps that the high-velocity explosive wound comes into being, unless you're using special ammo—Arcane, THV, and so on. At the moment Camellion was using .45 caliber cartridges, and a .45 ACP projectile carries only enough energy to knock a man backward at a rate of about two inches per second. For this reason the Death Merchant wanted to be positive that the targets didn't have even a minimoment in which to fire—not even as they were going down.
They didn't. The .45 bullet from Camellion's left Gonez smacked the Russian with the assault rifle in the bridge of the nose. The slug zipped through the lower portion of his brain and blew out the back of his head. No human being could have died faster.

Etc.:

"Richard Camellion was as calm as a clam in a coma."

"Turkey turds ... Hopefully, they had an IQ higher than an onion!"

"A thousand feet ahead, the road turned rather sharply and moved past a thickly wooded area, the trees appearing to be almost to the edge of the concrete. Russians, pig farmers that they were, loved woods."

"Homo sovieticus is a special breed of moral coward."

"Get on that phone, spinach face."

"The Russians have as much chance against that sub as a jungle bunny in Harlem has of learning calculus!"

Camellion has "an absolute horror of urinating in front of a member of the opposite sex, even with his back turned. Better to face an entire division of KGB trash."

Death Merchant #66: The Cobra Chase

Red Fever

His code name is Cobra. Behind him lies a long, bloody trail of violence and assassination. Before him is a sinister rendezvous with the KGB. For the Russians have developed the ultimate weapon of subversion - a ferocious AIDS-like virus targeted at America's heartland.

But the CIA has a one-man antidote: Richard Camellion. Determined to stop his old nemesis, he will lead an international killing team on a break-neck, blood-soaked chase across Western Europe to deliver his own cure for commie terror: sudden, violent death!

****

Three months have passed since the end of the Death Merchant's last adventure, Mission Deadly Snow, in which Richard Camellion destroyed the Partners' huge cocaine processing factory in Colombia.

Now Camellion is working undercover in a Paris suburb - posing as an architect from Florida on vacation - hoping to find and kill the Cobra, who escaped from the "snow" factory before the big attack. The Death Merchant had refused outside help in tracking the Cobra (aka Adrian Mirocco) but he eventually ends up working with French intelligence. A raid on the apartment of a PLO terrorist (one of the Cobra's mistresses was also there) yields keys that fit lockers at RER Station. Three suitcases are found containing weapons, maps, various receipts, and photographs believed to be of the Cobra. The PLO terrorist and mistress are tortured, but they reveal no useful information.

The Death Merchant then gets word that a US General in the Air Force was murdered when his plane was shot down over Spangdahlem AFB in West Germany. A total of 32 people (in the plane and on the ground) were killed, but one person survived. That person overheard someone using Mirocco's nickname and something about being "safe in Istanbul". Convinced that the Cobra was behind the attack on the plane, the Death Merchant travels to Istanbul immediately. At an Istanbul safe house, an agent informs Camellion that the Cobra has been located "in a deserted han in the Beyoğlu district". In preparation for an attack, they actually drive past the building, but rather than storming it from the street, Camellion decides instead to walk through some underground rat-infested sewer pipes and come up into the cellar of the han. Sure enough, the Cobra and various Turkish revolutionaries are in the building and there is a massive shootout, complete with Camellion using CNB gas and thermit grenades. Somehow, the elusive Cobra escapes.

Camellion believes Mirocco has gone back to West Germany to get assistance from the KGB. So the Death Merchant's next move is to disguise himself as Mirocco and kidnap Alexandr Vensivik, a counsul general of the Soviet Union, at a performance of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Camellion believes Vensivik will know where the Cobra is hiding. Vensivik does give the Death Merchant some information - after watching Camellion shoot his wife - but the reader is not privy to it.

The Cobra's previous plan to assassinate the Pope is put on hold because the Soviets want him to go to Sweden and take possession of a deadly virus (it gives victims symptoms similar to AIDS) and deliver it to a special KGB group in Wichita, Kansas. (Talking about the United States gives Rosenberger the opportunity to have Mirocco opine (as many of Rosenberger's characters do) that the US is "very stupid about its borders. They can't even keep out the trash from Mexico.") We learn that one of the KGB officials meeting with Mirocco told Vensivik, while tipsy, the details of this operation. This is likely the information that Vensivik told the Death Merchant. Mirocco also gets word that someone disguised as him pulled off a kidnapping. Mirocco realizes that only one person in the world could do this: "the mysterious Death Merchant"! He also wonders if the KGB is using him as bait to lure the Death Merchant to Sweden.

The handoff of the virus will be done in the ruins of Castle Vasa, off the shore near Härnösand on the east central coast of Sweden. A few days before the transfer, the Death Merchant and a small army of 14 others arrive at the castle. Rosenberger goes overboard describing the old castle as a "monstrous, silent sentinel enraged its privacy was being invaded". The structure is not attractive: "it looked as inviting as plague" and Camellion senses "a menacing perversion ... the Cosmic Lord of Death had many forms and shapes". In scouting out the many floors of the castle, they discover a secret room under the dungeon filled with Soviet weapons, as well as a stairway that leads down to the water. Camellion plants sound detectors and small packets of explosives all over the place and then it's time to sit and wait.

Once Camellion detects voices, he sneaks down to the lower level and tosses down some heavy stones to lure the Russians to investigate the first floor. When they do, the RDX packets are set off and the gun battle begins. Eventually, things come down to Camellion and Mirocco face-to-face. Camellion has the opportunity to "tweep" the Cobra, but he chooses not to. He wants the Cobra to know who is killing him, so they engage in hand-to-hand martial arts instead. "You're the reason birth control was invented", Camellion taunts him at one point. Of course, the Death Merchant wins the battle and blows the Cobra's head off. Success! (It is left unsaid whether some of the Russians in the underground chamber were able to retreat down the shaft and escape with the virus. Rosenberger drops the virus part of the storyline when the final battle begins and never returns to it.)

Etc.:

Right away, on page 9, we get some ammo porn to slow up the action:

The Death Merchant was using BAT cartridges, BAT being the acronym of Blitz-Action-Trauma. The BAT Safety bullet was a solid copper alloy, round-nosed projectile that did not contain any lead. The bullet was drilled all the way through with a stepped, two-diameter hole, thus leaving a cavity in the nose. This cavity was filled with a plastic-explosive plug that formed the round nose. A 9mm BAT bullet was deadly. Weighing 86 grains and having a muzzle velocity of 1,400 feet per second, the BAT slug could penetrate two car doors.

"The Cobra ... had only one religion. He was a fanatic who believed only in himself, only in Adrian Miroccoism!" [In an earlier book, Camellion says he follows only "Camellionism" and in a 1985 letter, author Joseph Rosenberger noted that his only religion was "Rosenbergerism".]

Camellion: "The only worthwhile pursuit that carries any reward is the avoidance of taxes."

"Working in the intelligence game, especially in the field, was always a carefully controlled nightmare, more often than not resembling a blind man's trying to walk on a tightrope that was never there in the first place."

Scherhorn, the eternal pessimist, was saying, "I don't care how well we've planned. There are so many unknown factors involved that it almost gives me diarrhea just to think about it".

"It's easy to be an angel when nobody ruffles your feathers. It is even easier to continue to avoid death when you've become a walking encyclopedia of dirty tricks and close-in combat tactics. But you had better have a very intimate knowledge of human nature and be familiar with how Evil thinks. Richard Camellion did have both."

"As far as Kröchen was concerned, the two Turks were as useless as pricks on priests."

"Adrian Mirocco was as puzzled as a man who has found Velveeta cheese in the gourmet section of a supermarket ..."

"Camellion, who would have dared to black-bag God, if the price for the job was right ..."

"If [the bald] Vensivik had been wearing a turtleneck sweater, he would have been able to pass for a giant tube of roll-on deodorant."

"As I see it, for us to even try to get to the castle can be equated with trying to take a bath in the middle of Yankee Stadium during the height of the baseball season."

"The Cobra knew he was doomed. Or, should be make a deal? Surrender? Do whales tap-dance?"

"And to think we're fighting men whose nation can't even manufacture a decent ballpoint pen!" Antoine Zegame muttered to no one in particular.

Death Merchant #65: Mission Deadly Snow

The Cuban Connection

Somewhere under the rich canopy of the Colombian jungle is the nerve center of the world's largest drug operation. And right now twenty thousand kilos of cocaine are being processed for shipment to Havana -- to be used as a weapon of subversion against the U.S.

Determined to put a stop to the plan, the CIA has established a base in Peru. But Richard Camellion isn't satisfied with that. For behind the cocaine, backed by the whole might of the KGB, stands a man whose name is whispered in fear, a shadowy legend. And the chance to seek out and destroy his archenemy El Cobra is more than a challenge. For the Death Merchant it's a sacred mission ...

***

In late 1985, Pinnacle - which had published the previous 64 Death Merchant books (dating back to 1971) - went out of business. Joseph Rosenberger retained the rights to his character and took his business to Dell, which published #65 (originally titled Operation Snow Job) as Mission Deadly Snow. The cover image of Richard Camellion looks far more like Rambo than the non-buff guy pictured on any of the last 64 books. In addition to making Camellion look more like a typical mid-80s mercenary, Dell also re-wrote (updated) the back-cover introduction to the character:

Volume #65 in the nonstop, high-voltage adventures of Richard Camellion. Totally fearless, a warrior-for-hire at the services of America's most secret security operations, he operates internationally with savage ease. Weapons and martial-arts expert supreme, he executes missions with stone-cold cunning. His enemies can do no right. His friends can do no wrong. A lone master of lethality, destruction, and disguise, he'll go anywhere, stop at nothing to get the dirty work done, to earn the name you know him by: The Death Merchant.

The back cover copy actually does a good job of relating the plot. From a secret US base in Peru, the Death Merchant plans an attack on La Niebla, the Colombian headquarters of the Partners' drug smuggling operation. Fidel Castro (with the backing of the Russians and the KGB) has ordered 20,000 kilos of "snow" from the Partners with the expressed intent of introducing it into the US, thus "wreck[ing] the morals of American society". Camellion's two-part mission: destroy La Niebla and kill "Adrian Mirocco", aka the Cobra, who is arranging the deal for Castro.

After Camellion's initial attempt to get close to the Partners by posing as a drug-buyer fails in the opening chapter, the Death Merchant resorts to more traditional means. While using Nightwalker, a series of interconnected caves in the Sangre Mountains of Peru, as a base of operations, Camellion learns that the Partners are set to receive thousands of pounds of both ether and acetone, products necessary to process Castro's cocaine. They attempt to thwart this delivery off the Pacific coast, but are unsuccessful. Then Camellion and his men have to defend Nightwalker as the powerful Cobra bribes officials high in the Colombia Air Force to fly across the border into Peru and attack the American base. After surviving that attack, the only thing left to do is invade Colombia and destroy La Niebla, where the cocaine is being processed.

Rosenberger is all business in this volume, offering relatively few of his usual political, social, and/or mystical digressions. Also, for the first time in years, he includes no footnotes. (There are a couple of brief scenes of a sexual nature, though neither of them involve the Death Merchant. I wonder if Dell's editors requested their inclusion to spice up the usual asexual DM adventures.)

Rosenberger also spends more time than usual describing the various slugs the men are using in their weapons:

Galen Shuck was also proving that one American is worth far more than two greasers south of the Texas border. In a stance that was a half-crouch, he coolly fired his Star M-30 PK pistols, putting three 9-millimeter hollow points into Eduardo Simón Yglesias as Wayne Augustine, a prematurely bald Alpha Force commando with a Bob Hope ski nose, fired a Smith and Wesson .38 Police Special. He was too busy to be afraid and too angry to even think of death.

The best loads for a .38 Police + S revolver are 95- and 110-grain hollow points. Augustine, however, was using 110-grain .38 Hydra-Shok HP Copperheads in the revolver. In less time than it takes to say ¡Madre de Dios! Augustine had pulled the trigger and had blown away Gilberto Lersundi, the .38 Hydro-Shok projectile going all the way through the Tiger commando's stomach and hitting his spine, breaking his back and cutting the cord.

During the gun battle, Rosenberger actually halts the action completely to provide information on Camellion's Arcane slugs:

It was also all over for Rafael Gonzalez, who had triggered the FAL, and for Tuñón Estrada, who had tried to use the Uru SMG. Both had been hit by Camellion's .357 Arcane projectiles.

A magnum bullet is bad enough. A .357 mag projectile that is also an Arcane bullet is awesome. Arcane comes from the Latin arcanus and means "mysterious." However, there isn't anything mysterious about the deadly Arcane bullet that was invented by the Germans during World War Two. The Nazis produced the Arcane in 9-millimeter to be used in their Schmeisser SMGs, wanting a round that could penetrate the side armor of American half-tracks. Fortunately for the Allies, the war ended before German Arcanes could roll off the production lines.

The Krauts had intended to use solid zinc tips. It is far different with modern Arcane ammo: made of pure copper, each bullet is a full-metal slug that is sharply angled and has a straight slope and a sharp point, all of it resembling a tiny pyramid. Arcane bullets do not have a soft metal outer coating, nor is there any other type of metal in the center of the slug. Lighter than most bullets of the same caliber, an Arcane slug is different from ordinary ammo, different not only because of its shape, but also because it combines the most desirable effects of both hollow point and armor-piercing ammunition.

For these reasons Estrada and Gonzalez looked as if they had been hit in the chest by blasts from a double-barreled shotgun at close range.

And later:

It was these ten [Colombian] mercs who were first spotted by Alpha Force recon scouts, two of whom were killed in a short firefight that followed in the forest that was turned into a free-fire zone, but not for any length of time. Firing Valmet M-76 and SIG PE-57 assault rifles, Bombaro's men peppered the area with 7.62 (X 51 NATO) and 7.5 X 55-millimeter projectiles, the storm of steel-cored slugs effectively pinning down both White and Blue companies, until three 91-millimeter warheads from AT-4 launchers exploded and turned the ten mercs into chunks of bloody flesh that ended up decorating the trees, the kappa grass, and scores of earthstar and lilac puffballs. This area of southern Colombia was similar in flora and fauna to northern Peru.

In the end, the processing plant and the cocaine are destroyed, but the Cobra escapes into the jungle. The series' next volume - The Cobra Chase - will be the second half of this adventure.

Etc.:

Slurs used to describe people in Colombia and Peru: spics, spic-heads, chili-peppers, chili creeps, rice-and-chili eaters, pepper-and-garlic snappers, chili-bean boobs, taco-heads.

"The Death Merchant's HP 9-millimeter slug hit him in the abdomen, bored through his colon and stirred up the steak he had had for dinner."

Vernon Cole, hiking through the verdant Colombian jungle: "Shit, this is like being at the bottom of a bowlful of salad."

"A thin individual with a long face and sad hazel eyes, he made one think of a punch-drunk caboose that had gotten lost and missed the gravy train of life."

Cole: "Fuck the United Nations! The UN is nothing but a group of nigger nations and commie lovers who do nothing but run down the United States. If Washington had the sense of a retarded ape, it would tell all those American haters to get their asses to Moscow. They'd soon learn what communism really is."

"A realist, Cole said exactly what he thought and when he felt like saying it. By normal standards, he was an oddball, a nonconformist who considered the entire human race an obscenity. A complex individual, the only thing he hated worse than a conformist was another nonconformist who didn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity."

It turns out that The Cobra shares Cole's (and Camellion's and every other character's!) opinion that the United States has a foolish belief in the equality of the races. "Only the Americans had the naivete of children in regard to the world picture, to the geopolitics of power. They were so obsessed with making the races of the world 'equal' that they were not only destroying their own country but permitting the Soviet Union to strangle them with amazing rapidity. The childish Americans were even supplying the rope!"

"Silvers was as calm as a drugged clam."

"The Death Merchant also spotted the man not far from Bombaro and wondered how the lard-butt had become a mercenary in the first place. The balloon belly had to weigh three hundred pounds—And all of it fat! That blubber gut will die yelling for a waiter! Muttering, "Rest in pizza!" Camellion raised the Desert Eagle and pulled the trigger. Lard-Butt's head exploded, brain and bone, flesh and blood, soaring outward in one complete mess."

Death Merchant #64: The Atlantean Horror

Ice Cold Hell

Veliki - a Russian missile base. Loosely translated its name means friendship. To America it could mean World War III.

Now an amazing energy converter is being studied by top American scientists. Its origin and composition, a mystery. Its power for destruction, awesome. Underlying its dread presence in the world is a prediction of nuclear holocaust that dates back to the ancient, lost city of Atlantis. The Russians will stop at nothing to get their hands on it.

But America's got another weapon of destruction that gives it a cold, hard, deadly edge: Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant. He will lead an assassination squad on a blood-soaked mission into frozen Antarctica that will leave America's enemies wishing they had never been born - or lived long enough to face the Death Merchant!

***

As The Atlantean Horror begins, Richard Camellion is spying on Veliki, the largest Soviet Union base in Antarctica. Three cargo ships are being unloaded nearby and when the Death Merchant sees 16 armored cars, he knows that can mean only one thing: an attack is being planned! The nearest U.S. base (Star-1) is only nine miles away. When Camellion is discovered lurking around, he has to shoot his way to safety. And although (as author Joseph Rosenberger puts it) "his chances of coming out of this mess alive were less than the possibility of dunking a doughnut in a thimbleful of hot coffee", the Death Merchant scratches ten Russians and makes a getaway through the swirling snow.

The reason for the activity in Antarctica is that the Americans have uncovered an "energy converter" that was built and buried by the highly-developed ancient civilization of Atlantis 70,000 years ago. The machine can "convert the rays of the sun into pure energy" and be used as a "death ray" to wipe out entire cities. This information, as well as the exact coordinates of the buried machine, came from a spirit entity known as "Baris", who communicated with Dr. Cecil Montrose (See DM #62, The Soul Search Project). In that book, Montrose developed an extraordinary machine that enabled him to communicate with the spirit world. Baris - a high-ranking scientist in Atlantis - has an awful lot to say about his people's vast knowledge and their ultimate demise in a nuclear holocaust, but more importantly, he wants the U.S. to have the energy device because they are "trying to maintain peace in the world" unlike those unrepentantly evil Russians.

If you're wondering how an artifact from Atlantis got so close to the South Pole, Rosenberger spends a lot of time explaining about pole shifts occurring every 19,000 years (or 32,000 years; it varies in his telling) and how what was once tropical is now frozen wasteland. Rosenberger also notes that another "shifting of the poles" (and "the end of civilization") is coming in the next 14 years (i.e., before the year 2000, since this book was published in late 1985).

The Russians know about the "cosmic generator" (although it's not explained how they learned of its existence) and they plan to attack the U.S. base known as Andromeda. When that is successful, the Sunburst-1 base - where the generator is being excavated - will be isolated and vulnerable. For making sure the U.S. secures the Atlantean device, the Death Merchant is being paid five times his usual $100,000 fee.

The plot follows the usual pattern. After extensive planning and discussing every possible scenario, the action begins. The Russians attack Andromeda - and are defeated. Camellion and about 10 other men then travel over the ice to Sunburst to examine the device. It's an eight-day trek over 1,100 miles in weather that is 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but Rosenberger doesn't devote any pages to the journey. Camellion, through his vast knowledge of the Russian mind and military tactics, has figured out the "pig farmers'" next move - to attack Sunburst. When that also fails, Camellion cranks up the crazy by deciding to launch a surprise attack on the Russian base Vostok-II. The DM and his fighting force are victorious and, although he gets no official word, Camellion learns that the Atlantean energy device is now safe and secure at an ultrasecret base in Colorado.

What steals the show in The Atlantean Horror is the sci-fi stuff that "Baris" revealed to Montrose.

"We Atlanteans were not native to your planet. We resembled modern man and we were air breathers, but we came from a world—slightly larger than your Earth—whose star was dying. That star was in a galaxy that your astronomers call NGC3245. It is in one of your local supercluster of galaxies." ...

Baris had explained that several thousand Atlanteans had survived the [pole-shifting] catastrophe by leaving the planet in spaceships powered by ion drives. Previously, the Atlanteans had explored the solar system and had not found any intelligent life on any of the planets and its moons.

"Our people who left the planet went to that which you call Mars. Conditions on that planet were very harsh and the survivors returned to earth fourteen thousand years ago, while the planet was still in the grip of one of its ice ages. It was their return and the buildings they erected that helped renew the legend. However, the main reason why Atlantis remained in the racial memory of your species is that this planet has never seen a civilization such as we of Alt possessed."

Bans had revealed that when Atlantis was at its peak, the members of the human species were little more than intelligent apes—until Atlantean scientists speeded up evolution with genetic engineering.

"We turned the apes into men, crude by your present standards, but there was a limit to how far we could progress in this direction. We gave man reason and memory and taught him to live in a civilized manner. But the shifting of the poles that followed over the thousands of years always destroyed his civilization and made him revert to a savage state. Always he overcame his difficulties and rebuilt—amazingly so. This is especially true after the poles reversed sixty-two thousands years ago. Within eight thousand years after the reversal, he had built a scientific civilization and had discovered the power contained within the atom. But man destroyed his civilization in a nuclear war. After this worldwide slaughter, he regressed almost to the level of beasts. There were genetic mutations caused by radiation, and the faint memory of Atlantis, of the god, was forgotten. Instead, there were stories about the god who had made war—truth taken from reality and turned into that which many of your leading scientists consider fables. Yet there are very ancient books that tell of this global conflict. These stories can be found especially in ancient books of India.

"When the descendants of the Atlanteans who had fled to Mars returned to Earth, they continued genetic operations that turned what were now brutes into true man. You call that species Homo sapiens. But it was a slow process. The Atlanteans found the brutal Neanderthal. Genetic manipulations changed him into that which your modern world has designated Cro-Magnon. To many of these Cro-Magnons did the Atlanteans from Mars tell of our wonderful civilization, of our continent that had vanished beneath the waters; and they related to them how we had constructed our buildings. The great pyramid of Egypt is a good example. . . ."

Rosenberger claims that evidence of Atlantis' destruction by atomic warfare was revealed in the Mahabharata and by Nostradamus!

Baris had been correct about many things. He had been right about ancient manuscripts5 of India. Most of the references to atomic warfare came from the Mahabharata, which had been translated from Sanskrit to English in 1843. The Mahabharata had originally been written in 1500 B.C. from legends dating 6,000 years before that.

The part of the Mahabharata that the Death Merchant recalled was:

[It was] a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe.
It burst—as bright as ten thousand Suns.
. . . An unknown weapon which reduced to ashes
The entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.
The corpses were so burned
As to be unrecognizable.
Their hair and nails fell out;
Pottery broke without apparent cause,
And the birds turned white.
After a few hours
All foodstuffs were infected.
. . . To escape this fire
The soldiers threw themselves into streams,
To wash themselves and their equipment
And watch in fear the death cloud climb the sky.

What better description than the explosion of an atom bomb? ...

Camellion had to admit that Baris' prediction checked with the prophecies of Nostradamus. Four of Nostradamus' quatrains are pretty clear—and they sure don't add up to peace and happiness!

You will see a great transformation at the turn of the century.
Extreme horror, a judgment upon the wicked.
The moon inclined at another angle.
The sun will appear higher in its orbit.

A swift and severe rain
Will abruptly halt two armies,
Celestial hail and descending fires will cover the sea with pumice.
Death on seven continents and seas sudden.

After there is great trouble among mankind, a greater one is prepared.
The Great Mover of the Universe will renew time,
Rain, blood, thirst, famine, steel weapons, and disease,
In the heavens a fire is seen, lengthening into shooting sparks.

The grand twentieth year ends, also the position of the moon. It will hold a different monarchy in the sky for another 7,000 years.
Then the sun, too, will be tired of its place,
And at that time will my prophecies for the world be finished and ended.

Footnote 5: Other than the Mahabharata, there is the Ramayana and the Mahavira Charita. It was only after the first atom bomb explosion in 1945 that the real meaning of the texts became clear. For example, this brief passage from the Mahavira Charita: "Many of the warriors vanished (vaporized). Others were burnt to ashes. Many more died from the strange sickness the winds blew from the rising cloud of death [radiation sickness)."
Dr. Oppenheimer was once asked if the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project was the first ever to be detonated.
Dr. Oppenheimer replied, "Well—yes. In modern times. of course."

Those alleged quotes from the Mahabharata provided by Rosenberger are not authentic.

Camellion wonders about Baris's motive for giving the U.S. the energy converter:

It was the possible hidden motive of Boris that bothered Richard Camellion, who for all of his adult life had studied certain arts and sciences. The "dead" were never dead, and often they were restless. Camellion knew that the material world interlocked with the world of spirit and that the only difference between the two was that the former was always in a process of change, while permanence was the order of the latter. It was time that contained the physical world, our "world of effects," just as eternity contained the realities and the causes of the spiritual, or higher, world.

Time is but the application of the principles of the world of spirit, of the world of eternity.

This was the reason why only a part of reality is manifest in time and space at any given moment or place; and so man dwelt with one foot in Eternity and one foot in Time. In this present, ever-changing time continuum, we experience our existence only partially.

But who gives a damn?

Well, presumably, Rosenberger cares about all this stuff - a lot. If not, why would he include it in so many of his books?

After a debate about the origin of the name "Moses" - the Death Merchant believes "that mose, the Egyptian word for 'child,' is a much more plausible etymology than the Hebrew mosheh" - Camellion thinks to himself:

Yes, I could tell them what the Vatican, the U.S. government, and the inner circle of the Soviet Union have known since 1974: that there are powers and forces that have always been an essential part of our immediate environment, things that coexist with us but are a part of another time frame, things that, operating outside the laws and limits of our space-time continuum, have the ability to act in our own three-dimensional reality.

They are transmogrifications of energy that are of a superspectrum of EM and are under firm control of some vast extradimensional intelligence. This intelligence controls important events in the world by manipulating certain human beings in various fields and in various forms of activity. Man does not know it, but all his religions are based on humanity's vague awareness of this power, this intelligence, and man's struggle to reduce it to terms and laws and divine truths acceptable to man's very limited intellect. ...

The scrolls in the Vatican? Millions of people would go mad or commit suicide if they knew the contents of those books. The Vatican and those scrolls will be the first to go in the World War Three. The Vatican is the number-one target of—The Kingdom. . . .

Elsewhere, Rosenberger writes: "[D]id Professor Montrose make contact with the Powers of the Kingdom?" ... WTF is The Kingdom? Is it connected to the oft-mentioned Cosmic Lord of Death? Perhaps Rosenberger will explain in a future volume (although there are only seven books left in the series). Fudge!

Random stream-of-consciousness Camellion thoughts (with similarly random italicising):

It makes sense and I don't think Baris lied. He said the magi were descendants of the Atlanteans. Let's see . . . it was Herodotus who wrote in the fifth century that the Magi were a tribe. Possibly. Magu is the old Persian form of the word. It renders into Greek as Magos, which could be the same as the Vedic magha that means "rich" or "gifts." The magi were prophets, philosophers, and astronomers. And according to Baris, Jesus Christ did exist. Hmmmmmmm.

And here's some useless gun porn, in two separate footnotes:

The Colt CAR-15 is a short-barreled version of the Colt AR-15/M-16 that is sometimes called the "Matty Mattel Special." During the early years of the AR-15, Colt Firearms designed a highly specialized version of the AR-15. This new weapon was the Colt CAR-15—"CAR," meaning Colt Automatic Rifle. Officially, the CAR-15 is the XM-177E2. From the CAR-15 came a further improvement called the Colt Commando submachine gun, with the Army and the Air Force using their own designations: XM177 for the Army and GAU-5 for the Air Force. GAU means "Gun All Utility." All these weapons fire the 5.56 by 45mm cartridge, or the .223 Remington. ...

A product of Steyr engineers and the Austrian army, the AUG has revolutionized arms design around the world. It is a tactical-support assault rifle that incorporates all the advanced military requirements. The efficient "bull-pup" design permits a short overall length—only 31 inches long—and it can be quickly stripped down into six modular parts in only a few minutes. It also has a 30-round box magazine. For field mobility, accuracy, design simplicity, and functional reliability, the AUG is the weapon of the future. The civilian version can be bought from Interarms, 1 Prince Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22313.

Etc.:

Rosenberger dedicated this book to "JJA—the real 'Courtland Grojean'". Rosenberger must be referring to James Jesus Angleton, who was the CIA's Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence from 1954-1975.

Veliki means "friendship". Camellion is disgusted: "So typical of the Russians and their word and phrase usage. Invasions were always 'liberations.' Mass murder and exterminations were always 'actions against enemies of the state.'"

"Richard Camellion had been at death's door so many times that he had worn holes in the welcome mat ..."

"More disgusted than a moonshiner who knew the BATF was closing in on him, Camellion got to his feet."

"It was the way he looked at you with those blue eyes of his, as though something incredibly alien were measuring you for some sort of sacrifice."

"One sensed in his presence a kind of barrier, a psychological reserve that separated him from other men. There was something almost alien about him. Sometimes it was the way he talked and the things he said. ... Dr. Ainsley had said that in her opinion, death was merely the termination of an accidental physical existence. Camellion had replied by saying, 'Death is a problem that can be understood only in the way we intentionally live through our physical existence with others.' Now, what kind of an answer was that!"

"Dingo dung!"

"The flames had died down but smoke was still rising from the entire base, a black, sooty mephitis, the telltale vapor of the Cosmic Lord of Death."

Twice the Death Merchant (in his own mind) corrects someone's grammar:
"You mean who hits whom first—objective case!"
"'Lay in the snow!' He should have said 'lie'."

Rosenberger mentions a drink called "trucker's penicillin": "coffee, brandy, lemon juice".

Death Merchant #63: The Pakistan Mission

Kill or Be Killed

The Russian Spetnaz - even the CIA feared them. The Spetnaz were nothing less than special assassin-commandoes trained in terror; marauders skilled in sabotage.

Now US Intelligence has discovered a seething Spetnaz base secreted in the rugged mountains of occupied Afghanistan. Poised to ravage unsuspecting Pakistan, only thirty miles to the south, the Spetnaz will spearhead a brutal Russian drive to isolate the crucial oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and bring the oil-dependant West to its knees!

Only a miracle can strangle the impending invasion - or a master of mayhem named Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant. He must rouse the troubled Pathan tribe of Pakistan to dare the impossible: a furtive thrust through the death-drenched Afghan frontier to surprise the Soviets and raze the savage Spetnaz base to the ground!

***

The Death Merchant and "Mad Mike" Quinlan are in Pakistan, helping a Pathan tribe led by Mujibur Ali Mirza-Khan forestall a Russian invasion from Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. To that end, they plan on attacking and destroying a Soviet military base near Narang that houses roughly 1,800 Spetsnaz troops.

Author Joseph Rosenberger offers a ton of background information on the political and tribal situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan and way too much information on geo-politics. It's more Rosenberger offering his opinions on the region than anything needed to move the narrative forward.

Camellion, Quinlan, and two members of Quinlan's group Thunderbolt Unit: Omega are meeting with Mizra-Khan in the village of Gubukil, in the Ismail Khan mountains. The appearance of low-flying Russian planes suggests to Camellion that the village has been pinpointed and an attack is forthcoming. Camellion urges the Pathans to abandon the village and hide out in some nearby caves. Sure enough, Soviet helicopters soon destroy the village from the air and Spetnaz troops come out to inspect the damage. However, they discover that the only things they killed were goats - and so they begin to charge up the hill to the caves. When the Russians are close to the top, the Pathans open fire. Camellion uses two Bren Ten autopistols (having apparently retired his beloved Auto Mags several books ago). The battle - "eyeball to eyeball", both sides firing at point-blank range - is over "faster than rain pouring down a gopher hole" and the Russians are defeated. The death toll: 96 Pathans and 164 Russians.

It was the last 10mm round in the`right Bren Ten [of the Death Merchant] that caught the young Russian while he was still in midair, the big bullet boring into the pit of his stomach and half doubling him over before he started to crash to the stone floor of the cave. Faster than the Cosmic Lord of Death could give a fatal coronary to a businessman, Camellion dropped the Bren Ten, stuck out his left foot, and, before the dying pig farmer could fall all the way to the floor, grabbed the AKS-74 from the man's hands, spun the weapon around and impaled another Spetsnazki leaping from the parapet of corpses in the mouth of the wide cave, the momentum of the Russian's body driving the blade as far as its muzzle. The man gave a loud gurgle. Blood poured form his mouth and his eyes jumped out as if attached to invisible stalks. Don't feel bad, pig man! Dying of cancer could be worse! ...

"Du kannst mir ma! an den Sack fassen!" snarled Bruckner, who stepped aside, let the blade slip by, jerked the assault rifle from Pripolhodov's hands, backhanded the stunned Russian, then picked him up the way a wrestler would pick up an opponent in preparation for a back body slam. Only Bruckner, holding the squirming man at waist level, shoved his back into the bayonet with which Vladilen Raina was trying to tickle Mike Quinlan's colon. Bruckner's shove had been so powerful that an inch of the bayonet protruded from Pripolhodov's stomach, much to the rage and astonishment of Raina, who, in a flash, thought of a giant worm squirming on a giant pin. Pripolhodov's weight forced Raina to lower the AKS assault rifle, yet he didn't have time to pull the weapon and its bloody bayonet from Pripolhodov's body. It wouldn't have made any difference. The Peppermint Kid, using a British Frogman's diving knife, stabbed Raina in the left side, just below the waist. Almost all in the same motion, he let another Russian have a TNT side kick in the back of the head. Under ordinary circumstances, such a kick would have snapped the victim's neck, but the Kid had been an inch off. All the blow did was rattle Galilik Alferin's brain and knock him toward Mike Quinlan, who promptly smashed in his left temple with a steel spring kosh.

(One of the Omega mercs is James O'Malley, aka The Peppermint Kid. He is British and the way Rosenberger lets you know that is by having O'Malley start most of his sentences with "I say ...". He is always referring to the others as "chaps" and he sometimes drops the "h" at the start of words, so he can 'ave a British accent, of sorts.)

After their victory, Mizra-Khan and the remaining Pathans head to Sirzihil, a village 19 miles away, while Camellion, Quinlan and two members of Thunderbolt Unit: Omega (and four guides) journey through the mountains to check out the Soviet Spetnaz military base in preparation for the attack (which Mirza-Khan now supports, thanks to a shitload of weapons airdropped to his village by the CIA). They trek for several days. At the end of one day ...

The conversation became philosophical after supper, Willy Bruckner maintaining that wars caused by differences in religious beliefs had killed more human beings than Hitler and Stalin combined.

"India is a good example," he said gruffly. "For centuries, the Hindus and the Moslems have been killing each other. Or the war between Iran and Iraq. More than half a million have already died. That crazy son of a bitch Khomeini is sending ten-year-old children into battle. The little fools go into battle thinking that they'll go straight to heaven when they're shot down—with Khomeini's permission! It does prove how stupid Moslems are. At least Jews and Christians have more common sense."

The Death Merchant said, "One has to go back in history to see why Christian belief conquered the ancient world. Christianity spread from the Middle East because it offered something that the Jewish and Roman and Greek religions didn't have: eternal life. Poor, deluded people still believe it. Life might be a hell on earth, but after death—provided one is a good little 'slave' and has more faith than reason—one can have a king's palace. This formula—promise of 'glory in the sky' still works and expresses itself through nationalism. That's one of the reasons why good old Ron Wilson Reagan acts like a celestial chairman who has the backing of God."

"Reagan may believe he's right, but he sure as hell is not keeping within Jeffersonian principles, is he?" Quinlan said with a lighthearted reflectiveness. He had brought a quart of Scotch along on the journey and now, carefully—his back to the Pathans—poured some of the liquor into his small, stainless-steel cup. "But what the hell! The world has never learned anything from history. It never will. Religious wars are still a part of our so-called civilization. Willy said it right. Look at Iran and Iraq."

"The war between Iran and Iraq is identical to the Forty Years War following the Reformation in Europe," Camellion said with a big sigh. "Identical in every way." ...

"I 'ave the feeling that the end of our civilization is shaping up in the Middle East," O'Malley said, "and that when it's all over with only the cockroaches will inherit the earth. Something 'as to give. There's more medicine than ever in the world, yet more sickness. More religion, yet more evil. All the talk about universal brotherhood, yet 'alf the population of the world is hungry." He uttered a small laugh. "It must be Mirza-Khan's Iblis! He's the bloody blighter responsible for all the misery in this world, all the pain and suffering this world 'as."

The Peppermint Kid had intended his remark about Iblis to be a joke. He hadn't expected Mad Mike to comment. He had expected die-hard atheist Willy to grin and Willy had. But he was surprised when Camellion didn't so much as smile. He was almost shocked when Camellion said, "Iblis, Ahriman, Set, Loki, Mahadeva, or Satan—whatever one wishes to call the supreme spirit of evil, it's only a human term. Another thing is that the idea might not be as superstitious as we might think. Truth is often implausible. Forty years ago, many scientists laughed at the atomic theory. They are no longer laughing. Today we have proof that the entire external world is made up of electrical charges, or points of energy which in themselves have no color or taste or smell or shape. Everything, including our own bodies, is merely the mind's interpretation of electrical excitement. What then is reality? For that matter, who are we, what are we?"

One night the guides try to sneak up on the Death Merchant, planning to murder all four men, but Camellion, alert to the slightest sound, wakes up and (in "4.099 seconds") kills the guides.

Medicine tries to postpone it. Religion tries to soften it. But in the end. the Cosmic Lord of Death drums his bony fingers on all of us. Hah hah. hah! That silent conspiracy of Nature that prevents terrified humans from knowing Reality!

They continue on and spend only about ten minutes spying on the Soviet base. Then they leave, with the knowledge that it's heavily guarded. (Like Camellion wouldn't have expected that!) They hear copters from the base land nearby as they are leaving the area. They end up circling around and stealing one of the copters (after killing a bunch of "pig farmers" first).

Back at the Sirzihil village, Camellion believes he'll need about 500-600 men to attack the Spetsnaz base. Even with ground-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles, the mission is "going to be trickier than a coon dog tiptoeing away from a skunk." Camellion radios Grojean and he okays an airdrop of 15 tons of cargo, weapons, and random supplies. The planes use the infamous Gf mechanism so they are rendered invisible to both radar and the naked eye. It takes 17 days to open all of the crates and prepare the weapons. At one point, Camellion notes that he can see the "auras" of some of the men: "Bright green auras radiated from Kuuls and Chaudhriy's faces. Slowly the green changed to a dark brown, then to black. I'm looking at dead men!"

Hundreds of Pathans are able to sneak up on the base without being noticed - and they start firing 82mm HE shells into the base, destroying buildings, fuel tanks, and planes. When other planes take off, they shoot them down with missiles. The Pathans storm the base. The Death Merchant surmises that 80% of the Russians' resistance is coming from three buildings, so he concocts a plan to drive a huge truck past two buildings (where he will toss out blocks of RDX explosives) and into the main building, causing it to collapse. In the ensuing battle, Rosenberger rises to the challenge with some excellent play-by-play.

Vlad Zhikin and Georgi Guchin, the last two Spetsnaz alive, had made the always fatal mistake of attacking the Death Merchant and Willy Bruckner. Doing his best to thrust the muzzle of his AKR into Camellion's stomach, Zhikin was confident that he would make short work of the enemy with the strange device over his face. Suddenly, he found Camellion expertly blocking the thrust with his Galil and shoving the AKR to one side. The Russian didn't have time to become worried. The Death Merchant let him have a lightning-fast snap kick in the scrotum. A world of pain and hurt exploded in Zhikin, his shriek automatic. Total blackness was dropping over his consciousness as Camellion put three Galil projectiles into his body.

Georgi Guchin was next to get a surprise. Bruckner did not attempt to push away the Russian's assault rifle with his Galil. He merely let it fall from his hands, sticking out his left foot to break its fall, grabbed Guchin's AKR with both hands and jerked the weapon from the now-worried Russian who tried to knee him in the groin. He failed. Bruckner sidestepped, slammed him across the jaw with the butt of the weapon, then jabbed him in the solar plexus with the barrel. Even more contemptuous of the Russians than the Death Merchant, Bruckner didn't intend to waste ammunition on the Schweinerei. As the tormented Russian gagged and doubled over from the blow to his solar plexus, Bruckner tripped him, slammed him in the right kidney with a left elbow stab and knocked the pig farmer to the ground, the dazed man falling on his face. Moving very fast, Bruckner didn't give him time to even partially recover his senses. He jumped on Guchin's back with both feet, all 240 pounds of him, his heels crashing into the lower part of the man's spine. There was a snapping sound, as though a twig had been broken. Guchin shuddered and lay still. He was dead, his back broken, the spinal cord severed.

Finally, in several footnotes, Rosenberger offers a bit of what some readers refer to as "gun porn", excessive detail about the various weapons:

Suppressor and "silencer" are one and the same. Silencer is actually a British term—the blokes called automobile mufflers "silencers" in Britain. it's the Americans who came up with "Suppressor." Silencers work because of metal baffels and "wipes." round rubber or plastic material. Silencers do wear out. Rubber wipes are good for only 50 to 250 rounds. Aluminum baffels are subject to erosion, a problem that is rapidly being solved by the use of stainless-steel. Suppressors/silencers are never totally silent. although a lab-built special assassination weapon—for example the AWC Ruger RST-4—can be made so quiet that the shot cannot be heard in the next room with the door closed or. if the door is open. during conversation. Factory-built military silencers will erase only half the report. ...

The inventor of the Glock-17 9mm autopistol, Gaston Glock, would not permit his military pistol to be entered in the 1984 XM9 Personal Defense Weapon trials. Used by the Austrian army, the Glock-17 has a plastic frame, with four steel rails integrated into the molding to accommodate the slide. The staggered box-type magazine, also made of plastic, holds seventeen rounds. Some experts rate the Glock-17 as the finest military pistol in the world today.

After the battle, Camellion thinks to himself:

Anyhow, it would all even out in the end, no matter what the CIA or the GRU and the KGB might do. What none of the people in government realized—in both the United States and the Soviet Union—was that their respective nations were a part of a plan, of a cosmic scheme that mortal man was not meant to comprehend. The paradox was that if man could comprehend such power and even manage to get the barest glimpse of the hidden force motivating people and orchestrating world events, he would not be man! He would not stand on his crooked little legs and scream at the stars that I am a special creation in this universe, I and I alone.

Pathetic. If man were not man, he would realize that all he really had to lose was his ridiculous pride. He would realize that of all the creatures on the planet, he was the most cruel and the most immoral. He would also know that he was responsible for the world's mess because he had lost all sense of good and evil.

The Death Merchant was a realist. What is to come will be. Italy will drop out of NATO after a severe economic crisis. Before that happens many problems will close in on the Vatican. The pope will reveal the third secret of Fatima, and even the "good people" will refuse to believe him. Much worse will be the decline of U.S. prestige in the world and the political and military pressure that the Soviet Union will exert upon Europe. The USSR will become more of an open partner of the Arabs in their hatred of Israel, and this alliance will lead to a further deterioration of East-West relations. He will be assassinated and the world will be astonished. Some will be happy. Many will be sad and accuse the wrong people. . . .

Etc.:

At the beginning of the book, Rosenberger quotes Thomas Hardy: "While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."

First sentence: "Modern Pakistan is a cesspool of confusion, barbarism and backwardness ..."

"The Death Merchant was uneasy. Even if he and Quinlan killed every pig farmer in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would remain intact and, eventually, slaughter all the dreams of mankind and turn the world into a planet of pallbearers."

"Why do I get myself into these messes? To watch that Swiss bank account grow, that's why!"

Quinlan "let out a stream of purple prose that would have horrified an Algers prostitute". (However, the only curses we hear Mad Mike yell are: "Buffalo balls!", "Croc crap!", "Possum poop!", and "Burn my butt on a broken broomstick".)

Conversation with CIA chief Courtland Grojean:
"Don't call me the Death Merchant!"
"Sorry, Camellion. It's just that the tag the KGB gave you, years ago, seems to fit."

"With his shoulderbone cracked, he was out of action, his right arm as useless as sunglasses on an oyster."

"In his early twenties, Shamspir was slightly cross-eyed, with a face that was one big mess of ugly. Looking at him made Camellion think that Shamspir's mother had conceived him during a nightmare and had lived in a state of constant terror all the time she had carried him."

"The pig farmers had a lot in common with high blood pressure: what you didn't know about it could kill you."

"The peculiar blend of roasted flesh* and burning rubber drifted to Camellion." (Footnote: "Smells like pork roast, but sweeter.")

Death Merchant #62: The Soul Search Project

Face to Face - Hate to Hate!

The KGB has kidnapped Cecil Montrose, an American professor whose electronic experiments may yield a means to contact spirits of the dead. The KGB has its own use for the professor. Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, has got a job: pry Montrose loose from the Reds - by any means that work.

It's a cross-country dance of ambush and attack. The Reds have a head start and Camellion has no time to spare. He's a whirling dervish of destruction as he leads a top-notch kill team on a crusade to crack the KGB's cover. This time he'll use every gruesome tool of his trade to exile the Reds - from the USA to the Land of the Dead!

***

Joseph Rosenberger dedicates The Soul Search Project to the Cosmic Lord of Death, "the best friend mankind will ever have". (I can't help but notice how puny Rosenberger's name is on the cover, as though letting readers know who wrote the damn thing was nearly an afterthought. Re the "Over 12 Million Copies In Print" notice: I wonder how much Rosenberger was paid for these books. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was a flat fee per manuscript, with no royalties.)

Richard Camellion's latest mission (as noted above) is to rescue Professor Montrose from the Russians before the "pig farmers" can learn of his remarkable experiments in contacting the souls of the deceased. Getting Montrose back safely from the KGB will be "another stab in the bloated body of atheistic communism".

Before Rosenberger explains what Montrose was doing, he spends seven pages having a couple of CIA scientists talk a lot of mumbo-jumbo of how the human body is actually a lot of empty space and that the brain needs an outside "mind" to send it information:

"I refer to the scientific fact that our present-day insights into the nature of matter prove that ninety-nine percent of all matter—be it flesh or steel or stone—is void. Let me give an example. Let us say we take an atom from the human toe. We shall now magnify the atom until it is the size of an apple, that is, until the nucleus is the size of an apple. On this kind of scale where would the next atom be? Between one thousand to two thousand miles away! Looking upon our bodies, based on this scale, we would see a vast universe composed of many millions of trillions of atoms forming billions of galaxies. If the nuclei of those atoms were shining, we would see a vast, starry sky of unimaginable spaces. So you see, our body, of which we have only a faint perception when using our limited senses, is really a 'great emptiness' with atoms, forming molecules, dispersed at great distances." ...

"All matter, all the furniture in this room, the very building we are in, all of it is mostly empty space. That is why our vision can pass through solid glass several inches thick; that is why hundreds of radio and television signals, carrying speech, music, and pictures, are at this moment traveling straight through the solid walls of this house and through our very 'solid' bodies. It is absolutely vital that each of you comprehends this truth of emptiness. By absorbing it, you will be able to grasp the scientific fact that it is possible to have two or more things occupying the same space at the same time." ...

"The premise is difficult to accept emotionally," agreed Dr. Lessenstein. He glanced in annoyance at Herbert Aduss who, lighting his pipe, was puffing out clouds of smoke. "It is obvious to anyone that we experience our physical bodies in everyday three-dimensional space and time. This means that our minds and souls are living in another space-time system which interpenetrates our physical bodies and occupies substantially the same space as our physical bodies. Hence, the 'next world' is the one in which our minds and souls already live and in which our minds and souls will continue to live. This means that when we have shed our worn-out physical bodies, we will be aware of the surroundings in which our minds and souls are living. We shall then be in the astral planes. There are various planes, this explaining the meaning of the Bible's 'many mansions.'" ...

"Another law that is being accepted more and more—not yet by all scientists, particularly in my fields, which are psychiatry, parapsychology, and psychobiogenic chemistry—is that the brain is not the mind, which is to say that the human encephalon does not generate thought. The brain is only the receiver. Or one might say that it is by means of the brain that the mind expresses itself.

"To put it another way—we know that the brain controls all aspects of the body. We can say that the body is the bioelectrical mechanism and that it is controlled by its computer, which is the brain. We can also say with confidence that the human brain is infinitely more advanced than the most sophisticated computer built by man. But even the brain would be totally useless without a programmer, some intelligence separate and totally removed from the computer itself. Gentlemen, it is the mind that is the programmer and interpenetrates the empty space in that jellylike mass we call the brain. It is the mind that controls every single action of the more than sixty trillion cells which make up the physical body. Is that not amazing?"

Before getting to the details (such as they are, or can be) of Montrose's work:

Dr. Herbert Aduss was saying, "We do know that Professor Montrose used a shielded transmitting-receiving system. The sets were encased in a Faraday cage, which is not a barrier to mental, psychic, or spiritual energies. Other components were an AM receiver, a standard five-inch magnet speaker, a microphone, a tape recorder, and an audio tone generator. Oh yes, I must not forget the electrically activated quartz transducer that used ultraviolet light—and the broadcasts were made on the kilohertz wavelength. Pragmatically, I don't suppose it matters how Montrose—"

Camellion sighed. He is leaving out many important points. The oscillator antenna—it was a one-fourth wavelength stub—radiated the 1200-MHz signal into the chamber at focal point F. At the other focal point F, he had a one-fourth wavelength open section which acted as a parallel resonant section at the fixed 1200 MHz frequency. A miniature demodulation amplifier was installed at the base of the microwave oscillator center. Fortunately, the Company has all his notes and tapes. But the pig farmers have Montrose!

"—did it. What is of tremendous importance is that Professor Montrose succeeded in talking to the dead! ...

"For one thing," said Dr. Lessenstein severely, "it is difficult for any discarnate intelligence to find the sufficient vibratory level by means of which it can use mental power to form words that can be audible in our space-time continuum. The sound energy imparted to the molecules of air from spoken words is at a very low frequency—from a few hundred to a few thousand cycles per second. Our radios receive waves of energy which vibrate at hundreds of thousands of cycles per second. Our telephone conversations are carried across the country by energy which has a vibrational frequency of millions of cycles per second. Light rays, with which we are able to see, have a frequency of roughly twelve trillio2n cycles per second, and soft X rays, hard X rays, gamma rays, etc., vibrate at even higher frequencies."

Excited now, Lessenstein stopped to inhale.

Dr. Aduss stared at Heyd. "Remember, all activity in the world of spirit is purely mental. Think of the most vivid dream you have ever had and you will only partly get the idea of what we are talking about."

You get the feeling that Rosenberger could easily continue in this vein for another 40 pages.

Also, a footnote on page 172:

Professor Montrose and his experiments do not seem so fantastic when one learns that back in the 1950s the CIA tried to contact dead Soviet agents in the hope that these souls would now see the falseness of communist materialism and "defect" to the West with all kinds of secrets about the Soviet Union—this information from former CIA agent Victor Marchetti. Source: Mind Wars. by Ron McRae. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1984.

That's actually a real book: "Mind Wars: The True Story of Government Research into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons".

The Soul Search Project opens with Camellion and Phil Heyd flying a two-seater Cessna 340 into a small airport outside Atlanta. (Montrose did his work in Atlanta.) Immediately after they land, gunmen in a Hughes OH-6 Cayuse helicopter swoop down and fire at them, "the Beretta M-12 SMG spitting out a stream of 9x19mm Parabellum slugs, and a U.S. AR-18 assault rifle spewing 5.56x45 projectiles". As the copter circles around and prepares to make another run, Camellion and Heyd plan their counterattack. In the end, the Death Merchant's slugs damage the rotor blades and the Cayuse is forced to land. After the occupants are riddled with slugs, the Death Merchant and Heyd have little choice but to surrender to the Georgia state police.

Naturally, the state cops don't believe Camellion's and Heyd's claim of being CIA agents; one Southern trooper says that Heyd's CIA ID card "don't mean no never mind". The locals are also a bit confused by the clothing worn by Camellion and Heyd, and think they might be "queers". (Camellion has a "white shirt with a frilly front" and Heyd is wearing "a lavender Sarasota Chintz jacket, a blue-and-white-plaid sportsshirt, sandpiper slacks, and pink Cardin wingtip shoes".) They are rescued when two other members of their top-secret group (Blue Eagle Force) arrive, flash their badges, and demand their release because they are part of a top-secret operation vital to national security.

There are also some humorous descriptions of how tough Camellion sounds when he cuts Georgia Sergeant Duddy Hallbanks down to size:

"Or you will do what?" The Death Merchant dropped each word with all the force of a tiny pistol shot, his whiplash tone a tossed gauntlet, an undisguised Go to hell! I dare you! It was his sheer gall and cold-blooded nerve that tossed Hallbanks and the other state cops off balance. ...

It was his icy calm and steely inaccessibility that seemed to defy all that was normal. Abruptly, Hallbanks had the fleeting thought that he was confronted with the possibility of the impossible and facing a man who had come from the far side of nowhere ... a man who had come from a long way and a long time.

Meanwhile, men at the Ceskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika embassy are offering awkward exposition about the successful kidnapping of Professor Montrose and explaining to the reader exactly when and how he will be transferred to "Seattle, in the State of Washington".

Blue Eagle Force has one small clue: the man who headed the Montrose kidnapping is Karel Konecky, a Czech diplomat at the United Nations. So a flight to New York is planned. Camellion and a female agent named Brendalee Charters dress up as two of Konecky's friends (the CIA has photos and the DM is a master with disguises). Unfortunately, Konecky's apartment is wired to the apartment on the floor below so when Camellion and Charters try to escape, they are met by gun-carrying goons on the stairs. The goons are quickly killed (as are two doormen in the lobby) before they escape into an alley beside the building.

After two somewhat dull volumes, Rosenberger redeems himself in this number, with plenty of shootouts and a lengthy, wild car chase around midtown Manhattan and north through Central Park after the kidnapping. From Konecky, they learn the location of the Seattle STB safe station: a roofing company run by a Vietnamese guy named Phan Kim Phuong. His second-in-command is Allen Jay Hobbs, who Camellion believes is "a native pig farmer" and the real boss of the STB network. The Death Merchant and his group raid Hobbs's house and, after finding a short-wave radio hidden under a closet's floorboards, they take both Hobbs and his wife into custody.

Hobbs and his wife are injected with dexedrine to hype them up and then thioridazine to make them crash. While under the influence of the drugs, they slip up and come close to revealing sensitive information, but they still refuse to confess. It's only after Camellion shoots Elina in the head that Hobbs starts talking. Hobbs (actually Anastas Sofrenovitch) says the KBG station is housed in an older/poorer section of Seattle, at Kibbs Klock Kove. There is a wild shootout at the clock repair shop  and Camellion learns from four captured Russians that Montrose is not being brought through Seattle. One of dead Russian officials has a book of matches in his pocket from a religious curio shop in Florida and Camellion believes this is a clue. Could a high-ranking Soviet agent be dumb enough to carry around something that could tip off the CIA to the entire operation? Yep. The Florida shop is raided (in an operation headed by Camellion's racist friend, Lester Vernon Cole), but Montrose has been moved out to a huge Russian vessel in the Atlantic. And so the big finale occurs on the "high seas", with Camellion, Cole, and 30 commandos storming the General Rodion Malinovsky.

(Cole expresses another reason to rescue Montrose: "Assuming it's all true, what Montrose has learned from the dead could mean that psychokinetic energies could be used to disturb the memory functions of microelectric chips, as well as the new biologic chips when they're perfected. Should the pig farmers ever perfect that potential, our missiles would blow up in their own silos. The Soviet Union wouldn't have to send one missile at us across the North Pole. Our own would do the job for them.")

The hand-to-hand combat in the final fight is classic Rosenberger:

The Death Merchant, so close to one Slavic slob he could see a mole on his left cheek, fired the left Coonan point-blank at the same time as he pulled the trigger of the right magnum pistol. The face of Mole vanished in a shower of skin, blood, and bone, all the features melting faster than a wax candle tossed into a blast furnace. The second Russian managed to get off a short burst of 9mm projectiles from a Stechkin MP, the hot stream of metal passing under Camellion's left armpit, several of the slugs tearing through a rear canvas strap of a shoulder bag. The Cosmic Lord of Death permitted only one mistake per victim. Fyodor Mikhailovich Yelchenki had made his and it was fatal. Camellion's .357 Glaser bullet struck him just below the breastbone, tore out his stomach, ripped out a section of his lower spine, and splattered the man behind him with pieces of flesh, bone, blood, and shirt, plus some bits of leather from Yelchenki's belt. The bullet then bored into the man's left side and killed him when it stabbed all the way, horizontally, through his stomach. ...

To the Death Merchant, who found himself hemmed in on all sides by tough Spetsnazska, it was worse than being caught in the middle of south Chicago. He employed a middle front snap kick that caved in a Russian's stomach and at the same time started another creep on the short road of choking to death, giving him a right four-finger spear stab to the throat. Ducking a terrific Seiken forefist and just barely escaping a side thrust kick, the foot of the Russian almost touching the side of his ballistic helmet, Camellion twisted, turned to his left, and employed a very rapid double blow against another pig farmer who was trying to crack his skull with an empty Vitmorkin machine pistol. He must be an idiot! Such a blow would not even dent this helmet. Camellion's left hand shot out and clamped around the man's right wrist as he let the dummy have a right-handed vertical Shuto knife-hand chop on the left side of the face, then, as the Russian gasped loudly in pain and jerked back, stabbed him directly in the eyes with a right Ni Hon Nukite two-finger spear thrust. A left-leg roundhouse kick to the groin sent the man reeling back, gagging and vomiting all over himself. He had a perfectly good reason to bring up his lunch: his testicles had been crushed. ...

Kidlikof came straight in while the KGB specialist darted to the Death Merchant's left in an effort to get behind him. Camellion then did the totally unexpected. Just when Shport was only a split second from passing him, Camellion jumped to the left in front of him, so fast and so close that if he hadn't put up his left arm, his face would have collided with the Russian's. Camellion's left hand darted to Shport's face in a tiger mouth grip, his fingers digging into the man's cheeks. To an observer, the clutch would have seemed like a mediocre blow. But it was not the force that counted; it was how the fingers were applied and what they did that made the difference. What they did was apply a specific pressure to facial nerves, the sensation penetrating deeply inside the head to a knot of neurones known as the "gasserian ganglion." The gasserian ganglion is headquarters for the nerves of sensation that serve the eyes, the nose, and the upper and lower jaws. When the knot is disturbed in any way, all hell breaks loose: the eyes can't focus, orientation is lost, and often the victim loses consciousness, if one is lucky. If he's not, then he suffers an agony similar to thermite burning inside his face and head. Yuly Shport was not lucky. He screamed shrilly from the unbelievable agony that would last a full five minutes.

Etc.:

Rosenberger is still screwing up military time. He writes that Camellion wants an attack to begin "at thirteen hundred hours tomorrow morning". Rosenberger means 1:00 AM - but 1300 is 1:00 PM.

"'It is the duty of the future to be dangerous!' These were the words burned into a wooden plaque that hung on a wall in the den of the Death Merchant's Memento Mori ranch in Texas."

"If the pilot had half the sense God gives to oysters, he and his buddy would call it a night and head for home."

"'Konecky, you get out first,' ordered Camellion, who was angrier than a crosseyed gopher in a cactus patch."

"That roofing company will be as clean as a nun's conscience by the time we get to Seattle."

Camellion "had a good feeling about [Jonathan] Fury, even if the guy did eat tons of wheat germ ... and was forever washing his hands as though he had murdered Jesus Christ."

"Quickly, she slipped into her white robe and stepped into her clog houseslippers—all the while half turned to Camellion (who would rather pat a Walther P-38 than a pussy)."

"The Soviet agent sensed that the man holding the two large pistols was not an ordinary individual. There was a deadly self-assurance about the way he spoke, the way he moved. Here was a man at home with violence and intrigue, with a lethal capability as well as self-control."

"'It's not going to be a ringside circus like it was last night,' the Death Merchant said, the flames of a warrior-monk burning in his blue eyes. 'This time we use stealth ...'"

"Double fudge! If I put a quarter into a parking meter, it would come up three lemons!"

"Yuri Miktkeneyev fired a long burst with his MAC-Ingram as the Death Merchant started to go down, the line of hot metal coming dangerously close to Camellion's back and right rib cage, four of the slugs so close that a sheet of paper could not have been inserted between them and cloth of Camellion's shirt." (Earlier, it is noted that a slug misses Camellion's neck "by only three-sixth of an inch"; why wouldn't Rosenberger write "one-half of an inch"? Does 3/6 seem smaller than 1/2?)

"With great difficulty, Cole pulled in his legs so that his knees were almost touching his chin. 'Man, I feel like an oversized fetus in the womb of an undersized midget!'"

"In the very long run, none of it made any difference . . . none of it. In less than ten years, the United States would be a radioactive wasteland, and when the sun did finally shine through the canopy of dust, years later, it would shine on a planet of horror, a little ball of death. And it's only 315 million, 360,000 seconds away. All aboard for Doomsday . . ." (315,360,000 seconds is equal to ten 365-day years, but what about leap years?)

Death is "a simple transition from three-dimensional imprisonment into spiritual freedom ... Camellion also knew that the true purpose of life was a search—and nothing more than a short journey. A step toward Total Wisdom, a step toward God. Gary Royden had completed his journey in the world of physical particles. He was now totally in the realm of Spirit."

An exchange: "Which of you is Richard Camellion?" "That's the name on my baptismal record," lied Camellion. So either his name is Camellion and there is a fake name on his baptismal record or Camellion is not the Death Merchant's true name. Mystery!

While in Manhattan, the Death Merchant reveals: "I lived in New York for almost four years some years ago. I was there on very special and very private business." (I don't think this has been mentioned in any of the previous 61 volumes.)

This book is roughly 50 pages longer than any previous Death Merchant volume, coming in at 260 pages of small print. ... And so this has been an extra-long recap!

Death Merchant #61: The Bulgarian Termination

Educating Reds

The Bulgarian Secret Service is offering a unique foreign exchange program. Communists from all over the world can earn their Ph.D.'s in Assassination and Terrorism, courtesy of the KGB.

The US Secret Service is anxious to liquidate the assassin's academy before its graduates are unleashed upon an unsuspecting free world. They dispatch Richard Camellion, American ambassador of annihilation, the Death Merchant.

In a race against the clock, the Death Merchant must dig deep into his bag of deadly tricks to abort the burgeoning evil and destroy the Bulgarian hydra...permanently.

***

The Bulgarian Termination is another dull affair from Joseph Rosenberger (with a lame cover by Dean Cate, too; the Death Merchant doesn't look very tough). The plot - as outlined on the back cover text quoted above - is pretty slight, and as with the previous volume, there is far too much discussion and planning and not enough action.

Richard Camellion is working with members of the National Freedom Council (NFC), a group "determined to overthrow the legal Communist dictatorship governing Bulgaria". Camellion announces his grand plan to blow up the six-story building housing the Komitet Darzhavra Sigurnost, the state security apparatus, killing the targeted five Russian officials in the process. (Despite the back cover copy, there are no graduates of an "assassin's academy" in this book.) Just before three trucks filled with 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate slam into the building, however, the Death Merchant and his force will storm inside, try to grab some important files, kill anyone in their way, and escape from the roof by helicopter.

This multi-pronged attack is the big finale of the book. Unfortunately, Camellion presents his idea pretty early on (page 57), so Rosenberger ends up with close to 100 pages of the characters talking every angle of the attack to death. (Okay, it's more like 75 pages. There is a shootout at a hotel bar and subsequent getaway that takes up 25 pages in the middle of the book.) Things gets quite boring: a nine-page chapter is devoted to Camellion being driven to a safe house located inside a church. Nothing at all happens during the drive, so it could have been dispensed with in one sentence or not mentioned at all.

And all the while, off to one side in his mind, the Death Merchant couldn't help but feel that he was only going through the motions, that all this was unreal and that he was only one of the actors in the frames in the world picture show. And, according to the doctrine of elementary particles, I just might be! So is everyone else! Time is thinking! Time is consciousness! Time is a continuous now! All of it a vast illusion in this time continuum.4

FN4: The reality might be—according to elementary particle theorists—that Time and Space come in "bits" and "pieces"—called Kronons.

At the appointed time, the Death Merchant and nine other men drive up to the building's gate in a Soviet BTR-60PK armored personnel carrier. Things go wrong right away, because of the extra security measures for the visiting Russian officials. Mercy, mercy, Mother Percy! So Camellion orders the BTR driver to crash through the gate and drive straight through one of the building's windows! From there, it is a shootout in the lobby with the force trying to get to the stairs to the second floor.

During a break from the flying bullets, the men take the opportunity to trash the ACLU!

Winkler surveyed Camellion in slow speculation, his expression facetious. "One thing is certain. If we're caught, we won't have the good old ACLU to come to our aid in court. Now that is something to think about!"

The Death Merchant acknowledged with a twisted smile. Winkler could be the world's worst pest at times, but Camellion admired him for his cold-blooded realism—expressed in witty cynicisms—in the face of death. If Winkler had an abundance of any quality, it was sheer nerve. When he drops into hell, no doubt he will ask Lucifer who keeps his horns trimmed!

"This ACLU," said Tsola Nekliv. "Some kind of American freedom organization?"

Winkler's little laugh was lewd. "Oh yes, the ACLU is an organization that fights for freedom—of criminals! Should you rape half a dozen women and cut their throats, the ACLU will be by your side, fighting for 'justice'!"

There is also a quick rant against something called "Emotional Terrorists" (ETs):

Privately, the Death Merchant was in complete agreement with Carey Winkler. The people who prayed the most were always the ones least prepared. Man made his own miracles, fabricated his own impossibilities, and won his own earthly battles. In spite of the ET's who would surrender us to Soviet imperialism. The clerics who are "positive" what God wants! The well-intentioned but unrealistic morons who can't even manage their own children! The celebrity circus from Hollywood—that world capital of mediocrity—who are "experts" on peace! All babbling about "The Bomb." Yet not one word about Soviet military buildup. Nor do they ask why Soviet Embassies are never attacked, or why Soviet government officials are never kidnapped, held hostage, or assassinated. . . .
Yet all of them—the entire population of this planet—have only another sixteen years at the most.

Camellion and his men encounter heavy resistance on the fourth and sixth floors of the building and that's where Rosenberger is at his best, describing the carnage and letting us know the exact path of so many slugs and projectiles:

Fedor Rykov was having some slight problems. His short burst of 7.62mm. slugs had blown 'out the stomach and part of the spine of Aram Gvishini, the six projectiles zipping right through the Bulgarian and striking Vasily lkonov in the left side, tearing through the coat of his business suit and taking up residence in his lungs. Then Rykov's RKZ was but of ammo and he didn't have time to pull his holstered pistol, switch off the safety, and fire. Another DS officer was swinging his weapon toward him. A cursing, snarling Rykov quickly reversed the RKZ in his hands and, with his right hand, swung it viciously at Abez Alkhimov's head: The blow would have crushed the DS officer's skull if he had not-ducked, his quick motion making him lose his balance and fall backward, right into the path of Aleksei Izogyi, who carried a hunting knife in a leather sheath inside his lieutenant's uniform coat. He had jerked out the knife, wanting to save ammunition, and now he put the ten-inch gleaming blade to good use. Alkhimov, as he fell back, stumbled to within several feet of the long-faced Izogyi, who brought up the knife with an underhanded motion and buried the blade in Alkhimov's back, the razor-sharp steel slicing into the man's kidney. ...

A 7.62mm. slug struck the Vitmorkin machine pistol in Vordorbov's left hand. A second projectile struck him in the top of the left shoulder, shattering the knob of the humerus. A third slug cut off the tip of his nose, sliced through the end of his chin, and, zipping almost half the length of his body, bored high into the front of his left leg; and when he jerked violently in agony, the fourth bullet hit the top of his head, exploded his brain, and killed him.

The Death Merchant and his party make it to the roof and take off in a helicopter. The third tractor-trailer never made it and while the building was heavily damaged, it did not collapse. There was no chance to get any files, but the targeted pig farmers were killed. When it's all over, Camellion muses:

Man lived in an exquisite bedlam, a brutal asylum in which everything was tinged with death. A wise person learned to speak the language of reality and to see through the misty veil. He danced with the tango of life and enjoyed the tantalizing possibilities of the paradox, of the riddle of consciousness. The lover, the mystic, and the scientist discovered the very same things on different planes. The people's thirst for liberty and the martyrs' hymn of faith mingled in a madness of worthless solutions that lasted only for the moment. The world has always washed the corpses, wiped up the blood, and prayed over caskets about to be lowered into holes. . . . The world always would—but for only a very short time. . . .

Etc.:

In a footnote, Rosenberger tell us to watch for Death Merchant #69, Operation Nose-Candy, "to be published in the future". (There was no DM book published with that title. The series ended with #70.)

Another footnote: "The Russians may have been the first to put a man in space, but the best hotels in Moscow are still without rolled toilet paper. Instead, one finds small squares of rough paper, similar to American paper towels."

Carey Winkler, Camellion's partner, thinks the members of the NFC are a "bunch of yogurt yahoos".

Five curses: "Hell and great gobs of goose grease!" ... "Piss on a paper moon!" ... "Piss on a poltergeist!" ... "Piss on a pineapple!" ... "Donkey dung! Triple fudge and damn it!"

"Like a guitar picker running away from his past, the dead Liskovik fell to the right, his right leg doubled up underneath him."

"Those three goofs couldn't outdraw a crayon!"

"Zorkosobog's face and head exploded with all the force of a melon hit by a blast from a double-barrel shotgun, much of the blood and flesh, bone and gray brain matter splattering on the shoulders of two other DS agents."

"Elated at trapping the Russians and the chiefs of the DS, Izogyi placed his last three 7.62mm. slugs in Lavrenty Strokash, the last KGB bodyguard, the projectiles stabbing into the Russian's midsection and making him the only corpse in the building with four navels."

Camellion: Life is "nothing more than one long coffee break between two deaths".

During the final shootouts, Camellion refers to the DS agents as "chicken-brained biological disasters" and "leftovers from a genetic garbage dump".

"It could have been worse. The Death Merchant did have one consolation. We could have crashed an airplane into the tenth floor of a twenty-story building! Or I could be a citizen of Mexico!"

"I think we have more of a chance of converting Ronald Reagan to Communism than we have of getting out of this mess!"

"Camellion had only one other major ambition, one that took precedence even over his own life: to live long enough to see the entire Soviet Union, all of Red China, and the rest of the filth nations turned into a radioactive wasteland. I want to see three and a half billion ghosts on this little cinder of a planet. And I will—as one of the ghosts—in less than thirteen years..."

This book was published in late 1984, so I'm guessing this :ambition" is tied to Rosenberger's (apparent) belief in the end of civilization by the year 2000. Or perhaps he didn't believe that and it was simply one of Camellion's quirks. Either way, Rosenberger sure brought it up often - sometimes several times, like in this book.