Foreword - Well, here it is, my first multichapter Black Lagoon story. I've had this idea in my mind for a while since watching the episodes with the Neo-Nazi's since I felt so much more could have been done with them, but there's still time - assuming a new series comes along.

Anyway, please read and enjoy.

War of the Fascists.

The man took a sip of coffee as he poured over the reports prepared for him by his subordinates and handed them to him in his office via mail. Unlike his predecessors, he didn't like the thought of advertising his connections openly and publicly and considering his previous allegiances, that was a sensible precaution. He would have done it anyway, especially considering the blunders the Aryan Socialist Union had made in the past; he had needed to reach out to some of his oldest contacts to open fresh new deals with the drug trades going on in various cities, something that made many in the ASU uncomfortable since many of the intermediaries were not the types of people the ASU considered 'pure' but it could not be helped. They needed funding and they needed it now.

That was one of the few things he had never truly worked out about Stanford and Ratchman, really; they were both really keen on saying they were going to do this and do that, and yet when it came down to it they didn't have a clue. In an office in the United States of America, a typically stereotypical office complete with a filing cabinet, a desk with several telephones on it, the new head of the Aryan Socialist Union was busily arranging all of the documents and the reports, some of which weren't even related to the Aryan Socialist Union. His life didn't revolve around the ASU, not by a long shot, and as long as the police and the feds didn't look too deeply, and they would if his long term plans gained the momentum they needed, he was safe.

He had always been a radical and he had moved from one radical organisation to the other, while he had been tempered by time on the rough streets of New York and Detroit and Chicago, to say nothing of LA.

But he was an educated man, and he quickly saw some of the flaws out there.

At first he had been a loyal member of the radical groups out there because he had wanted something to believe in - religion and other petty things didn't suit him, and there were more than a few out there, only he wasn't held down by the same fanaticism which had brought down many of the various groups out there, but over time and with one blunder after another where the leaders and various members of the organisations refused to look three dimensionally rather than the usual two dimensions they frequently viewed the United States with, he had become tired of their petty schemes and their views that in the long run didn't do much good anyway.

Sometimes he asked himself why on Earth he'd joined the ASU but the ASU was also all he could get.

Unfortunately, he had found an organisation that made him feel as if he had stepped back into the past into the days where Adolf Hitler and the likes of Himmler and Goebbels and Mussolini were running the show. The Aryan Socialists were so caught up trying to be dead ringers of Hitler, adopting the uniforms, the attitudes, and even the salutes of the Nazi party that he even wondered if they knew they were seen as a joke. To skinheads and other depraved bastards that followed the old fashioned illogical ideology of a dislike for the unlike, the ASU was as Nazi-ish as you were bound to get, but truthfully he thought it a mistake to copy so much from Hitler's Germany.

He shook his head, dwelling on the past was not important right now. He had a lot to do.

In front of him on the desk weighed down by documents and reports, and a cup of coffee and a box of tissues which acted like paper weights was a map of the Thailand area. There was a ring made with black ink, and if some passerby leaned in and peered at it, they would find themselves looking at the name of a place known as a shithole even to the residents.

Roanapur.

Ever since that disastrous mission for 'Lord' Alfred, who under the promise of financing and advertising the ASU to other fascistic movements through his connections accumulated during his time in the SS and over the years when the surviving Nazi's who'd either managed to slip through the cracks when Berlin fell after the war or had simply gone into hiding when they'd accepted the fact their precious Fuhrer had lost them the war had formed groups in the hopes of giving themselves some people to dominate and control, the ASU had been struggling to rebuild. Ratchmen had taken a small group of their organisation out to the wreck of an old U-boat to retrieve a painting, which had resulted in a lack of manpower.

The new leader had felt some suspicion for the job Alfred had hired them for, and at the time he'd been unsure why.

It might have been it had been simply too easy, find a boat with the right facilities - a submersible, diving equipment, and the means to find the wreck of a U-boat, and charter it before managing to overpower the crew with threats, though the sight of the ASU's Nazi styled uniforms may have contributed to that all too well and go down to the wreck while on the lookout for those who might be interested in plundering the wreck before some telecommunications firm moved in for some reason and retrieve a painting. All the boat's crew would need to do to stay alive would be to keep their heads down and not do anything remotely stupid to get themselves killed.

He had not gone with the party. The ASU wasn't a large organisation, but it was too big to go out there on a single boat to watch something like that. But he had insisted the boat be wired up with cameras and microphones so then the organisation in America could watch the 'momentous occasion' as he'd called it even if he'd been indifferent towards the mission when he found out what Ratchman planned to do. He couldn't believe it.

The Neo-Nazis were all alike, really; they talked and talked and talked about gaining power and restarting what Hitler and Mussolini had tried to do in the 40s, but the problem was it was the same stuff all over again; they wanted marches in streets, arms raised in salutes, experimentation on those considered inferior, businesses belonging to various enemies smashed and people intimidated, wars breaking out…. But the problem was they were too blind to see that their ideas and the way they should proceed had already been done, no government in their right might would ever allow another rise like that.

The graphic novel V for Vendetta may have revolved around a plot line where a similar fascistic regime took over England and ruled with an iron fist, but the only way that could have worked in his mind was if a different but similar set of circumstances occurred. It was just no good trying the same moves Hitler made. The only sane manner in which the ASU, and all other fascist groups for that matter, could move on was if they adapted to the modern world.

It hadn't been easy to arrange, either. The ASU had needed time to adjust after that disaster with the painting and with the simultaneous deaths of Stanford and Ratchman, to say nothing about the loss of a large number of personnel and the unhidden phone conversation between Ratchman and Alfred, seen from the footage taken from the cameras installed on the charted ship, rebuilding the ASU had been a long job, and he had needed to take things slowly to help the others get used to the changes he was putting into place. But the good news was there weren't that many in the chain of command, and since he had managed to claw and fight his way to a position directly below Ratchman and Stanford his control was more or less assured. The hardest parts had been to stop the organisation from going back to what they'd been doing before. He had needed to introduce new ways of thinking and doing things, and that had not been easy. Neo Nazi's did not like change though there were few to get in the way.

The good news he had was his plans were nearing fruition. The Union was getting more funding than it had in the past though he had needed to keep many of the members away from the intermediaries in case they acted without considering what it would do for them.

He looked down again at the map. Of all the places Alfred could have chosen to find a group of outsiders who could retrieve the painting, it had to be Roanapur. He had visited the city once or twice over the years and so he knew what it was like. Considering what Alfred wanted he had to admit it made sense to look at Roanapur since it was not that far away from the site of the U-boat's resting place, but after listening to the tapped phone call which he had listened to between Ratchman and Alfred who'd admitted he had hired the pirates of the Lagoon company to retrieve the painting to see if the ASU was capable of living up to Hitler's legacy, his admiration for the old Nazi's plan had simply grown even if he'd been annoyed at the thought of being used. But it had made sense to use a group from Roanapur. The people there were criminals, and they had been hardened by gang fighting, petty squabbles and the like, and pirates always got into fights with crews of the ships they raided.

In comparison, the Aryan Socialist Union's only combat experience revolved around playing computer games. Not a good combination. After he had watched how only two pirates from the Lagoon company had boarded the charted ship and slaughtered the Union detachment Ratchman had taken with him to recover the painting (Ratchman had wanted to oversee the mission himself, though truthfully he had a feeling the real motivation was a little more shallow..), the first thing he had done was show the rest of the Union what their 'glorious' organisation had failed to recognise; even if you had superior numbers and believed all that fancy bullshit about Aryan supremacy and how all other races were backwards, you should never underestimate them.

He had also gotten them to learn how to fight. He hadn't bothered showing them how to fight like an army on a battlefield, no he had shown them how to fight like guerrillas or gangs on the streets, and he had tried to make them think for themselves and how to improvise their skills rather than be dependent on a single person to tell them how to do things, and after seeing how that scantily dressed woman with the hard expression and those two guns which she had used with terrifying precision which came only with tens of hours of hard work and practice kill everyone on the ship, he had made sure they were motivated.

Many on that boat had made mistakes, despite the few that tried so hard to redeem themselves and fight back, but because of their lack of practice and common sense many of the detachment had problems with their weapons, either because they chose big ones they didn't know how to use or because they lacked practice.

When he had seen what Stanford had done…..

The Union had taken the painting in a surprise attack on the U-boat, flooding it and leaving the two pirates to drown only to fire on them as they swam up after the submersible and then was caught in a surprise attack when they'd been celebrating their 'victory' but they had been taken by surprise by their enemy, and the happy, drunken soldiers of the Aryan socialist union had been completely overwhelmed. Sure, some of the ASU detachment had managed to fight back, but they had been killed quickly and easily. Still, their deaths proved to the new leader of the ASU not everyone was hopeless.

Stanford, on the other hand…

What kind of idiot burst through a door and began ranting at one of the pirates, boasting at her, telling her who he was and what his rank and duty was? Why hadn't the blundering oath used the opportunity to shoot her? Half of the men who'd gone up against her had managed to shoot her, for fuck's sake he thought, remembering some of the footage he'd reviewed so then he could put it down into a training program for the ASU, and yet Stanford had spent two minutes boasting about his gun.

The man had seen the withering contempt on the woman's face (many of the ASU had been disgusted and disturbed by the fact the pirates who'd boarded the boat were not from good old caucasian stock, but truthfully the man didn't care; he didn't like black people and thought that people from Asian backgrounds were weird, but he didn't have the same blind prejudice the ASU had that dismissed everyone who didn't fit the mould, and besides he had met his fair share of sinister and dangerous characters in his life who hadn't been 'Aryan' so he wasn't bothered, besides he thought it was good motivation to get the others moving) before Stanford, stupidly and blissfully unaware of the fact she had unloaded one of her guns had loaded in a fresh new magazine into the weapon right in front of him, laughed in her face before he finally lifted the gun-

Only to be shot down by the woman, who'd told him in a straight and blunt manner that she wasn't bothered at all by what he'd spent the last couple minutes ranting about before she had shot him in the forehead. Examples like that were being used to train the ASU today, and so far many of them were showing good results, but the man had enjoyed shoving the phone call shared between the black man (Dutch, his intel had told him so far), Ratchman and 'Lord' Alfred down the throats of the organisation.

Alfred had been a senior member of the SS, and considering what he had done he was seen as a type of icon for reasons the new leader could barely work out, and yet he had set up a complex plan to find out if the ASU was even worthy of his time. The painting itself was useless although seeing Ratchman's clear and open awe that the painting had been supposedly drawn by Hitler himself made the man wonder if he realised how stupid that was; if Hitler had drawn a painting, surely he would have kept it close to him in Germany? Why would it be in another part of the world, miles away from the front lines of Europe?

It had made him laugh when Alfred himself admitted it was just a rumour, and that Hitler was incapable of painting anything too complex and could only draw paintings no gallery would take. It was strange that someone in an organisation reputedly devoted to Hitler (he blamed the movies for that one), considering him to be the closest thing to God they were ever going to get, was willing to basically say the ugly son of a bitch was bad at something. But what had really made him laugh was how Alfred had basically said the Aryan Socialist Union was nothing more than a joke, he had had the same thought occasionally, but for a senior Nazi to say it…. it had been taken quite hard.

The new leader of the Aryan Socialist Union wondered how Alfred, if he was still alive that was, would react when he saw what the ASU was going to do next…. The man always shrugged whenever the thought crossed his mind; the thought of some old Nazi who had had his time meant nothing, and if Alfred showed himself then the new leader would personally see to it one of the last members of the SS didn't live beyond that day.

Terror had worked for the Nazi's in the past, but now it would be the only weapon the ASU had left. One thing was for sure

The new leader didn't care for the old plans, his own was infinitely superior.