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Brigade (novel) Civil war Real men

The Brigade excerpts, chapter II

by Harold Covington


“The Trouble Trio”


Covington in uniform
“Like we’re not marked already?” snorted Washburn. “I think Lear knows damned well who did Liddy King and that plug-ugly dyke Proudfoot. He gave me a funny look when he talked to me about your night of gainful employment at the store. It’s common knowledge we’re Steve’s closest friends, and Zack’s military record isn’t exactly a secret.”

“Yah, same with me. I think he knows, all right. He just can’t prove anything,” said Len Ekstrom.

“I don’t think he wants to prove anything,” said Hatfield. “What I don’t understand is why no FBI involvement? Why no mention in the media of the letters NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army] I scrawled on the bedroom wall in dyke squaw blood?”

“Right on time. A good sign in a revolutionary.”

“How was the traffic on the bridge?” asked Hatfield. “We came down the scenic route, from Ilwaco,” replied the newcomer. “Homeland Security is starting to put closed-circuit TV cameras on bridges.”

“You know our names now, but all we know about you is you’re called Mr. Chips,” said Charlie. “Do we get code names too?”

“Eventually you’ll each have a whole collection of your own, yes,” said the Party’s man with a smile. “Mr. Chips isn’t so much a code name as it is a nickname. I used to be a schoolteacher up in Dundee, and I taught a kind of unofficial history course to certain selected white students after school, strictly extracurricular. The feds know who I am, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t. My name is Henry Morehouse, but back in the days when I had more hair, I ended up being called Red. You guys acted, on your own, and that impresses us. Zack has told me about the incident that took place here with the King woman and her beast of pleasure.”

“Uh, we gonna have to take some blood oath or something?” asked Ekstrom.

“No, not at this time,” said Morehouse. “Later the Army may find it expedient to formalize. For now, if you’re good men and true then an oath is unnecessary, and if you’re not, no oath will make you so. If I say you’re in, then you’re in.” Morehouse paused and took a sip of coffee. “The first question that I need to ask is the obvious one. Are all of you up for this? Do you fully understand just what the hell you’re doing? This isn’t a video game or a made-for-TV movie. This is the real thing. You see what’s going on in the Northwest, every time you turn on CNN. People are dying, and not just white people this time. The Beast is in a blind rage. It has been defied and it has been wounded, and it’s lashing out in all directions. You do understand that if you proceed, there is every chance that you men will end up either dead or living out the remainder of your lives in a federal prison, under conditions that don’t bear thinking about?”

“Mister, the way they’re hollering in the news media about racism and domestic terrorism, if we were even caught sitting here with you, we’d go to prison for the rest of our lives,” said Ekstrom. “We know this, and we’re still here.”

“Yeah, official paranoia is rampaging, all right,” replied Morehouse with a chuckle. “They’re starting to wake up to the fact that they didn’t get us all when they stormed into Coeur d’Alene last month, and some of us are still fighting. Fair enough. But before we get down to cases, I’d like each of you to tell me in your own words what has brought you here tonight.”

“I guess I’ll start,” said Hatfield. “I knew that time had to come, if any of us in this country had one spark of manhood left in us. We have tried everything else,” Hatfield went on grimly. “For generations we have dutifully trooped to the polls like sheep and voted in elections where we were given no meaningful choice, and where not one single candidate or party represented the white man’s racial interests. Nothing changed except the politicians grew more and more coarse and corrupt, more cynical and contemptible. We tried the internet and spent years tapping to one another on keyboards, because we bought into the idea that ‘education’ was the answer, and if we could just get the truth to people, then things would change. Well, education without action isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit. We got the truth to people, all right, and it turned out to be nothing but a bunch of noise that was simply ignored, because the internet was where it stayed. Nobody ever did anything except tap on keyboards. That was fine with the bosses. Tapping on keyboards was no threat to them, we just let off steam and nothing changed. It is now crystal clear to any white man with two brain cells to rub together that the only thing that will make these dogs in power hear the word no is the sound of gunfire.

“But I didn’t make up my mind finally until that night when I took care of Steve King’s problem for him,” Hatfield continued heavily. “I never realized just how damned good it would feel to strike back! It wasn’t like Iraq at all.”

“I know what you mean,” said Charlie Washburn with a smile. “For once, just once, the bad people didn’t win. I am just so damned sick and tired of bad people always winning all the time. But not this time. For once, just once, there was true justice and a good man and two good children will now have some kind of a chance together in life. A horrible deed committed by wicked perverts has been undone. The scales were balanced just a tiny bit back in the right direction. I feel it too, and it’s indescribable.

“But it’s more than that with me,” he went on carefully. “You know, Americans see a lot of movies and TV shows where some ordinary Joe like me is called upon to step up to the plate, so to speak, and be a hero in some way, usually fighting against the Arabs or Serbs or French or evil white racists or whoever the Jews’ main enemy of the moment is. Most of those flicks are just hokum, but in the past few months, ever since Coeur d’Alene, I’ve been feeling like that. Like I’ve gotten a call from destiny.”

“Things must change,” said Lennart Ekstrom slowly. “Every white man and woman in America knows it, deep down inside of themselves. This isn’t America anymore.”

“And that, Mr. Ekstrom, is what the white race has been waiting to hear from men like you for a hundred years,” said Morehouse with a nod. “You know that we were in a very similar situation, back before the Party was formed? The Old Man himself Came Home in 2002, but for years he simply sat all alone in a series of cracker box apartments or trailers or boarding houses, pounding on a computer that grew older and crankier as time passed. For years he looked for those out-of-state license plates to come over the hill, begging and pleading on his knees with his fellow white people to come to his side and help him, and for year after year, no one came. He asked only for a hundred good men, or women. One hundred people who were willing to place the future of their blood and their civilization over their own personal welfare. And for year after year, no one came.”

“And then what happened?” asked Ekstrom.

“Then they came,” replied Morehouse simply. “We refer to this among ourselves as The Awakening, and we still don’t understand it fully. Don’t get me wrong when I say this, because we’re not a religious movement, rather the reverse in fact. But the best and most comprehensible way that I can put this, is that it had to be some kind of divine intervention. God decided to give His most wonderful and yet wayward children one final break before He threw the white race onto the scrap heap of history. He reached into the hearts of one hundred people and moved them, changed them, so that they let the scales fall from their eyes and they knew they had to put something above their own well-being; that they had to live for something besides a job and a paycheck and a shopping spree at the mall. One day it just kind of began, and one hundred people stopped worrying about themselves and went out and began packing the moving van. The Old Man had his first hundred, and they became the nucleus of the Party that was formed when they came to the Homeland and were in place. Without that first hundred people, there could have been no Party, because it was they who set up the infrastructure and the safety net so the rest of the migrants would have something to Come Home to.”

“We’re going to need more than a hundred men now,” said Washburn gloomily.

“They will come,” said Morehouse with quiet confidence. “They came before. Damned late, but they came. Very well. Let’s get on with it.” He knocked back the rest of his coffee, put down the mug, and leaned forward to speak to them. “We are here to make history, gentlemen. We are here to plan and execute the first organized, armed insurrection against the United States of America since 1861.”

“I’m in,” said Hatfield.

“I’m in,” said Washburn.

“And I,” said Ekstrom.

“Gentlemen, you just swore your blood oath. Make sure you honor it all the days of your lives,” said Red softly.

“I look back at all the crap our people have put up with over the past century and I am still astonished that we never picked up a gun before,” said Washburn plaintively. “Why the hell has the white man never fought?”

“Oh, God,” said Morehouse with a sigh. “Some of us have spent our entire lifetimes studying that one simple question, Charlie, and I have to say we’re no closer to an answer than we were at the beginning. There are a few standard, canned answers, of course. Up until the past couple of decades, most white people simply had it too good. Life was just too damned sweet, and all the bullshit caused by liberal democracy and political correctness didn’t seem to be really life-threatening, just more and more annoying as time wore on. When men are merely annoyed, they write letters to the editor, or phone a radio talk show, or bitch and gripe drunkenly in bars about how the world is going to hell. They don’t pick up a rifle or start making bombs in their basement. And of course, up until about twenty years ago, if things got too bad where you were living, then you could just up stakes and move to the suburbs, or some other state that was a little whiter.

“Liberals are always the first to flee from the messes they make. Usually, they’re the only ones who can afford to do so. Anyway, liberalism and political correctness have gone beyond the merely annoying phase for a long time now. Things have been getting colder and crueler for white people. Medicare. The drawbacks of our wonderful democracy have become quite apparent to those of us who find ourselves living in the northernmost province of Mexico. They can’t sweep all the problems under the rug anymore. They’re too visible and obvious, and no one has any money left to run to the suburbs.”

“But that still hasn’t produced anything other than an army of white people hollering on talk radio and then trooping in to the polls on election day to vote Republican,” complained Ekstrom. “What the hell was wrong with us back in the 60s and 70s? Or even earlier? Why didn’t we fight?”

“Perhaps the more pertinent question, Len, would be why are we fighting now?” asked Morehouse. But it’s more complicated than that. White American males are still capable of being physically brave, sure they are. They prove it every day on the battlefield. Every week you can see some story on the tube about a white cop who faces down a pack of gang-bangers or a white fireman who pulls kids out of a burning building, and then you get these extreme sports kooks who jump out of airplanes with snowboards and try to surf down Mount Everest, or snorkel butt naked in a school of sharks, that kind of nonsense.”

“God knows I saw enough Aryan heroism every day in Iraq,” said Hatfield. “White men will still be as brave as lions, granted, but only for the Jews or for their money, Red. When it comes to standing up and fighting for ourselves, against the Jews and the government that’s tyrannizing us, all of a sudden we wuss out.”

“Mmmmm, here’s where it gets complex, Zack,” said Red contemplatively. What we can’t seem to do is to be brave on our own, for our own interests, without the Jewish seal of approval. We have developed a poisonous symbiosis with the system. We can be brave in a structured environment, so long as it is an officially approved form of courage.

You might say the Jew has succeeded in domesticating the Aryan. We can be brave and good dogs so long as we hear the reassuring sound of our master’s voice and get the occasional doggie treat from his hands, but we can’t be lone wolves anymore. We didn’t fight, Charlie, up until now, because for a century or so we have no longer been wolves, but dogs. The Jew domesticated us. But now we must hear the call of the wild again. We have to find that spirit of the wolf once more within us, and bite the hand that feeds us. And I suppose I’d better abandon that simile before I stretch it into a pretzel. But you get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I do,” said Zack with a sigh. “And that poisonous symbiosis between the American white male and the system is still very much with us, an ingrained part of us. How many guys are going to be able to break out of it? Those are going to be pretty rare birds.”

“Well, maybe not so rare,” said Red with a smile and a swirl of smoke. “Once that first hundred stepped forward, it wasn’t so hard for others to do so, because more and more, when they came here they found a crowd to hide in. It was getting that first hundred to go first that was the real bitch. We will be the tiny lion against the enormous snake, but the serpent is old and sick and dying, poisoned with its own crapulence.”

“The movement has always had to deal with this defeatist and paranoid belief that if we ever really tried anything, the might of the Army and the Marines would simply crush us,” said Hatfield.

“You would think that maintaining the territorial integrity of the United States would be the régime’s first priority, but it won’t be,” agreed Morehouse. “With the growing world fuel shortage, oil is frankly more important than land, and will become more so. After all, the Northwest has no oil, other than Alaska, which is a separate problem. The Army Council’s strategic assessment is that initially, at least, there will be only a small actual military commitment against us, if any. They won’t take us seriously. Wishful thinking on their part: they desperately won’t want to take us seriously. The idea that white boys would actually revolt against them boggles their minds too much. They’re not going to be sending B-52s to bomb Seattle or landing the Third Marine Division in Astoria. What would that accomplish against small bands of guerrillas who will simply melt away in the face of overwhelming force, and then strike where the underbelly is soft? I think they’ve learned at least that much in Iraq and Iran. It won’t be that type of war.

“No, they’ll try to treat us as a crime problem at first,” Morehouse went on, the three of them leaning forward intently to listen. “Our enemies on the ground will consist of a hodge-podge of local police, National Guard reservists, FBI and BATFE, Homeland Security and other enemy paramilitaries, and eventually probably some SWAT-type special units. Of course, ideally speaking, it should never come to a full-blown shootout. We live light, we move light, we hit hard, and then we vanish before they can bring their superior force to bear. Classic guerrilla tactics.”

“So how many men do you think we will need in the NVA to get the job done?” asked Ekstrom again.

Morehouse puffed his pipe meditatively. “We should be able effectively to terminate federal control over three Northwestern states and maybe more territory as well, if we can maintain a force in the field of approximately one thousand men.”

“Overthrow the United States government with a thousand men?” demanded Washburn in skeptical amazement. “Bullshit!”

“I didn’t say overthrow the United States government,” Morehouse corrected him. “I said effectively terminate federal control and authority in three large Northwestern states, which is not the same thing.”

“How?” asked Ekstrom.

“By hitting the enemy hard and often, in teams or crews of two to five or six people max. Let’s assume an average of five Volunteers per squad or crew. Our thousand effectives will make up two hundred such crews. Assume half of them are involved in support duties, supply, intelligence, medical services, propaganda, whatnot. That’s one hundred combat teams of five guys each remaining, who are actually pulling triggers and making things go boom. Imagine each of those crews striking the enemy on an average of once per day, all across the Northwest. Remember, one of the main reasons we migrated and we’re restricting our campaign to this corner of the country is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions. Let’s assume an average of a single dead enemy of one kind or another per attack. That’s 100 people per day being killed in one three-state area, with concomitant damage to enemy property, infrastructure, and damage to his morale, his public image, and thereby his capacity to govern. Their armies are designed to fight Star Wars, but we won’t be fighting Star Wars. We’ll be fighting Godfather style.” Morehouse knocked out his pipe onto the concrete floor, and then went on.

“In Vietnam, in Iraq, in Iran and Afghanistan, ZOG had every gadget and deadly toy human ingenuity could devise, computerized and covered with bright shiny lights. But they never found a way to beat the little barefoot brown man, dressed in rags and armed with an AK- 47 and a couple of magazines of ammo, and a heart that would never surrender. The human heart and the human spirit can beat their machines, gentlemen. The human heart and the human spirit can beat their money. The human heart can beat their lying media.”

“That’s if we can find the kind of political soldiers necessary for that kind of warfare,” Hatfield reminded them. “The guys with the cool head and the iron nerve and the ice water in their veins.”

“You got it,” agreed Morehouse with a nod. “I can outline for you a structure for a revolutionary armed force. I cannot turn mere white males into white men once again, men that our ancestors would have recognized. That we must somehow do for ourselves, by finding within ourselves that last dying spark of pride and honor and courage that has always distinguished us for thousands of years.”

“You think these bastards will give in no matter how many people we kill?” asked Washburn. “Iraq and Afghanistan are very far away, something people read about over their morning coffee or watch on CNN. We will be striking at the very core of their power, right here on what they consider their home turf. Can they psychologically bring themselves to admit defeat even if we beat them?”

“This is another reason why we are not being so foolish as to try this in all 50 states. What we’re going to be doing, Charlie, is we’re going to be fighting a classical colonial war,” Morehouse told him. “There are rules for fighting a successful colonial war, and they have come into play dozens of times over the last century, from Ireland to Africa. We’re not trying to take their whole loaf from ZOG. Of course, they’d resist that to the death. Such a guerrilla war across all of America would last for generations, and anything we could salvage after such a conflict probably wouldn’t be worth living in anyway. Nor could we win it. For one thing, we’d have to slaughter over one hundred million non-whites, or drive them back south of the Rio Grande in the most massive refugee wave ever seen, and that simply isn’t feasible with what we have or what we are likely to get.

“With our thousand or so people—and by the way, there will almost certainly be more than that as our insurgency grows—anyway, what we can do is to make these three states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and maybe parts of Montana and northern California completely ungovernable. We can stop the United States from reaping any profit or income from this territory, and we can turn it into one gigantic black hole sucking in men, resources, time, effort, and above all money. Gentlemen, there is a truth to fighting and winning a colonial war that I want all of you to burn into your brains, because it is the key to our victory. In a colonial war, the generals never surrender! The accountants surrender! What we have to do is to confront the United States with a situation where as bad and as humiliating as it will be to let the Northwest go and let white people have their own country, the continuation of the guerrilla war is no longer an option for them. We can win this, comrades,” concluded Morehouse decisively. “We can beat the God Almighty United States of America, kick their stinking rotten asses right out of here, and take this land for ourselves and our children. But only if we have the stomach for it.”

There was a long moment of silence. “Let’s get started, then,” said Hatfield.

“Right,” said Morehouse, filling his pipe again. “Okay, you’ve already got the basics here. You’ve got three men. In this room you’ve already got your first Trouble Trio.”

“Say what?” asked Charlie.

“The basic building block of the NVA company,” said Morehouse. “A three-man team. When we were planning all this out, studying and analyzing how previous successful revolutionary movements worked in Western political and social environments similar to ours, we came up with a kind of hybrid anatomy combining the IRA and the Cosa Nostra, two highly successful subversive outfits who to this day have never been completely repressed by their governments. You’d be amazed how much hell three men can raise in a society this complex, this racially volatile and unstable.

“Go ahead,” Hatfield urged him.

Morehouse lit his pipe again. “You start with three people as I said, all of whom must have the requisite qualities of courage, resourcefulness, loyalty, and fanatic dedication. That’s the hard part, finding the right men and women for this. Each of these threes will be the nucleus of a company. I know it sounds ridiculous to call three people a company, but there will be more of you, and what we want is a structure that we can maintain right up until the end, when we will make the transformation from a guerrilla insurgency to become a proper national army. During our initial underground phase, the NVA is not an ordinary army where units are supposed to have some kind of set strength or function. We are as fluid as a lava lamp, always changing shape and bobbing around. Each company needs to be free floating, capable of conducting operations indefinitely on its own, even if it is totally cut off from the rest of the movement, and eventually regenerating itself and growing, adding more cells, like an amoeba.

“Each company will be part of a larger unit called a brigade,” Mr. Chips continued. “The next unit up from a company in most armies is actually the battalion, but we’re not going to create any of those until necessary and until we’ve got the bodies. The brigade will be the main operational combat unit of the Northwest Volunteer Army, responsible for taking on ZOG within a roughly defined operational area. Each brigade will report to and be directed by the Army Council in the person of one or more political officers.”

“So the political officer actually commands the brigade?” asked Charlie.

“No. He’s strictly a liaison who acts as a communications conduit between the brigade commander and the central organization.”

“Got it,” said Charlie. “I’m a state forestry employee and I have an official truck and uniform and ID, so I can be seen pretty much anywhere and have a good reason for being there that won’t cause comment.”

“That’s ideal,” said Morehouse with a nod. “Now, one of the first things you will need to do is recruit more Volunteers. This will be the most potentially dangerous of all the things you do. Make a mistake and try to bring in the wrong man, and you’ve compromised the whole company. Make a bigger mistake and actually bring the wrong man in, and you will either die or spend the rest of your lives being sodomized by niggers in the prison shower. Your first duty will of course be to clear this North Shore area of all enemy forces and non-whites.”

“Define enemy forces,” requested Hatfield.

“Anyone who is part of the federal apparatus of control and enforcement, or who assists in maintaining the Zionist occupation, or who gives aid and comfort to the régime,” Morehouse explained. “Military personnel, of course. FBI and Homeland Security agents, obviously. Certain local police but not all; that’s a special problem I’ll go over with you later. Some of the cops will be on our side, or at least willing to stand aside and let us get on with it. State and federal judges and anyone to do with the court system, and all lawyers. Federal bureaucrats of any kind, but especially anyone to do with the IRS or revenue collection. One of the keystones of our strategy is that from now on, not one more dime we can prevent goes to Washington, D.C. from the Pacific Northwest. Elements in the media and the civilian population who actively support the régime or propagandize for it. And of course, anyone with skin the color of shit is henceforth persona non grata in the Northwest. Believe me, Zack, you won’t lack for targets. Basically, your job is to make sure that from Beaverton on down the river to the sea, ZOG’s writ doesn’t run anymore.”

“That’s a mighty big stretch of territory,” commented Ekstrom with a frown.

“Yes, but the potential is immense,” replied Morehouse with a smile. “I don’t know if it’s hit you guys yet, but you’re sitting right in the middle of perfect guerrilla country here. Huge expanses of heavy forest, mountains and ravines where you could hide an army. The whole area a backwater that the feds won’t want to expend much on in the way of effort or manpower, because their main fight will be in the cities.”

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war Justice / revenge

The Brigade excerpts, chapter III

by Harold Covington


“In Shadow”


Covington in uniform
“It always helps to have allies and exterior sources of aid, true,” agreed Morehouse. “A lot of people across the world want to see the United States go down, and they’ll be willing to help once they observe that our men have the right stuff and we are seriously pinning down American forces which would otherwise be used against their own countries. The Russians in particular won’t have any objection to stepping back up to superpower status while we mangle ZOG from within. Bear in mind that there are certain advantages in fighting from within the belly of the beast. For all the incipient collapse and waste of the past three generations, this is still the richest country on the face of the earth. Everything we need to fight and win is right here; we just have to take it.”

Coyle nodded. “You’re right, Red. It’s all there just waiting for us to stiffen our spines and take it. We need weapons and ammunition? We don’t need gun-runners from outside. There are enough guns left in private hands in this country to get us started, guns we can beg or buy, or just take. The Old Man always said that gun control was never really that important an issue. There was no point in having a right to keep and bear arms if we were never going to use it. How many right wing cranks have we all known down through the years who had a whole rec room full of guns, all gathering dust and rust, not one of them ever used to fire a single shot in anger at the real racial enemy?

“We need safe houses, training and staging areas?” Coyle continued. “The Pacific Northwest is huge; the Feds simply won’t have the manpower to put a soldier behind every Douglas fir tree… The NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army] does not fight on the defensive. They do. They don’t hunt us. We hunt them… This is a spiritual problem, not a material one. What we need are men and women with enough balls to pull the triggers and live the life.”

“The size and terrain of our new country is in our favor,” pointed out Morehouse. “A completely self-contained revolt might have small chance of success in some small and overcrowded country like England or Belgium, or some tiny state like Vermont or New Hampshire here, where the occupation forces can monitor pretty much everything and bring their superior forces to bear on any point quickly. This is the problem the Palestinians have always faced. They’re trying to fight in a strip of land the size of a postage stamp, crowded in like sardines with their own people. But here in the Northwest we’ve got room to maneuver.”

“Maneuver exactly how?” asked Hatfield.

“What the Army Council finally decided on is a series of small crews raising as much hell as possible in the cities. For the first year or so, in addition to direct operations against all federal authority and personnel in general, we want the combat crews to concentrate on gofers.”

“On what?” asked Zack, puzzled.

“General Order Number Four,” said Coyle. “GO-4 enforcement actions. Gofers. Get it?”

“Uh, refresh my memory,” said Zack.

“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t yet seen the NVA General Orders. General Order Number Four orders all non-whites and homosexuals to leave the three basic Homeland states and anywhere else we’re operating. Henceforth all non-whites, especially Jews, are considered to be legitimate military targets and are to be destroyed on sight, in theory. In practice, your job will not be to run around slaughtering blacks and Mexicans en masse. Your task is to drive them out, if you see the difference.”

“Oh, they’ll get gone,” said Tommy Coyle grimly.

“It is absolutely vital that we whiten up the Northwest, and fast,” said Morehouse. “Every non-white, every Jew, and every bugger boy is a potential enemy asset, a pair of eyes and ears for the Feds, a potential enemy soldier who by the very nature of who and what they are can only seek to do harm to us and to our people. That’s in addition to all the problems they cause with their usual crime, violence, drugs, and monkey music. Right now the federal government has a vast pool of millions of willing assets, activists, and soldiers, living right here among us. We have to drain that swamp. But what’s more important, the white people of the Northwest need to see a difference, a visible improvement in their lives. Fewer Mexicans especially. They need to no longer hear the babble of Spanish or ching ling ding in the local Safeway. They must no longer be confronted with sullen clerks and attendants in business places who don’t speak English. They have to notice that all of a sudden there are jobs available once again. They should be able to open their windows on a summer evening and not hear jangling salsa music from a boom box or a passing low ride.”

“They have to understand that we are doing with the gun what the American politicians promised for 50 years and never delivered,” concluded Zack. “How do we go about it exactly?”

“Blacks are simple,” said Morehouse with a shrug. “You shoot a few and make it clear to the rest of them that remaining in the Pacific Northwest is hazardous to their health. Let them know the Boss Man is back, as the Old Man said in his nationwide address on October 22nd. You’ll get some who’ll go on television and swagger and beat their chests like King Kong and go booga booga booga about how brave they are, and how no cracker woodchuck racists gonna run dere black asses outa nowhere, all that happy horse shit. You shoot them, too. It won’t take long for the message to sink in.

“Mexicans are a more complex problem,” Morehouse went on. “There’s an economic factor there. Mexicans are here because capitalists employ them. Some of those employers are rich white people who want their pools cleaned, and their lawns trimmed, and their children nannied while they go out every day dressed for success, sure, but mostly it’s the big corporations who have brought in all this mud, everything labor-intensive from flipping burgers to stacking pallets to mass farming in agribusiness.”

“Which is one reason why whites are so poor these days,” pointed out Coyle. “Whites aren’t eligible for affirmative action.”

“The employers are the key” said Morehouse. “To get rid of the beaners we don’t just go around blasting them on the corner, although there needs to be some of that, of course, to get them motivated. We go for the employers, without whom there would never have been any problem to begin with. We need to deprive capitalism of this vast pool of cheap Third World labor they’ve imported into this country and force them to start investing in real human resources again. They’ll try all the usual crap, outsourcing and eventually shutting down their companies and trying to flee the Northwest for Guatemala or someplace rather than employ white people at a living wage. They’ll think we can’t find them and wire something to their car ignitions in New York or St. Louis.

“That’s for the future, though,” Morehouse went on. “Right now, what you guys on the ground need to do is deal locally with direct managers. You just go into a place that employs Mexicans or Chinese or whatever, wearing your ski masks at first, then later you won’t need to because no one will dare to try and stop you. You politely explain to the boss or the manager that come Monday morning there had better not be a single brown face in his establishment, or else there will be all kinds of physical experimentation done upon his carcass. If he tries to pass the buck to the head office or something like that, explain to him that the head office isn’t going to go upside his head with a baseball bat if he doesn’t do what he’s told. Do not burn down or blow up the factory or the business unless it seems really necessary to make your point. Remember, white people need those jobs the illegals will be vacating, and there will be some white employees there whom we don’t need blaming the NVA for losing their jobs. No need to get too heavy about it. We’ve already littered the landscape with enough corpses so they’ll know we’re serious. There’s nothing like killing people to convince others that they’d damned well better listen to what you have to say.”

“It won’t last,” said Hatfield grimly. “What little is left of the Constitution will go right out the window and the iron heel is going to come down hard, and soon. Okay, now, my favorite and most anticipated part of the evening. What about our local lefties and anti-fascist scum?”

Washburn grinned and pulled out a list. “That was easy, thanks to the public library and a stroll through our four or five lefty bookstores and coffee bars in Astoria. These 55 names are just about everybody in our three counties who has ever written an anti-racist letter to the editor, organized some left-wing demonstration or event, run some lefty activism group, or worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

“Surely there’s more than that?” asked Ekstrom. “In Astoria alone there’s some liberal airhead under every rock.”

“I removed overlaps from the other lists,” said Washburn. He pulled out a second paper. “This one is bugger boys and dykes, 112 names. I won’t say that’s all of them, but damned near. And finally,” out came a third list, “119 Jews. May I make a suggestion? We don’t burn these lists. We should find some way to blow them up poster-sized, and then when we’ve popped a couple of Reds or sodomites or hebes, we start posting them around town in the dead of night with the appropriate names crossed off. Psychological warfare.”

“Bet you by the time we’ve killed half a dozen of them, the rest will scatter like quail,” said Ekstrom.

“But first I need to go over the Army Council’s policy on target selection with you,” said Donner. I’m sure Red and Tommy have already mentioned to you that we don’t just want to run around slaughtering everybody with a dark face.

“That said, a lot of your work will still be gofers, GO-4s, General Order Four enforcement. It may look to outsiders like we’re just gunning down non-whites at random, but actually the whole issue of target selection is very complex. The selection of targets will primarily be the duty of the company commander, with the assistance of the XO [Executive Officer] in his intelligence gathering capacity, but anyone can propose an enemy target for the CO’s [company commander] consideration. Every target that we destroy, human or material, needs to have some kind of clear and visible value to the Zionist occupation government. The public needs to be able to see and understand why we shot so and so or blew up or burned down such and such a place.

“The NVA tactical philosophy is that the minute hostilities commence in any operational area, we need to start hitting those targets, not sit there admiring our lists for the neat typing. The NVA must always hit, hit, hit! We must keep the feds off balance, never knowing when and where we will strike next, but knowing it will be damned soon. Right now they’re still trying to maintain business as usual, trying to pretend that we’re just ordinary criminals. They’re doing full CSI workups, forensics, and legal documentation on each incident. We must present them with so many incidents that their ordinary procedures of criminal investigation and apprehension will be stretched to the breaking point and then snap under the strain, thus forcing them to fall back on brute force and institutionalized terrorism. Remember, normal law enforcement in America is already so swamped with ordinary crime, drug-related messes and the thousand-and-one problems that come from massive numbers of Third World people living in a Western society, that in many areas the system can barely function as things are. We need to tip the system over the edge. We have to hit them so hard and often that they can’t keep up, so that all they can do is just follow along behind us and keep on picking up the dead bodies we leave for them.”

“Sounds good to me,” growled Hatfield.

“But still, there are some guidelines. Some very important guidelines,” warned Donner. “First and foremost, no kids!

“If they’re old enough to have a shitty little moustache or visible tits, they’re old enough to do harm to white people and they’re fair game, although personally I’d say play it safe by concentrating on adults. One obvious exception would be blacks or Mexicans in high school that can’t seem to lay off chasing white girls. We need to get the word out: that shit comes to a screeching halt, now!”

“Mmmm, Larry, what about bombs?” asked Hatfield. “I recall that the one thing that probably screwed the pooch for the Provisional IRA more than anything else was their seeming inability to pop the top in Belfast without blowing up some poor mother and baby in a stroller passing by.”

“Yeah, and those dumb Paddies would also do crap like shooting a man down in front of his children, shooting teachers in front of a class full of kiddies, so forth and so on,” said Donner in disgust. “What the hell were they thinking? I admit, one of our big nightmares is that some white child is going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get killed by one of our detonations. The white people they accidentally kill will disappear. Any witnesses will be silenced, their families will be bought off, and the media will make those incidents drop off the radar like they did in Iraq. The United States can afford collateral damage, but we can’t.”

“Got it,” said Hatfield.

“Okay, second no-no in target selection,” Donner went on. “Christian ministers, priests, and for the moment, church buildings themselves. This one may change later, depending on how serious a threat the evangelicals and others become to us. Remember, we have to get the silent support of a majority of the white population here at least to the extent that they do not inform or actively collaborate with the occupation.”

“Understood,” said Hatfield.

Donner continued, “Obvious targets like racially mixed couples and faggots. That shit stops! It stops now! No more! If you know where any live, waste them and burn them out, just make sure you don’t kill any cute little mulatto kiddies.”

“They’ll be on the 6 o’clock news crying for their mommy and daddy,” rumbled Ekstrom with a scowl.

“Who else is on the hit parade?” asked Washburn.

“Basically, we hit anyone who is part and parcel of maintaining federal authority in the Northwest. Start with lawyers, judges, and anyone to do with the courts. It is absolutely essential that the enemy court and judicial system come to a grinding halt. From now on courts do not sit, unless it’s behind a Bremer wall, and not for long even then, until we get at them somehow. These courts do not judge us, or anybody else. They are no longer lawful and the government they serve no longer rules in this land. We do. If someone in the community is causing a real problem with drugs or genuinely anti-social behavior, the NVA will deal with them, not the American law and not the American courts. All attorneys are considered officers of the court, and the court is an alien and enemy power occupying our land. All attorneys are therefore legitimate military targets. All judges will immediately resign and leave the Homeland, or die. We thus force the enemy to fall back on military tribunals or simple arbitrary internment.”

“That’s coming anyway,” remarked Hatfield. “Let me hear some more about the goddamned lefty media.”

“Media personnel are much more delicate,” said Donner. “We not only need to neutralize them as enemies, we need to make use of them for our own purposes, no matter how reluctant they may be. We can do this by punishing a few of their more excessive individual personnel, but letting the rest continue to function so long as they provide balance in their coverage. For example, if they have to report federal government press releases and statements, fine. But they also report statements by the NVA, verbatim, and they do it with a straight face and no unseemly comments. They give us the same air time and they refrain from any snide side remarks or manipulation of the news. Oh, and by the way, they don’t use the term ‘terrorists.’ They call us the NVA, or Northwest Volunteers, or white separatists, or even insurgents is fine, but terrorist is the ZOG word for us, and the media will not use it.”

“You mentioned something you called floats?” asked Hatfield.

“Floats are the most dangerous of all NVA operations, because they’re more or less spontaneous and unplanned,” said Donner. “That’s when some of the boys lock and load, pile into a couple of cars, and go out cruising to try and find somebody to shoot. The drawbacks are obvious; there’s a possibility you will run into something you can’t handle or get jammed up in traffic with the cops after you, something like that. But they’re a valuable tactic for the same reason.

“There’s no real hard and fast rule here,” Donner continued. “You guys are going to have a more independent command out here in the great north woods than our urban units, and you’re going to have to play a lot of it by ear. The basic operating principle for now is this: we cannot allow the enemy to maintain any pretense of business as usual, any pretense that they are still the law and we are criminals of some kind. From the moment of the Declaration of Northwest Independence in Coeur d’Alene, from the night the Old Man gave that address to the world on TV, we are the law and we are legitimate. They are the criminals and the interlopers. Be good cops for the Republic and take ‘em out, boys.”

“No, you don’t understand, I’m not proposing to hit the monkoids themselves,” said Hatfield. “Read on.”

“Hmmm….” Donner said, pursing his lips. “Says here that Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Goldman donated their own personal beach house indefinitely to these poor Affikin-Amurkin refugees from racist fascist terror, and Mrs. Irene Goldman tells us she thinks that Oregon needs more diversity in the face of this growing threat from us evil white boys. Do they live around here?”

“Big Victorian mansion up on the hill in Astoria,” said Hatfield. “He’s retired from some New York merchant bank, he’s a wheel in the local Democratic Party and a known ADL asset, and she runs the most upscale art gallery in town. Big contributors to every known Jewish and liberal charity, including hosting our annual Israel Bonds dinner at the Elliot House. Both of them really tight with the local evangelicals who of course fall down and adore them as God’s Chosen People. I can’t think of any opening target that will send our message louder or more clearly. The Goldmans, their kind, and their day are done in the Northwest.” Donner looked up, his lip curled in a sardonic smile, and he raised his hand and quickly drew his finger across his throat in a slashing motion.

“It’s done,” said Hatfield grimly.

“When?” asked Donner.

“Give us another few weeks. I’d kind of like to give the Goldmans a very special Valentine,” said Hatfield with a chuckle.

“Okay, this fits in really well with something else,” said Donner. “Brigade has a strategic objective we need your help with. If you watch the news, I’m sure you’re aware that both First and Second Portland Brigades are both starting to strike on a regular basis. We’ve taken out some blacks and gooks and Mexicans, and the city is already beginning to get noticeably whiter. We’ve also taken down a few Portland cops, mostly of the black and brown persuasion, and we’ve popped the top on a couple targets, mostly Korean stores, the Holocaust memorial, petty shit like that. But the one thing we haven’t been able to do yet is to take out any FBI or Homeland Security. Our friends in the silk suits are getting antsy, and they’ve gone cautious as hell on us. They know they’re being hunted. They’ve fortified the federal building on Southwest Third Street and all the offices and facilities they use. They’ve created a whole huge Green Zone in the Justice Center surrounded with Bremer walls and razor wire and every electronic security device known to man as well as an army of police and federal security guards. It now takes a triple-threat security clearance even to get upstairs. Most of them have sent their families out of the city and in most cases out of the Northwest. They’ve taken over the downtown Holiday Inn for most of their staff, and they take armored shuttle buses to and from work. Those who still live in their own homes now drive bulletproofed cars and vary their routes to and from the office, etc. etc. I guess these assholes did learn something in Iraq. We’ve come close enough to pop a few rounds at them from a distance, but no hits. That’s given them something to think about and made them even more nervous, but we haven’t been able to nail any of them yet. The fact is that in the city, they’re hard to detect and follow. We know who some of them are but not all, and they’ve started to shift their agents around every couple of months so there are a lot of new people we don’t know. What we want to do is flush the FBI or U.S. Marshals out, get some of them out in the open, out here in one of these small towns or on some rural road where they’ll stand out like statues and we can get a clear shot at them.”

“The assassination of two very prominent left-liberal Jews in Astoria sure sounds like a hatecrime to me,” said Hatfield. “The FBI would pretty much have to investigate something like that, would they not? Especially with the Blue State establishment in this county howling like banshees demanding immediate action?”

“I think the FBI would understand that their absence from the scene would be a very bad message to send, politically, especially after they sloughed off your killing of those two lesbo bitches. Their absence from the scene of a second double hit would look very much like they’re scared of us,” agreed Donner. “They are, of course, but they don’t want to be seen to be scared of us. Anyway, when you do get a fix on them, this will probably have to be done as a float. You won’t have the chance to rig a bomb or booby trap, you’ll have to take them on the wing, tail them and nail them as targets of opportunity. Are you going to be able to handle that?”

“I think this will be a good opportunity for Cat-Eyes Lockhart to make his NVA debut,” said Hatfield. “I’ll be his driver and spotter myself.”

“I agree,” said Donner with an enthusiastic nod. Most of our jobs are done like a Mob hit. Get in close, two in the head to make sure they’re dead. Make sure you see the brains, as gross as that sounds. Then beat feet out of there and get rid of the weapon.”

“Shoot and scoot,” said Washburn.

“You’ve got it.” Donner leaned over to them. “Gentlemen, there’s something else I need to mention here, and I suppose this is as good a time as any for it. Now, what we have been talking about this evening sounds very bad and brutal. It is bad and brutal, but let’s be very clear: this is the only way that this society and this foul world we grew up in is ever going to change.

“We live in a system that is specifically designed to prevent change. ZOG has turned this country into one great steel cage to keep us and our children penned like livestock all our lives. America has robbed white people of any hope, any future. They drag our sons away to be slaughtered in Iraq and Iran. They poison our children’s minds and turn our kids into stupid white niggers, grown fat and lazy on fast food and computer games, trashed out on drugs and hip hop, while our daughters present us with mulatto grandchildren.

“The tyranny under which we live may still wear a velvet glove on occasion, but it is unspeakably evil and brutal, and only greater violence and brutality will bring it down. This was their choice. They made it this way, not us. You guys have to understand that in order to win through to freedom, we Northwest Volunteers are going to have to become hard, hard men. The hardest history has ever known, because that hardness of soul is one of the few weapons we can muster against an incredibly powerful enemy who holds all the cards. Compassion and mercy are all very well, but they are luxuries that are possible only in a basically decent world, and that world is not this one. You are embarking on a journey that will become horrible beyond measure, but our fathers and grandfathers sloughed it off onto us. We dare not pass it on to our own children, because we are the last generation that will have a chance to do anything about all of this.”

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war Justice / revenge

The Brigade excerpts, chapter IV

by Harold Covington


“Valentine’s Night”


Covington in uniform
“This is going to be a doozy of an opening number for D Company, and we’ve got one week to work out all the details,” Hatfield told them all in a cheerful voice. “We’re going to try for two major takedowns within 24 hours, the second one flowing from the first. This means we’ve got to plan and carry out the Goldman hit in such a way as to leave us windows of opportunity for the FBI attack. I’ve thought about this, and I think the best place to hit the feebs would be at the same place we do Jake and Irene. I am basing this on the assumption that the FBI, when they do show up to investigate this nasty horrible hatecrime, will be constrained to at least put in a token appearance at the actual crime scene and pretend they’re Sherlock Holmes looking for clues and dogs that didn’t bark in the night.

“I want to do the Goldmans up close and personal, with handguns, so that the FBI and the cops don’t get an inkling that we have somebody of Volunteer Lockhart’s skill and stature on our side. We’ll introduce ’em to the boy on bigger targets than a couple of Jews.”

“I was in there once,” said Ekstrom. “Took Eva there for dinner, and unfortunately we’d already sat down before I saw the prices on the menu. I had to max out my one remaining Visa just for salad and a couple of sandwiches.”

“It’s a trés chic watering hole for our Blue State élite, all right,” agreed Hatfield. “One of those places where if you have to ask the price of something, you can’t afford it.”

“Yeah,” continued Charlie. “Wapner isn’t officially on our Jew list, although with that name I’m suspicious, but he’s on the liberal scumbag list. He toadies to the Goldmans and their ilk, probably because he makes his living off of them.

“It seems Wapner doesn’t speak Spanish, so he asked Conchita to run down his Valentine’s night program with his kitchen and wait staff. The Goldmans were a big part of it. They’ve got a special private dining room reserved, but get this—they’re not going to be eating off the regular menu. Goldman has ordered in a special ten-course glatt kosher dinner for two, flown in from, get this, some high-toned restaurant in Jerusalem. This special nosh is going to be coming in from Israel by chartered Lear jet and helicoptered in from Portland to our little airport, and then rushed to the Beanery by taxi, where Wapner will give it a quick warm in his ovens and microwave, specially rabbincally kosherized for the occasion, and serve it up to the happy hebes. Plus all the trimmings, kosher wine and hors d’oeuvres and whatnot, and the whole dining room covered in sheaves of roses. Total cost for this evening of conspicuous consumption, including a handsome backhander to Wapner himself for using his restaurant while not deigning to eat the same food as the rich goyim eat, will be over $60,000.”

“Mother of God!” gasped Campisi. “I’ve never even seen $60,000 in one place. My family has to make do with meat twice a week, and that’s with me and my wife both working.”

“If we do this right there shouldn’t be any shooting except the holes we put in Jake and Irene,” said Hatfield. “Charlie, once you see the targets leave the house, you call us and give us the signal. Tony and I will then pull the Yukon out onto the platform and into the parking area, get into position, and wait.”

“Do we take them before or after their big imported kosher banquet?” asked Tony.

“Before, on their way into the restaurant. We don’t need to be waiting around for a couple of hours with guns in our pockets. Besides,” Hatfield continued in a grim voice, “I don’t want one single sixty thousand-dollar kosher morsel flown in all the way from Jerusalem to go down those kikes’ gullets. I want that vile slap in the face to my people to sit there on the table getting cold and gooey while the roses fade and the petals fall to the floor. Call it a symbolic act. The Goldmans’ day is done, in every sense of the term.”

“Lieutenant, you have the soul of a poet!” laughed Lee. “What if there are people around who might see the whole thing?”

“Then they see the whole thing,” said Zack with a shrug. “We’ll be masked. We shoot them both, triple tap, first bullet dead center to put them down and two more into the head to complete the execution. We walk at a quick pace, but do not run, back to the Yukon and we drive at a normal speed off the pier, and then we rendezvous at Shangri-La.” Shangri-La was a code name for a vacation-rental RV on a scenic bluff overlooking the river in the nearby crossroads village of Knappa.

“Sounds simple enough,” said Len.

“Yah, but the simplest plan can go haywire because of the smallest missed detail or unexpected occurrence,” said Hatfield. “We need to get into the habit of going over these things two dozen times, extrapolating anything that might cause a hitch or go wrong. Now for hit number two, the one that will put D Company on the rebellion’s map. Those dead FBI agents we promised Brigade. That’s where you come in, Cat.”

“Christ Almighty!” he exclaimed. “An M-21!”

“Sniper version of the old M-14, semi-auto, with complete cleaning kit and accessories,” said Ekstrom proudly.

“We had a familiarization course on these at sniper school at Fort Benning, and I think I remember most of it, but I never thought I’d get to use one in action!” said Cat-Eyes Lockhart, balancing and presenting the rifle. “The older guys in the sniper school swore by them. They were all pretty much out of service by the time I went through. Where the hell did they get this beauty?”

“No idea, and I didn’t ask,” Ekstrom told him. “The Commandant just said our brigade’s best sharpshooter needed our best weapon.”

Cat was examining the barrel. “You know, they trained us for kills up to 800 yards at Benning with the M-24, but if I recollect correctly some of the old guys in ‘Nam claimed they killed at a thousand yards with this. In a good covered position, with enough ammo, I could hold off an infantry company. They’d have to bring up copters or artillery.”

“You won’t be standing anyone off, Cat,” said Hatfield. “Shoot and scoot, remember. Don’t risk yourself. If ever it looks like it might be too dangerous, I want you to fade. Remember General Order Number Eight.”

“Well, that’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about, sir,” said Lockhart. “When I was in Iraq, we all had cards or some kind of mark we used to put on or near our kills. Signing our work, so the hadjis would know who was on their tail, a psychological warfare thing. I was the Jack of Diamonds. I was wondering if it would be allowable for me to do the same here? When I can do so safely, of course? Maybe leave the card in my firing position for them to find?”

“Wouldn’t that be just broadcasting your identity to the enemy?” asked Hatfield.

“Look, they’re not dumb. I’ve already got a record for horrible evil racism and male chauvinism and God knows what else,” reasoned Lockhart.

“You realize that will make you one of the most hunted men in the Pacific Northwest?” demanded Hatfield.

“They’ve already hunted me out of everything,” said Lockhart bitterly. “This filthy society has hunted me out of my wife, my children, my future, my dignity, and my hope. Good honest bullets will make a nice change.”

“Then we’ll start you off with each one of us buying a Bicycle deck and giving you the Jack of Diamonds, only let’s all make sure we wear gloves when we handle the cards. No sense in deliberately leaving the enemy a fingerprint. Now, once again assuming the feebs will show at Rigoletto’s, what about firing positions? Cat, you know that big hill overlooking 39th Street, the heavy woods?”

On Valentine’s night, Zack Hatfield and Tony Campisi sat in the front of a battered old GMC Yukon, parked behind a loading dock just off 39th Street. The night was dark and cloudy, and there was a light drizzling rain, a perfect cover for the Volunteers. The cell phone on the dashboard rang. Zack answered it. “Hello?”

“Is this Luigi’s Pizza?” asked Charlie Washburn on the other end.

“No, I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” said Zack in an exasperated voice, in case anyone was listening in. He folded the phone. “Okay, they’ve left the house. Charlie and Lee will be behind them. He’ll let us know if there’s any delay or change in their destination he detects, but we need to get into position.” Hatfield started the Yukon and turned on the lights, and a moment later he rolled onto the long, curved 39th Street Pier. He pulled up into the parking lot on the former cannery platform and found the one available remaining space, which he carefully backed into. The restaurant was crowded, no doubt with Valentining couples. They could hear the noise and clinking of dishes and voices even through the rain.

“Where the hell are the Goldmans going to park?” asked Tony, looking around. “They’re chock-a-block in there, it looks like.”

“We will kindly give up our space, of course,” said Hatfield with a chuckle. “Okay, we’ve got a few minutes. Check your weapon, once, and then leave it alone until it’s time to use it.” Tony took out a .38 snub and broke the cylinder, and saw the five .38 Special Black Talon rounds. He closed the cylinder. Zack did the same with his old police-issue Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. They were both using revolvers so as not to have to go scrambling around looking for ejected cartridge casings.”

“How you holding up, Tony?” asked Hatfield, noticing a slight shake in Campisi’s hands.

Campisi understood what he was talking about.

“You’ll do fine,” said Zack with a smile. “Just remember, let me fire first. I’ll take the yenta, you take Jake. Call it psychology. I’ve killed women before, here and in Iraq, and so has Cat-Eyes, and it doesn’t bother us, but for their own self-image and emotional strength I think every Volunteer’s first kill needs to be a man, and a clear racial enemy, a Jew or a nigger or a fed of some kind. God knows all the horrible ambiguities of war will set in for us all, in time.” The phone rang again. Zack opened it. A silly child-like voice said, “Is your refrigerator running?”

“Dickhead,” said Zack, and closed the phone. “They’ve just turned onto 39th Street.” Zack started the Yukon’s engine but kept the lights off. “Gun in your left hand, keep your right to open the door.” Campisi took out the .38 and complied. They could see the lights of the Lincoln rolling slowly across the pier toward them.

“Oy, honey, look, that nice man is leaving us his parking space!” mocked Campisi in a girlish voice. The Lincoln slid into the vacated space, and the lights turned off. Zack hit his windshield wipers; the rain was light but steady. He stopped the Yukon at the edge of the bridge. “No one is coming. Couldn’t be more perfect. All right, let’s do it. Masks.”

When they were five feet behind the two expensively dressed people, some sound or sense made the Goldmans both turn. They stared at two men coming out of the darkness just beyond the pool of friendly light and laughter, masked so that only the black of their eyes could be seen, and leveling revolvers at them. The two gunmen said nothing, but Jacob Goldman gasped out in a strangled cry, “You!”

A timeless drama was once again about to be played out, an ancient debt was once more to be paid, and blood was about to be spilled once more in humanity’s longest war.


http://northwestfront.org/

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war Justice / revenge

The Brigade excerpts, chapter V

by Harold Covington


“Hunting The Hunters”


Covington in uniform
On the morning of February 15th, Hatfield, Cat-Eyes Lockhart, Charlie Washburn, Tony Campisi, Len Ekstrom, and Lee Washburn met in a trailer out in the woods, which had used by their circle of friends as a hunting lodge in times past.

“Does Marie know?” asked Hatfield.

“She’s pretty sharp. She knows I’m up to something,” Tony admitted. “I just hope she doesn’t think I’m screwing around on her with another woman. I know you’re leery of bringing in married men because most white women can’t be trusted nowadays not to betray even their own husbands for money or to save their lifestyles, but don’t worry. They’re not all like that. Marie is one of the good ones.”

“I know she is,” said Hatfield with a nod. “And yes, I know they’re not all like that. It’s just that so many white women have become so damaged by life in this filthy society; we’ve got to tread very carefully. It’s a real problem and we have to be aware of it. And somehow we’re got to beat it, to bring white women around and show them that their future is with us. We can’t do this without our sisters at our side, gentlemen.”

After Tony left to stand watch, Charlie Washburn plunked down two newspapers. “Our little St. Valentine’s Day Massacre last night made the front page in both the Daily Astorian and the Oregonian.

Hatfield looked at the screaming headlines. “Yeah, I bet if you count up the column inches and the minutes of television air time on this one, you’ll find that the Goldmans rate five times more than mere police officers. Dead Jews get the establishment’s attention. Well, hopefully today or tomorrow we can give them some more to jabber about. But this is going to be a lot tougher, gentlemen. Last night we took down two unarmed targets, hit the Beast in the soft underbelly like we’re supposed to. But this second act is going to be different. Now we have to attack armed targets who are trained in firefighting techniques and who will shoot back. Even more than the Goldmans, we need to make sure we have our shit together on this.”

“I drove by 39th Street on the way out here,” said Washburn. “The sun was barely up but all you could see was flashing lights. Those poor guys must have been out there all night. What the hell were they doing?”

“Probably they all trooped down there as soon as the sun rose to search the area in daylight,” said Hatfield. “That means they’re already doing CSI investigation. They probably have a state police crime lab team down from Portland or Salem. That means most likely the Feds won’t be bringing their own, which is good. Fewer FBI means more chance of cutting a couple away from the law enforcement herd when they go for pizza or something. Okay, here’s my educated guess. Two or more FBI agents are going to show up at the 39th Street pier late this morning or early this afternoon, even if the state and local boys have already done the work. The feebs will rock up at Rigoletto’s Beanery if only to show the flag and convince the local lefty establishment that they’re doing something. That’s where we need to wait for them, with Cat-Eyes in place and ready to fire.”

“Okay, Cat, I want us to get into position in the area so that we can get in there quick,” said Hatfield. “We’ll wait at the Maritime Museum on Marine Boulevard; there are always vehicles parked there, and anyone driving by will think we’re just tourists gawping at all the shippy stuff. As soon as we get word that the Feebs are in town, we drive to Columbia Prospect and park in front like we belong there. We go into the building through the lobby, with those boxes I showed you held up to shield our faces from the security cameras, just in case they’re operational. Are the boxes all scrubbed down?”

“With alcohol and with a Scotch pad, clean as a whistle,” said Lockhart.

“Good. Don’t touch them again without gloves. We’re going to be leaving them behind and I don’t want them to find a single fingerprint. “We have to hope the roof door isn’t alarmed,” said Hatfield. “I haven’t been able to actually get up there and take a look. It should be okay as a firing position, but if it isn’t we’ll have to go to Plan B.”

“Which is?” asked Charlie.

“If for any reason we can’t get up onto the apartment house roof, or the roof isn’t suitable, we’ll have to break into one of the third floor apartments on the north side of the building, with a view over the river, and fire from one of the windows,” said Hatfield. “That may involve hostage taking and restraint, if anybody’s home. Once we know they’re in town, if they haven’t showed at last night’s crime scene after a reasonable time, we’re going to have to clock them, improvise and take them on the wing somewhere. That’s why I want you guys in two other cars.”

“Now, on that subject, the brigade adjutant was able to give me some interesting info when I went up to Portland Sunday,” continued Hatfield. “The idea behind all the diversity is for them to be able to blend in to traffic and not be spotted as Fed, but they made one dumb-ass mistake which kind of defeats that whole purpose. The windows on these vehicles are all tinted so we can’t see inside, which is against the law. You can assume that any motor vehicle you see with fully tinted window is a federal car. Don’t ask me why they missed something so obvious.”

“Because they’re stupid,” said Ekstrom.

“Bingo, and that’s encouraging,” said Hatfield with a smile. “Any agency dumb enough to pull a boner like that isn’t smart enough to catch us, eh, guys? Now, on the armor. The windows and windshield are top-of-the-line bulletproof glass, which isn’t really glass. It’s what they call a polycarbonate compound, and don’t ask me what that is, but whatever this stuff is, it’s stopped whatever we’ve thrown at it thus far, and not just in Oregon. The gas tank is self-sealing and can allegedly stand a tracer hit. The tires are some kind of super-duper steel belted radial that’s supposed to be proof against caltrops and land mines and whatnot, and the underside of the vehicle is composed not of steel but these nylon-sheathed plates, so they’re not magnetic. The main thing is that when they’re in the vehicle, the FBI agents will be likely shielded from a single rifle bullet.”

“I’ve got a full magazine of standard USGI tungsten armor-piercing .308, if that helps,” said Lockhart.

“It might,” said Hatfield. “A lot of this so-called bullet-proof glass is quirky, and if you hit it at the right angle or velocity it breaches, as we found out on numerous occasions in Baghdad.

“One last little reminder, gentlemen,” Hatfield went on in a grim voice. “These are bad people and they’ve done very bad things. I for one think they still owe us for Sam and Vicky Weaver. There are times when vengeance is thoroughly justified, and this is one of them. But there’s more to it than that, much more. We’re not just sending a message to the FBI today, we’re sending our message to Joe Six-Pack. He has to understand that these people no longer rule the roost in the Northwest, that when he sees something he shouldn’t or he has some kind of problem with the NVA, the last damned thing on earth he wants to do is call the police or the FBI, because they can’t even protect themselves, much less him and his family. This is about destroying the occupation’s credible monopoly of armed force.”

GOT IT, LET ME KNOW WHEN replied Zack, and closed the phone. “Jeez,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Luck is with us. This couldn’t be better. Only two FBI agents, one white male and one Asian female, driving a green SUV. Let’s roll, boys!”

FBI Special Agent Rabang Miller practically pranced into the day room of the Clatsop County sheriff’s office. In ten years with the Bureau she had mastered what she saw as the necessary combination of brisk efficiency, no-nonsense assertiveness and a touch of arrogance.

She was a short, orange-ish woman with long black hair in a severe bun, dressed in a dark green pants suit with matching jacket to cover the 9-mm sidearm in a clip holster by her side, a Glock with a specially modified grip to fit the generally smaller hands of female agents. Rabang Miller was Filipino, the child of a Subic Bay bar girl and prostitute. Her father was an unknown American serviceman of undetermined identity or racial ancestry, but judging from her appearance, most likely a Hispanic of some kind. After entering her mother’s trade at 14, she had eventually achieved the ultimate life coup that all Filipino bar-girls dreamed of. She had fucked and sucked a dumb-ass alcoholic redneck Army sergeant from North Carolina into marrying her and bringing her to the Great Golden Paradise of the U.S.A. From then on it was up, up, up all the way for this strong and valiant womyn of color.

Rabang proceeded to ride every available affirmative action program out of Bragg, into Duke University and an eventual law degree, then into the United States Attorney’s office, whence she slid into the Bureau as a trade-off for not bringing formal charges of sexual harassment against the federal judge who was her boss. She kept Miller’s name because all of her original immigration documents were in that name, and she didn’t want to provoke any official examination of them through a legal change that might reveal certain discrepancies such as her age and the fact that her marriage to the sergeant was technically statutory rape. She was now married to another judge in Portland, with a twenty-room Colonial mansion in a wealthy gated suburb, a 13 year-old mulatto son who was already on the crack pipe, and her eye on bureau chief if she could find some way to finesse it. She was already throwing the present SAIC two-hour Subic Bay Specials in an assortment of motels around town, looking for his weaknesses, anything she could use to bring him down, but a good case clearance or two on her record certainly wouldn’t hurt. Cracking the Goldman murders and reeling in a gang of white racist domestic terrorists would be just the ticket.

Agent Miller’s partner was Special Agent Brian Pangborn. Pangborn was the kind of agent who would have gone far under the old régime of J. Edgar Hoover. He was tall and lean, with sandy hair and blue eyes, sharp from his freshly pressed suit and his spit-shined shores up to his buzz cut, and active member of Promise Keepers and the 700 Club.

Pangborn was Rabang Miller’s third partner in the two years since she had come to the Portland office. Her previous two had asked to be re-assigned, and he was about ready to do the same. Pangborn had come to admit to himself that he loathed the officious little Asian woman; being in her presence was like continually hearing nails drawn across a chalkboard. Pangborn had one serious drawback as an FBI agent—he suffered from occasional spurts of independent thought and initiative. Combined with his race and gender, Pangborn knew these character flaws were enough to blight him forever on the Bureau’s career track.

Rabang Miller stomped up to the nearest deputy behind a desk. “Where’s the sheriff?” she demanded. She whipped out her badge and ID with a practiced flourish. “Miller and Pangborn, FBI.”

The deputy was remarkably unimpressed. “I’ll see if he’s in.” He picked up the phone. “Ted, those people from the FBI are here.”

Another deputy came into the day room. “Hey, is anyone here driving a green Chrysler Aspen with completely illegal full-tinted windows, parked in my parking space in the garage?” he yelled across the room.

“That’s our vehicle,” Rabang called back. “What about it?”

“Well, I just gave you a $250 ticket!” snapped back the deputy. “Tinting is against the law, and taking my parking space damned well ought to be!”

“We are FBI agents!” hissed Rabang in a rage.

“So you don’t have to obey the law like everyone else?” demanded the deputy. “Oh, sorry, silly me! What a question!” At one end of the day room was a raised platform enclosed with three cubicle walls, which contained the combined law enforcement and emergency services 911 and dispatch radios, maps, and unit location board. No one noticed a slim blond girl in long sleeves and trousers [Christina Ekstrom], sitting at a computer with a radio headset on. The girl quietly leaned over, took a look, and then surreptitiously pulled out a cell phone and started texting a message.

Ted Lear came out of his office and extended his hand. He was a surprisingly young man of medium height and auburn hair, with a slim and strong physique. “Hi,” he said, forcing a polite smile and extending his hand. “Ted Lear, Clatsop County sheriff.”

“Miller and Pangborn, FBI,” replied Rabang in a clipped staccato voice like a drill sergeant, flashing her ID again. She ignored the sheriff’s outstretched hand and Pangborn reached over and shook it before the snub became obvious. “Brian Pangborn,” he said with genuine warmth. “Glad to meet you, sheriff.”

“There seem to be an awful lot of people hanging around in here fourteen hours after a major homicide,” said Rabang, looking around the day room disapprovingly. “I understand that your department doesn’t give priority to hatecrimes, sheriff. This is the second double murder you’ve had in three months, both incidents clearly motivated by hatred against sexual orientation in the first case and racial hatred in the second. Why aren’t all your people out there pounding the pavement, or better yet pounding your local racist inbreds and getting some answers as to who killed Jake and Irene Goldman?”

“We’re kind of old-fashioned here, Special Agent, ah, Miller,” said Ted mildly. “We like to ask the questions first, before we start beating on people. By the way, you said the homicide here last night was racially motivated?”

“Of course it was!” screeched Rabang. “Our information is that the fascist terrorists called in to your local newspaper and claimed credit!”

“Someone called the editor of the Astorian, yes,” said Lear in the same mild tone. “No, I was curious because you used the term racially motivated. I didn’t think Jews were a race.” Miller suddenly pulled up, realizing she had inadvertently made a potentially dangerous error in politically correct nomenclature that did not need to get back to her superiors. “Well, you know what I meant,” she explained lamely. “Persons of the Jewish faith are one of the officially recognized politically protected special victim categories. All offenses against Jews are hatecrimes under the law.”

“So they are,” agreed Lear. “Would you step into my office, please?”

Once inside Lear’s office with the door closed, Rabang launched herself at him again like a striking snake. “Alright, cut the bullshit, sheriff! You know damned well that you’ve had four hatecrime homicides on your turf plus the disappearance of a large number of privately held firearms, and the NVA claimed credit for the killings last night! Time for you to wake up and smell the coffee. You’ve got a racist death squad operating right here in your little tourist paradise, and we are here to make sure it gets crushed out of existence, and fast! The Portland office doesn’t want any of this disgraceful foot-dragging that occurred in the murders of Elizabeth King and Martha Proudfoot. If you don’t get some results within forty-eight hours, the U.S. Attorney in Portland is assuming jurisdiction over these cases under the Patriot Act as domestic terrorism, the Bureau will be taking over completely, and I will tell you right up front that these murders and that gun raid aren’t the only things that we will be investigating!”

Lear ignored the threat. He sat down behind his desk and replied calmly and rationally, like someone trying to explain something to a stubborn child. “As I have repeatedly briefed the U.S. Attorney, the Oregon Attorney General, and various people from your own office, there was no foot-dragging in the Liddy King and Martha Proudfoot murders,” he told them patiently. “The case is still active and I have detectives assigned to the ongoing investigation. The reason we haven’t arrested and charged anyone is simple. We have no idea who did it. It wasn’t the husband, because he was in jail here on a potential domestic violence preventive detention warrant and also pending an indictment for hatespeech. Whoever it was left us not a jot, not a smidgeon of forensic evidence. It’s true someone wrote the letters NVA on the wall, but that could have been a red herring to throw us off.”

“You know perfectly well that ever since 9/11, evidence isn’t necessary!” argued Miller. “The Patriot Act gives local as well as federal law enforcement broad proactive powers to protect lives and property and the security of the United States against both foreign and domestic terrorism! If you’ve got two brain cells to rub together as a law enforcement officer, you know or else you damned well should know every individual in your county who so much as harbors a racist thought!”

“I have to admit, I’ve never arrested anyone for their thoughts before,” confessed Lear.

“Well, with two murdered Jews on your doorstep, don’t you think it’s fucking well time you started?” shouted Rabang in anger. “You’ve got to know who these people are! It’s your business to know!”

“No, ma’am, I don’t know,” said Lear wearily. “Where do I start? Anyone who has ever complained about losing his job to an illegal alien or an affirmative action employee? Anyone who has ever had his son rejected by every college he applied to and then dragged away into the Army and killed in Bumfuckistan? Anyone who has ever had a child raped or murdered or mutilated or their brains fried like an egg on drugs in our Brave New World here? Anyone who has ever walked through a public park with their children and seen two Third Worlders copulating like dogs under a tree? Where do I start? No, I mean it, really. Since we’re just pulling names out of a hat, who would you like me to arrest first for unapproved thoughts?”

Pangborn and Lear both understood that this was terribly dangerous talk and if he kept it up, there was every chance he would leave his own office in handcuffs on a federal charge of hatespeech, but Lear couldn’t seem to help himself. Pangborn caught Lear’s eye and shook his head.

Lear picked up a torn sheet from a notepad from his desk and read, “At 8 p.m. on February 14th, an active service unit from D Company, First Portland Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army, carried out an enforcement action under General Order Number Four issued by the Army Council on November 24th of last year, ordering all non-whites including Jews to leave the territory of the Northwest American Republic forthwith. The NVA accordingly has shot dead Jacob and Irene Goldman for non-compliance with that General Order. All Jews and non-whites who are apprehended by the NVA will be similarly dealt with.” He put the paper down. “That’s it. I gather that’s pretty much their style?” he asked.

“That’s their racist fascist anti-Semitic jargon, yes,” snarled Rabang. “And do you still deny you have one of these racist murder gangs operating in your county, sheriff?”

“I never denied that we did,” protested Lear. “Maybe we do, God help us. But you will notice they said Portland Brigade. I think there’s a very good chance the shooters came down here from outside, from your bailiwick up in the city.”

Rabang was getting more and more steamed. “You need to get out of your denial phase really fast, sheriff, because I am starting to wonder about you.”

“We passed the crime scene on the way in here, and we saw the units there. Did the CSI team from the Oregon State Police get here yet?” interrupted Pangborn. He was used to trying to keep a leash on Rabang, but it was getting harder and more distasteful all the time.

“Yes, they’re out there now and I just came back from there when you arrived,” said Lear. “I was out there all night, if that improves your opinion of my professional zeal any, Agent Miller, but there was damn-all to find. The rain washed away any traces of anything and they must have used revolvers, because there were no cartridge casings found.”

“Or else if they were real pros, they policed up their brass,” said Pangborn.

“Maybe,” conceded Lear. “The medical examiner’s preliminary opinion was medium-heavy handgun rounds, either .357 or capped .38s, Devastators or something like that. Both of them shot once in the chest and twice in the head. Judging from the blood splatter patterns, they got hit in the head when they were down, to finish them off. That sounds pretty professional and pretty damned cold to me. Like the kind of thing we’re seeing in Portland or Seattle or Spokane.”

“We’ll take a look ourselves,” snarled Rabang, getting up.

“Knock yourselves out,” said Lear cheerfully, glad to be getting rid of them. “Agent Miller, if you guys can find anything out there I missed, I’ll buy you both dinner when Rigoletto’s re-opens.”

Rabang ignored his tentative peace offering. “Bullshit,” she said. “I told you. You get the cuffs on these racist motherfuckers within forty-eight hours or the U.S. Attorney is assuming jurisdiction and you can look forward to a career as a security guard at Mighty Mart.” She stalked out, followed by Pangborn, who turned at the office door and looked at Lear helplessly with a shrug. Lear gave him a friendly wave, the unspoken acknowledgement of helpless chagrin between white males in all strata of society that had been growing more and common over the years. When the door was closed, Lear picked up the intercom.

“Dispatch,” said a female voice.

“Hi, Chrissie,” said Lear in a weary voice. “Chrissie, could you radio Leo Galli out at Rigoletto’s, and tell him to tell the officers on the scene and those state forensics people that they are about to have the edifying experience of a visit from two charming folks from the FBI? They’re on they’re way now.”

“Sure, sheriff!” chirped Christina Ekstrom brightly. “I’ll let the guys know right away!”

“Hey, lieutenant, you know what they say,” responded Lockhart cheerfully. “No plan survives the first day of combat.”

“I don’t want the plan to survive, I want us to survive,” said Hatfield.

“Down,” ordered Zack. “They might be able to see us out here, especially if they’ve got binoculars.” The two of them low-crawled across the roof to a low brick parapet topped with an ornate iron railing, approximately twenty inches high, and Cat-Eyes looked around him.

“Uh, I don’t know about this, sir,” he said dubiously, shaking his head. Zack saw what he meant. From where they lay, they could see the 39th Street pier and the platform at the end of it whereon stood the yuppie restaurant and a series of smaller shops. There were at least eight police cars there or parked along the pier, blue and red lights flashing, and a large official-looking van that had to be a crime scene unit. Cops were standing in clumps, smoking and drinking coffee, or sitting in their cars, obviously waiting for something.”

Hatfield’s phone beeped. He took out his phone and saw I CAN TASTE THAT GREEN BEER NOW. “They’re coming,” he told Cat. He closed the phone and it beeped again almost right away. This time he read TWO DELIVERIES SHOULD BE THERE SOON. “Okay, Mr. Green is on them. Green SUV, fully tinted windows, remember.”

“They’ll have to exit the vehicle when they get out there on that pier,” said Lockhart confidently. “When they do, I’ll knock both their asses into the river!”

In the Chrysler Aspen, Rabang Miller had finally finished tearing the deputy’s citation into the tiniest possible shreds, and she rolled down the window and tossed the confetti out. Brian Pangborn, who was driving, looked over and said to her sharply, “Roll that window up! You know procedure!”

“Like these bumpkins are going to give me another ticket for littering?” Rabang sneered.

Rabang’s cell phone chimed with the first few bars of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” and she opened it. Pangborn drove along in silence and turned left onto 39th Street while Rabang engaged in a conversation with someone apparently from her son’s expensive private middle school in Portland. Sounds like Junior has dropped himself in the shit again, thought Pangborn. He drove past Columbia Prospect on his right, onto the pier, and toward the police cars and yellow crime scene tape on the platform.

“There they are,” said Hatfield, looking through a crack in the blinds.

“Got ’em,” replied Lockhart, sighting the rifle and slowly matching the Chrysler’s pace.

In the SUV Rabang closed her phone in a fit of irritation. “What’s Juan done now?” asked Pangborn, hoping to distract her from the previous conversation.

“The usual,” snapped Rabang. “Just a few rocks in his locker this time, but this is one time too many and they’re talking expulsion. If he gets kicked out of Westwood Academy that will be the second school this year! I told the principal I’d be in for a parent teacher conference at 1 o’clock.”

“That’s going to be cutting it pretty close,” said Pangborn as he slowed to a stop by the state police forensics van. “We’ll be at least half an hour here, then two hours minimum back to Portland, where we’ll run into lunch hour traffic. I don’t think you can make it. You better call him back and re-schedule.”

“Fuck it,” said Rabang. “I’m not going to risk throwing another eight thousand dollars down the tube because that little junkie can’t even finish a semester. Let’s go back now.”

“Back to Portland? Now?” asked Pangborn, stunned. A senior Clatsop County deputy was walking over to their vehicle. “Aren’t we supposed to be investigating a double homicide?”

“Screw that,” said Rabang. “You heard me tell Cletus back there that he’s got forty-eight hours to catch these racists, and since I doubt if he could catch a cold, in two days we’ll be back here with full authority and our own team, with a list of names from Homeland Security. We will shake every tree in this county, gather up all the apes who fall out, and use the Dershowitz Protocol to get the information we need, as well as all the confessions we need.” The deputy was knocking on the window. Pangborn rolled his window down and flashed his badge.

“FBI,” he said.

“Hey there,” said the deputy. “Sheriff said you guys would be coming out. We’ve been waiting on you.”

“Can you give us a minute, deputy?” asked Pangborn, and rolled up the power window again.

“Never mind that,” said Rabang. “Turn around and head back for Portland.

There was something else, a sixth sense left over from Pangborn’s own time in Iraq. The roof, all those windows. In Baghdad he and his men would never have gotten anywhere near a building like that until it was cleared and secured.

“Fine,” said Pangborn, backing the SUV around and driving slowly back off the pier and out onto 39th Street. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.” Behind them the deputies stared at one another in astonishment.

“What in the name of the devil? They’re leaving!” hissed Hatfield.

“They were tipped off somehow,” said Lockhart.

“I can’t believe it!”

“Do we abort, sir?” asked Lockhart.

Zack took a deep breath. “Like hell we do! Maybe they’ve been tipped, maybe they just got spooked, maybe they got called back, who knows? But I can see them, God damn it, and they’re not getting away from right under our noses! No matter what, we’re taking those bastards down today! Let’s go!”

They pelted down the hall and down the outside stairwell, and they were in the front seat of the Yukon, Cat’s rifle between his knees, and Zack was firing up the engine in twenty-eight seconds. Zack pulled onto 39th Street just in time to see the green SUV turn left onto Leif Erickson Drive. “Looks like they’re going back to Portland for some reason,” said Hatfield.

“Or luring us into a trap,” suggested Lockhart.

“If it was an ambush they would have either hit us in the apartment building or at least outside in the parking lot,” said Hatfield. “Feds always try to surround and contain. They never let their targets get mobile if they can help it. No, for some reason those two must have got spooked, and they’re trying to make it back to their nest. Roll up your mask,” he said, suiting the action to the word. “Don’t want people to see two masked men driving down the road, after last night.” After a little speeding Zack now had the Chrysler in sight. They were doing the speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour on the winding road out of Astoria. There was another vehicle between them. Zack took out his phone and hit the speed dial for Charlie Washburn’s phone. It rang and Charlie answered. “Praise Jesus!” he shouted.

“Sorry about the call, Reverend,” said Hatfield, “But I don’t see any other way to do this. You know we were all gonna gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, but we got a couple of sinners here who done backslid and have turned their faces against salvation. They’re headed in your direction, ETA maybe ninety seconds, green Chrysler Aspen, fully tinted windows, which I can’t think of any way to say Scripturally. Could you please show them the error of their ways and await our second coming, that we may smite them with a rod of iron?”

“Verily, we shall vouchsafe unto them the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.”

“Uh, Reverend, that’s not the Bible. That’s Monty Python,” said Hatfield in exasperation.

“Just keep far enough back so you don’t go to your own heavenly reward. And always look on the bright side of life, my son.” Charlie hung up.

“I tell you, if that was recorded and played back in court, we could plead insanity,” said Hatfield. “They’re going to try and use their pipe to bomb blow the feds off the road at Tongue Point. As soon as their vehicle stops, we take them. Somehow.”

“I’ll get up on the roof and fire from there,” said Lockhart.

The funny feeling in the back of Brian Pangborn’s mind hadn’t gone away. He glanced in his rear view mirror and saw the car behind him turning off into a driveway. Behind that car came a battered OD green Yukon SUV. It was coming up a little too fast for his liking. He interrupted Rabang. “The witnesses in the restaurant said the shooters were two men who fled the scene in a dark colored SUV, right?”

“Yes,” said Rabang. “Why?”

“That’s a Yukon behind us,” he said. “There seem to be two men in it.”

Rabang twisted around to look back. “It could be anybody,” she said.

“See the way he speeds up a bit and then slows?” pointed out Pangborn. “He’s trying to keep a set distance between us, a bit too much distance, like he’s hanging back for some reason. On this winding road at thirty-five, if he’s a local yahoo he should be getting in closer. It’s just a feeling, but I don’t like it.” They passed the point where Lief Erickson drive transmuted into Highway 30, and the speed limit went up to forty-five. “See? I’m speeding up now, and so is he, but he’s still keeping about seventy yards between us.”

At Tongue Point Charlie Washburn had turned the black Toyota Camry around and pointed it into the highway. “We gonna ram ’em?” asked Lee. “Not unless we have to,” said Charlie. “I’ll hit them with the Uzi and you get ready to flick your Bic, light that fuse, and see if you can blow an axle off, and not endanger Zack and Cat who will be coming up behind them. God, I hope traffic stays this light and no one else comes driving along right into the middle of this! Masks on!”

In the Chrysler, Rabang Miller pulled out her pistol and jacked a round into the chamber. “Be careful with that!” snapped Pangborn, looking for a place to pull over so he could let the Yukon pass, or not as the case might be. He saw a possible pulling off spot right at the intersection of Tongue Point Road and Emerald Drive, and so he was actually slowing down and veering right when all of a sudden the Camry roared out of Tongue Point Road and stopped right beneath the blinking yellow light hanging over the intersection. Pangborn saw two men in ski masks leap out of the car. He heard the stuttering of the Uzi, saw the muzzle flash and heard the pop pop pop as the 9-mm slugs slammed into the windshield. The polycarbonate glass held, but big ugly white splotches blossomed on the windshield before him.

“It’s them!” screamed Rabang in terror. “Fuck the car behind us, you asshole! They’re in front of us!”

Pangborn decided to try for a right turn up onto Emerald Drive, but he briefly saw a black cylindrical sailing through the air toward him. It banged against the windshield, bounced off, and just as he yelled “Bomb!” the pipe bomb exploded in the air about four feet in front of the FBI agents, with a weird crushing sound rather like a cross between a crump! and a clink! The Chrysler’s armor still held, but the front bumper was ripped almost entirely off and flapped up onto the windshield, and the force of the explosion crumpled the front end and caused all kinds of hissing and steaming fluid leaks and electrical shorts within. Pangborn lost control and the Chrysler slid into the ditch. The Uzi was still pattering bullets against the armored body.

A mere 50 yards behind them, the Yukon rolled to a stop. Hatfield got out and covered down on the disabled FBI vehicle with his submachine gun, leaning over the Yukon’s hood, waiting for a target. Cat-Eyes Lockhart was out the other door and he slithered up onto the roof with the agility of a serpent, spreading himself prone and sighting the rifle. “If they don’t come out I’ll move in with our bomb. Get ready to cover me!” called out Hatfield.

Steam, smoke and the smell of burning began to fill the passenger compartment of the Chrysler through the vents from the damaged engine. “We’re on fire!” shrieked Special Agent Miller. She tore her door open and bailed out of the car.

“No, wait!” yelled Pangborn. Rabang had thrown down her gun and she was running up the embankment, screaming hysterically in pure fear. She was completely open to the Uzi and Pangborn jerked open his own door and leaped out, crouching behind it with his handgun at the ready, planning on using the armored panels as cover to fire at the Toyota and the Uzi gunner, make them keep their heads down so Rabang might have a chance to get down or into the woods. He was convinced that the two men in the Toyota were the killers of Jacob and Irene Goldman, and the simple fact was that he had completely forgotten about the green Yukon that had been following them.

Nor did Pangborn have any more time to remember. Lockhart’s first armor-piercing bullet entered the base of his skull from behind and decapitated him; he never even heard the shot.

One second later, Lockhart’s second shot snapped the fleeing Rabang Miller’s spine, tore through her heart and sternum, and sent her spinning to the ground as bleeding rag that twitched and kicked and scrambled and then lay still.

Cat-Eyes leaped down off the Yukon, ran up to the smoking Chrysler’s open driver’s door, leaned down and inserted a Jack of Diamonds from a Bicycle playing deck into the dead hand of Brian Pangborn. He snagged Pangborn’s piece and stuck it his back pocket, ran up the hill to where Rabang Miller lay with her dead face staring at the sky, and stuck a second Jack into her mouth. He then ran back to the Yukon. Hatfield waved off the Washburns, who got into the Toyota and pulled off down Highway 30 toward John Day. The Yukon followed. From the moment the Toyota pulled out into the road until both NVA vehicles left the scene, the elapsed time was thirty-four seconds.

Cat-Eyes Lockhart turned to Zack Hatfield. “That’s it? he exclaimed in amazement. “That’s the big, bad FBI? The rough tough G-Men that we’ve all been so afraid of for seventy years? Jesus, I’ve shot rabbits that put up more of a fight!”

Hatfield chuckled. “I think they’ve always been scared of this,” he said. “Scared that one day we’d find out just how easy it is.”

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war

The Brigade excerpts, chapter VI

by Harold Covington


“The Mami and the Monkey”


Covington in uniform
“You back on the pipe, Kick?” “No, I’m not back on the pipe!” Kristin “Kicky” McGee snapped back. “I’m clean as a whistle, and I been clean for six months now!”

“Yeah, well, I guess I shouldn’t have called the cops on you. That wasn’t, like, playing the game,” muttered Lenny. “Then again, maybe if I wanted to jam you up I should have turned you in for hatecrime. I know you don’t like dark meat, but that’s prejudice, even in a whore.”

“The term is sex trade worker, thank you,” said Kicky primly. “And it’s not prejudice, it’s a preference. Being a sex trade worker, I am in a politically protected category, sort of anyway, and I’m allowed to have preferences. Remember, no means no. Even for hookers.”

While the two of them were haggling, a nondescript older model Ford Explorer pulled up outside Jupiter’s Den. It was a warm summer’s day, and the SUV’s two occupants had the windows rolled down. The driver was a tall and powerful man with a seamed boxer’s face, a shaved head and goatee beard. The pro wrestler look wasn’t Big Jim McCann’s personal choice, since he was a master electrician by profession, but he needed to alter his appearance because his face was on a few too many wanted posters, web sites, and television screens as of late. McCann was quartermaster of the NVA’s [Northwest Volunteer Army] First Portland Brigade. His passenger was Jesse “Cat-Eyes” Lockhart, who after much debate amounting to a passionate argument between Tommy Coyle and Zack Hatfield, had been transferred from D Company to First Brigade A Company and put on sniper duty in the big city. As reluctant as Zack had been to let him go, and as reluctant as Lockhart himself had been to leave his old friends and comrades in Clatsop County, the fact was that Cat was running out of major targets in D Company’s area of operation, and he was too valuable a resource to waste out in the sticks plinking away at Mexican dock workers and the local Chamber of Commerce. In the short time he had been in Portland, the Jack of Diamonds had already bagged a city councilman, a U.S. Army colonel, the head of the African-American Democratic Club, another FBI agent, and several police officers. His presence in the city was known, and he was driving the local politically correct establishment into hysterics. “You want me to go in with you?” asked Lockhart.

“Naw,” said McCann. “Gillis is a nervous little cuss, and he might get spooked if he sees somebody he don’t know. I just need to find out from him where he’s got the stuff stashed, and set up a pickup so we can get the gear and pay him. Then we need to get you to the Mayflower Hotel.” It was time for Cat to change safe houses, and McCann had been the only transport available. McCann’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Yeah?” He listened for a few moments. “Okay.” He closed the phone. “That was our escort vehicle. Van Gelder says there’s a patrol coming down Sandy Boulevard, two units and an armored car. Unmarked, probably Portland Rapid Response, but maybe BATFE or FBI. They’re cruising slow. The way they’re coming, looks like they’re gonna turn onto 82nd in about a minute.”

“I don’t think they’re looking for us specifically,” said Lockhart. “They’ve been doing that a lot lately, keeping goon squads on the street as rapid response teams, moving around, trying to cover the city so they can move in fast with a lot of firepower on any of our naughty shenanigans. Ace and me got chased by one of those crews last time out.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want them driving by and looking in here and recognizing you,” said McCann. “You’d better come inside after all. Just hang back at the bar while I have my chat with Lenny, and then we’ll move on after Van tells us they’ve passed.”

Kicky turned around and saw one of the men who looked like a wrestler or a biker walk forward to talk to Gillis. They met at the end of the bar nearest to where Kicky sat in the booth. Reading men was a vital survival skill in Kicky’s lines of work both legitimate and otherwise, and with these two she immediately read muscle of some kind, heavy muscle. There was just something about the way they carried themselves, not with a criminal swagger or thuggish biker lope, but controlled and fast and efficient, no wasted motion.

She got up and went to the ladies’ room, in a small corridor near the bar. After she finished she quietly slipped down to the door of the men’s room at the other end of the short hallway and studied the younger man in the long mirror behind the bar. The bartender brought him a diet soda in a can with a plastic cup, and when he turned to pour it Kicky saw his face and profile clearly. Damn, she thought, I know him from somewhere. Who is he? She ran over her long list of male personal and business acquaintances. No, not one of them. She rummaged through the past few years of her disorderly life. No, nothing. Was he on TV or something? Recognition suddenly slammed into her. Jesus H. Christ! she whistled to herself. It’s him! That sniper every cop and Feebie in the Northwest is looking for! Well, well! Lenny’s coming up in the world, looks like. What the fuck kind of business is he doing with the spuckies? Bet it’s guns.

Kicky left the club and returned to her battered single-wide mobile home in a rundown trailer park about two miles away. She didn’t have a car of her own, the cab company wouldn’t allow her to take her cab home, and the buses were full of Mexicans who always dirty-mouthed her in Spanish and pawed all over her, so she walked. She was so sick inside herself at what she was doing that it was all she could do to go home and not go out hunting the streets for some rock, but she knew full well that if she went back to the drugs as well as back to the sex trade, she would be dead or back in prison within a year, and her daughter would be scooped up by It Takes A Village like a barracuda snapping up a minnow.

The prospect of committing sexual acts with drunken and usually unhygienic strange men, even white men, filled her with such disgust that she wanted to vomit even at the thought, but she understood that she had reached the point in her life where her always limited range of choices had virtually disappeared. Kicky knew that America had one rule above all else. Get money. It didn’t matter how you did it, you got money, end of story, or else you ended up like the white-haired bag women Kicky saw pushing their possessions up and down 82nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard in shopping carts. No welfare or affirmative action or diversity programs for poor white chicks. Poor white chicks either stole or put out, or they got left behind. If you had a white skin, you got money or you fell below the point of no return. Never mind all that crap you saw on TV, that lovely diverse, racially mixed society where there was still a middle class and still material things and all was jolly. That was television. It wasn’t real. 82nd Avenue was real.

“You goin’ back to whoring?” snorted the old lady.

Kicky didn’t attempt to evade the question. “I got to get money, Mom,” she said simply. “I have to get Ellie out of Oregon, out of Child Protective Services’ reach. Otherwise they’re going to take her and sell her to some rich bastards. I know she’d be better off with them…”

“Mommy!” shouted a small golden-haired personage of eighteen months, wearing nothing but a Pamper, who gallumphed into the room from the bedroom and hugged onto Kicky’s leg. “Up!” she demanded. “Up me!”

“Hi, baby girl,” said Kicky with a smile, picking up the child. “Ooh, pooh, baby made a boo-boo! You need a change! Come on, let’s fix that!” She snagged another Pamper from the torn bag on the cracked Formica kitchen table and headed for the bathroom, trying not to think of what she would be doing later on.

She was wearing short hot pants and gleaming vinyl boots with elevated although not quite high heels, a low-cut halter top with no bra (she knew a lot of her potential customers found her tattoos erotic), a wide leather belt, and carrying a shoulder bag purse containing such items as extra condom packs and sex toys. It also contained a canister of pepper spray in a special holster sleeve.

Kicky looked around for Lenny Gillis, but couldn’t see him anywhere on the floor. She shoved through a door marked “Employees Only”—well, she was kind of an employee now—and looked in his office, which was also empty. She slipped outside into the alley.

The shouting was coming from just on the other side of a dumpster. Kicky crept up and peeked around the side of the receptacle. Lenny Gillis was being held up against the wall by a large, black, uniformed Portland police officer. Shit! thought Kicky to herself in shock. It’s the Monkey!

Like any street girl, she had immediately recognized Detective Sergeant Jamal Jarvis of the Portland Police Bureau’s Hatecrime and Civil Disobedience Squad, the feared police unit that constituted the muscle arm of Portland’s ultra-liberal and politically correct establishment. The word on the street was clear and unambiguous: black, Mexican, and Asian hookers paid Jarvis off in money or sometimes in drugs, but white girls paid in trade. Kicky was not the only white working girl who still retained some vestige of decency and personal standards, and the fate of those who refused or evaded Jarvis’s demands was not encouraging. Such bigoted ladies of the evening tended to end up facing bogus charges and many years in prison, or getting a coffee cup full of acid in the face, or in some cases their dead and violated bodies were found floating in the Columbia River or jammed into a culvert. No one cared much about a few dead white skanks here and there, but there had eventually been such a rash of that kind of thing that even the politically correct Portland Police Bureau realized that they had to do something to avoid embarrassment.

Jarvis was in the process of assaulting Lenny with a heavy, flat, leather-wrapped implement about a foot long, known in police circles as a slapjack. It was just as heavy and painful, but the flat surface left less telltale bruising than a traditional blackjack. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny?” Jarvis droned on, slapping Gillis’ head back and forth with the cosh, each blow a dull and sickening thud that sprayed blood from Gillis’s mutilated and bleeding face, his broken nose and bleeding eyes. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny? Gib Roscoe his money, fukkin cracka, gib Roscoe his money.”

“I haven’t got it!” screamed Lenny hysterically. “I can get it Friday! I can get it Friday! Jesus God!”

“Friday ain’t today, muthafukka!” rumbled Roscoe. “Gimme my props, muthafukka! Gimme my thousand!”

Kicky realized with horror that Jarvis was high, on drugs and on shedding white blood. He didn’t really care about the money. He just liked to beat white boys. She also realized that Lenny had suddenly stopped screaming.

“Aw, shit, Jamal, you a fool!” yelled Roscoe angrily. “We was takin’ a grand a month off this ofay mutthafukka!”

“So we finds us another piece of white trash to pin it on,” said Jarvis carelessly. In her hiding place behind the piled cardboard boxes of trash, Kicky McGee suddenly realized her own deadly peril. She tried to back away quietly, and needless to say she managed to back into another stack of piled boxes and knock it over, the glass and cans and junk inside cascading into the alley floor with a clatter.

Jarvis and Roscoe were calloused and brutal men, but their animal instincts were sharp and when need arose they could both move fast. They were on her before she could get ten feet down the alley in her sprint for the door.

Kicky was still unconscious when they brought her in. She didn’t even know for sure where she was. It might have been some station house, but most likely she was somewhere in the bowels of the downtown Portland Justice Center on Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Originally built as a modish complex of brick, glass, and concrete to adorn a stylish and politically correct power structure, decorated with murals and sculptures by trendy Portland artists, the Justice Center had taken on a much more grim and stark appearance and function since the Coeur d’Alene rebellion had broken out the previous autumn. Other areas had been slow to realize the danger and had accordingly suffered courthouses and police stations burned, bombed, and invaded by the NVA, who sometimes torched big stacks of legal and law enforcement papers and records on rural courthouse lawns. Not Portland. The multi-structured complex of the Justice Center’s several buildings containing the courtrooms both state and federal, offices, and the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau, had immediately been transformed at great taxpayers’ expense into a fully fortified and secured Green Zone, based on plans drawn up by consultants from Israel and the United Kingdom.

But the Center had become a place of fear and nightmare not just in its outward appearance. Inside were the headquarters not just of the police, but of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. These agencies had considered their pre-10/22 offices too exposed, and they had taken over a large portion of the administrative floors of the federal courthouse and sealed it off. There were rumors of excavations being done in secret by specially imported construction crews of Asian and Mexican laborers as more offices, soundproofed interrogation cells, and holding cells were dug deep beneath the complex. Then there were the stories of the torture chambers deep beneath the earth or high in windowless rooms, padded to muffle the screams. It was known that more white prisoners entered the Justice Center than ever emerged. What happened to them no one knew, but it was rumored that there was a covert crematorium in one of the walled-off courtyards of the complex. The Justice Center cast a long shadow over the city of Portland, a warning to any who might dare think of rebelling against the United States, and a source of anger and hatred that glowed secretly in the recesses of men’s hearts and minds, burning steadily brighter as time went on and more and more white people’s family members disappeared into the Green Zone.

It was all gone. She was white, she was poor, and everything she knew from her very birth told her that no one on earth would lift a finger to help her. She had always held the bitter belief that she had nothing, but now that it was all gone she understood how much she’d really had before, the trailer where she could at least lay down her head at night alone if she chose, the sad drunken woman who had borne her but at least had not left her, and above all the little golden child she would never see again except maybe through the glass on visiting day. This couldn’t be happening. It was surely a nightmare. She had them sometimes. Surely she would wake up soon. She closed her eyes and desperately willed herself to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, she was still in the god-awful puce green room with the cloying and overpowering smell of fresh paint, a smell that was making her sick.

Outside, behind the two-way mirror, although Kicky could hear nothing through the soundproofed walls, Jamal Jarvis was having a spirited discussion with his partner, Detective Sergeant Elena Martínez. Lainie Martínez was the Mami half of the Portland detective team commonly known as the Mami and the Monkey. She was a tall, slim, thirty-something woman with clear olive skin, straight black hair, brown eyes and a figure that looked fine indeed in a bathing suit and turned many heads both male and lesbian in the indoor swimming pool in the police gym where she worked out every couple of days and swam 50 laps afterward. Unlike her quondam FBI counterpart, the late and rather unlamented Rabang Miller, Lainie was actually respected, if not liked, by her superiors and her fellow officers in the PB for her competence and her occasionally brilliant detective work. No one remembered ever having seen her smile.

She wasn’t smiling now. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jamal, how many of these messes do you think you can get away with making until Internal Affairs has finally had enough?” she snapped.

“Hey, it ain’t my fault a white boy’s candy ass is so fucking fragile he cain’t take a little beat-down,” muttered Jarvis defensively.

“Look, I know how the game is played,” said Lainie in irritation. “Until police salaries come up to something commensurate with the work we do, and the risks we take, especially now with a bunch of racist crazies gunning for us every time we step outside the door, then every officer with any initiative is going to have something going on the side.”

A Mexican uniformed officer came down the hall toward them, holding a larger manila file folder and handed it to Jarvis. (He had once made the mistake of addressing Sergeant Martínez in Spanish with a flippant “Hola, Mami!” and had almost found himself hauled up on sexual harassment charges.)

“Hey, Jamal, here’s the file on your puta blanca with the tattoos in there,” he said. “Lookin’ good, my man. Seems Lenny Gillis filed a complaint with us a few months back when she assaulted him, hit him in the head with a beer bottle. He dropped the charges, but it’s on record. She’s got priors for solicitation and holding, and she did fourteen months in Coffee Creek on a two to five for larceny and possession of stolen goods.”

Lainie was thoroughly Americanized, and she spoke Spanish only on these occasions when it was required in the line of work. Her one secret neurosis and obsession, not even admitted to the Bureau shrink during her periodic required evaluations, was that she wanted more than anything else to be white. Not just any white; Elena Martínez dreamed of herself as Nordic white, with creamy skin and golden hair. Like the girl in the interrogation room, only without the tattoos. Her unconscious longing had long ago sublimated itself into an almost insane hatred of white people in general, white racialists in particular, and blonde white women even more particularly.

Jamal Jarvis was sharp enough to realize that Lainie was smarter than he was, and he sensed that hers were good coattails for him to ride on, so he generally acted as the brawn of the team while she was the brains. It worked surprisingly well, and their high clearance rate and general rep for getting results in the form of confessions from suspected racists and other thought criminals had done them both good, departmentally speaking. But Jarvis sensed that Lainie was what the Hispanics referred to as a “cocoanut,” brown on the outside and white on the inside.

Kicky looked up as the door opened and the two detectives entered the room. Jarvis had a thick file in his hand that she presumed were her yellow sheets. She looked at Lainie, Levantine sleek and arrogant and dressed to the nines in a blue serge skirt and jacket like some kind of model in the Lady Cop Chic section of Vogue. She knew full well that any faint hope she had of ever getting out of this depended on her crawling and groveling like a whipped dog to these two, and yet something in her that she didn’t understand seemed to take on a perverse life of its own. “I see the Monkey, so I guess you must be the Mami,” she snarled at them.

Martínez leaned over the table, and like lightning she lashed out in a vicious slap across Kicky’s face, almost knocking her out of the chair. “Inmates in this Justice Center are prohibited from using racial or ethnic slurs, derogatory references to anyone based on race or sexual preference or national origin, or other hateful language, Ms. McGee,” she said. “It’s not only a violation of JC regulations, it’s a violation of the hatespeech section of the penal code. If you do so again you will be charged with felony hatespeech in addition to first degree murder. I suggest you take heed. You’re in trouble enough.”

“Watch yo’ mouf, bitch,” added Jarvis.

Martínez took the file and slammed it onto the desk in front of Kicky. “We’ve got you cold. Your previous assault on your pimp with a blunt instrument is the icing on the cake. You’re gone, girl. I’m offering you one chance for a deal. One only. You will plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Leonard Gillis and I can arrange it with the DA so you get twelve to twenty. As an added sweetener, since I’m feeling generous this morning, I can arrange for you to serve your sentence in a medium security facility so you won’t have to go back to Coffee Creek. This is as good as it’s going to get, Kristin. Take it or leave it.”

“They call me Kicky,” said the girl sullenly.

“Of course they do,” sighed Martínez.

Don’t I get a lawyer?” she demanded.

“Technically speaking, since 9/11 the state no longer has to provide you with one, depending on whether we want to file this as a security case under the Patriot Act, but in Portland the powers that be do like to keep up appearances. So yes, if you want I can get you a legal aid attorney,” explained Lainie. “Any such attorney will almost certainly be black, Hispanic, Jewish, gay, female, or some combination of the above, and probably will hold as little brief for white trailer trash crack whores like you as I do, and they will advise you to take the deal I’m offering.”

“I suppose the fact that I didn’t kill Lenny doesn’t have a damned thing to do with anything?” Kicky demanded bitterly.

“No, of course it doesn’t,” responded Lainie with another sigh.

“What about justice?” cried Kicky.

“This is a legal matter. Justice has nothing to do with it,” explained Lainie irritably, irked at the girl’s stubborn stupidity. “I can’t believe you’ve been on the streets as long as you have, and you still don’t know how it works.”

Kicky’s self-control finally snapped. “No!” she screamed in uncontrollable rage. “Fuck you! Fuck both of you! I didn’t do anything, God damn you both to hell! I didn’t do anything! I didn’t kill Lenny, that nigger standing there did! You know it! I didn’t do anything!”

Martínez stood up and slapped Kicky across the face again, but more or less pro forma, without anger or enthusiasm. “Suit yourself, you stupid little twist,” she said in disgust. “Don’t you ever say I didn’t try and help you. First degree murder and a life sentence it is. I suggest you watch your language in Judge Feinstein’s court. He’s not going to believe any wild stories you come up with about a respected and decorated police officer killing your pimp, and if you keep on using racial slurs and try to offer perjured testimony against an African American officer, you need to remember that hatecrime carries life without parole. So go ahead, jump up in court and yell out your stupid lies, and really fuck yourself over forever. Hell, maybe it’s for the best. Wealthy and decent couples all over the U.S.A are going to be lining up around the block for that little girl of yours. Maybe you’re doing the right thing after all by permanently taking yourself out of the picture.” She and Jarvis turned and opened the door to leave.

Kicky stared in horror. She knew that the door wasn’t just closing on the interrogation room. It was closing on her, her whole life, on her daughter. They were going to take Ellie now. She had lost. They were going to take Ellie.

As the door closed, Kicky jumped up and screamed at the top of her lungs, “I can give you the NVA! Fucking spic bitch, you hear me? I can give you NVA! I know where they are! I can give you that sniper, that guy they call the Cat! I can give you two the NVA, you bitch, you baboon! Just let me go! Please, God, I didn’t do anything, please let me go, please don’t take my baby!” She collapsed onto the table top, weeping hysterically.

The door opened.

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war

The Brigade excerpts, chapter VII

by Harold Covington


“Someone Who Knows Who They Are”


Covington in uniform
“For almost a year now,” said Lainie Martínez, “there has been a full-blown armed insurrection against the United States going on here in the Northwest. Never mind the fact that those morons in Washington and our own bosses are too damned stupid to see it for what it is, or too blind and stubborn to admit the fact if they do!

“Where are they getting weapons and supplies and money? Who are their intelligence sources, their spies and agents, some of whom we both know damned well are in this very building with us as we speak?”

“Okay, and after tonight?” asked Jarvis. “We gonna be running a long term undercover like dis, Rawlinson will have to be brought in on it, and a lot of other people as well.”

“I know there will have to be others,” said Martínez, “We’ll need a whole task force. But we need to keep them to a minimum and compartmentalize everything, especially her identity. I don’t trust Rawlinson. He’s white and male and heterosexual, and by definition that means he’s politically unreliable. His definition of hatecrime has always been a little too lenient for my taste, especially when it comes to hatespeech. He doesn’t seem to understand that hatespeech is a dead giveaway for thoughts and attitudes that lead to hatecrime, and that once we know that hate is in a white male’s mind we need to nip him in the bud before he can act on those thoughts. It’s the only way to protect women and minorities. I don’t want him in on this, and I don’t want him knowing who Kicky is. And I don’t want Roscoe or any of your compadres in corruption knowing what’s going on, either. You just tell Roscoe it’s all taken care of and you leave it at that, got it? I’m going to move Ms. McGee into a conference room upstairs now, and get her paperwork on this murder charge off the computers and out of the system now, before it gets too complicated.”

“Kicky, look, you know as well as I do where you’ve been and what you’ve done,” said Lainie. “You know how to handle yourself on the streets and in prison. If you didn’t have some moves you wouldn’t have survived, you wouldn’t be here. And you won’t have to do anything proactive, no fishing for specific people or things, although needless to say, we’re very interested in Mr. Lockhart. You don’t have to ask leading questions or act overly curious. Just go with the flow and sound enthusiastic about their great racist revolution. We will be recording you every step of the way, and our intelligence people will be doing all the analysis and figuring out what the hell their scene is from the raw data you bring in. You’ll just be a fly on the wall, so to speak, a listening post. Do whatever they tell you to, convince them you’re just a bimbo, and of course use your sexual skills, which I’m sure you’ve picked up in your professional life.

“These men are brutes, granted, but like all men they’re nothing but dumb thugs who think with their cocks, and they’re not going to suspect a foxy bitch with neat tits who gives them good head.”

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war

The Brigade excerpts, chapter VIII

by Harold Covington


“Running The Game”


Covington in uniform
“There’s an old Norse saying: ‘Luck often enough will save a man, if his courage hold,’” Wingo replied. “McGee. That’s Irish, right?”

“Well, the Irish never gave up for eight hundred years,” said Wingo.

“I hope we can win a bit sooner than that,” said Kicky with a small laugh.

“The Army Council is basing all its strategic thinking on an assumed thirty-year conflict,” said Wingo seriously.

Back in the operations center Lainie Martínez had her headphones on. She was listening intently and taking notes. “30 year terror campaign (???!!!!)”

“So what happens now? What do you want me to do?” asked Kicky.

“The next step is that we will arrange for you to receive a copy of the old Party Handbook and the new NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army] General Orders,” said Ma. “The General Orders you need to memorize, and I do mean memorize, and then destroy the sheet of paper that they’re printed on, because if you’re caught with them in your possession it’s a federal felony carrying a death sentence. No kidding. These tyrants are killing people now simply for having a single sheet of paper. You need to have the General Orders committed to memory not just for your own security, but because you will be expected to obey them. Always. Without fail.”

“So when do I get to be a Northwest Volunteer?” asked Kicky.

“You don’t, not at first. We need to take a good long look at you and see how you perform, like any job,” said Wingo. “To begin with, you’ll be what some crews call an asset, what others call a candidate member.

“You won’t be asked to make your bones for a good while,” said Wingo, “And even then, it will be voluntary on your part. This is not a regular war. Our people have to carry an immensely personal and crushing burden on their shoulders, and that goes far more so for the shooters and the bombers. Only a small number of people have the right combination of steady hand and nerves of steel, along with—oh, hell, I suppose you’d call it a lack of introspection, the ability to just do the job and then not worry about it afterwards. If they’re not right for it, their conscience gets to eating at them, they start losing their nerve and going to pieces and muttering about finding Jesus and getting forgiveness. No offense, Ma.”

“None taken,” said Ma. “It does happen, and then there are problems all across the board. White people are the greatest killers the world has ever known, but we have in fact been subjected to that century of social engineering and behavior modification through propaganda that I mentioned earlier, and in a lot of our people, that predator gene does seem to have been bred out. You will never be asked to do anything that is beyond your strength. But you will find that as time goes on, and you come to understand who you are, that your strength is greater than you think.”

On the cab ride back, as they neared the center town, Kicky asked him, “What did Ma mean when she said you had a bug up your ass about women?”

Wingo sighed. “Same thing you probably feel about men. I’ve just been betrayed once too often. Nothing personal. I think that’s the worst thing that the Jews have done to us, in a way. Made white men and women hate and fear and mistrust one another.”

“Yeah, I know it in my mind,” said Kicky. “It’s just common sense that there have to be some good men left out there somewhere. But why the hell don’t I ever meet any?”

“The mutual consensus seems to be that white women are all neurotic and treacherous bitches…”

“Does the NVA have a lot of women members?” asked Kicky.

“Mmm, some. Look, I’m afraid I still presume most white women are write-offs, but I will say this: the few remaining exceptions have more range than men do.

“You’ll probably start getting some of our special trips tomorrow night. One of the people you drive will give you a copy of the Handbook and the General Orders. I’ll repeat what Ma told you, because this is important. Memorize the General Orders and then live by them. There’s only ten of them, just like the Commandments, and like the Commandments they’re just what they say they are: orders, not suggestions.”

Kicky tried to wrap her mind around the fact that the mightiest empire the world had ever known would use all of its power and resources to put her to death if they knew she had this sheet of paper in her hand, and if they knew she had read these ten paragraphs.


NORTHWEST VOLUNTEER ARMY GENERAL ORDERS

General Order Number One: The Army Council of the Northwest Volunteer Army is hereby constituted as the governing body of the Northwest American Republic…

General Order Number Four: No Jew or other non-white person, no homosexual, and no white person engaged in interracial sexual activity shall reside within the boundaries of the Northwest American Republic, or within any area of NVA operations. NVA field commanders shall deal with violators of this General Order at their discretion…

General Order Number Seven: The provisional government of the Northwest American Republic demands the complete and unambiguous loyalty and cooperation of all white residents of the NAR, and of all areas of operation of the NVA, and will accept nothing less. Any and all collaboration, cooperation, informing, public incitement against the Republic or its armed forces, or giving of aid and comfort to the Occupation authorities is prohibited, and will be dealt with by NVA field commanders at their discretion…

Then she went back and picked up the Party Handbook. There was no table of contents or title page, and the text simply started at Chapter One: Race. She read:

Race is the North American issue. It always has been, ever since one of Columbus’ sailors shot the first Indian with a crude matchlock musket back in 1492. Every problem that America faces today, every crisis of the economy or of the spirit, is in some form or another eventually traceable back to the problem of race. Every civilization, every culture, every major historical achievement of mankind is the product of the racial personality of those who created that civilization. Destroy a race and not only living beings are destroyed, but an immense hole is ripped in the entire fabric of this planet’s existence. Destroy the most intelligent and creative and dynamic race of all mankind, the Aryan, and damage has been inflicted on the human species that can never be recovered or repaired. The racial issue can be boiled down to one very simple question: Who does the world belong to? Does it belong to the various black and brown races of the Third World, who have contributed nothing except sporadic physical labor?…

Racial purity strengthens a society; whereas diversity weakens and eventually destroys it. No nation is born diverse. Diversity is indeed the antithesis of nationhood. The multicultural, and especially the multiracial state, carries in its makeup the seeds of certain national destruction. Deliberate fragmentation of these nations into racially diverse, politically disharmonious elements and special interest groups, and the resultant loss of national identity and purpose, are requirements of the New World Order. The leveling in a multicultural, diverse society is never upward, always downward.

We have been taught by our lords and masters to view “racism” as evil and wrong. It is not. Racism is in fact the purest expression of patriotism. We live today in a world where old ideas of geopolitics are being replaced by biopolitics. Racism is right because racism is the will of Nature. Racists are doing the work of Nature. They are aiding Nature by helping to protect the most important of Nature’s creations: the different races that Nature has evolved over many millennia…

My God! thought Kicky in wonder, trying to understand and assimilate the wild heresy before her, which contradicted everything she had ever been taught in her life. These NVA people actually expect me to THINK!

It was a strange sensation. For the first time in her adult life, someone was trying to reach her, to teach her something they thought she needed to know for her own good instead of something that would serve the interest of the rich people and empowered minorities. For the very first time in her adult life, someone was acknowledging that race even existed, telling her it was all right to think and feel in terms of race. The very idea that anyone seriously expected her to sit down and think about something instead of buy something, stunned her. Suddenly a thought arose in her mind unbidden. These are the only people I’ve ever met who don’t want to fuck me, in one way or another.


http://northwestfront.org/

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war

The Brigade excerpts, chapter IX

by Harold Covington


“Driving for the Boys”


Covington in uniform
“Okay,” said Kicky. “Look, at the risk of sounding too curious, just when do I cease being an asset and become a Northwest Volunteer? Is it like the Mafia? Do I have to make my bones and swear a blood oath or something?”

Jackson allowed himself a wintry smile. “Actually, we do call a first kill making our bones. But it’s pretty simple. No blood oath or mysticism. When I say you’re in, you’re in. Anything else?”

“Am I allowed to ask what we’re going to do when we get there?” said Kicky. “If so, can I ask who and why? Or is this a shut up and obey orders kind of thing? I’m kind of curious.”

“It’s not a hit,” said Wingo with a laugh. “Like the CO said, we’re starting you off light. This is a punishment beating, and it’s part of our procedure to make sure that every Volunteer on an action knows what we’re doing, who we’re doing it to, and why. It’s important for morale for everyone to understand that we’re not just gangsters mindlessly obeying Don Vito. There is a purpose to everything the Army does. The target is a man named Gregory Booth. White, aged 35, married with two children, degree in psychology, a churchgoing type, no bad habits we know of, not a bad guy, really. He’s just doing something we have to put a stop to. Booth is a guidance counselor at a local high school, and probably because of his 700 Club and other evangelical affiliations, he’s pretty neocon in his outlook.

“Like the Old Man said, this will inevitably turn into a civil war between whites, and once all this is over, the survivors of both sides are going to have to live together in the Northwest Republic. We’re looking ahead to that time, and we want to create as little bad blood as possible. Finally, there’s the religion thing. Killing Christians only encourages them. They thrive on martyrdom, and persecution is largely the secret of the faith’s survival for all these centuries. We don’t want to make Booth a dead martyr, we want him to be a visible wreck in a wheelchair eating through a straw for some months, in clear and evident pain. Everyone will know that we could have killed him if we’d wanted to. We can only hope that most folks will understand this and draw the proper conclusion. Okay, here’s the turn…”

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war Ethnic cleansing Homosexuality

The Brigade excerpts, chapter X

by Harold Covington


“Sharkbait”


Covington in uniform
Kicky never knew ahead of time what she would be doing on a mission. The first few times out, there were no actual homicides committed. There were more punishment beatings of white liberals or people who had otherwise contrived to annoy the NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army], similar to the Lake Oswego job. Kicky marveled at the amount of time and effort put into the advance preparation of such relatively minor operations.

There were other missions besides punishment beatings. The actions of the rural NVA units such as Zack Hatfield’s D Company, whose flamboyant attacks had generated for them the media nickname “the Wild Bunch,” had successfully driven most of the Mexicans and the few blacks out of large portions of the Northwest hinterland in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. Many of the mestizos didn’t stop running until they got to California, but some only ran as far as the big cities, and so temporarily at least there was actually a slight increase in the number of non-whites in Portland suburbs such as Hillsboro, McMinnville, and North Portland. The urban teams of the Portland brigades then took over the task of persuading them to váyanse from the Northwest as a whole, permanently. At least half of Kicky’s tickles involved burning out or blowing up various Mexican hangouts, with or without the Mexicans inside, or else businesses known to employ illegals, including a construction site, a warehouse on the river front, and a commercial laundry owned by Jews and run by a Chinese straw boss with illegal coolie labor. These missions involved the approach to the target, one scouting tour through the area looking for potential problems, and then covering down and preventing interference while Fred and other volunteers hurled incendiaries through windows.

Kicky read the words from the sheet in a steady voice: “At 2035 hours tonight, elements of C Company, First Portland Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army carried out a General Order Number Four enforcement action directed against the Blue Lagoon Lounge on 82nd Avenue in Portland, a known resort of drug dealers, transvestites, and non-whites posing a clear and present danger to the white community. A vehicle containing two hundred pounds of explosives was parked in front of the main entrance and detonated, destroying the building and everyone inside it completely. All sexual deviates, Jews and other non-whites are reminded that Army General Order Number Four prohibits their presence anywhere in the Homeland, and if found within any NVA command’s area of operation they are liable to immediate termination as military targets. End communication.”

“Wait!” squealed the woman. “Let me get a pen. What did you …?” Kicky closed the phone and handed it back to Ace. “Uh, comrade, looks like this script was printed earlier today, before the bomb could have even gone off,” she inquired, handing it back to him as well. “How could you know beforehand that everything I just said would happen according to plan?”

“It did. That was the confirmation call I got just now,” said Ace. “As to how we knew beforehand, the Red Baron never misses.”

“Red Baron?” asked Kicky.

“Best car bomb maker in the NVA,” said Ace proudly. “He not only makes ’em, he drives his own work. Maybe you’ll meet him one day.” A moment later, Kicky felt her own cellphone at her side vibrate. She guessed that Lainie Martínez was having an orgasm at the thought of getting close to a major NVA explosives expert, and was sending her a hint that she was to pursue the subject, which she ignored.

Categories
Brigade (novel) Civil war

The Brigade excerpts, chapter XI

by Harold Covington


“Hearing the Screams”


Covington in uniform
“Dad, no need to dance around it. Jan’s decisions were just plain stupid. She was self-destructive, she had no sense of self-esteem and no inner strength. She let the whole adolescent angst thing get on top of her, she just went with the flow, and it killed her. She got involved with drugs, she got involved with a nigger, and she did both at once. If that’s not the classic definition of a self-destructive personality, I don’t know what is.”

Ray looked at her oddly. “The psychobabble I get. You picked that up from your mother and her hundred and one self-help books and fads, not to mention TV. But the racism is a new one on me. Where did that come from?”

“Where racism always comes from, Dad,” said his daughter calmly. “From close and regular contact with blacks.”

“Oh? And how many blacks do you have close and regular contact with at Ashdown Academy?” inquired her father. “Three? Four?”

“One was enough,” she replied coolly. “Look, Dad, can we take all the shocked disclaimers as read? Or to quote one of your own favorite sayings, don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining. I know what every white person in this country knows, even if they’re all too terrified to say it out loud. They’re not Africans-Americans, they’re niggers. They aren’t equal to us in any way, they never have been, they can’t tie their own shoelaces without an affirmative action program, and they’re not even very nice. Now, what did you want to say to me?”

Ridgeway looked at her, bemused. “Okay, fine, we’ll leave the deep political and philosophical debate on diversity and multiculturalism for another time. And yes, you’re right, we all know in the privacy of our own thoughts that when all is said and done, they’re nothing but niggers, and they won’t ever be anything else. But the fact is that society doesn’t allow that viewpoint anymore. I always thought of myself as pretty smart, but I’ll admit to you, I have no idea how on earth we have gotten to—well, where we are, but we have. The point is, Annette, and it’s the point I have to make sure you understand completely, is that whether we like it or not, we have to live in the real world. But Annette, I want you to promise me something. Dead serious, I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything stupid along that line.”

His voice was anxious. “I want you to promise me that you’re not going to try to contact this damned gang of racist psychopaths who are running around Portland murdering people and bombing things, and try to get them to kill this Flammus character!”